Word: tolkien
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Hairy feet and all, Frodo Baggins is the reluctant hero of this year's "In" book-a three-volume fantasy called The Lord of the Rings. Written by J.R.R. Tolkien, 74, a retired Oxford philologist, the Rings trilogy was first published in the U.S. twelve years ago, had a small but dedicated coterie of admirers, including Poet W. H. Auden and Critic C. S. Lewis, but languished largely unread until it was reprinted last year in two paperback editions.* Since then, campus booksellers have been hard put to keep up with the demand. At the Princeton bookstore, says...
...hobbit habit seems to be almost as catching as LSD. On many U.S. campuses, buttons declaring FRODO LIVES and GO GO GANDALF-frequently written in Elvish script-are almost as common as football letters. Tolkien fans customarily greet each other with a hobbity kind of greeting ("May the hair on your toes grow ever longer"), toss fragments of hobbit language into their ordinary talk. One favorite word is mathom, meaning something one saves but doesn't need, as in "I've just got to get rid of all these mathoms." Permanently hooked Ringworms frequently memorize long passages from...
...that time, if not before, the aspiring teachers who know Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (and every teacher should) will begin to see the tower as something other than the beacon of American education. Behind the window slits, vaulted ports, and bulging bastions, grey-green scaly orks will lurk, whispering in the Black Speech, plotting hideous amusements. Hulking trolls will patrol the moat. Shelob, the monstrous arachnid, will have spun her webs among the stairways, ducts, and circuits of the "service perimeter." On the battlements will wait the flying Nazgul, their piercing cries cutting across the Common...
...success of a written epic has therefore usually come from reliance on words and symbols already tried and accepted in the consciousness of a people. Both erudition and genius are necessary to utilize be the full potential of this tradition in both language and myth, Tolkien has been able to set forth his story in a heroic style not only appropriate but effective. His chapter endings are indicative...
...book's success, a proof that emotive language need not be confined to poetry and advertising. Yet to call a work a successful epic, even when it combines scope, structure, and expression, is always dangerous. Perhaps more fitting would be the suggestion that for the twentieth century, Tolkien is more acceptable and more comprehensive than Malory, Spenser, or Milton...