It was December 1942 and J.R.R. Tolkien was having doubts about his new book, a sequel to The Hobbit published five years earlier. ‘Is such an “epic” possible to consider in the present circumstances?’ he wrote to his publisher Stanley Unwin. The specific circumstances included the second world war; but the literary climate was hardly more propitious. The warden of Merton College, Oxford, where Tolkien was Professor of English Language and Literature, was ‘visibly shaken’ when Tolkien showed him the blurb for that sequel, eventually titled The Lord of the Rings. Reviews were largely poor: the American critic Edmund Wilson was not alone in thinking it ‘juvenile trash’.

In a sense, Tolkien’s question to Unwin holds good. What is the place of an ‘epic’ in the modern world? That it has one, thanks to Tolkien, is unarguable. Yet, despite millions of readers and a thriving scholarly community, Tolkien remains stubbornly outside the norms of literary criticism. As D.J. Taylor writes in his fresh, incisive but uneven new study of the man and his work: ‘He is too unlike anyone else, too detached from most of the discernible mainstreams and too opposed to most of the things they hold dear.’

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