The qualitative case for these genres, including the fantasy genre, needs to be made, and the qualitative case for Tolkien must be a major part of it. It is not a particularly difficult case to make, but it does require a certain open-mindedness as to what people are allowed to get from their reading. Too many critics have defined ‘quality’ in such a way as to exclude anything other than what they have been taught to like. To use the modern jargon, they ‘privilege’ their own assumptions and prejudices, often class-prejudices, against the reading choices of their fellowmen and fellow-women, often without thinking twice about it. But many people have been deeply and lastingly moved by Tolkien’s works, and even if one does not share the feeling, one should be able to understand why.
In the following sections, I consider further the first two arguments outlined above, and set out the plan and scope of the chapters which follow, which form in their entirety my expansion of the third argument, about literary quality; and my answer to the question about what Tolkien felt he had to say.
Tolkien and the polls
Tolkien’s sales figures have always been an annoyance for his detractors, and as early as the 1960s commentators had been predicting that they would soon fall, or declaring that they had started to fall, so that the whole ‘cult’ or ‘craze’ would pass or was already passing into ‘merciful oblivion’ (so Philip Toynbee wrote in the Observer on 6th August 1961), just like flared jeans or hula hoops. The commentators were wrong about this – a surprise in itself, since Tolkien never followed up with either a Hobbit-sequel for the children’s market nor a Lord of the Rings-sequel for the adult market. But the whole issue of his continuing popularity was brought forward dramatically during 1997.
Very briefly – there is a more extensive account in Joseph Pearce’s book of 1998, Tolkien: Man and Myth, to which I am indebted – late in 1996 Waterstone’s, the British bookshop chain, and BBC Channel Four’s programme Book Choice decided between them to commission a readers’ poll to determine ‘the five books you consider the greatest of the century’. Some 26,000 readers replied, of whom rather more than 5,000 cast their first place vote for J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Gordon Kerr, the marketing manager for Waterstone’s, said that The Lord of the Rings came consistently top in almost every branch in Britain (105 of them), and in every region except Wales, where James Joyce’s Ulysses took first place. The result was greeted with horror among professional critics and journalists, and the Daily Telegraph decided accordingly to repeat the exercise among its readers, a rather different group. Their poll produced the same result. The Folio Society then confirmed that during 1996 it had canvassed its entire membership to find out which ten books the members would most like to see in Folio Society editions, and had got 10,000 votes for The Lord of the Rings, which came first once again. 50,000 readers are said to have taken part in a July 1997 poll for the television programme Bookworm, but the result was yet again the same. In 1999 the Daily Telegraph reported that a Mori poll commissioned by the chocolate firm Nestle had actually managed to get a different result, in which The Lord of the Rings (at last) only came second! But the top spot went to the Bible, a special case, and also ineligible for the twentieth-century competition which had begun the sequence.
These results were routinely and repeatedly derided by professional critics and journalists (the latter group, of course, often the products of university literature departments). Joseph Pearce opens his book with Susan Jeffreys, of the Sunday Times, who on 26th January 1997 reported a colleague’s reaction to the news that The Lord of the Rings had won the BBC/Waterstone’s poll as: ‘Oh hell! Has it? Oh my God. Dear oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear’. This at least sounds sincere, if not deeply thoughtful; but Jeffreys reported also that the reaction ‘was echoed up and down the country wherever one or two literati gathered together’. She meant, surely, ‘two or three literati’, unless the literati talk only to themselves (a thought that does occur); and the term literati is itself interesting. It clearly does not mean ‘the lettered, the literate’, because obviously that group includes the devotees of The Lord of the Rings, the group being complained about (they couldn’t be devotees if they couldn’t read). In Jeffreys’s usage, literati must mean ‘those who know about literature’. And those who know, of course, know what they are supposed to know. The opinion is entirely self-enclosed.
Other commentators meanwhile suggested that the first poll by Waterstone’s must have been influenced by concerted action on the part of the Tolkien Society. The Society denies this, and points out that even if every one of their five hundred members had voted, this would still have been less than the margin of victory (1,200 votes) over the runner-up, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Germaine Greer took another tack by declaring angrily in the Winter/Spring 1997 issue of W: the Waterstone’s Magazine, that ever since her arrival at Cambridge in 1964, ‘it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialized’. She added, ‘The books that come in Tolkien’s train are more or less what you would expect; flight from reality is their dominating characteristic’. It seems strange to see novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four and fables like Animal Farm castigated for ‘flight from reality’, though of course they are not novels of mainstream realism: as I remark above, it seems that some themes, including public and political ones, are best handled as fable or as fantasy. And calling something that has after all happened a ‘bad dream’ does not suggest too strong a grip on reality by the critic. Tolkien in any case had his own view on the modern development of words like ‘reality, real, realist, realistic’, see p. 76 below: Saruman, the collaborator, the wizard who goes over to the other side because it seems the stronger, would no doubt have called himself a ‘realist’, though that would not make him one.
It remains perfectly sensible, of course, to say that popular polls are no guide to literary value, any more than sales figures, and indeed both statements are no doubt true. The figures ought however to have produced some sort of considered response, even explanation, from professional critics of literature, rather than the nettled outrage which they got. To quote the critic Darko Suvin (writing primarily about science fiction, but extending his point to all forms of ‘paraliterature’ or commercial literary production):
a discipline which refuses to take into account 90 per cent or more of what constitutes its domain seems to me not only to have large zones of blindness but also to run serious risks of distorted vision in the small zone it focuses on (so-called high lit.)
(Suvin, 1979, p. vii)
This ‘noncanonic, repressed twin of Literature’, he adds, is ‘the literature that is really read – as opposed to most literature taught in schools’. And this indicates a further oddity about the polling results above. If one looks at the Waterstone’s list overall, it is very easy to detect what a correspondent in the Times Educational Supplement called ‘the formative influence of school set texts on a nation’s reading habits’. Even leaving aside the Welsh preference for Joyce’s Ulysses – the work most intensely promoted by academics and educationalists – the leading places after The Lord of the Rings were taken by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, with Golding’s Lord of the Flies not far away: all very familiar school set texts, routinely taught and examined, and for the most part comparatively short. The Lord of the Rings is however rarely if ever set as a text in schools or universities. Apart from the dislike of the educational establishment, it is too long, at over half a million words. The following it has acquired has all been the result of personal choice, not institutional direction.
A further thought which ought to have struck commentators is this. It is quite possible, as said above, to separate the evidence of mass sales from claims for lasting or literary value. There are several authors now who out-sell Tolkien on an annual basis, or who have done so in the recent past – Barbara Taylor Bradford, Tom Clancy, Catherine Cookson, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stephen King – to offer a mere selection