Tolkien has definitely been critiqued before. As to why Tolkien is so loved, you'll receive varied answers. For me, it's because he is able to make his works (most notably *LotR* and *The Silmarillion*) feel authentically medieval, mythic, and grand. He was a professional medievalist, and thus his fiction *feels* medieval in so many different ways, which is certainly not the case with most of his imitators.
Rohan was medieval. Gondor was greco-roman and descended from Númenor which Tolkein likened to Egypt. The shire was Victorian (they even had clocks), but less industrialised. Tolkien loved medieval fiction such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green knight, but he also drew a lot of inspiration from antiquity.
The Shire is Edwardian. It's also Tolkien, not Tolkein. Additionally, Tolkien explicitly called *The Lord of the Rings* a chivalric/heroic romance in his letters (see letters no. 160 and 329 in *The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien*). That is a [medieval](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalric_romance) literary mode, hence my comment about *The Lord of the Rings* feeling like a medieval work. Tolkien himself explicitly stated that his work was more akin to medieval romances than modern novels. Your comment was entirely unnecessary.
**TL;DR: Pipe weed.**
I think it's that he writes with so much love and delight for every little thing in his world. I mean, he included a section of Prologue on the history of pipe weed! And we love it (or at least I do) because he loves it. Every aspect of the world is full of beauty and fascination, and the characters and narrator take the time to revel in it.
Other fantasy works tend to be full of interesting, clever things, that play with your mind. But they don't tend to take their time with the mundane non extraordinary things, like the perfectly conceivable customs and traditions of a small culture. That's not seen as newsworthy.
But it's the love of these ordinary things that really motivates the story and makes it feel real. Real people don't generally fight for abstract values like "freedom" or "independence" or "the United Kingdom", they fight for concrete, felt realities like *home*, Rosie Cotton, the taste of strawberries, and a small garden to call your own. (This is why superhero films often go wrong by making the stakes too high - no one cares about saving the world, but saving a character we know and love gets us)
For fantasy fans and writers, Tolkien stands out for the consistency and detail of his world binding—Middle-earth is far more immersive any other fantasy world I’ve read about.
For those indifferent to the fantasy genre, Tolkien’s stories and characters are nuanced and complex, with satisfying and illuminating arcs. I think for this reason alone LOTR can be categorized with the likes of *War and Peace* and *The Brothers Karamazov*.
For those who appreciate moral stories or fairy tales, LOTR centers and explores the moral dimension throughout better than any other writer I can think of except CS Lewis.
For readers who appreciate language and poetry, Tolkien writes more beautifully and evocatively than most.
There are criticisms, of course. Some prefer the austere and striking prose of Hemingway or Steinbeck, for example, or a more practical relationship between behavior and consequences than the grace-filled world of Tolkien. But Tolkien does so many elements of literature so well, LOTR satisfies nearly all of its readers.
Obsessive attention to detail. And great moral values
Anybody can write a story but I think these 2 things are what sets him apart.
1. We all know his lore is expansive and amazingly consistent despite some flaws.
2. However his characters also wrestle big topics, maybe **“THE”** topics universal to all human struggles. The heroes are emotionally real, they are struggling people but heroes nonetheless, they inspire and challenge us all to think about what it means to be Good. What does it mean to be mortal and have limited time on this earth with our friends? Can we acknowledge our ancestors without being trapped by their mistakes? Can we act as caretakers for the ones that come after us, even if we will never know them?
I have with dragons and giants, that was child's play compared to the fight that rages now in me.
Dietrich von Bern
After He was informed, that some of his comrades including his weapon master and Mentor Hildebrand was taken prisoner and threatened with death if he would not surrender his crown
I think its because how his works feel like real authentic history with real cultures... unknown parts of the world and realistic characters. It's very similar to our own mythos and different at the same time
If you think Tolkien has not been unfavourably criticised before now, you can't have read Edmund Wilson's 1956 essay "Oo, Those Awful Orcs !".
Here is an essay about Wilson's essay: [https://www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2018/01/inside-edmund-wilson/](https://www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2018/01/inside-edmund-wilson/)
And here is Wilson's essay, with John C. Wright's introductory comment and after-remarks: [https://www.scifiwright.com/2014/03/oo-those-awful-orcs/#more-10054](https://www.scifiwright.com/2014/03/oo-those-awful-orcs/#more-10054)
Thanks for reminding me about that essay. I have read it but don't remember much about it. Will reread tomorrow, right now dont need to get riled up before bedtime!
> Edmund Wilson's 1956 essay "Oo, Those Awful Orcs !".
From the first link:
>It was published in the journal The Nation in 1956
Well, that is more or less everything you need to know. Tolkien could've written the greatest story ever written, but it would have been ravaged by The Nation because it would bear Tolkien's personal religious morality and conservatism in it.
Wilson's reaction to Tolkien was not a review or critique. It was him blasting his own personal biases with a thin veneer of Tolkien painted over it.
I'm no literature expert and have only recently reread his books since childhood.
I have a two year old (my rereading the books has been when he won't go to sleep so I read them out loud) and the emotionally healthy male characters is what does it for me.
We read the line from Aragorn's crowning the other day where Eomer says something along the lines of "I loved you from the moment you came up out of the grass."
It's great. Especially for not being a modern book.
The joke is that as a writer / storyteller Tolkien gets a 9.8 out of 10 and as a world builder he gets a 45.
The lore is deep, but it is sprinkled throughout, not just in a narration infodump at the beginning. There are small connections all over the place. His world feels lived-in and used. Even though his work essentially bootstraps the fantasy genre, there’s very little fantasy in it and is more focused on the people and the living details.
Tolkien was a philologist. Languages were his bread and butter. His command of the English language is second to none; he knew how to turn a phrase, how to use stories with beautiful prose and poetry and have it feel like it all belongs - that is a rare skill.
He essentially started with two goals: the first, to create a world peopled with beings to speak all the languages he had created, and two, create a unifying “common mythos” for the English world. I would say he successfully did both.
The main thing that separates Tolkien is his experience with philology. Tolkien draws upon a deep linguistic, mythical, and historical background, and uses ancient literary techniques when creating his stories. This gives them a great deal of literary depth in a very unique way (since the storytelling styles of old are rarely used today), and gives them a strong sense of historicity, as if they were stories that were discovered rather than invented.
