Lord of the Rings: Popularity
Lord of the Rings was so popular it spawned a whole genre, but why does it remain popular when modern fantasy novels are written very differently?
Jude: Last week we began our discussion of Dune by thinking about why it’s popular and what that can tell us about why art becomes popular. One of the many unusual things about our format here is that each topic is considered first with a science fiction book and then with a fantasy book (or vice versa), so today we’re going to start talking about The Lord of the Rings by seeing what it teaches us about popularity.
Thomas: This is only the second post here and we’re already screwing up. This is three books, not one.
Jude: Tolkien wrote it as one book and it’s frequently published as one today, so we’re going to call it one book. Now hopefully I don’t have to defend the proposition that Lord of the Rings is a popular fantasy book? It’s very popular. But it wasn’t always so! It had an even slower start than Dune. It had some prominent early fans like C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden, but word of mouth appears to have spread slowly for a decade until it exploded in popularity following its American publication in 1965. From there it just got more popular, and of course it was eventually brought to movie fans through big budget Hollywood adaptations starting in 2001, but it was already a massive success by that point.
Thomas: Perhaps in this case the passage of time allowed Tolkien to create more fans. Lord of the Rings is extremely popular, but it’s not even the most popular book Tolkien wrote. I guess we’re not doing children’s books here, but The Hobbit was a big success in what was then a relatively sparse children’s literature market. Generations of children read The Hobbit as they grew up and were thus prepared to appreciate Lord of the Rings as teens or adults.
Jude: I don’t know remotely enough about the book’s early publishing history to really say why it took ten years to really get going, but certainly by the 1980s it had spawned a whole genre, first of imitators, then of reactions trying to “deconstruct” it. The fantasy genre has since grown outward in many diverse directions, but I’d still say that nearly all of the tens of thousands of fantasy novels out there can be traced back through a chain of influences to Lord of the Rings.
Thomas: I’ll try not to hold that against it, but it’s going to be hard. So many terrible books!
Jude: But also some masterpieces. Yet despite having so many successors, Lord of the Rings itself remains enormously popular. My Goodreads rating count metric considers it the most popular adult fantasy novel (still beating out A Song of Ice and Fire by a small margin despite being much older and therefore having far more reads not tracked by Goodreads) and the fourteenth most popular book of any kind. Of course if you bring in children’s books, it’s eclipsed by the Harry Potter series and as you already mentioned, even The Hobbit, so it’s not the final word on fantasy, but certainly it’s a towering presence.
Thomas: For now. Fewer and fewer people actually read books, so to keep going it’s got to lean heavily on the original trilogy of films from two decades ago. Meanwhile the terrible Hobbit adaptations are doing their best to undercut it and Amazon’s absurd decision to try to adapt the appendices isn’t helping either.
Jude: So compared to Dune, which I said last week was bursting with interesting ideas so that lots of different readers found something to like, I think Lord of the Rings is much more focused and cohesive. There’s a couple of core ideas here that I’d say are very deeply explored. I’ll sum them up as personal virtue and connection. Personal virtues of courage, faith, and mercy are demonstrated in different ways, and with different amounts of success or failure, by the various characters. And connection is explored in several respects: connection with the natural world, connection with the vanishing past, and connection with the people around us. That may not seem like a short list, but this is a very long book (or three normal length ones, if you insist) so it develops each of these to a much greater degree than Dune has room to do.
Thomas: But if Herbert was a weird dude, J.R.R. Tolkien was a really, really weird dude. Lord of the Rings reads like 75% of what he was reading were things no one else was reading at the time or since. And I say it seems “like” that, but actually it’s probably literally true! While ordinary people were reading things like, I don’t know, The Old Man and the Sea or The Good Earth, Tolkien was reading Old English poetry and Finnish sagas and whatnot.
Jude: Right. Last time we didn’t say much about Frank Herbert’s skill with language because—
Thomas: Because he didn’t have any?
Jude: —Because while his prose is effective, it’s complementary to the core elements of Dune. But Tolkien’s use of language must be considered part of the main event. Because he was reading those older forms of English and related languages, he had a nearly unique ability to come up with proper nouns that seem foreign yet familiar and euphonious to the ear of a native English speaker. Meanwhile his long study of sagas and epic poems surely helped him craft a compelling quest narrative.
