Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism is the definitive collection of essays on Tolkien's masterpiece. The essays span fifty years of critical reaction, from the first publication of The Fellowship of the Ring through the release of Peter Jackson's film trilogy, which inspired a new generation of readers to discover the classic work and prior generations to rediscover its power and beauty. Fans and scholars alike will appreciate these important, insightful, and timely pieces. Fourteen of the fifteen have been previously published but are gathered here for the first time. The final essay in the volume, "The Road Back to Middle-earth" by Tom Shippey, was commissioned especially for this collection. Shippey examines how Peter Jackson translated the text into film drama, shaping the story to fit the understanding of a modern audience without compromising its deep philosophical core. Fans will find much in these essays to enjoy and ponder. Library Journal Understanding the Lord of the Rings The Best of Tolkien Criticism By Rose A. Zimbardo Houghton Mifflin Company Copyright © 2005 Rose A. Zimbardo All right reserved. ISBN: 9780618422531 Neil D. Isaacs On the Pleasures of (Reading and Writing)Tolkien Criticism It is almost forty-three years since Rose Zimbardo pointed me toward Middle-earth. I was a relatively late arrival, the phenomenal success of The Lord of the Rings having already been well established —to the dismay of some establishment defenders of the traditional canon. Throughout the sixties, three aspects of that phenomenon seemed to dominate perceptions of the value of the book. One was the persistent resistance by the arbiters of literary taste to afford critical recognition to a work that had proven its abundant appeal to a wide popular and, worse, youthful audience. Another was the fact that the book"s commercial success was not the product of hype: the early popularity of The Lord of the Rings was produced by a word-ofmouth groundswell that preceded the reactive attention of the mass media. It was a matter of reporting the phenomenon rather than precipitating it, though the reportage added fuel to the ?re. The third was that some of the features and attractions of the book and its created world inevitably elicited an infectious outbreak of "faddism and fannism, cultism and clubbism," as I called it in "On the Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism." In that introduction to our ?rst collection of critical essays I was lamenting that these factors, particularly "the feverish activity of the fanzines," were counterpro- ductive to the development of a climate for serious critical attention to Tolkien"s masterpiece. More than a decade after the novel"s appearance, as an example if not a proof of the shocked attention still being paid to a literary phenomenon by an uncomprehending coterie of critics (including EdmundWilson, Germaine Greer, and Philip Toynbee), the New York Herald Tribune"s Book Week published on its front page (February 26, 1967), beginning in large type and accompanied by a cartoon, what amounted to a confession of ignorance by a prominent critic, Paul West. Part of my response in "On the Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism" neatly summarizes, I think, the nature of the problem: On what bases does West attack The Lord of the Rings? 1. He is baf?ed by it, baf?ed into numbness. I cannot argue with this; he demonstrates both baf?ement and numbness throughout. 2. With a nostalgia for the last century"s discarded theories, he laments that Tolkien created his world and its creatures alone, without some folksy community origin. But if Tolkien is sole owner and proprietor of Middle-earth, I would prefer to give him all my admiration than to betray any envy for his creative imagination. 3. The Lord of the Rings is a game, only a game, and has no bearing on humanity. Now this is a serious objection, to which I would offer a pair of categorical adversatives: ?rst, without the sense of play as an essential element in literature, we would have to do without much of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Proust, Nabokov —for in a sense all art is a game, the game of putting form to matter; second, the game of The Lord of the Rings is miraculously designed to be played and won by anyone who takes part, but the reader who doesn"t see the signi?cance of its urgent bearing on humanity will always be a loser. 4. The society from which people must escape into Tolkien"s world is very bad indeed. I offer no comment on this argument, but I wonder if West hasn"t simply used Tolkien"s popularity as a way to make this last general point; it has no direct (or logical) bearing on the relative excellence of the book. It may be unfair to hold West up as epitomizing the negative attitudes toward Tolkien. After all, few attentive readers had actually been driven to the simplistic notions that the book features "a virtue that triumphs untested," an "evil