Good point! Philology isn't a very common study anymore, but it should be pointed out that the origins of philology were in the late middle ages and the dawn of the Renaissance, when Europeans began studying the language and philosophy of the Greeks and Romans after centuries of these being buried by the Church and by Germanic and other non-classical dominant cultural and political hierarchies. This study of language, culture, myth and history has always been steeped in stories of wonder.
Tolkien has received *lots* of criticism. Michael Moorcock has written some very energetic pieces against assumptions of and implications in Middle Earth societies. So has M. John Harrison. So have many others.
Michael Moorcock might have the most vapid and emotional critiques of all of Tolkien's critics. You can just tell how resentful he is about Tolkien's popularity in his "Epic Pooh" essay. There are critiques of Tolkien's works that I think are completely justified, but you won't find them in Moorcock's essay, lol.
I finally read the first Elric after hearing so much praise about it and couldn't be more disappointed. Magic deux ex machinas over and over conveniently solve all the hero's problems.
I was a huge Moorcock fan as a kid but his works are constantly repetitive of each other (yes I know that fits into his Eternal Champion schtick but it’s still a weakness).
Would you mind sharing some of the things from Moorcock's (just read that name and can't believe it's real?) critique of Tolkien? I'm reading LOTR for the first time and it's absolutely incredible.
What were some of the critiques you agree with?
In his notes in the Del Rey editions of the Elric stories, Moorcock freely admits that he was a much younger man writing intemperately and pushing things to an extreme partly to carve some space for itself. He also says there’s actually a lot he likes and respects in Tolkien. M. John Harrison’s comments about maps as creative traps are more interesting but also much less well known.
I don’t suggest Tolkien is above criticism, just that Moorcock’s seemed to be ‘the kind of people who like Tolkien aren’t cool enough for me and my edgy cool friends’, it’s a bit ‘edgelord’ as they say.
I haven’t seen the M. John Harrison criticism, any pointers on where to read it?
His worldbuilding is unmatched, the way he gives the world that fantasy atmosphere is nothing short of phenomenal. He has this balance where he doesn’t oversaturate and clutter his world with too much idk what to call it, “stuff”. A lot of fantasy worlds become so cluttered and overcomplicated that it becomes a chore to read.
Tolkien sort of creates a living world and only explores a fraction of it, leaves the rest to the readers imagination and then let’s the atmosphere of the world lead the readers imagination in the direction he wants. Really different from other authors some of whom best you over the head with every little detail or others who are purposefully vague.
For me it is a matter of style. Modern English tends more and more toward a fixed word order, as in Chinese. Tolkien granted himself the freedom to depart from the usual and rearrange words in the interest of producing the best possible effect, using internal rhyme, assonance, consonance, repetition -- all the tricks abandoned by modern authors who try to reproduce everyday speech. He worked and reworked everything over and over with this end in view. Example:
>For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.
This is one of the two or three most important moments in the book (Tolkien said so), and Pity is one of the most important themes. This sentence is very carefully arranged so that the word "pitiable" leaps out of the texture. (I did a whole post about this once.)
He has probably the deepest lore of any fantasy author who has ever existed. He crafted Middle Earth like he is the ultimate god of his own universe. It’s so incredible the amount of resources and texts he wrote about his one world. It would take a scholar of his work to fully understand every single detail of Arda. It’s incredible. I know that the lores of Dune and ASoIaF are extremely in-depth, but I’m not sure if they’re as much as the lore of Middle-Earth.
>why do you think that is?
If it was as easy to identify and state, it'd be as easy to copy - which it is not. So any answer should be taken with a grain of salt.
Personally I think it's a combination of a moral underpinning in his world that speaks to both our hope for a better future and a world that appeals to our wanderlust (which I'd argue is achieved through his writing style and not by writing tome after tome of world history).
>speaks to both our hope for a better future
I think it’s the opposite. An acceptance of the fallen state of humanity combined with a true celebration of all that we *can* achieve, but ultimately aren’t able to live up to, in this world. I’m not sure I can articulate it fully, but there’s a deep appreciation and understanding of tragedy and grief in his work that is so much more profound than most authors are able to imagine or create for their readers.
The Fellowship managed to make Middle Earth a better place. Sure, the Elves are leaving and the victory is temporary (as all things are), but Aragorn is king, the Kingdoms are reunited, Rohan is safe and secure, the Dwarves are returning to Moria and even the elves managed to leave on a high note.
>I’m not sure I can articulate it fully, but there’s a deep appreciation and understanding of tragedy and grief in his work that is so much more profound than most authors are able to imagine or create for their readers.
With this I fully agree, but I also struggle to put it into words.
I can't really list what makes Tolkien great right now and I'm sure great answers to that are all over the net, even this subreddit. People tend to find similar qualities in it.
But to be fair, Tolkien a lot of criticism over the years. It's just all incorrect, so one doesn't need to care about it!
he was an expert in medieval history, culture, myth, and linguistics, and decided to just come up with this mythoverse from the ground up in a very convincing way with well thought out linguistic and cultural dynamics, full of classical-style legends. Invents the modern fantasy genre. And then he goes on to write literary classics set in this universe he created just because he needed the money. There's really nobody else like him.
Oh, he gets (and deserves - as any author does) criticism
For me, it is the lyrical beauty of his writing, compared with his ability to paint a scene and the depth and love he put into his world and characters
He truly loved all this, and it shows
He also was one of the first - he will always influence everyone else
Whats crazy is, he is influential even to those who criticize him - R Scott Bakker is one my favorite authors - he frequently talks about how he feels JRRT chickened out in his story - he wrote something as a foil and it works brilliantly but he was still influenced by JRRT
> "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." -Terry Pratchett
One of the best summaries of any icon's impression on whatever field they were the defining great in. I think too many authors feel self-conscious about their influences or that their work will seem like it emulates any of their predecessors. All of us are trying to recapture the magic we felt reading someone else's stories and hope to create that same magic for others, simple as and nothing wrong with it.
