But even the relatively limited success he experienced in his lifetime proved a source of mild embarrassment, given the book’s unexpected reception among his core fanbase, those “tens of thousands of Americans” described in the NYT obituary. It wasn’t until after his death-following the consolidation of the fantasy genre and Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings (in 2001–03) and The Hobbit (in 2012)-that Tolkien truly transcended cult status as a fantasy writer to become the broader pop culture sensation he remains today. “Even the nose of a very modest idol … cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense,” he admitted to a friend in a letter of 1972, though “eing a cult figure in one’s own lifetime is not at all pleasant.” It was only after his retirement in 1959 that Tolkien started to acknowledge his burgeoning fame, about which he felt some ambivalence. The books were passion projects, ancillary to his professional interest in classical languages and cultures as a professor of Anglo-Saxon The Hobbit began life as a bedtime story for his children. Conservative to his core, he did not see himself as a pioneer, but as an amateur writer of heroic epics in the tradition of Beowulf or the Norse sagas. ![]() But he was perhaps the most influential fiction writer of the twentieth century. It would be an overstatement to proclaim Tolkien the grandfather of fantasy-Lord Dunsany’s magical legends in Fifty-One Tales (1915) predate The Hobbit by more than twenty years, while the battle between man and monster is a tale as old as time. All these works of high fantasy bear the mark of Middle-earth in their mock-mediaeval settings, archetypal protagonists, and encyclopedic appendices even the cartographical style of the maps in their opening pages betrays their debt to Tolkien. Martin’s mega-bestseller series A Song of Ice and Fire, with its TV spin-offs. ![]() The Lord of the Rings plunged an entire genre into the mainstream, characterized by sprawling epics ranging from Terry Brooks' 1970s The Sword of Shannara trilogy to Robert Jordan’s 1990s Wheel of Time series (of which a TV adaptation is currently airing on Amazon Prime) and George R.R. To The New York Times, Tolkien was the man who “cast a spell over tens of thousands of Americans in the nineteen-sixties,” while The Guardian placed him in the ranks of Dennis Wheatley and Harold Robbins, sometime superstars of genre fiction whose flames have long since tapered out.īut Tolkien’s reputation was to follow a different trajectory, reaching a high point at the turn of the millennium-largely thanks to numerous film, TV, and video game adaptations of his oeuvre. While the obituaries acknowledged the extraordinary impact that The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954) made upon a generation of readers, they implied that their author’s death was likely to bring an end to his literary acclaim. The news received a surprisingly muted response from the press. Tolkien died of a gastric ulcer at the age of eighty-one. ![]() Fifty years ago, on 2 September 1973, J.R.R.
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