Christian History Corner: The Lord of the Rings: What Harvest?
A reader's guide to the best of epic fantasy
"Aaron Belz, introduced by Christian History managing editor Chris Armstrong" | posted 9/01/2003 12:00AM
Early one morning last week, a Christianity Today International executive joined thousands of other Americans by driving out to a major retail chain to snag a newly advertised $15 copy of the The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers DVD. He arrived to find the bins already cleaned out.
Had he then headed to his local bookstore, our colleague would likely have found a similarly brisk trade in Tolkien's trilogy itself. Not that those books needed Peter Jackson's help: They long ago entered the rarified ranks of the blockbuster bestsellers.
But the millions of DVDs and books sold represent only the "camel's nose" of Tolkien's influence under the tent of popular culture. Because that brilliant, devoutly Catholic Oxford don created not only a phenomenon, but an entire genre. Little did he know, as he sat with C.S. Lewis in the latter's Magdalen College rooms in 1936 and determined to write "the sort of books they liked to read,"that within a half-century, entire bookstore shelves would groan under the offerings of his admiring imitators.
In Christian History's new special issue dedicated to Tolkien, author Aaron Belz provides a handy guide for readers who want to sift the wheat from the chaff in this abundant harvest of "Tolkien-esque" fantasy novels. Here is his survey of the best of these novels—divided into children's books and books for older readers:
* * *
When The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954-55, nothing like it had ever been seen. This epic tale in its elaborately devised world sent shock waves through the publishing world. It was, in the words of Tolkien biographer Tom Shippey, "a one-item category." But soon, it was clear that the category was destined to overflow. J.R.R. Tolkien had done nothing less than found a new genre.
There were fantasy writers before Tolkien—notably George MacDonald, with Lilith, Phantastes, and his Curdie stories. But The Hobbit gave epic fantasy its shape, creating Middle-earth and populating it with halflings and monsters that would become stock figures for scores of authors after him. What Tolkien had created, as George R. R. Martin has said, was "a fully realized secondary universe, an entire world with its own geography and histories and legends, wholly unconnected to our own, yet somehow just as real."
Understanding how Tolkien did this is key to knowing both why his stories are valuable literature and why so many people have imitated him.
Raiders of the Lost Word
One element of Tolkien's genius was his knowledge of philology, the history of language.
Although casual readers might assume words such as hobbit and orc, and town names such as Withywindle, derive from sheer imagination, Shippey demonstrates in his J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000) that the language of Middle-earth has roots in the real world.
Early English was largely oral; we do not have a complete record of the way Norse, Celtic, German, and other languages shifted and settled to form Modern English. Like geologists imagining continuities in an incomplete fossil record, philologists conjecture what kinds of words might have appeared in intermediary stages, in some cases being able to identify words that must have been, even though they aren't recorded. This is how Tolkien arrived at much of the language of Middle-earth.
September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47
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