Thomas: Yeah, yeah, people have already written millions of words about what great linguist and scholar Tolkien was and how that made Lord of the Rings so amazing, but I can’t help but notice that modern fantasy novels have almost none of this. They’re written in a modern style, the prose is fine but usually not amazing or poetic, and the authors aren’t lifelong obsessives who are carefully modeling the sound changes that happened in Elvish languages over the course of thousands of years.
Jude: By ordinary standards there’s a massive amount of worldbuilding in epic fantasy series like Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire or Brandon Sanderson’s series, but it’s true they don’t really have the incredible depth Tolkien achieved through a lifetime of work on a single setting. But it’s hard to tell if modern authors don’t employ Tolkien’s archaic style and worldbuilding methods because this is no longer a path to popularity, or if they don’t because they just can’t manage it.
Thomas: I think it’s telling that Tolkien’s Silmarillion, which puts that archaic style and worldbuilding firmly on center stage, languishes in comparative obscurity.
Jude: Two hundred and ninety thousand ratings on Goodreads! I’ll be thrilled if our work here ever reaches such heights of obscurity!
Thomas: Come on, I said “comparative”. Lord of the Rings is so popular it generates a steady stream of people who want more, open up the Silmarillion, and then wonder how they ended up reading biblical fan fiction. I know there are Tolkien diehards who love it, but I think even most of them would admit it’s a very niche product compared to something like The Name of the Wind.
Jude: I don’t think that tells us the archaic voice and so on aren’t valuable, it just suggests that moderation is a virtue in this as in so much else. In fact, I think the simplest explanation for the success of Lord of the Rings is that what really made Tolkien unique is that he was a really unusual man—a weird guy if you insist—who therefore had this very unusual authorial skillset, but despite this, in Lord of the Rings he was able to mediate the force of his passions and create something approachable to modern readers by centering relatable, down-to-earth characters.
Thomas: So the secret is hobbits? The other element that modern fantasy books have almost entirely dropped?
Jude: Modern fantasy books don’t need them. Tolkien does. He writes the hobbits with a modern voice (modern as of the 1950s, at least) and he allows them to slowly encounter the secondary world around them along with the reader. The hobbits are changed by that encounter and return to their world at the end of the story, again mirroring the reader’s own experience.
Thomas: If hobbits represent the reader, then it’s interesting that Tolkien makes fun of them.
Jude: He satirizes the hobbits and it’s no surprise that Bilbo and Frodo are somehow both more adventurous and more scholarly than the rest of their society, like hobbit Indiana Joneses, but unlike many modern authors who comment on quotidian middle-class life, Tolkien isn’t angry at them or contemptuous of their way of life. You can tell he likes the hobbits even as he pokes a little fun at them.
Anyway, since other epic fantasy authors don’t have Tolkien’s facility with the archaic voice, they either try to copy him in those elements and fail, or they eliminate them, producing very readable works (like Game of Thrones, Mistborn, and Name of the Wind) that are popular and have plenty of their own strengths, but which don’t have the same gravity and sense of depth. This is why I think Lord of the Rings is a timeless classic that will continue to be read widely until English changes enough that it falls out of our ear the way Shakespeare has.
Thomas: Don’t be ridiculous, it won’t last as long as Shakespeare. A lot of people already bounce off the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring because they don’t actually want to be immersed for chapter after chapter in hobbit-stuff. I won’t try to argue those early chapters aren’t well done, but they’re undeniably stuffy and way too slowly paced for the modern reader. Peter Jackson’s miraculously decent adaptation is what will keep Lord of the Rings going until either someone else makes a better adaptation or it dies.
Jude: I think it will last for hundreds of years because it’s so good at what it does and what it does is so unique. The whole modern fantasy genre is ultimately complementary to it, not a replacement for it.
Thomas: Sheesh, people won’t even be reading novels pretty soon. Prose is going the way of poetry. People will sit in their VR classrooms and struggle through Tolkien at the behest of their AI teachers the way high schoolers today struggle through Paradise Lost or Dante’s Inferno.
