The book of the century

"The Lord of the Rings" is conventionally called fantasy, yet Tolkien in some ways considered it to be true, or at least to be "true myth." It is a work by a devout Christian that never mentions God and has only one reference to religious practice (and that is entirely nonsectarian). In terms of conscious intention, at least, it is a profoundly conservative work, an elegy for lost tales, lost eras and lost hierarchies tinged (it must be said) by xenophobia, troubling racial attitudes and a confused sexuality. Yet it became a central text of the 1960s counterculture and a source of inspiration to the radical environmental movement.

I could go on: Despite the quintessential Englishness of his work and his own anti-Americanism -- or perhaps because of it -- Tolkien found his largest audience and warmest critical reception in the United States. As Shippey demonstrates, Tolkien's presentation of evil, which often seems depressingly simplistic (Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, does not appear directly in "The Lord of the Rings," but we get the impression that he is sadistic, sarcastic, headstrong and none too bright), is at other times quite sophisticated. In his handling of Sauron's chief creation, the One Ring of Power, for example, Tolkien can be said to have anticipated the contemporary concept of addiction.

But the crux of the matter, it seems to me, lies in Tolkien's wholehearted rejection of modernity and modernism. This is what so powerfully attracts some readers, and just as powerfully repels others. The division has existed since "The Lord of the Rings" was first published, and was deftly summarized by no less august a figure than W.H. Auden, in his 1956 New York Times review of "The Return of the King," the final volume of Tolkien's published trilogy.

"I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments," Auden wrote. "Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect ... I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light 'escapist' reading."

The principle Auden was struggling to define, by which certain readers reject Tolkien's universe out of hand, still exists, although its terms have shifted since his day. To many literary-minded readers, Tolkien seems simultaneously too earnest and too gay (in the old-fashioned sense, although we'll get to other connotations in due course), insufficiently misanthropic, excessively popular yet lacking the delicious tang of trashiness.

His narrative tone ranges from the tragic and elegiac to the heroic and even comic (in a pipe-smoking, tweedy sort of way), but it is never ironic or cynical, a failure of taste and discrimination that some find embarrassing. Also, although he was trying to write a plausible reconstruction of ancient myth, not a modern novel, those forms frequently share a frankness about human sexuality and bodily functions that his work never has. (Consider the ancient Irish warrior-goddess Queen Medb, who fertilized the fields with her menstrual flow.) If there is one word that characterizes "The Lord of the Rings," with its high-flown poesy, its fatal heroism, its intensively worked-out systems of history and language and its Edwardian prudery, the word is boyish.

But boyishness is not the same thing as childishness, and I'm not trying to denigrate the scope of Tolkien's peculiar achievement. Boys can have access to a nobility and moral clarity, an uncloudedness of motive, that disappears with the arrival of devious and lustful manhood. (Female readers, forgive me for the gendered nouns; we are in Tolkien's world now.) Furthermore, as vigorously as Tolkien resisted biographical or psychological readings of his work, he also suggested, in typical self-contradictory fashion, that its key was to be found in his own boyhood.

Next Page: Tolkien's nightmarish childhood and youth

• View blog reactions