When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsur­pris­ing recep­tion giv­en that noth­ing like them had been writ­ten for adult read­ers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish poem The Faerie Queene, per­haps. At least, this was the con­tention of review­er Richard Hugh­es, who went on to write that “for width of imag­i­na­tion,” The Lord of the Rings “almost beg­gars par­al­lel.”

Scot­tish writer Nao­mi Mitchi­son did find a com­par­i­son: to Sir Thomas Mal­o­ry, author of the 15th cen­tu­ry Le Morte d’Arthur — hard­ly mis­placed, giv­en Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture, but not the sort of thing that passed for con­tem­po­rary writ­ing in the 1950s, notwith­stand­ing the seri­ous appre­ci­a­tion of writ­ers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s tril­o­gy. “No pre­vi­ous writer,” the poet remarked in a New York Times review, “has, to my knowl­edge, cre­at­ed an imag­i­nary world and a feigned his­to­ry in such detail.”

Auden did find fault with Tolkien’s poet­ry, a fact upon which crit­ic Edmund Wil­son seized in his scathing 1956 Lord of the Rings review. “Mr. Auden is appar­ent­ly quite insen­si­tive — through lack of inter­est in the oth­er depart­ment,” wrote Wil­son, “to the fact that Tolkien’s prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same lev­el of pro­fes­so­r­i­al ama­teur­ish­ness.” Five years lat­er, the Nobel prize jury would make the same judge­ment when they exclud­ed Tolkien’s books from con­sid­er­a­tion. Tolkien’s prose, wrote jury mem­ber Anders Öster­ling, “has not in any way mea­sured up to sto­ry­telling of the high­est qual­i­ty.”

The note was dis­cov­ered recent­ly by Swedish jour­nal­ist Andreas Ekström, who delved into the Nobel archive for 1961 and found that “the jury passed over names includ­ing Lawrence Dur­rell, Robert Frost, Gra­ham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Tolkien to come up with their even­tu­al win­ner, Yugosla­vian writer Ivo Andrić,” as Ali­son Flood reports at The Guardian. (The Nobel archives are sealed until 50 years after the year the award is giv­en.) Ekström has been read­ing through the archives “for the past five years or so,” he says, “and this was the first time I have seen Tolkien’s name among the sug­gest­ed can­di­dates.” His name appeared on the list chiefly through the machi­na­tions of his clos­est friend and chief sup­port­er, C.S. Lewis.

Lewis, “also of Oxford,” Wil­son sneered, “is able to top them all” in praise of Tolkien’s books. From the first appear­ance of his Mid­dle Earth fan­ta­sy in The Hob­bit, Lewis promised to “do all in my pow­er to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recog­ni­tion it deserves,” as he wrote in a 1953 let­ter to British pub­lish­er Stan­ley Unwin. In what might be con­sid­ered an uneth­i­cal pro­mo­tion of his friend’s work today, Lewis respond­ed tire­less­ly to crit­ics of the tril­o­gy, going so far, after the pub­li­ca­tion of The Two Tow­ers, to pen an essay on the sub­ject titled “The Dethrone­ment of Pow­er.” Here, Lewis explains the pro­lix qual­i­ty of Tolkien’s prose — that which crit­ics called “tedious” — as a nar­ra­tive neces­si­ty: “I do not think he could have done it any oth­er way.”

Tolkien’s biggest fan also urged read­ers to spend more time with the books and promised that the rewards would be great. In defense of the sec­ond work of the tril­o­gy, he con­clud­ed, “the book is too orig­i­nal and too opu­lent for any final judg­ment on a first read­ing. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not quite the same men. And though we must ration our­selves in our reread­ings, I have lit­tle doubt that the book will soon take its place among the indis­pens­ables.” And so has all of Tolkien’s work, becom­ing the lit­er­ary stan­dard by which high fan­ta­sy is mea­sured, with or with­out a Nobel prize.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a Ger­man Pub­lish­er Ask­ing for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heart­felt Loathing” for Walt Dis­ney and Refused to Let Dis­ney Stu­dios Adapt His Work

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lit­tle-Known and Hand-Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book, Mr. Bliss

