A curiously very great book

All right, but one might also say that with the 20th century in the rearview mirror and the boundaries of high and low culture virtually dissolved, Tolkien's outsider status isn't what it used to be. For all its idiosyncrasy, "The Lord of the Rings" looks more and more as if it might belong to two distinct but interconnected literary traditions. One of these reflects the growing literary respectability of science fiction and fantasy, and would include Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany and various others. (Tolkien has a legion of imitators and emulators, but that is a separate phenomenon.)

The second category is really the leading offshoot of modernism itself, and might be dubbed Great Weird Boy Books, meaning weighty tomes that mix realism and fantasy along with various forms of language and discourse, much of it technical or abstruse, while aspiring to a mythic dimension. Such a list would include "Ulysses" and "Lolita," to be sure, but also "Gravity's Rainbow," "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse Five." You could add books by William Gaddis, Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace; you could reach outside the overeducated pale-male demographic for Ralph Ellison or A.S. Byatt or Delany or Margaret Atwood.

If we've gotten anything useful from postmodern literary theory (which is a debatable proposition), it's the idea that a book always reveals and conceals things that neither the writer nor the reader can control. Tolkien may have intended "The Lord of the Rings" as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," as he once wrote, but relatively few readers since the 1950s have received it that way. As Shippey makes clear, Tolkien's world is one of virtuous pre-Christian monotheism rather than paganism, and his "eucatastrophe" (Tolkien-C.S. Lewis parlance for a great moment of deliverance), when the One Ring is destroyed and Sauron's works are unmade, carries faint but distinct pre-echoes of Christian salvation and resurrection. But to those who saw Tolkien as a liberatory spirit of the counterculture, a lover of trees and hater of machines, the Christian dimension was simply irrelevant.

Tolkien was indeed a lover of trees and hater of machines; he was also an unregenerate Tory, even a monarchist, who distrusted modern notions of democracy and equality and resented the increasing dominance of the left in intellectual life. Those who embraced Tolkien from the '60s onward had of course not seen his letters of the 1940s, in which he praises Francisco Franco, suggests that it may not matter whether Adolf Hitler or the forces of "Americo-cosmopolitanism" emerge victorious from World War II and even remarks, "There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the 'Germanic' ideal."

Although Tolkien's defenders have done their utmost to rationalize and contextualize it, there is a troubling fixation on racial and ancestral purity in "The Lord of the Rings." Aragorn (usually described as "Aragorn son of Arathorn"), the returned king who assumes his rightful throne by epic's end, is descended from the Númenorean line of Elendil, which confers fair skin, great height and beauty, exceedingly long life, valor in battle and healing powers. The further away from this ideal ancestry Tolkien's humans get, the darker, cruder and less reliable they become.

In fairness, Tolkien never suggests that racial purity makes a decisive difference between good and evil; the Woses are noble savages who value freedom, while the sinister Lord of the Nazgûl is a great king of Númenorean descent who was twisted to the will of Sauron. (Further philology: Tolkien's English word for the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths, was aptly chosen, since "wraith" is related to "writhe" and "wreath," and carries the meaning of a bent and twisted spirit.) Even the dark-complexioned Southrons and Easterlings who fight for Sauron's armies are seen as valiant but deluded, and those who surrender to Aragorn's forces are shown mercy.

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