Jude: I disagree, but that’s a question for another day. It sounds like overall you’re agreeing with me, so maybe it’s time to wrap up.
Thomas: Not yet. I want to propose a different, though I guess not exclusive, theory of Lord of the Rings’s popularity: it’s deeply, profoundly reactionary. And people just love that. But it’s also fairly vague, and that is the key, because there are lots of variations and types of reaction, but just about everyone who feels that way can see themselves somewhere in Lord of the Rings.
Jude: Ah, I should have known you’d try to cancel it for being too right-wing.
Thomas: Not right-wing, even that is too specific. People can and do read Lord of the Rings and get mad that Aragorn is the rightful king through the divine right of his bloodline, and that’s as right-wing as it gets, it’s literally what the people sitting in the right wing of the French assembly thought, but the book is obviously not interested in forms of governance. The Shire has hilariously little government not because Tolkien was a committed anarchist but because he wasn’t interested in exploring it. In fact he relegates politics and religion, the animating forces of at least five hundred years of wars and suffering when Tolkien was alive, both firmly in the background. He’s laser-focused instead on personal behavior. Frodo doesn’t go on his quest because the mayor of the Shire, the duly elected executive who embodies the collective will of the hobbits, orders him to go. He goes because it seems to him that it’s the right thing to do.
Denethor is a villain of sorts not because he won’t recognize Aragorn as the rightful king but because he despairs of the fight against evil. The story takes it for granted Aragorn will be a good king not because he will collect the right amount of taxes or help the downtrodden, but because he tries his best to be a good person. Faramir is good because he keeps his word, Boromir is not because he breaks it.
Jude: I agree with all this, but “reactionary” is a term from political science and is supposed mean politics.
Thomas: Fine, then let’s call it nostalgic instead. The really central idea here is that the old days were better, things are going downhill, and we’re not fighting evil so that everything will be great, we’re fighting evil just so that things won’t go downhill quite so fast. It’s completely set against any notion of progress. The only progress in this story is the progress of entropy.
And my argument is this nostalgia is just massively resonant. Even politically left-wing or progressive people complain about how the traffic is worse now, or it’s too hard to park, or that today’s right-wing leaders are worse than the old ones. Most humans are just programmed to think things were better when they were young.
Jude: All right, but by the same token, aren’t lots of authors nostalgic, by this definition?
Thomas: Maybe, but Tolkien was unusual for two reasons. First, his personal sentiments along these line were pure in way that is unusual, especially in America. American culture dominates the English language world, so it’s true both that most popular modern fantasy authors are American and even the ones who aren’t can’t help but be powerfully influenced by American attitudes. America experienced the world wars of the twentieth century and even the Cold War as triumphs, so it’s only in the last two decades or so that American popular culture has taken a turn for the pessimistic. In contrast, Tolkien personally experienced the horrors of war in the trenches of World War I, so it’s no surprise he came out of that experience convinced that technological “progress” was nothing to get excited about. He also loved nature and green spaces, so the steady addition of highways and parking lots and other forms of development happening throughout his lifetime were repulsive to him.
Jude: I guess I agree, but surely this still isn’t all that unique to Tolkien. No one likes highways. And there are plenty of British authors who served in the wars and had a different sensibility. Ian Fleming comes to mind.
Thomas: Fleming was too young to serve in World War I and then was a spy of some sort in World War II. He didn’t serve on the front lines. Presumably a lot of powerful authorial voices who could have interpreted the war into fiction as Tolkien did died in the trenches instead, like Ian Fleming’s older brother and many of Tolkien’s friends.
But if you want to me to identify something unique and special about Tolkien, a specific quality of artistic genius as you like to say, I think that most nostalgia is grounded in memory but not knowledge. In other words, people remember their childhoods as being nice, but they don’t rigorously explore that recent history. If they did, they’d realize that actually, for most people, the past wasn’t so great. Tons of aspects of the past were worse in ways that are hard for us to remember, things like disease, racism, quality of life, infant mortality, technology, and so on.
