On July 29, 1954, a UK publisher called George Allen & Unwin published a volume titled The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic novel The Lord of the Rings. The modern fantasy novel existed before The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings; Tolkien was himself an enthusiastic reader of fantasies set in ‘secondary worlds’ by authors such as William Morris and E.R. Eddison. But when we look at the fantasy genre before and after Tolkien, we can see that something epochal happened with the publication of The Lord of the Rings.
In 1954, fantasy novels were a minor feature in the literary landscape. Seventy years later, in 2024, in any bookstore, you can find a substantial section for fantasy, often alongside its literary cousin, science fiction (a genre that Tolkien enjoyed, incidentally1). Fantasy series such as C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones have name-recognition far beyond their readers, and the popularity of the genre extends from the printed page to the screen, both big and small.
Today, ‘fantasy’ often brings to mind elves and dwarves, dragons and treasures, kings and warriors; medievalesque worlds imagined in great detail; magic items and strange prophecies; quests and epic battles: these elements of plot, character, and setting have become fantasy staples in large part because they appear in The Lord of the Rings. For the Victorians, ‘elf’ suggested a diminutive flower-fairy; for readers today, it suggests a warrior of a proud, wise race older than humans. The difference is profound, and it is Tolkien’s. Even the tendency to publish fantasies in trilogies (or trilogies of trilogies!) stems from the publication of The Lord of the Rings in three volumes.
It can be well-nigh impossible to imagine the fantasy genre without imposing on it ideas taken from The Lord of the Rings or from reactions against it.
The secondary world of modern fantasy novels might be dark and disturbing, or energized by hope; the author might share Tolkien’s Christian ethos or not; the book might be written well or written badly; it might even be deliberately challenging or resisting Tolkien’s approach to fantasy. Whatever might be the case, Tolkien cannot be ignored. Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld books and one of the giants of modern fantasy literature, put it this way:
J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.2
C.S. Lewis, in his review of The Fellowship of the Ring, put it this way:
This book is like lightning from a clear sky . . . in the history of Romance itself—a history which stretches back to the Odyssey and beyond—it makes not a return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory. Nothing quite like it was ever done before.3
The Lord of the Rings has shaped not just the literature that came after it, but even readers’ expectations of what fantasy should look like. Ironically, the effect of Tolkien’s work on the genre has influenced (indeed, distorted) later readers’ responses to The Lord of the Rings itself. At this point, it can be well-nigh impossible to imagine the fantasy genre without imposing on it ideas taken from The Lord of the Rings or from reactions against it.
A book can be influential, even transformative in the literary history of a genre without having staying power for later readers. Samuel Richardson’s 18th century Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto fall into that category: hugely popular in their day, they are now for the most part read only to understand how they helped to shape more enduring works of literature, such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Even in the context of modern fantasy, we can look at William Morris, one of Tolkien’s own favorite authors, who was so highly regarded in his day that he was mooted as a potential poet laureate. With the exception of his utopia News from Nowhere, Morris’s fiction is now largely out of print, lacking staying power beyond his own generation of readers.
The Lord of the Rings, however, is both influential and enduringly popular. Why should an epic fantasy about a quest to dispose of a magic ring featuring elves and dwarves, wizards and warriors, speak so profoundly to the twentieth century and now to the twenty-first? Why does Tolkien’s work have such staying power, with its appeal widening and increasing over time?
There are many factors to consider, not least that it is superbly written; Tolkien’s magisterial command of English prose is not nearly as widely recognized as it ought to be. (There is still a fair bit of residual snobbery in the culture about fantasy being ‘not real literature.’)
I would venture to suggest, as one element of its lasting success, that The Lord of the Rings contains a timeless quality, and that this quality is not a negative one (arising out of total detachment from modern-day concerns), but rather a positive one, deriving from an engagement with the present that is united with a discerning valuation of the past.
