mad …’ Yet just over ten years later, his books become runaway bestsellers; and after forty years, they count among the most widely read in the global history of publishing.
The author is, of course, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973). Born, in South Africa to English parents, he moved back to England, just outside Birmingham, at the age of three-and-a-half. He developed a childhood passion for languages into a lifelong academic career, interrupted by service in the war of 1914–18. He became Professor first of Anglo-Saxon, then of English Language and Literature, at Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life. Despite co-editing a respected edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and writing a paper on Beowulf acclaimed for its brilliance, it was an unremarkable life by many standards … except for those books.
Reliable figures are hard to come by, but as far as I can tell, total worldwide sales of Tolkien’s books are as follows. The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), at about 50 million copies, is probably the biggest-selling single work of fiction this century. The Hobbit (1937) is not far behind, at between 35 and 40 million copies. And one could add the considerable sales, now perhaps over 2 million, of his dark and difficult posthumously published epic The Silmarillion (1977). The grand total is thus well on its way to 100 million. Tolkien’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages, including Japanese, Catalan, Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Finnish, Indonesian and Vietnamese. (This last, unofficial translation appeared in 1967, whereupon the South Vietnamese II Corps was rather perceptively fêted by tribesmen with shields bearing the Eye of Sauron.)
Furthermore, this is no flash-in-the-pan phenomenon, riding on the heels of the 1960s; Tolkien has outlived the counter-culture in which he first flourished. No longer fashionable, he nonetheless still sells steadily. That was undoubtedly the main reason for the purchase in 1990 of his publisher, Unwin Hyman (originally George Allen and Unwin), by HarperCollins.
Every other index points to the same conclusion. In England, for example, since figures began to be kept in 1991, Tolkien’s books have been taken out of public libraries around 200,000 times a year; he is one of only four ‘classic authors’ whose annual lending totals have exceeded 300,000 (well ahead of Austen, Dickens and Shakespeare). The Hobbit spent fifteen years as the biggest-selling American paperback, and The Lord of the Rings is still the most valuable first edition published in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the latter – laboriously typed out on a bed in suburban war-time Oxford, and expected by its first publisher to lose money – is now universally acknowledged as largely responsible for the subsequent money-spinning genre of ‘fantasy literature.’ Then there are the extra-literary phenomena. In the 1960s and 70s, buttons and graffiti proclaiming ‘Frodo Lives!’ sprouted (in Quebec, it was ‘Middle-earth Libre’). The title of The Silmarillion provided the name of an early heavy-metal band, while on the more establishment side, ‘hobbit’ is now entrenched in the Oxford English Dictionary, and a thousand ‘Lothlóriens’ and ‘Rivendells’ can be found on house-signs in suburban lanes. There is now even an area of submarine features off the southwest coast of Ireland named after Tolkien characters: hence, ‘Gollum’s Channel,’ and so on.
In other words, we are talking about a massively popular and successful publishing phenomenon; all the more so when one of the books in question is half-a-million words long, and neither involves any big money or sex, explicit or otherwise – two ingredients now normally considered essential for bestsellers – let alone cannibalism, serial murder, sadomasochism or lawyers. (And how many such books will still be in print half a century after publication? The fate of Jackie Collins beckons.)
This book will undoubtedly make more sense if you have already read The Lord of the Rings; but if you have not, or need reminding, here is a very brief synopsis. It takes place in the Third Age of Middle-earth – our Earth, but in an imaginary period a very long time ago. Frodo Baggins of the Shire, where the hobbits live, inherits a magic ring from his uncle Bilbo, who had acquired it from a fallen hobbit, Gollum, in the course of adventures recounted in The Hobbit. Gandalf the Grey, a wizard, realizes that it is the One Ring, eagerly sought by its maker Sauron, the ruler of Mordor and the greatest power in Middle-earth. With the Ring, Sauron would be invincible. The only hope is to try to smuggle the Ring into Mordor and cast it into the furnace of Mount Doom where it was forged; for it cannot be destroyed in any other way, and anyone who tries to use it against Sauron would simply become another Dark Lord.
Frodo and his devoted companion Sam therefore begin the quest to return the Ring to its source. Initially, they are accompanied by the Company, including and representing the ‘free peoples’ of Men, Elves and Dwarves, as well as Gandalf and two other hobbits, Pippin and Merry. But the Company is soon dispersed, and from then on (most of the book), the reader follows two parallel stories: the adventures of its remaining members in the War of the Ring, as they struggle to keep Sauron occupied and distracted, and the agonizing journey of Frodo and Sam, accompanied by the treacherous Gollum.
Although Gandalf has always been its chief strategist, the war against Sauron is increasingly led by Aragorn, the hitherto unknown heir to the thrones of Arnor (now vanished) and Gondor (still the chief kingdom of resistance among Men). In its course, followed principally through the fortunes of Merry and Pippin, we meet some extraordinary places and people, both human and otherwise – including Lothlórien, the last remaining stronghold of pure Elvish ‘magic,’ where the powerful elven lady Galadriel lives; the fierce feudal Riders of Rohan; the Ents, sentient, talking and moving trees; Shelob, a malevolent spider-being; the nine Ringwraiths, Sauron’s lieutenants; and Saruman, a corrupted wizard.
When Frodo does arrive, he is mastered at the last moment by the Ring, and claims it; but Gollum bites it off his finger, loses his balance, and falls into the Crack of Doom holding it. The works of Sauron come to a cataclysmic end, and Frodo and Sam are just saved from the wreck. Eventually, after Aragorn’s coronation and wedding, and together with Pippin and Merry, they return to the Shire to find their struggles not yet over. But order is finally restored, and after a few years Frodo (who never really recovers from his ordeals) is allowed to pass over the Sea to within sight of Elvenhome, together with some of the last and greatest Elves and Gandalf. Sam remains in the Shire with his wife and family.
The Lord of the Rings is not really a trilogy, that being merely the publisher’s device for breaking it up into manageable-sized volumes; it is written in six ‘books,’ largely following the two parallel stories. Middle-earth’s languages (both written and spoken), the histories of its various peoples, calendrical systems, and some family trees are discussed in detailed appendices – all too briefly for those readers who have fallen in love with the book en route. (Those who haven’t won’t have gotten that far.)
The first and chief riddle I want to try to unravel is therefore this: how could such a remarkably unlikely book, written by someone so removed from (and indeed hostile to) mainstream cultural and intellectual life, achieve such a huge and lasting popular success? Or, to put it another way, what are millions of readers from all over the world getting out of reading these