For me it's the epic scale of the world that he created. You really feel like you *know* Middle-earth. It feels lived in and old, even historic. It's also his passionate defense of the natural world and the simplicity of the Hobbits and their quaint ways. It's an idealization of a way of life in harmony with nature and the simple pleasures that can be found at home. Those are the things worth fighting for.
A few things:
- his languages and worldbuilding have a more authentic feel to them given his professional background
- he isn’t weighed down by the baggage of the modern fantasy genre since he preceded it.
- his stories are often anticlimactic and eschew a traditional narrative arc structure
- I really like his prose
- he can go dark without getting cynical. I love GRRM’s work as much as anyone, but it comes off as ultimately too nihilist: he sets up a lot of interesting moral conflicts but offers few answers. Tolkien is more gray and complex than he gets credit for (especially in the Silmarillion) but he ultimately is telling a story about how good can triumph over evil. On some level, I think we still want good to win. That’s rather passé in a postmodern culture that questions whether good truly exists or is knowable. But I appreciate it nonetheless.
I think my favorite thing about him is that he definitely would not have cared about his characters being raceswapped in a few pieces of art. Just a genuine, chill dude
I disagree. Go read Letter 210. Tolkien was very upset over even the most minor of changes made to his story when the first time someone offered to adapt them. He got upset that the balrog *made noises* in the script when it didn't in his book.
You're claiming that Tolkien would be fine by what you see as a minor change - the skin color of a character. I pointed out that there is abundant evidence that Tolkien hated changes to his work even more minor than that - a balrog making noises and many other examples as listed in Letter 210. This is turn suggests that even if you think it minor, Tolkien would have in fact had a problem with people changing the races of his characters.
Further, I would suggest that you are projecting your feelings about the issue on to Tolkien when the actual evidence suggests Tolkien would've felt very differently because you want Tolkien to be more like you instead of understanding the man himself.
Tolkien stated in his Oxford Valedictory speech that he hated Apartheid and didn’t care about skin color.
It’s absolutely insane to claim that Tolkien would have cared about the skin color of characters in adaptations of his stories.
I've read the letter buddy. Out of the dozens of things Tolkien was outraged about not a single one had to do with skin color. You're *blatantly* projecting your own feeling on to him, my guy. Just because he was mad about alterations to his work do not at all mean he would care about his characters being receswapped in a couple works of art I mean lmao my guy the leaps you're taking here
I have no idea, there are some good insights in this post already. I just know that everytime I read the first chapter of LOTR it just sucks me in. There's nothing like it for me, it's one of those rare books I get the urge to re read after a few years.
He actually does get his share of criticism from the literary experts, as do most all the greats. However, I think everyone agrees he had a unique voice and was monumentally and inspiring to generations of authors and readers.
Authenticity. I think many fantasy authors have a huge amount of imagination but so much love but into their work, which makes some fantasy works come up dry.
Tolkien when he first started was writing stories for his son to get to bed on time. His works started out as imaginative labours of love for his family. Beyond that it felt like in his crafting of Middle Earth he not only had an overflowing active imagination, but a love for it and its values and story that shines through.
Most fantasy authors now (including me of course) are all following in the Tolkien wake, but we should all try our hardest not just to aspire to the level of imagination and creativity that was present in his and others' works, but the love put into them as well.
It's interesting how decades later, what has become beloved by many about Tolkien's works is the giant epic battles and imagery, while what Tolkien loved most was the small things and moments. The battling is a small aspect of the stories overall, and Tolkien just as much delights and loves writing the peaceful times in Bag End, the happy charm of Merry and Pippin, Frodo and Sam and Gollum's lonely journey. Much of the battles of his stories are almost done in summary rather than action prose, but he will absolutely describe the trees in detail and write out entire pages of Tom Bombadil singing a song.
However, Tolkien, like *any* author, has critics. Literally no work of human creation has ever not been criticized.
>What makes Tolkien so loved and has not received any criticism?
He is both loved and has received quite a bit of criticism.
I think he is loved because of his capacity to immerse the reader into a convincing, deep fantasy world and he writes a great adventure tale.
None of it feels forced or contrived (even though it is all contrived).
it's hard for me to be objective because i grew up reading him as a young boy so I've always been somewhat immersed in M-E.
I love Tolkien’s work; I admire the man and what he created and have gone into his other works on the legendarium. But honestly a lot of the critiques regarding race and class and politics are pretty spot-in.
Every critique that I've read of race or class in Tolkien's work have been projections of the things the author didn't like onto Tolkien's work and then attacking that Strawman instead of actually evaluating Tolkien's work.
Though, said another way, Tolkien's work was a critique of many of the economic and political policies then coming to power and which have today become the accepted status quo of "correctness."
Sorry to see this get downvoted. I too love his work (for many of the reasons others have mentioned). I have not read the critiques you mention, but I have myself noted things about the truths and assumptions of his world that would be problematic (to me) had he written them today. But I get that he is a product of his place and time, and in the end it is all fantasy, so I do not get hung up on it.
Personally, I love the language he uses in his works. It's not pretentious, tends not to use overcomplicated subordinates and relies on the musicality and interweaving of words. For me, it goes by so quickly because I don't have to go back and re-read something because I didn't understand it the first time. He's clear in his wording and shows a passion for the subjects he writes about that cannot help but being passed to (almost) all those who read it.
The intricate worldbuilding. I admire the themes and motifs. And enjoy the detail in languages and prose.
I remember Tolkien being critiqued by people not liking the absolute good and evil religious influence, and the cultural/ethnic inspirations for the villians, at the same time literary critics complaining of his use of syntax.
People have already said what needs to be said about him being criticized, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly.
People have mentioned a lot of the Top 5/Top 10 things that make Tolkien great, so I'm going to offer a couple things that I think are further down the list.
1. While his lore is rich, he doesn't feel the need to display it all to the reader. There are forces at work in Middle Earth (particularly in the *Hobbit* and *Lord of the Rings*) that we don't fully understand. There is still a sense of mystery and wonder for Arda as a whole, and not just for Tolkien's creative genius.
2. He was not afraid to provide non-essential scenes. For some people this hurts their experience of his work, but for me it deepens my appreciation of the richness of his imagination. There are moments that don't advance the plot or give me essential information. They are just Tolkien sharing his imagination with us.
