![]() In 1966, Plotz invited Auden, who was spending his winters in New York, to come speak at one of the Tolkien Society’s gatherings, and the New Yorker writer Gerald Jones covered the meeting for the magazine. Tolkien is not as great a writer as Milton,” Auden conceded, “but in this matter he has succeeded where Milton failed.” On the one hand, we envision “a God of Love who creates free beings who can reject his love” on the other, we picture “a God of absolute Power whom none can withstand.” It’s a story about how, as we gain power, we lose freedom. “The Lord of the Rings,” he wrote, aimed to reconcile “two incompatible notions” we have about God. Moreover, Auden wrote, Tolkien’s moral sensibility was profoundly grownup, especially when it came to theological questions. Tolkien’s world may not be the same as our own, Auden wrote in a 1956 review of the author’s work for the New York Times, but it’s a world “of intelligible law, not mere wish,” that represents our own reality. ![]() The critic Edmund Wilson famously panned “The Lord of the Rings” as a “children’s book which has somehow gotten out of hand.” In The New Yorker’ s 1954 Briefly Noted review of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the writer concluded that the novel had “the air of having been written as a hobby by a man with a ferreting imagination and a capacity for industry that will not allow him to stop inventing long after all the facts are down and the picture is clear.” The books, the reviews suggested, were driven by an essentially childish desire for a never-ending story.Īuden repeatedly challenged the idea that Tolkien’s work was only suitable for children. But most people still viewed his work as rambling, juvenile fantasy. Some early critics admired Tolkien’s intricate knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and his inspired updating of old Germanic themes. Berkeley official said that the Tolkien phenomenon was “more than a campus craze it’s like a drug dream.”) (Drugs probably helped: in a 1967 Times interview, a U.C. At universities across the country, Hobbits quickly become more popular than Salinger, Heller, or Vonnegut. “The Hobbit” had been published in 1937, followed by “The Fellowship of the Ring,” in 1954 then, in 1965, an unauthorized paperback version of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was released by Ace Books, renewing interest in the series. In the late nineteen-sixties, Tolkien’s books were just beginning to enjoy a renaissance on American campuses. ![]()
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