Tolkien was unusual in that he studied the past with the rigor of a scholar but, whereas this activity teaches most scholars to appreciate the comforts of modern life, he somehow came away from this still seeing the past as better. Because he understands the past, especially the literary past, he can wield it in his fiction in a way that resonates with most people’s uninformed nostalgia.
Jude: I can agree that the Shire is the England of Tolkien’s childhood that never really was. But that’s a recipe for a work that resonates with people from a specific time and place, not something with readers who love it around the world and across generations. You yourself argued a minute ago that the Shire parts of the story no longer work for many people.
Thomas: The nostalgia goes far beyond the Shire, though. It’s baked into every part of the setting. It’s not like the lack of a happily-ever-after is a twist ending. Right at the outset, “wise” characters like Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel are telling Frodo that look, this is going to be terrible, and even if your quest works out, the world won’t be fixed. That’s an important part of Frodo’s decision: he’s not fooled or being foolish. He’s not laboring under the delusion he’s creating a better world. Tolkien deliberately built this into every part of the story.
Aragorn’s restored kingdom won’t be as good as Elendil’s, and Elendil’s wasn’t as good as lost Numenor. After the story ends, Gimli goes around doing, uh, cave things, and they’re cool, but they can’t hold a candle to the cave things the dwarves did in Moria before they dug too deep. Saruman calls himself ringmaker and wears a ring when he imprisons Gandalf, but even though he’s supposed to be on even metaphysical footing with Sauron, Saruman’s ring apparently sucks. The knowledge Sauron and the Elven smiths used to make the rings of power is lost, but even they were not able to make anything remotely as amazing as the silmarils that Fëanor made long before them. Those are just a few examples, but I could go on and on.
This is also why the story ends by following all the members of the Fellowship to their deaths (or ends, in the case of those who go over the sea to Tol Eressëa, but that removal from the world amounts to death as well). That’s a bizarre choice in a typical story that’s about defeating the evil wizard or restoring the rightful king and then living happily ever after. But in a letter, Tolkien said he meant for the story to be about “death and the search for deathlessness”.
Jude: Right, but here I would have expected you to argue that, like Frank Herbert last week, this is a case of the author’s intention being lost on his audience. How many readers of Lord of the Rings, teenage or adult, would say it’s about “death and the search for deathlessness” if you asked them after they finished it for the first time?
Thomas: Zero, but—
Jude: Zero because they would instead say it’s about defeating evil, or succeeding in a quest, or something like that. They wouldn’t say it’s about how everything’s going downhill and nothing can stop it. Frodo and the rest of the fellowship stop a great deal!
Thomas: Yes, but all the declinist material is still there and it still has a powerful impact. It resonates with people and leaves them feeling like it’s a deeper story as a result.
Jude: You mean because it is a deeper story!
Thomas: Yes, true. But what I was getting at is that because the nostalgia or declinism or whatever you want to call it is baked in so thoroughly, it manifests in lots of different ways, and people can therefore choose to relate to it in a lot of different ways. This is the way it’s like Dune. Whereas Dune gives you lots of distinct things to like, Tolkien gives you lots of paths to the same core experience.
If you see your childhood as a place of comfort and familiarity that you long to return to but no longer can access, then you relate to the characters finally returning and finding it a changed place. If instead you feel like the society around you is often a place of stifling conformity, you relate to Frodo and his friends leaving for adventure but failing to make a true home elsewhere and having to come back. Places as different as Moria and the forests of Lothlorien used to be better before greed and evil and simple time took its toll, and those can stand in for all sorts of things in people’s lives. We’ve seen the books appeal successfully to very different sorts of people, from new age hippies in the 60s to environmentalists to nerds.
Jude: And to, ahem, normal people, at least via the movies.
Thomas: Yes, and coming out when they did, American movie audiences readily identified the threat of Sauron with the threat of Islamic terrorism. I think Tolkien would have found that outrageous, but he was dead and couldn’t complain. That just goes to show how flexible the story is to interpretation since it’s set in this medieval secondary world with lots of focus on character decisions and a congenial blurriness around the religious and political details that would have alienated people had Tolkien put his own feelings more explicitly in the story. Sauron is barely on the page at all and Tolkien has only the barest theory of evil, just a little bit about a desire to dominate. So it’s easy to associate Sauron with any faction or force or nation that you consider to be evil. By the same token, he disperses “good guy” status pretty widely among humans, hobbits, elves, and dwarves, so readers can choose to identify with not just Frodo but Sam, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Eowyn, Merry, and so on. Yet the core theme of decline and nostalgia applies to everyone.
