Thursday, July 29, 2004

Tolkien’s Triumph, 50 Years Later

BBC News Online has a cool article about the initial reviews of Fellowship of the Ring, which was published 50 years ago.

One of the most popular books in literary history it is also a regular winner of recent polls to find the nation’s favourite novel - last year it topped the BBC’s Big Read survey.

But Tolkien’s public did not alway look so favourably upon this epic work.

The Spectator’s Richard Hughes, writing in October 1954, opened his review praising the pleasures of reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit - published 17 years earlier - to his children.

“This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,” said the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, while American critic Edmund Wilson, dismissed the entire trilogy in 1956 as “juvenile trash”.

Ouch! Happily, his sentiments turned out not to be true.

There are a ton of Rings-related links at the website linked. Some interesting trivia:

  • The Lord of the Rings took 11 years to complete
  • Only 3,500 books were printed for the first print run
  • In the US in 1965, 100,000 pirate trilogies were sold
  • Tolkien sold the film rights to the books in 1969 for £10,000
  • Tolkien created 37 new languages for 34 books

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