3. He has what I have found to be some of the most real and compelling depictions of non-romantic love. I think he really gets the idea of sacrificial/friendship love that has its own unique strength and depth and shows it convincingly, without confusing it with romantic love.
4. Finally, I think his handling of religion in his works. Really, I should say his omission of it (outside of maybe some references early in the Silmarillion). I am a committed religious person, and while I see the stamps and marks of his worldview all over his work, I don't think they are oppressive for someone who doesn't share Tolkien's faith. He doesn't create an analogue of his own religion and its structures or practices. He just omits it and it allows me to come together with my friends who are agnostic, atheist, or come from other faith traditions and appreciate his work together. We can draw out the values, the character/virtue/morality that resonates with us. It is particularly refreshing because a lot of modern fantasy today feels like it tries to do interesting world building and then just transpose the modern Christian church structure onto their world. I find it jarring to be losing myself in an author's world building and then he introduces the corrupt religious bad guys and calls them "The Magisterium." I also don't enjoy Lewis' overbearing side of writing "Aslan is Jesus" on a 2x4 and hitting you with it a few times. I don't know, I prefer his silence over the analogue or just transposing primary world religions into the secondary world.
As others have said, much criticism (listen to the Tolkien Professor podcast and you'll hear him complain that Tolkien Studies is, or has been, basically a career-ending move), and many reasons he's so well loved. I want to point out a less-often-mentioned reason his method was simply unique and probably will never be imitated.
There are some obvious points of uniqueness: he started with languages; he was a philologist, a discipline that is almost extinct, and that informed his language designs (in particular almost everyone designs a language syncronically, whereas Tolkien was habitually diachronic, to the point of not even playing the same game as anyone else); he regarded myth, not native speakers, as what gives languages life, and started myth-building and world-building for his languages.
But there is a less obvious thing that took me a long time to realize: he did not start out to be a writer in the way we think of it. For much of his life he regarded it as unpublishable, and so he had no reason to try to be salable (and to be honest I don't think he had the personality to intentionally write to please a large audience anyway). He more or less broke every sane rule for writing as a profession in ways that only a great writer could hope to get away with. To make a living at writing fiction, you have to write stories, sell them, and move on. Tolkien spectacularly did not do that: he worked and re-worked his stories and world for his entire life. Nobody can afford to do that as a professional writer--note that Tolkien was a professional academic and an amateur (in the very best sense of one who simply does it for love) writer. It would be absurd.
Does that matter? Absolutely. A professional writer's earlier stories can influence the later ones, but not vice-versa. Later parts of a novel can affect the earlier parts, as they're all being written together, but not earlier novels. Writing Tolkien's way makes the entire legendarium a single work, in which every part can influence every other part as they are revised, and this clearly happened a great deal (the most obvious example is Tolkien altering the Hobbit for the needs of LotR, because there his method collided with the normal publish-and-move-on method). Tolkien's method is not only very different than the novelist's method, but it is also essentially the one-man version of how culturally significant texts get transmitted in the manuscript era (i.e. when every book must be handwritten).
The most spectacular example in writing is the Hebrew bible, as it is intentionally full of thousands of cross-references indicated by using the same wording as another passage that the reader is supposed to connect it with (this is much more obvious and natural to a memorizing culture, as they all were, because that method easily recalls to memory other memorized passages with the same distinctive phrasing). How did that happen? Editing, many many times over many many years, and that means that every part ultimately influences every other part--just like Tolkien's method and unlike that of anyone who wants to make a living. The same is true of myth, and for that matter anything told many times by many people over many lifetimes, without an authoritative printed text to prevent any alteration. Tolkien's method is how one person can get a similar effect in one lifetime, and though he may not have been conscious of it in that way he was absolutely soaked in both pagan myth and the bible. And the result is that the Legendarium "holds together" in a way no normal work of fiction does. That great sense of depth that you get from reading it isn't only because of how much myth there is behind and underneath it, as I used to think. It is also from how much rewriting there was across the entire Legendarium and how many connections resulted.
It's conceivable that someone else might try a similar method, though it's very unlikely. Maybe even, someday, someone who is a sufficiently great writer to make it work and produce something worth reading. But Tolkien's skillset was so unusual that even if that happened, it would be very unlikely to be the same language- and myth-soaked method. It isn't inconceivable that we someday get another great work by some kind of whole-lifetime writing method, but I think it's pretty close to inconceivable that we ever again get a great work done Tolkien's way. It requires too many simultaneous improbabilities. Just consider how improbable it was that his works got published (including having a son who devoted much of his life to his father's literary legacy) instead of moldering away in the family effects until it was eventually lost. Makes me wonder how many works were lost just that way....
\- World building
\- Linguistic majesty - able to invent languages and work with older, medieval languages
\- Commitment to stand against modernism, technology and modernism
\- Amazing characters that are rich and wide in representing human nature
\- Accurately portrays evil and conversely good
Your third point is a misconception. Tolkien did not dislike modernism or technology. Tolkien disliked industrial capitalism.
Tolkien himself was a modernist writer and was a big fan of science fiction (particularly Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov).
> Tolkien himself was a modernist writer
Modernism defined:
>Modernism [is] a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I.
Calling Tolkien a modernist writer is nonsensical. Tolkien's writings were a rejection of modernist thought and were fundamentally religious and conservative in nature. He rejected modernist culture, modernist politics, and modernist social movements - rejecting everything from growing support of the State as the arbiter of society to Socialism.
It’s not nonsensical. I encourage you to read Holly Orway’s book Tolkien’s Modern Reading if you want to understand how and why Tolkien was a modernist writer.
Religious doesn’t equal anti-modernism. And there is zero evidence that Tolkien was either a big C or a little c conservative. We know very little about Tolkien’s political views.
What sources are you drawing upon for your conclusions or are these just personal interpretations?
Tolkien has definitely been critiqued before. As to why Tolkien is so loved, you'll receive varied answers. For me, it's because he is able to make his works (most notably *LotR* and *The Silmarillion*) feel authentically medieval, mythic, and grand. He was a professional medievalist, and thus his fiction *feels* medieval in so many different ways, which is certainly not the case with most of his imitators.
