Tolkien studies View of
The Lord of the Rings with hero, anima and other archetypes In 1973, Patrick Grant, a scholar of Renaissance literature, offered a
psychological interpretation of
The Lord of the Rings, identifying similarities between the interactions of the characters and
Jungian archetypes. He states that the Hero appears both in noble and powerful form as
Aragorn, and in childlike form as
Frodo, whose quest can be interpreted as a personal journey of
individuation. They are opposed by the
Ringwraiths. Frodo's
anima is the Elf-queen
Galadriel, who is opposed by the evil giant female spider
Shelob. The Old Wise Man archetype is filled by the wizard
Gandalf, who is opposed by the corrupted wizard Saruman. Frodo's Shadow
Gollum is, appropriately in Grant's view, also a male Hobbit, like Frodo. Aragorn has an Ideal Partner in
Arwen, but also a Negative Animus in
Eowyn, at least until she meets
Faramir and chooses a happy union with him instead.
Richard C. West compiled an annotated checklist of Tolkien criticism in 1981. Serious study began to reach the broader community with Shippey's 1982
The Road to Middle-earth and
Verlyn Flieger's
Splintered Light in 1983. To borrow a phrase from Flieger, academia had trouble "taking seriously a subject which had, until he wrote, been dismissed as unworthy of attention." Tolkien's works have since become the subject of a substantial body of academic research, both as
fantasy fiction and as an extended exercise in
invented languages. Alongside their analysis of Tolkien's work, scholars set about rebutting many of the literary critics' claims. Starting with his 1982 book
The Road to Middle-earth, Shippey pointed out that Muir's assertion that Tolkien's writing was non-adult, as the protagonists end with no pain, is not true of
Frodo, who is permanently scarred and can no longer enjoy life in the Shire. Or again, he replies to
Colin Manlove's attack on Tolkien's "overworked cadences" and "monotonous pitch" and the suggestion that the
Ubi sunt section of the Old English poem
The Wanderer is "real
elegy" unlike anything in Tolkien, with the observation that Tolkien's
Lament of the Rohirrim is a paraphrase of just that section; other scholars have praised Tolkien's poem. As a final example, he replies to the critic Mark Roberts's 1956 statement that
The Lord of the Rings "is not moulded by some vision of things which is at the same time its ''
raison d'etre''"; he calls this one of the least perceptive comments ever made on Tolkien, stating that on the contrary the work "fits together ... on almost every level", with
complex interlacing, a
consistent ambiguity about
the Ring and the nature of evil, and a consistent theory of the role of "chance" or "luck", all of which he explains in detail. The pace of scholarly publications on Tolkien increased dramatically in the early 2000s. The dedicated journal
Tolkien Studies was founded in 2004; that same year, the scholar Neil D. Isaacs introduced an anthology of Tolkien criticism with the words "This collection assumes that argument about the value and power of
The Lord of the Rings has been settled, certainly to the satisfaction of its vast, growing, persistent audience, but also of a considerable body of critical judgment". The open-access
Journal of Tolkien Research began publication in 2014. Pressure to study Tolkien seriously came initially from fans rather than academics; the scholarly legitimacy of the field was still a subject of debate in 2015. Tolkien was strongly opposed to both
Nazism and
Communism;
Hal Colebatch in the
J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia states that his views can be seen in what he considers to be the somewhat parodic "
The Scouring of the Shire". Leftist critics have accordingly attacked Tolkien's social conservatism. Other
Marxist critics, however, have been more positive towards Tolkien. While criticizing the politics embedded in
The Lord of the Rings,
China Miéville admires Tolkien's creative use of
Norse mythology,
tragedy,
monsters, and
subcreation, as well as his criticism of
allegory.
