It may recently have become the biggest cinema project of all time, but for readers during the past 50 years J.R.R. Tolkien's spectacular epic, The Lord of the Rings, is far more than a book, even far more than a dazzling story; it is a life experience, writes Eileen Battersby.
Two years ago anxious followers queued up proprietorially to watch the filmed version of volume one, The Fellowship of the Ring. Heavy was the dread. Was Peter Jackson worthy of the task of transposing Tolkien's imaginative vision to a conventional screen? Could he carry the responsibility? Had he the moral courage of the Ring Bearer? Would Jackson falter in the face of Sauron's duplicitous? Were mere actors capable portraying lofty individuals such as Elrond and the Lady Galadriel? Would the Ents survive off the page? Would the perverse tragedy of Gollum become a farce? How could a world as complex as Middle-earth, with its detailed topography, diverse range of cultures and languages, its depth of history, its layers of nuance and its overriding gravitas, be rendered into a less subtle, more commercial medium?
It is a fantasy saga, not a great religion. Why the fears? Why the protective attitude?
There are many reasons. The Lord of the Rings is not a cartoon, and though not without humour, it is deadly serious. It is about life, death and, above all, honour and its moral choices. It is about the defeat of evil, the evil contained in a relentless ring that must be returned to its deadly place of origin. The narrative pivots on the point where power and potential disaster meet. Darkness has emerged and, with it, the overthrow of the old order.
Traditional notions of adventure and quest become subverted in the need to destroy something that is all-corrupting. Frodo is not seeking something, he has been entrusted with a specific task: the destruction of the ring.
Throughout all great world literatures, there have been many adventures, many quests, but none can compare with Tolkien's creation. This is a dense, highly literary fantasy drama with echoes of Dante, Macbeth and Milton. Although it is not an overtly religious work like C.S. Lewis's lesser Narnia chronicles, it is the work of a Christian sensibility conscious of moral choice.
To explain its deeply emotive, almost romantic and wholly heroic appeal is like trying to define a landscape or a piece of music. Many interpreters have looked to its allegorical intent. And it does appear to be the classic study of good versus evil, easy-going hobbits confronting wizards gone mad with crazed ambitions.
After all, although it was finally published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955, it was begun in 1939, in the shadow of the second World War and in the wake of Tolkien's delightful earlier foray into the adventure genre, The Hobbit, written for his own four children and published in 1937.
Tolkien, who was born in 1892, had served in the first World War, spent three months on the Somme in 1916, saw two of his closest friends (and many others) die, was seriously wounded and invalided home.
Long seen as a quiet-living Oxford don, he was in fact a member of Britain's war generation of writers. It is not surprising that the many battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings are so vividly described. Violence runs through the narrative, as does, most interestingly, an often palpable sense of fear. Tolkien never forgot the war, nor the sense of honour present throughout the trilogy.
It is tempting to see in the portrayal of Sauron, the corrupted wizard, a combination of the fall of Lucifer and the rise of Hitler. But Tolkien would have disagreed. For him it was really very simple.
There was no message, no polemic, no arch symbolism. He merely wanted to test his powers as a storyteller and see if he could find an audience. He achieved more than that: he has shaped imaginations, and influenced other writers, most notably Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy, including the Whitbread Prize-winning The Amber Spyglass, aspires to Tolkien's level of literary sophistication.
But Pullman's moral, quasi- anti-religious odyssey falters into righteousness. It is an easy trap when venturing into the heroic. Some of Tolkien's magic lay in his ability to sustain the heroic without becoming worthy; he was as alert to the tiniest gesture - the gasp of fear, or a sigh - as he was to the panoramic sweep. His underlying humour, often filtered through the ironic asides of Gandalf, allows the text to breathe.
The good don, who described himself as a career academic and amateur novelist, also possessed an acute ear and was aware of the class and cultural contrasts between his large cast of characters, such as the snobbish disregard the graceful elves have for the clumsy dwarves.
After all, before the fellowship is formed at the Council of Elrond, long before danger takes over the action with the Ringwraiths or Dark Riders, Tolkien presents Middle-earth as a place in which English common sense and traditional rural values, as represented by the Shire, encounter the mythic hailing from an older epoch. It is the presence of that ancient world that brings us closer to understanding Tolkien's allure. As early as The Hobbit, we see Bilbo Baggins, the food-loving suburbanite with his tidy hobbit hole and middle-class values, smugly dismissing adventures as "nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them."
As the dwarves file in to plan the recapture of their lost treasure, Tolkien has begun to establish his fusion of the heroic and the ordinary. A hint of this is evident in The Hobbit, but the true power of his recreation of a medieval world picture emerges in The Lord of the Rings. Along with traditional English rural society and an older England of warrior princes more preoccupied by honour than love, Tolkien calls upon darker elements of the European fairytale, with its trolls, elves, dragons and other creatures.
To these, he adds his hell-hounds, the foul orcs, good and bad wizards, prickly kings and, of course, his expertise as a professor of Old and Middle English with a scholar's knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon epics, Old Norse sagas, great stone halls and battles, plus the romance genre of the Middle Ages. There is also his skill at characterisation and sense of dramatic pace.
As with the finest storytellers, Tolkien was careful about the details; from about 1913 he was at work creating the massive bedrock of mythology, folklore, family histories, tribal tensions and hierarchies of kings and wizards, as well as the linguistic sources that would make Middle-earth a world unto itself. All of this fabric is contained within The Silmarillion, his Book of Genesis. J.R.R. Tolkien, the storyteller blessed with soaring imagination and forensic scholarship, created a world and allowed ordinary hobbits and princely heroes to make sense of it, while readers remain seduced.