According to Eugene Vinaver, Tolkien once said that “his typical response upon reading a medieval work was to desire not so much to make a philological or critical study of it as to write a modern work in the same tradition.”4 Tolkien was not an antiquarian whose eye is forever fixed on his rearview mirror, but a translator who looks both ahead and behind, aiming to preserve the best that history had to offer by making it accessible to contemporary readers. And to achieve that translation, he had to know both languages, as it were—tongues ancient and modern. In his book The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, John Garth remarks on the way that Tolkien’s The Book of Lost Tales is in fact a fusion of three literary genres that Tolkien admired: it is not only “a foundational myth for England, like the one that Virgil’s Aeneid had furnished for Rome,” but also “a collection of stories within a story, like Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales” and “a lost-world story, like Henry Rider Haggard’s She.”
Classical, medieval, and modern: all interwoven in the earliest tales of Middle-earth. Like a tree whose roots go deep into soil and deeper into rock while its leaves yet take in sunlight high above ground, Tolkien participated in the recent past, the distant past, and his own day, and thus could do more than merely reject or react to the problems of his time: he could challenge and reorient the contemporary status quo in unexpected ways.
This multi-layered quality of his legendarium is one reason that Tolkien’s work speaks powerfully not only to his own century, but now to the twenty-first century too. William Fliss, the Tolkien Archivist at Marquette University, observes that Tolkien is “transgenerational,” having the “rare ability to attract a popular audience in each new generation.”5 Indeed, in some ways, the reach of his work is not merely continuing, but intensifying, showing its value more tellingly as the years go by.
Tolkien, like a scribe of the kingdom, brought out from his storehouse treasures both old and new.
Consider the theme that is at the heart of The Lord of the Rings and foreshadowed in The Hobbit: that of relinquishing the will to power. Renunciation of power, the embrace of humility, and the elevation of pity and mercy are values that ultimately come from Tolkien’s deep-rooted Christian faith (a topic that I explore in Tolkien’s Faith), but he does not simply insert them into his stories as moral touchpoints; rather, they are part of the very fabric of the tale, so deeply woven into the story that we may not even notice, at first, the remarkable reversal that Tolkien is effecting in his stories.
Power and its abuses have always been a concern, in every era; the possibility of total power is a distinctively modern concern, as is Tolkien’s response. Although The Hobbit ostensibly centers upon a quest for something—to recover the dwarves’ gold—the turning-point of the story occurs as Bilbo gives up the Arkenstone, and by extension his entire share in the treasure and his place in the dwarves’ company, in order to forestall the terrible conflict between the dwarves and the men of Dale and their Elvish allies. This theme, deepened and enriched, becomes also the centerpiece of The Lord of the Rings. The magic ring has a long lineage in ancient and medieval literature, but in the folkloric quests and heroic sagas, the quest is always to find and use the magic item. Tolkien gives us something new in the Fellowship’s mission to destroy it, to renounce utterly the libido dominandi that it signifies. Power and its abuses is a perennial theme for reflection, but the twentieth century—Tolkien’s century—gave it a new and sinister aspect: the potential for total power, complete domination.
Tolkien engages the attention of modern readers in part because he addresses quintessentially modern concerns such as this. In his study The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey situates Tolkien alongside writers such as Orwell, Golding, and Vonnegut, who addressed “the most pressing and most immediately relevant issues of the whole monstrous twentieth century—questions of industrialised warfare, the origin of evil, the nature of humanity.”
When The Lord of the Rings originally appeared, many critics found it baffling: it was something unprecedented, for which they had no adequate classification. Given that Tolkien was not the first to write secondary-world fantasies for adult readers, nor the first to popularize traditional stories for modern audiences, we should ask what it was that made The Lord of the Rings so startling. Part of the answer, at least, is that Tolkien, like a scribe of the kingdom, brought out from his storehouse treasures both old and new.
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This article draws in part from Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (Word on Fire Academic: 2021)
1 See my Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages, chapter 9.
2 Terry Pratchett, “Magic Kingdoms,” in A Slip of the Keyboard.
3 C.S. Lewis, review of The Fellowship of the Ring, in Image and Imagination.
4 Richard C. West, quoted in Tolkien’s Modern Reading, p. 289.
5 William Fliss, quoted in Tolkien’s Modern Reading, p. 290.