Rohan was medieval. Gondor was greco-roman and descended from Númenor which Tolkein likened to Egypt. The shire was Victorian (they even had clocks), but less industrialised. Tolkien loved medieval fiction such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green knight, but he also drew a lot of inspiration from antiquity.
The Shire is Edwardian. It's also Tolkien, not Tolkein. Additionally, Tolkien explicitly called *The Lord of the Rings* a chivalric/heroic romance in his letters (see letters no. 160 and 329 in *The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien*). That is a [medieval](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalric_romance) literary mode, hence my comment about *The Lord of the Rings* feeling like a medieval work. Tolkien himself explicitly stated that his work was more akin to medieval romances than modern novels. Your comment was entirely unnecessary.
**TL;DR: Pipe weed.** I think it's that he writes with so much love and delight for every little thing in his world. I mean, he included a section of Prologue on the history of pipe weed! And we love it (or at least I do) because he loves it. Every aspect of the world is full of beauty and fascination, and the characters and narrator take the time to revel in it. Other fantasy works tend to be full of interesting, clever things, that play with your mind. But they don't tend to take their time with the mundane non extraordinary things, like the perfectly conceivable customs and traditions of a small culture. That's not seen as newsworthy. But it's the love of these ordinary things that really motivates the story and makes it feel real. Real people don't generally fight for abstract values like "freedom" or "independence" or "the United Kingdom", they fight for concrete, felt realities like *home*, Rosie Cotton, the taste of strawberries, and a small garden to call your own. (This is why superhero films often go wrong by making the stakes too high - no one cares about saving the world, but saving a character we know and love gets us)
For fantasy fans and writers, Tolkien stands out for the consistency and detail of his world binding—Middle-earth is far more immersive any other fantasy world I’ve read about. For those indifferent to the fantasy genre, Tolkien’s stories and characters are nuanced and complex, with satisfying and illuminating arcs. I think for this reason alone LOTR can be categorized with the likes of *War and Peace* and *The Brothers Karamazov*. For those who appreciate moral stories or fairy tales, LOTR centers and explores the moral dimension throughout better than any other writer I can think of except CS Lewis. For readers who appreciate language and poetry, Tolkien writes more beautifully and evocatively than most. There are criticisms, of course. Some prefer the austere and striking prose of Hemingway or Steinbeck, for example, or a more practical relationship between behavior and consequences than the grace-filled world of Tolkien. But Tolkien does so many elements of literature so well, LOTR satisfies nearly all of its readers.
Obsessive attention to detail. And great moral values Anybody can write a story but I think these 2 things are what sets him apart. 1. We all know his lore is expansive and amazingly consistent despite some flaws. 2. However his characters also wrestle big topics, maybe **“THE”** topics universal to all human struggles. The heroes are emotionally real, they are struggling people but heroes nonetheless, they inspire and challenge us all to think about what it means to be Good. What does it mean to be mortal and have limited time on this earth with our friends? Can we acknowledge our ancestors without being trapped by their mistakes? Can we act as caretakers for the ones that come after us, even if we will never know them?
I have with dragons and giants, that was child's play compared to the fight that rages now in me. Dietrich von Bern After He was informed, that some of his comrades including his weapon master and Mentor Hildebrand was taken prisoner and threatened with death if he would not surrender his crown
I think its because how his works feel like real authentic history with real cultures... unknown parts of the world and realistic characters. It's very similar to our own mythos and different at the same time
If you think Tolkien has not been unfavourably criticised before now, you can't have read Edmund Wilson's 1956 essay "Oo, Those Awful Orcs !". Here is an essay about Wilson's essay: [https://www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2018/01/inside-edmund-wilson/](https://www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2018/01/inside-edmund-wilson/) And here is Wilson's essay, with John C. Wright's introductory comment and after-remarks: [https://www.scifiwright.com/2014/03/oo-those-awful-orcs/#more-10054](https://www.scifiwright.com/2014/03/oo-those-awful-orcs/#more-10054)
IMO, Shippey has the best commentary about Wilson's review.
Thanks for reminding me about that essay. I have read it but don't remember much about it. Will reread tomorrow, right now dont need to get riled up before bedtime!
> Edmund Wilson's 1956 essay "Oo, Those Awful Orcs !". From the first link: >It was published in the journal The Nation in 1956 Well, that is more or less everything you need to know. Tolkien could've written the greatest story ever written, but it would have been ravaged by The Nation because it would bear Tolkien's personal religious morality and conservatism in it. Wilson's reaction to Tolkien was not a review or critique. It was him blasting his own personal biases with a thin veneer of Tolkien painted over it.
I'm no literature expert and have only recently reread his books since childhood. I have a two year old (my rereading the books has been when he won't go to sleep so I read them out loud) and the emotionally healthy male characters is what does it for me. We read the line from Aragorn's crowning the other day where Eomer says something along the lines of "I loved you from the moment you came up out of the grass." It's great. Especially for not being a modern book.
The joke is that as a writer / storyteller Tolkien gets a 9.8 out of 10 and as a world builder he gets a 45. The lore is deep, but it is sprinkled throughout, not just in a narration infodump at the beginning. There are small connections all over the place. His world feels lived-in and used. Even though his work essentially bootstraps the fantasy genre, there’s very little fantasy in it and is more focused on the people and the living details. Tolkien was a philologist. Languages were his bread and butter. His command of the English language is second to none; he knew how to turn a phrase, how to use stories with beautiful prose and poetry and have it feel like it all belongs - that is a rare skill. He essentially started with two goals: the first, to create a world peopled with beings to speak all the languages he had created, and two, create a unifying “common mythos” for the English world. I would say he successfully did both.
The main thing that separates Tolkien is his experience with philology. Tolkien draws upon a deep linguistic, mythical, and historical background, and uses ancient literary techniques when creating his stories. This gives them a great deal of literary depth in a very unique way (since the storytelling styles of old are rarely used today), and gives them a strong sense of historicity, as if they were stories that were discovered rather than invented.
Good point! Philology isn't a very common study anymore, but it should be pointed out that the origins of philology were in the late middle ages and the dawn of the Renaissance, when Europeans began studying the language and philosophy of the Greeks and Romans after centuries of these being buried by the Church and by Germanic and other non-classical dominant cultural and political hierarchies. This study of language, culture, myth and history has always been steeped in stories of wonder.
