In the following essay, Shippey finds mythic-allegorical elements in The Lord of the Rings relating to events of the twentieth century, although contends that the trilogy is not an allegory of World War II.

In the following essay, Chance examines the tension in Lord of the Rings between the values of the age of Germanic heroism and those of the later Christian age.

In the following essay, Chance examines the effects of the characters' relative level of articulateness in The Two Towers.

In the following essay, Arthur contends that Gollum is a hero in the sense that he is Tolkien's most complex and human-like character.

In the following essay, Lobdell discusses elements of Lord of the Rings that coincide with the Edwardian adventure story.

In the following essay, Potts delineates the various “hero cycles” and applies them to The Lord of the Rings.

In the following essay, Lobdell discusses the widespread appeal of The Lord of the Rings.

In the following essay, Reilly analyzes The Lord of the Rings in terms of Tolkien's theory of the fairy story.

In the following essay, Nelson examines the ways in which the characters in The Lord of the Rings personify various sins and virtues in the traditions of medieval allegory.

In the following essay, Wytenbroek locates elements of both the biblical and the Old Norse vision of the end of the world in The Lord of the Rings.

In the following essay, St. Clair presents arguments against placing The Lord of the Rings as a fairy story, an epic, and a romance, and instead contends that the trilogy is most similar to the genre of the traditional saga.

In the following essay, Bradley explores the expression of emotion in The Lord of the Rings in its most prevalent form: the love and admiration of young males for older, powerful father figures.

In the following essay, Keenan finds that the appeal of The Lord of the Rings for adults lies largely in the trilogy's examination of existential issues and the psychology of childhood.

In the following essay, Madsen argues against interpretations of The Lord of the Rings that locate the trilogy as a specifically Christian allegory and contends instead that it is informed by a nonspecific religiosity.

In the following essay, Bettridge distinguishes between myth and allegory and shows the ways in which Tolkien created in The Lord of the Rings a mythology.

In the following essay, Abromaitis discusses Tolkien's spiritual optimism in his writings.

In the following essay, Ready examines Tolkien's thoughts on human nature as they appear in The Lord of the Rings.

[The Lord of the Rings] came just when disillusion among the American young at the Vietnam war and the state of their own country was at a peak. Tolkien's fantasy offered an image of the kind of rural conservationist ideal or escape for which they were looking (it also could be seen as describing, through the overthrow of Sauron, the destruction of the U.S.). In this way The Lord of the Rings could be enlisted in support of passive resistance and idealism on the one hand and of draft-dodging and drug...

In the following essay, Burger finds Tolkien's allusions to ancient and medieval tales in The Lord of the Rings to be intended as modernized instructional and moral stories.

When Bilbo Baggins chooses to rush out of his hobbit-hole without his handkerchief and accompany some disreputable dwarfs on a dangerous and seemingly impossible venture, Tolkien makes it quite clear that he is choosing rightly. By opting for hardship instead of comfort and (more important still) Romance instead of everyday life, he is, we know, choosing the life of imaginative experience. Wizards, elves, dragons and treasure are, as well as being superbly real in themselves, symbols for various aspects of ...

Eglerio! Praise them! I want to type fast and congratulate American Youth on the (J.R.R.) Tolkien Cult before it is over. Perhaps it ends today and thousands of people, shutting Volume I or II or III of The Lord of the Rings, are now never to know if Gollum came back or Frodo came to. Still, I would hope that no one, even on the West Coast where the time lags, missed the Door Scene in which two necromancers exert two separate spells, one to open a door and the other to shut it. The molecules of the door, fl...

The Lord of the Rings is an extremely valuable pedagogical instrument for heightening students' awareness of concepts and values which are difficult to grasp in the modern environment, but which are essential for full response to literary works we must teach them. (p. 819) The central values of the book are thoroughly traditional, and the direct, immediate style and tone reinforce the fact that, however applicable they may be to our own age, these are the things that have always been true. It is curi...

There are [many] explanations for the popularity of [The Lord of the Rings] as anyone who has taught it knows. It's a great story. It has wildly original and interesting characters. It takes place in a delightful world of fantasy. And, finally, it communicates an extraordinary reverence for natural life. Long before ecology became fashionable, the trilogy celebrated the natural wonders of our world: the earth, the water, the trees, the flowers, the other living things that Tolkien lets us commune wit...

The Lord of the Rings focuses upon a particular episode in the eternal struggle between Good and Evil. Special emphasis is placed on the central role that Power plays in this conflict. Tolkien demonstrates that Power is the true weapon only of Evil, and that even in the hands of Good it eventually must result in corruption and suffering…. [Louis J. Halle, in a review comparing Tolkien's work to actual historical studies, says] "The two prime facts of Middle-earth … are power and ...

Although I like reading epics, medieval romances, and folktales, for many years I could not get beyond the barrier of that first all-too-Hobbit sentence: "When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton." When I forced myself inside I began to read with growing speed and excitement; then went back to The Hobbit (which is a very good children's...

The Lord of the Rings is one of the most surprising products of British literature since 1945, and one of the most serious. Edmund Wilson's attack on the book [see CLC, Vol. 1], though it hearteningly insisted on the obvious—for instance, that Tolkien's prose is as undistinguished as his verse (someone ought to point out, for example, how much mileage he gets out of the one word "great")—quite fails to account for the seriousness of the undertaking, for the pressure...

[At] college bookstores all across the country, students who formerly pounced on The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies are passing them up in favor of a new Lord, The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The king of the campus novels is dead. Long live the king. (p. 130) The Hobbits and their buddies are almost wholly good and, with one exception, light of skin. And no one has much more psychological depth than Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. There seems to be no allegorical meaning to the trilogy. At l...

Tolkien's trilogy … resembles the Anglo-Saxon chronicles he studied as a scholar. The Lord of the Rings is a work of art but it is also history—even if invented history—and it bears comparison to works of Gibbon or Parkman more readily than it does to other novels. The great historians are equally artists and builders of worlds. Gibbon's Rome and Parkman's French America are worlds as strange and distant from our own as Tolkien's Middle Earth. On the level of...

In recent months, The Lord of the Rings has been at the top of college best-seller lists across the country, and although the Tolkien people wince at the word "fad" as if it were sheer blasphemy, even they will admit that their enthusiasm has gone—perhaps inevitably—beyond all reason. The Tolkien people may be less noisy than the LSD-heads, but there are more of them, and they give the lie to most of the melodramatic scandal that has emanated from the American campus within the p...

The real surge of interest in Tolkien's writing has been among high school and college students. Students make strange and varied works their own, and if there is any significance to their adoption of The Lord of the Rings—beyond the fact that it's a good book—the hell with it; one or another of our explainers of the young will take note of it pretty soon. But there is one possible reason for Tolkien's popularity that I would like to put forward, because it concerns the re...