Lewis’s Narnia seems a wispy caprice compared to Tolkien’s imaginary land. There has never been another creative endeavor quite like Middle-earth — beginning with the extensive, fully elaborated languages Tolkien devised, and then the maps, genealogies, history, literature, and mythology that sprung from them. In the same way that certain people love movies so much they cannot rest until they get to make them, Tolkien’s passion for languages led him, at an early age, to formulate languages of his own. And because his understanding of language was profound and organic (rather than the arid pedantry often assumed to motivate philologists), he knew that languages can’t exist without someone to speak them; even a dead language was spoken and shaped by living people once. So Tolkien resolved to animate his handiwork by devising a world and a time in which the elvish tongues Sindarin and Quenya could be spoken. “I made the discovery,” he explained to a reader, “that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition.”
Tolkien often spoke of Middle-earth as partly of his own devising and partly received from a mysterious other source. From the first, when he began to write verses about an ancient mariner named Earendel in 1914 and showed them to a friend, the border between his own imagination and some variety of semirevealed truth was blurred. The friend asked Tolkien what the verses “really meant,” and Tolkien’s response was “I’ll find out.”
He soon came to think of the myths, legends, and epics he concocted in his spare time as a suitable replacement for the forgotten mythology and legends of the Anglo-Saxons. (His first efforts at writing The Silmarillion were compiled in a notebook entitled “The Book of Lost Tales.”) “Imaginatively this ‘history’ is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet,” he once told his publisher. He had fashioned a fictional past for a real country. In his later years in particular, Tolkien felt compelled to clear up minor discrepancies in Middle-earth’s history by “finding out” obscure “facts” that would explain one thing or another.
To his lasting astonishment, Tolkien’s “private and beloved nonsense” (as he called it), when unleashed upon the world, became immensely popular. His complete conviction in his own creation — one of the most comprehensive and steadfast cases of authorial conviction known to literature — was transmitted to many of his readers. They set about studying and speaking his languages and designing all sorts of time-consuming ancillary versions of Middle-earth, games like Dungeons and Dragons or gatherings where people dressed up like wizards or hobbits. He had created a new world; they packed their bags and moved in. Tolkien had a term for the practice of inventing worlds: “sub-creation.” It was, he believed, in the construction of consistent, believable alternate realities that human beings paid the highest tribute to their Creator — by imitating him. Eventually, for the would-be denizens of Middle-earth, the professor himself became not unlike a god.
Tolkien’s books were not among my own childhood favorites. With the vague notion that it was esoteric and dense, I put off attempting The Fellowship of the Ring until I was almost ready to leave for college. Even The Hobbit had, among owlish eleven-year-olds, a reputation for being a “hard” book; The Lord of the Rings was considered an intellectual Everest. I tried The Hobbit too soon, attempting it a couple of times before giving up at age eight or so. The copy we had lying around the house (presumably my father’s) was a small, thick drugstore paperback, and its tiny type, combined with the story’s uninspiringly middle-aged hero and all those odd names, contributed to make the story seem stuffy and impenetrable. By the time I acquired the patience for it, I was embarked on a jag of reading plays: Shakespeare, Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and (because my father had a shelf of these) George Bernard Shaw.
Besides, I much preferred fantasies whose main characters were children from this world. Yet even taking that into account, my own resistance to Middle-earth puzzles me. I loved Mr. Tumnus, yet somehow didn’t recognize that Bilbo Baggins, with his cozily appointed hole, was the same type (and probably an inspiration for Tumnus, I now realize). I had trouble, I think, with The Hobbit’s longish passages of description. I couldn’t visualize any of these places, and although Tolkien was even more devoted to the natural world than Lewis, his style was less lyrical and he didn’t have Lewis’s knack for suffusing scenery with human emotions. He wouldn’t have wanted to, since he thought human beings already got far too much attention as it was. That was the nub of his objection to drama and to those critics whose taste ran toward “dramatic” fiction: they are, he wrote, “likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play.”
Just before leaving home, however, I finally tackled The Lord of the Rings, burning through it over the course of a summer. (It is the perfect long book to read before you set off on an ambitious and incomprehensible adventure.) I approached it then with a diligence that now strikes me as bizarre; it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I was able to read it for pure, escapist pleasure. By that point, I recognized that, much as I liked it, Tolkien’s freakishly prodigious powers of invention could not supply the book with what four years of studying English literature had led me to expect from a great novel. I relished The Lord of the Rings, and have reread it several times since then. I awaited each installment of Peter Jackson’s three-part film version with excitement and even delved into the “mythological” texts collected in The Silmarillion — the province, really, of the hardcore fan, the geek. But by the time I left college I had read Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Absalom, Absalom! and Crime and Punishment — to name just three books with related themes — and knew they sounded depths that Tolkien never touched.
This is a delicate subject. Tolkien has many, many devotees who fly into a fury when anyone suggests that he is not, as Tom Shippey put it in the subtitle to his book on Tolkien, the “Author of the Century.” Long stretches of Shippey’s text are given over to sniping at Tolkien’s less appreciative reviewers. The archenemy, the Sauron of the literary press in the eyes of Tolkien’s champions, is the late American critic Edmund Wilson, who dismissed The Lord of the Rings as “juvenile trash.” This, understandably, rankles the faithful, and whenever they encounter any objection like it, they rise to Tolkien’s defense. Their counterarguments usually involve testy lectures on the unparalleled complexity, consistency, and thoroughness of Tolkien’s imaginary world. He invented entire languages, for crying out loud: what contemporary novelist, however gifted, had done — or could do — that?
This reasoning never succeeds in winning over critics and readers who just don’t have a taste for such things, the kind of people for whom Middle-earth looks like nothing more than the biggest model-railroad setup of all time. To the contrary: For those with an allergy to the fantasy genre, all this talk of the vastness of Tolkien’s invented world proves that his fans don’t really understand what makes literature literature; they think it’s a matter of the quantity, rather than the quality, of invention.