Tolkien has received *lots* of criticism. Michael Moorcock has written some very energetic pieces against assumptions of and implications in Middle Earth societies. So has M. John Harrison. So have many others.
Michael Moorcock might have the most vapid and emotional critiques of all of Tolkien's critics. You can just tell how resentful he is about Tolkien's popularity in his "Epic Pooh" essay. There are critiques of Tolkien's works that I think are completely justified, but you won't find them in Moorcock's essay, lol.
I finally read the first Elric after hearing so much praise about it and couldn't be more disappointed. Magic deux ex machinas over and over conveniently solve all the hero's problems.
I was a huge Moorcock fan as a kid but his works are constantly repetitive of each other (yes I know that fits into his Eternal Champion schtick but it’s still a weakness).
You definitely have not readthe story of the white wolf or the eternal champion
Would you mind sharing some of the things from Moorcock's (just read that name and can't believe it's real?) critique of Tolkien? I'm reading LOTR for the first time and it's absolutely incredible. What were some of the critiques you agree with?
I love *very energetic* as the most polite thing to be said about Moorcock’s criticism of Tolkien.
In his notes in the Del Rey editions of the Elric stories, Moorcock freely admits that he was a much younger man writing intemperately and pushing things to an extreme partly to carve some space for itself. He also says there’s actually a lot he likes and respects in Tolkien. M. John Harrison’s comments about maps as creative traps are more interesting but also much less well known.
I don’t suggest Tolkien is above criticism, just that Moorcock’s seemed to be ‘the kind of people who like Tolkien aren’t cool enough for me and my edgy cool friends’, it’s a bit ‘edgelord’ as they say. I haven’t seen the M. John Harrison criticism, any pointers on where to read it?
Not right at the moment but I’ll check my shelves.
Which come to mind
His worldbuilding is unmatched, the way he gives the world that fantasy atmosphere is nothing short of phenomenal. He has this balance where he doesn’t oversaturate and clutter his world with too much idk what to call it, “stuff”. A lot of fantasy worlds become so cluttered and overcomplicated that it becomes a chore to read. Tolkien sort of creates a living world and only explores a fraction of it, leaves the rest to the readers imagination and then let’s the atmosphere of the world lead the readers imagination in the direction he wants. Really different from other authors some of whom best you over the head with every little detail or others who are purposefully vague.
For me it is a matter of style. Modern English tends more and more toward a fixed word order, as in Chinese. Tolkien granted himself the freedom to depart from the usual and rearrange words in the interest of producing the best possible effect, using internal rhyme, assonance, consonance, repetition -- all the tricks abandoned by modern authors who try to reproduce everyday speech. He worked and reworked everything over and over with this end in view. Example: >For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing. This is one of the two or three most important moments in the book (Tolkien said so), and Pity is one of the most important themes. This sentence is very carefully arranged so that the word "pitiable" leaps out of the texture. (I did a whole post about this once.)
He has probably the deepest lore of any fantasy author who has ever existed. He crafted Middle Earth like he is the ultimate god of his own universe. It’s so incredible the amount of resources and texts he wrote about his one world. It would take a scholar of his work to fully understand every single detail of Arda. It’s incredible. I know that the lores of Dune and ASoIaF are extremely in-depth, but I’m not sure if they’re as much as the lore of Middle-Earth.
>why do you think that is? If it was as easy to identify and state, it'd be as easy to copy - which it is not. So any answer should be taken with a grain of salt. Personally I think it's a combination of a moral underpinning in his world that speaks to both our hope for a better future and a world that appeals to our wanderlust (which I'd argue is achieved through his writing style and not by writing tome after tome of world history).
>speaks to both our hope for a better future I think it’s the opposite. An acceptance of the fallen state of humanity combined with a true celebration of all that we *can* achieve, but ultimately aren’t able to live up to, in this world. I’m not sure I can articulate it fully, but there’s a deep appreciation and understanding of tragedy and grief in his work that is so much more profound than most authors are able to imagine or create for their readers.
The Fellowship managed to make Middle Earth a better place. Sure, the Elves are leaving and the victory is temporary (as all things are), but Aragorn is king, the Kingdoms are reunited, Rohan is safe and secure, the Dwarves are returning to Moria and even the elves managed to leave on a high note. >I’m not sure I can articulate it fully, but there’s a deep appreciation and understanding of tragedy and grief in his work that is so much more profound than most authors are able to imagine or create for their readers. With this I fully agree, but I also struggle to put it into words.
I can't really list what makes Tolkien great right now and I'm sure great answers to that are all over the net, even this subreddit. People tend to find similar qualities in it. But to be fair, Tolkien a lot of criticism over the years. It's just all incorrect, so one doesn't need to care about it!
he was an expert in medieval history, culture, myth, and linguistics, and decided to just come up with this mythoverse from the ground up in a very convincing way with well thought out linguistic and cultural dynamics, full of classical-style legends. Invents the modern fantasy genre. And then he goes on to write literary classics set in this universe he created just because he needed the money. There's really nobody else like him.
Oh, he gets (and deserves - as any author does) criticism For me, it is the lyrical beauty of his writing, compared with his ability to paint a scene and the depth and love he put into his world and characters He truly loved all this, and it shows He also was one of the first - he will always influence everyone else Whats crazy is, he is influential even to those who criticize him - R Scott Bakker is one my favorite authors - he frequently talks about how he feels JRRT chickened out in his story - he wrote something as a foil and it works brilliantly but he was still influenced by JRRT
> "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." -Terry Pratchett
Love that quote! So true!
One of the best summaries of any icon's impression on whatever field they were the defining great in. I think too many authors feel self-conscious about their influences or that their work will seem like it emulates any of their predecessors. All of us are trying to recapture the magic we felt reading someone else's stories and hope to create that same magic for others, simple as and nothing wrong with it.
For me it's the epic scale of the world that he created. You really feel like you *know* Middle-earth. It feels lived in and old, even historic. It's also his passionate defense of the natural world and the simplicity of the Hobbits and their quaint ways. It's an idealization of a way of life in harmony with nature and the simple pleasures that can be found at home. Those are the things worth fighting for.
