"I Would Rather Have Written in Elvish": Language, Fiction and "The Lord of the Rings"

TLDR: The Lord of the Rings as mentioned in this paper is a three-volume novel by a distinguished medievalist, and it has become one of the most popular books in the world for fantasy reading.

Abstract: That a three-volume novel by a distinguished medievalist should be as popular as J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings may be a little odd. That it should be popular with people who paint "Frodo lives!" on walls and wear pins that say "Go! Go! Gandalf" in elf script; with people who have never seen an English pub or walked more than two miles consecutively; with artists of the stature of W. H. Auden; and with respected critics who compare it to Malory, Spenser and Ariosto; and that it should achieve this with six appendixes and no sex is an event Aristotle would banish from any plot as an "improbable possible." That the trilogy should be a novel at least in being "a piece of prose fiction of a certain length" and yet show itself so different in kind from the literature on which our current tools for understanding and evaluating aesthetic experiences work best, makes the riddle one of real concern to the critic of fiction. An admirer of the trilogy is inevitably haunted by the ghost of Ossian-or rather, by the fantasm of some urbane critic of the twenty-first century who will find our response to it as self-evidently ludicrous as we find the mid-eighteenth century's enthusiasm for Macpherson's pseudo-epics. We cannot even be sure that he will laugh at our enthusiasm rather than at our prudishness about admitting it. One way or the other, he will find in our behavior infallible symptoms of cultural malnutrition. But whether our response to Tolkien merely reveals, as the Ossian phenomenon did, an age's craving for a category of experience of which it is discovering itself to be deprived, or whether it shows the euphoria of discovering something intrinsically good which will go on appealing to audiences who come to it from widely differing experiences, we can certainly ask ourselves what sort of experience reading the Trilogy actually is. When we do, we see that it is as different from what happens to us in reading a novel, whether of the nineteenth century or of our own, as it is from most fantasy and most "escape" literature. Tolkien himself has made it peculiarly difficult for his admirers to save face. The manifest discrepancy between the subject and manner of the trilogy and the works we take seriously as "literature" might be glossed over if we could interpret it allegorically and find that it is about everything it appears not to be about. But Tolkien has repeatedly insisted that the trilogy is not allegorical. Recently, in a preface to the paperback edition, he has gone so far as to admit that such a story may have "applicability" to other situations where related issues are involved, but he insists that his book "is neither allegorical nor topical.... I cor-