Conquer Club

Metsfanmax wrote:The Chinese language Wikipedia includes that description of him as "the father of modern fantasy literature" in its intro. Though who knows if that was written by someone in China.

notyou2 wrote:I think he is the greatest fantasy writer ever.

DoomYoshi wrote:http://fan.lib.ru/img/e/eskov/last_ringbearer_engl/last_ring_bearer.pdf
This is the Russian version.

When it comes to the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, it is a truism that critics either love the books or hate them: Concerning Middle Earth, there is no middle ground. Such has been the case ever since Tolkien, an Oxford philologist, first published his epic novel The Lord of the Rings in three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) between 1954 and 1955. In 1956 W.H. Auden wrote in The New York Times that, in some respects, Tolkien's story of the hobbit Frodo's quest to destroy the Dark Lord Sauron's "One Ring" of power surpassed even Milton's Paradise Lost. But that same year, Edmund Wilson, at the time America's pre-eminent man of letters, dismissed The Lord of the Rings as "balderdash" in a review for The Nation titled "Ooh, Those Awful Orcs." Wilson also swatted at Tolkien defenders like Auden and C.S. Lewis, observing that "certain people--especially, perhaps, in Britain--have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash."

Wilson's derisive review inaugurated an estimable tradition of hobbit bashing, but the enduring success of Tolkien's fiction has bedeviled his literary detractors. In 1961 Philip Toynbee wrote optimistically in The Observer of London that Tolkien's works had "passed into a merciful oblivion." Forty years later, The Lord of the Rings has sold 50 million copies in numerous languages, influencing everything from Star Wars to Led Zeppelin and single-handedly spawning the genre of fantasy fiction in the process. (Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit has sold almost as many copies.) These days, Tolkien fans are counting down the weeks until December, when The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of New Line Cinema's three projected Tolkien blockbusters, is to appear in theaters.

In Britain, Tolkien's literary merits have been the subject of very public debate. In 1996 a poll of 26,000 readers by Waterstone's bookstore crowned The Lord of the Rings "book of the century." Writing in W: The Waterstone's Magazine, Germaine Greer expressed her displeasure at the poll results:

"Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies and babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialised."

In his curt introduction to last year's Chelsea House critical edition J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," Harold Bloom--the famously Falstaffian Yale English prof who has designated himself the gatekeeper of the Western literary canon--calls Tolkien's romance "inflated, over-written, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme." Bloom concludes: "Whether [Tolkien] is an author for the coming century seems to me open to some doubt."