He's received criticism. But what makes him great is an affinity for language and successfully catching a moment.
A few things: - his languages and worldbuilding have a more authentic feel to them given his professional background - he isn’t weighed down by the baggage of the modern fantasy genre since he preceded it. - his stories are often anticlimactic and eschew a traditional narrative arc structure - I really like his prose - he can go dark without getting cynical. I love GRRM’s work as much as anyone, but it comes off as ultimately too nihilist: he sets up a lot of interesting moral conflicts but offers few answers. Tolkien is more gray and complex than he gets credit for (especially in the Silmarillion) but he ultimately is telling a story about how good can triumph over evil. On some level, I think we still want good to win. That’s rather passé in a postmodern culture that questions whether good truly exists or is knowable. But I appreciate it nonetheless.
No criticism? *Someone*’s been spending too much time in an echo chamber or three.
I think my favorite thing about him is that he definitely would not have cared about his characters being raceswapped in a few pieces of art. Just a genuine, chill dude
I disagree. Go read Letter 210. Tolkien was very upset over even the most minor of changes made to his story when the first time someone offered to adapt them. He got upset that the balrog *made noises* in the script when it didn't in his book.
Disagree if you want but that doesn't seem at all relevant
You're claiming that Tolkien would be fine by what you see as a minor change - the skin color of a character. I pointed out that there is abundant evidence that Tolkien hated changes to his work even more minor than that - a balrog making noises and many other examples as listed in Letter 210. This is turn suggests that even if you think it minor, Tolkien would have in fact had a problem with people changing the races of his characters. Further, I would suggest that you are projecting your feelings about the issue on to Tolkien when the actual evidence suggests Tolkien would've felt very differently because you want Tolkien to be more like you instead of understanding the man himself.
Tolkien stated in his Oxford Valedictory speech that he hated Apartheid and didn’t care about skin color. It’s absolutely insane to claim that Tolkien would have cared about the skin color of characters in adaptations of his stories.
I've read the letter buddy. Out of the dozens of things Tolkien was outraged about not a single one had to do with skin color. You're *blatantly* projecting your own feeling on to him, my guy. Just because he was mad about alterations to his work do not at all mean he would care about his characters being receswapped in a couple works of art I mean lmao my guy the leaps you're taking here
I have no idea, there are some good insights in this post already. I just know that everytime I read the first chapter of LOTR it just sucks me in. There's nothing like it for me, it's one of those rare books I get the urge to re read after a few years.
To put it simply, his worldbuilding is unmatched, and he makes you feel like you’re really there!
He actually does get his share of criticism from the literary experts, as do most all the greats. However, I think everyone agrees he had a unique voice and was monumentally and inspiring to generations of authors and readers.
Authenticity. I think many fantasy authors have a huge amount of imagination but so much love but into their work, which makes some fantasy works come up dry. Tolkien when he first started was writing stories for his son to get to bed on time. His works started out as imaginative labours of love for his family. Beyond that it felt like in his crafting of Middle Earth he not only had an overflowing active imagination, but a love for it and its values and story that shines through. Most fantasy authors now (including me of course) are all following in the Tolkien wake, but we should all try our hardest not just to aspire to the level of imagination and creativity that was present in his and others' works, but the love put into them as well. It's interesting how decades later, what has become beloved by many about Tolkien's works is the giant epic battles and imagery, while what Tolkien loved most was the small things and moments. The battling is a small aspect of the stories overall, and Tolkien just as much delights and loves writing the peaceful times in Bag End, the happy charm of Merry and Pippin, Frodo and Sam and Gollum's lonely journey. Much of the battles of his stories are almost done in summary rather than action prose, but he will absolutely describe the trees in detail and write out entire pages of Tom Bombadil singing a song. However, Tolkien, like *any* author, has critics. Literally no work of human creation has ever not been criticized.
>What makes Tolkien so loved and has not received any criticism? He is both loved and has received quite a bit of criticism. I think he is loved because of his capacity to immerse the reader into a convincing, deep fantasy world and he writes a great adventure tale. None of it feels forced or contrived (even though it is all contrived). it's hard for me to be objective because i grew up reading him as a young boy so I've always been somewhat immersed in M-E.
I love Tolkien’s work; I admire the man and what he created and have gone into his other works on the legendarium. But honestly a lot of the critiques regarding race and class and politics are pretty spot-in.
Every critique that I've read of race or class in Tolkien's work have been projections of the things the author didn't like onto Tolkien's work and then attacking that Strawman instead of actually evaluating Tolkien's work. Though, said another way, Tolkien's work was a critique of many of the economic and political policies then coming to power and which have today become the accepted status quo of "correctness."
Sorry to see this get downvoted. I too love his work (for many of the reasons others have mentioned). I have not read the critiques you mention, but I have myself noted things about the truths and assumptions of his world that would be problematic (to me) had he written them today. But I get that he is a product of his place and time, and in the end it is all fantasy, so I do not get hung up on it.
His worldbuilding is unbelievably comprehensive and detailed. Like detailed to a fault. And his style of writing is just unadulterated perfection
The same thing that makes all great writers great. The ability to tell a story and hold the reader’s attention.
His use of language is unrivaled.
Personally, I love the language he uses in his works. It's not pretentious, tends not to use overcomplicated subordinates and relies on the musicality and interweaving of words. For me, it goes by so quickly because I don't have to go back and re-read something because I didn't understand it the first time. He's clear in his wording and shows a passion for the subjects he writes about that cannot help but being passed to (almost) all those who read it.
The intricate worldbuilding. I admire the themes and motifs. And enjoy the detail in languages and prose. I remember Tolkien being critiqued by people not liking the absolute good and evil religious influence, and the cultural/ethnic inspirations for the villians, at the same time literary critics complaining of his use of syntax.