Jude: This is a very interesting theory, but aren’t most new fans coming to Tolkien as teenagers? Are teenagers really nostalgic for childhoods they haven’t even left?
Thomas: I don’t think either of us are experts on teenage psychology, but I’m pretty sure most teenagers see themselves as having left behind their childhood innocence. High school is famous for being a much more socially stressful experience than earlier stages of school. Also the flexibility I mentioned still applies, so a teenager can, for example, relate the oppressive, all-seeing eye of Sauron to their parents or school administration. The emotions here are universal.
Jude: Many years ago I was trying to explain Tolkien’s love of “northern courage” to a friend and describing how elves in the Silmarillion fight “the long defeat” against Morgoth, a hopeless battle against an evil far beyond their ability to ever defeat. He said surely it was dumb to fight if you can’t win, and I don’t know what I said in response, but it was only later that I realized that, duh, we are all fighting a losing battle!
Thomas: Yes, against death. Surrender in that fight is, in Tolkien’s view, the sin of Denethor. He would have us make Frodo’s choice instead: to push on and do the best we can and to make the world around us…not a better place, really, but a less-bad place. That’s the human condition. In the letter where he said Lord of the Rings was about death and deathlessness, Tolkien went on to say that this “is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man”. But that’s very humble. What he did, and what has mostly not even been attempted by the authors who followed in his footsteps, is to write an epic where every part of the endless fictional history of the secondary world speaks to the reality of aging and decline that we all experience.
Jude: If that was his goal, it seems like elvish immortality complicates things. They’re just wandering around the forests, communing with nature and never dying.
Thomas: That’s the one area where I think Tolkien’s intention really doesn’t come through clearly and so might be a bit similar to Frank Herbert’s views about messiahs. Reading the Silmarillion, you get a very different picture of the elves. The elves of Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings either didn’t obey the divine summons to Valinor (Legolas is descended from these), explicitly rebelled against it (Galadriel), or are at least heirs to those rebels (Elrond). Elves aren’t really immortal in Tolkien’s conception, they just age at the same rate as the world. Because they remember the good ol’ days so well, they are prisoners of the same nostalgia that Tolkien himself felt. The elves of Middle-earth are trying to hold on to what by all rights should be gone already. Their desire seems reasonable in Lord of the Rings, but it causes immense suffering in the Silmarillion and leads directly to the forging of the rings of power. And no matter how useful the three elven rings are, forging rings with Sauron was definitely a mistake. It’s a sin to give up entirely the way Denethor does, but Galadriel makes the right choice when she gives up on trying to hold the world in stasis and accepts the decaying world for what it is.
Unfortunately Lord of the Rings accidentally (I think) portrays this as a noble sacrifice on Galadriel’s part, and on all the elves’ parts, when I think Tolkien intended it to be seen as repentance. It’s too bad because for me this is Tolkien’s most “artistic genius” aspect. I think it’s clear he himself strongly felt the desire the elves have to hold back the changing in our world, but he knows he has to accept it.
Jude: Not so reactionary after all!
Thomas: He was a complicated man! But you should take his message to heart. You want the popularity of Lord of the Rings to continue unchanging for centuries. Instead, you must accept it will diminish and fade, as indeed novels will as a medium. The world that follows will be a poorer, diminished place. There’ll be a much decayed cultural landscape of short-form algorithmic video and people spending hours wearing virtual reality helmets instead of going outside or reading a book. But this is the natural order of things.
Jude: You know what, I’ve changed my mind. Tolkien was wrong! We must rage against the dying of the light!
Thomas: Nice Interstellar quote.
Jude: Ugh, let’s wrap up before this gets too depressing. Next time we’re going to dig into the plots of both of these books with a particular focus on tragedy and destiny in first Dune and then Lord of the Rings.