Literary re-evaluation With the understanding that Tolkien was worth studying, scholars, authors, and critics began to re-evaluate his Middle-earth writings as literature. The humanities scholar
Brian Rosebury stated in 2003 that
The Lord of the Rings is both a quest – a story with a goal, to destroy the Ring – and a journey, an expansive tour of Middle-earth through a series of tableaux that filled readers with delight; and the two supported each other. 's analysis of
The Lord of the Rings as a combined quest (to destroy
the Ring) and journey (as a series of Tableaux of places in
Middle-earth); the two support each other, and must interlock tightly to do so. In
Mallorn in 2004, the Tolkien scholar Caroline Galwey wrote the ironically-titled "Reasons for 'not' Liking Tolkien", inverting Turner's "Reasons for Liking Tolkien" and attacking her position, along with Edwin Muir's. In her view, "we cannot understand Tolkien-haters properly unless we go beyond their arguments to the things they do not say." Those things, she argues, include the "greatest strength" of
The Lord of the Rings, that "in sensibility it is a (capital-R) Romantic work". In her view, Turner is "apparently so embarrassed by [Tolkien's Romanticism] that she won't even name it or admit that it has a pedigree." In 2016, the British literary critic and poet
Roz Kaveney reviewed five books about Tolkien in
The Times Literary Supplement. She recorded that in 1991 she had said of
The Lord of the Rings that it was worth "intelligent reading but not passionate attention", and accepted that she had "underestimated the extent to which it would gain added popularity and cultural lustre from
Peter Jackson's film adaptations". with the words "Tolkien's books have become
Alps and we will wait in vain for them to crumble." Curry, writing in the
Companion, stated that attempts at a balanced response, finding a positive critic for each negative one, as Daniel Timmons had done, as this failed to address the reasons for the hostility. Curry noted that the attacks on Tolkien began when
The Lord of the Rings appeared; increased when the work became "spectacular[ly] successful" from 1965; and revived when readers' polls by
Waterstones and
BBC Radio 4 acclaimed the work in 1996–1998, and then again when Peter Jackson's film trilogy came out in 2001–2003. He cited Shippey's remark that the hostile critics Philip Toynbee and Edmund Wilson revealed "gross inconsistency between their self-professed critical ideals and their practice when they encounter Tolkien", adding that Fred Inglis had called Tolkien a fascist and a practitioner of "'country-based fantasy' that is 'suburban' and 'half-educated". Curry states that these criticisms are not simply demonstrably mistaken, but "rather how
very (his emphasis) mistaken they are, and how consistently. That suggests that there is (as Marxists like to say) a structural or systematic bias at work". He noted that Shippey's 1982
The Road to Middle-earth and then
Verlyn Flieger's 1983
Splintered Light had slowly begun to reduce the hostility. That did not prevent Jenny Turner from repeating "some of her predecessors' elementary mistakes"; Curry wrote that she seemed to fail to grasp "two of the most important things about art, literary or otherwise: that reality is (also) ineluctably fictional, and that fiction and its referents are (also) unavoidably real", pointing out that
metaphor is unavoidable in language. Summing up the history of attacks, Curry identified two consistent features: "a visceral hostility and emotional animus, and a plethora of mistakes showing that the books had not been read closely". In his view, these derived from the critics' feeling that Tolkien threatened their "dominant ideology",
modernism. Tolkien is, he wrote,
modern but not modernist, at least as well-educated as the critics (another thing that made them feel threatened), and not
ironic (especially about his writing).
The Lord of the Rings is equally "a story told by a master story-teller; a story inspired by
philology; a
story suffused with Catholic values; and a mythic (or
mythopoeic) story with a
North European pagan inflection". In other words, Tolkien was about as anti-modernist as possible. Curry concluded by noting that newer authors including
China Miéville,
Junot Diaz, and
Michael Chabon, and the critics
Anthony Lane in
The New Yorker and Andrew O'Hehir in
Salon were taking a more open attitude, and cited the work's first publisher,
Rayner Unwin's "pithy and accurate" assessment of it: "a very great book in its own curious way". == See also ==