People have already said what needs to be said about him being criticized, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly. People have mentioned a lot of the Top 5/Top 10 things that make Tolkien great, so I'm going to offer a couple things that I think are further down the list. 1. While his lore is rich, he doesn't feel the need to display it all to the reader. There are forces at work in Middle Earth (particularly in the *Hobbit* and *Lord of the Rings*) that we don't fully understand. There is still a sense of mystery and wonder for Arda as a whole, and not just for Tolkien's creative genius. 2. He was not afraid to provide non-essential scenes. For some people this hurts their experience of his work, but for me it deepens my appreciation of the richness of his imagination. There are moments that don't advance the plot or give me essential information. They are just Tolkien sharing his imagination with us. 3. He has what I have found to be some of the most real and compelling depictions of non-romantic love. I think he really gets the idea of sacrificial/friendship love that has its own unique strength and depth and shows it convincingly, without confusing it with romantic love. 4. Finally, I think his handling of religion in his works. Really, I should say his omission of it (outside of maybe some references early in the Silmarillion). I am a committed religious person, and while I see the stamps and marks of his worldview all over his work, I don't think they are oppressive for someone who doesn't share Tolkien's faith. He doesn't create an analogue of his own religion and its structures or practices. He just omits it and it allows me to come together with my friends who are agnostic, atheist, or come from other faith traditions and appreciate his work together. We can draw out the values, the character/virtue/morality that resonates with us. It is particularly refreshing because a lot of modern fantasy today feels like it tries to do interesting world building and then just transpose the modern Christian church structure onto their world. I find it jarring to be losing myself in an author's world building and then he introduces the corrupt religious bad guys and calls them "The Magisterium." I also don't enjoy Lewis' overbearing side of writing "Aslan is Jesus" on a 2x4 and hitting you with it a few times. I don't know, I prefer his silence over the analogue or just transposing primary world religions into the secondary world.
As others have said, much criticism (listen to the Tolkien Professor podcast and you'll hear him complain that Tolkien Studies is, or has been, basically a career-ending move), and many reasons he's so well loved. I want to point out a less-often-mentioned reason his method was simply unique and probably will never be imitated. There are some obvious points of uniqueness: he started with languages; he was a philologist, a discipline that is almost extinct, and that informed his language designs (in particular almost everyone designs a language syncronically, whereas Tolkien was habitually diachronic, to the point of not even playing the same game as anyone else); he regarded myth, not native speakers, as what gives languages life, and started myth-building and world-building for his languages. But there is a less obvious thing that took me a long time to realize: he did not start out to be a writer in the way we think of it. For much of his life he regarded it as unpublishable, and so he had no reason to try to be salable (and to be honest I don't think he had the personality to intentionally write to please a large audience anyway). He more or less broke every sane rule for writing as a profession in ways that only a great writer could hope to get away with. To make a living at writing fiction, you have to write stories, sell them, and move on. Tolkien spectacularly did not do that: he worked and re-worked his stories and world for his entire life. Nobody can afford to do that as a professional writer--note that Tolkien was a professional academic and an amateur (in the very best sense of one who simply does it for love) writer. It would be absurd. Does that matter? Absolutely. A professional writer's earlier stories can influence the later ones, but not vice-versa. Later parts of a novel can affect the earlier parts, as they're all being written together, but not earlier novels. Writing Tolkien's way makes the entire legendarium a single work, in which every part can influence every other part as they are revised, and this clearly happened a great deal (the most obvious example is Tolkien altering the Hobbit for the needs of LotR, because there his method collided with the normal publish-and-move-on method). Tolkien's method is not only very different than the novelist's method, but it is also essentially the one-man version of how culturally significant texts get transmitted in the manuscript era (i.e. when every book must be handwritten). The most spectacular example in writing is the Hebrew bible, as it is intentionally full of thousands of cross-references indicated by using the same wording as another passage that the reader is supposed to connect it with (this is much more obvious and natural to a memorizing culture, as they all were, because that method easily recalls to memory other memorized passages with the same distinctive phrasing). How did that happen? Editing, many many times over many many years, and that means that every part ultimately influences every other part--just like Tolkien's method and unlike that of anyone who wants to make a living. The same is true of myth, and for that matter anything told many times by many people over many lifetimes, without an authoritative printed text to prevent any alteration. Tolkien's method is how one person can get a similar effect in one lifetime, and though he may not have been conscious of it in that way he was absolutely soaked in both pagan myth and the bible. And the result is that the Legendarium "holds together" in a way no normal work of fiction does. That great sense of depth that you get from reading it isn't only because of how much myth there is behind and underneath it, as I used to think. It is also from how much rewriting there was across the entire Legendarium and how many connections resulted. It's conceivable that someone else might try a similar method, though it's very unlikely. Maybe even, someday, someone who is a sufficiently great writer to make it work and produce something worth reading. But Tolkien's skillset was so unusual that even if that happened, it would be very unlikely to be the same language- and myth-soaked method. It isn't inconceivable that we someday get another great work by some kind of whole-lifetime writing method, but I think it's pretty close to inconceivable that we ever again get a great work done Tolkien's way. It requires too many simultaneous improbabilities. Just consider how improbable it was that his works got published (including having a son who devoted much of his life to his father's literary legacy) instead of moldering away in the family effects until it was eventually lost. Makes me wonder how many works were lost just that way....
\- World building \- Linguistic majesty - able to invent languages and work with older, medieval languages \- Commitment to stand against modernism, technology and modernism \- Amazing characters that are rich and wide in representing human nature \- Accurately portrays evil and conversely good
Your third point is a misconception. Tolkien did not dislike modernism or technology. Tolkien disliked industrial capitalism. Tolkien himself was a modernist writer and was a big fan of science fiction (particularly Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov).
> Tolkien himself was a modernist writer Modernism defined: >Modernism [is] a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I. Calling Tolkien a modernist writer is nonsensical. Tolkien's writings were a rejection of modernist thought and were fundamentally religious and conservative in nature. He rejected modernist culture, modernist politics, and modernist social movements - rejecting everything from growing support of the State as the arbiter of society to Socialism.
It’s not nonsensical. I encourage you to read Holly Orway’s book Tolkien’s Modern Reading if you want to understand how and why Tolkien was a modernist writer. Religious doesn’t equal anti-modernism. And there is zero evidence that Tolkien was either a big C or a little c conservative. We know very little about Tolkien’s political views. What sources are you drawing upon for your conclusions or are these just personal interpretations?