When J.R.R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary and “Learned More … Than Any Oth­er Equal Peri­od of My Life” (1919–1920)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

“If Youth, through­out all his­to­ry, had had a cham­pi­on to stand up for it; to show a doubt­ing world that a child can think; and, pos­si­bly, do it prac­ti­cal­ly; you would­n’t con­stant­ly run across folks today who claim that ‘a child don’t know any­thing.’ ” Ranked along­side the oth­er notable open­ing sen­tences of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, this falls some­what short of, say, “Call me Ish­mael.” The entire nov­el that fol­lows is writ­ten in the same odd­ly stilt­ed, cir­cum­loc­u­tive prose, and a read­er who skips the author’s intro­duc­tion may not per­ceive just what has set it askew for some time. They’d also have to be read­ing an edi­tion oth­er than the first, with its bold promise of a “50,000 WORD NOVEL WITHOUT THE LETTER ‘E.’ ”

The book is Ernest Vin­cent Wright’s Gads­by (1939). Though self-pub­lished in the late nine­teen-thir­ties to no fan­fare, it’s now acknowl­edged more or less wide­ly as a lit­er­ary odd­i­ty, far more often cit­ed as a piece of triv­ia than actu­al­ly read. (I first learned of it from a list of fun facts on the back of a cere­al box, which, look­ing back now, seems cul­tur­al­ly appro­pri­ate.) As the Dis­am­bi video above explains, in deny­ing him­self e, the sin­gle most com­mon let­ter in the Eng­lish lan­guage, Wright denied him­self the, as well as “the major­i­ty of pro­nouns, like he, she, they, them, theirs,” and so on. “Past-tense words that use -ed are out of the ques­tion, as is any num­ber between six and thir­ty.”

To some, more sur­pris­ing than the fact that Wright man­aged to com­pose a full-length nov­el this way (over­look­ing three thes and an offi­cer that slipped into the ini­tial print run) is the nature of the sto­ry he chan­neled this con­sid­er­able effort into telling. John Gads­by — not to be con­fused with the sim­i­lar­ly named, much more famous title char­ac­ter of anoth­er nov­el from the pre­vi­ous decade — returns in mid­dle age to his home­town of Bran­ton Hills, which has slid into a state of advanced dis­so­lu­tion. In despair, he assem­bles a youth league ded­i­cat­ed to breath­ing life back into the place, and before those 50,000 very near­ly e‑less words have passed, the pop­u­la­tion has grown thir­ty­fold, and he’s become the may­or.

In truth, Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry is lit­tered with Gads­bys; it’s just that none of the authors of those for­got­ten hom­i­lies on civic-mind­ed boos­t­er­ism thought to use so strik­ing a gim­mick. Tech­ni­cal­ly called a lipogram, the tech­nique of omit­ting a par­tic­u­lar let­ter has since been used since to greater lit­er­ary effect. With their char­ac­ter­is­tic weak­ness for Amer­i­can eccen­tric­i­ty, cer­tain French intel­lec­tu­als even­tu­al­ly took up Gads­by as a kind of mod­el. In 1969, Georges Perec pub­lished the longer but sim­i­lar­ly e‑less La Dis­pari­tion, which would have been much more chal­leng­ing to write, giv­en the French lan­guage’s even greater reliance on that miss­ing vow­el. Far from a par­lor trick, its lipogram res­onates with both the con­tent of the sto­ry and sense of absence felt by the author, who’d lost both par­ents in World War II. As for this post, per­haps you’ve noticed that it’s been writ­ten thus far with­out a sin­gle instance of the let­ter z. Please clap.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

An Intro­duc­tion to the Codex Seraphini­anus, the Strangest Book Ever Pub­lished

The Strangest Books in the World: Dis­cov­er The Madman’s Library, a Cap­ti­vat­ing Com­pendi­um of Pecu­liar Books & Man­u­scripts

Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture, From the Begin­nings to the Civ­il War: A Free Online Course from NYU

The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945: A Free Yale Course on Nov­els by Nabokov, Ker­ouac, Mor­ri­son, Pyn­chon & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.