Eglerio! Praise them! I want to type fast and congratulate American Youth on the (J.R.R.) Tolkien Cult before it is over. Perhaps it ends today and thousands of people, shutting Volume I or II or III of The Lord of the Rings, are now never to know if Gollum came back or Frodo came to. Still, I would hope that no one, even on the West Coast where the time lags, missed the Door Scene in which two necromancers exert two separate spells, one to open a door and the other to shut it. The molecules of the door, flustered by these opposing influences, lose their grip on each other and go off every which way. The door achieves absolute Doorlessness.

The addiction of young people to scenes like that is unrivaled in its purity. In late and jaded adolescence, they have demanded their right to live innocuously…. [All] sorts of Tolkien readers grow innocent by association. Most of them, sick of being analyzed, are sick of analysis in fiction too. They could of course find book Be-Ins like Alice in Wonderland or Finnegans Wake in which there is no comprehensible motivation. But they prefer Tolkien in whom motivation is so comprehensible as to be less than none; at ones so limpid and yet so emphatic as to establish the only ambiguity that still pleases. Even the East Coast enthusiasts aren't quite sure whether their enthusiasm is epic or parodic, inspired by Tolkien real or Tolkien camp. The swollen smallness of the Rings, the swarming details of its self-evident circumstances, its colossal freedom from embarrassment create in the end a breathtaking puerility. It is a book like climbing to the top of Mount Everest to keep an appointment with one's sixth-grade teacher.

But (without precedent!) the teacher likes the same book the pupils like. The catholic charm of the Rings is its leaving out almost every complexity we know now: the young find this simplicity exotic, the middle-aged find it significant. The young enjoy transparency, the middle-aged take it for a moral solution of some previous or mutually premised opacity. It is as though at the bottom of a custard that the child swills down, the parent finds a single almond inscribed TRUTH. By good or bad luck (he himself seems undecided), the gap in Tolkien's writing between an intended sublimity and an actual absurdity doubles the audience. The simpler this writing becomes, the more it pleases the vestigial Matthew Arnolds who respond to clarity as to grandeur, and the hippies who want to float free of intricacies.

Tolkien nourishes the deprived impulse of them both given two dots on a piece of paper, to draw a line between them. In three volumes, he traces just such a narrative between a starting point, Bag End, Hobbiton, the Shire, in the west corner of the vast nursery called Middle-earth, to a final destination, the Cracks of Doom, Mount Doom, Mordor. The horizontal purpose is relentless, converts say irresistible: Frodo must get through to Mordor, Tolkien must get Frodo through, the reader must get through Tolkien. But even all this determination detaches itself from customary effort by its odd immateriality. It is true that Frodo Baggins is often said to have a Quest, an energetic concept of behavior, but his is not accumulative, he is not to come back with something he went after. He already has it: the First Ring of the Nine Rings of Power belongs to Frodo. But its use can only corrupt its user: Power Loves Evil. Still, it is not enough for Frodo to keep it hidden in his pocket or around his neck on a scapular string. For aligned against Frodo and all the cozy kitchen values of the hobbit culture are the eastern hordes headed by Sauron who is eager to frisk Frodo, find the Ring, and wear it himself: Evil Loves Power. It is, therefore, necessary for the Ring to go back where it came from, and for Frodo to take it there. (pp. 217-19)

[The] obsession of the hobbits with dark and light … determines the structure of their story. Their expedition is, in skeleton, a progress through a series of tunnels, like that of a well-accoutered toy train. In almost every chapter, hobbits are caught in a dark tight spot, they panic, they crawl or climb or fight, they emerge once again into light and space. And yet really, their enemies do to them only what they do to themselves. When they aren't forcibly inserted into little blind places, like dimes into a jukebox, they look for their own slots. That is, their system of values has, as they say in English class, a central ambivalence. While they don't want to be extinguished by others (put out like lights), they don't want to be brilliant either. Their ideal, and this is at once strange, ingenious, and alluring to Americans, is to be dim. So their temptation is to go too far, into total invisibility. The Ring offers Frodo this seductive chance, and in not keeping it on his finger, he proves he has the courage to be seen.

It would be painful to list the reasons American youth may have for wishing to disappear too. Fortunately, while Tolkien raises the possibility, he also argues strenuously against it. But in view of his influence here, one might wish he showed as much energy in urging a prompt maturity as well as a low but certain visibility. (pp. 221-22)

After so much labor, so much loss. The insolence of slimy things, and the unhealthy questions to be asked of them. Do words, then, have no certain commitment to dogma, are the two at cross-purposes here again? Tolkien himself is guiltless, oblivious of his own sudden insinuation—he endorses its opposite. His book is based on the assumption that all words, like the pigments of all skins, are indicative of either good or evil. Moreover, it is again the supposedly pretty that is good, and the supposedly ugly that is bad, in languages as in legs. (pp. 226-27)

[Both] the Elven and Coarse styles are only little lay-bys on the great highway, the M-1, of the Middle style. It is this blandness from which young people might have benefited the most, were it not for the linguistic distractions provided by that capricious Gollum. For the Middle style bears the intellectual brunt of Middle-earth. A sense of the unexceptional is omnipresent, the security of an unbroken line of commonplaces by means of which good dull creatures have regulated their thoughts and feelings for Generations Without Count. (pp. 227-28)

[Tolkien unites with a] settled syntax, never tense or impatient or dissatisfied, as predictable in form and as resonant in spirit as a bag of communion wafers. (p. 228)

But Gollum is a genuine subversion, not by evil so much as by idiosyncrasy. The almost whole fabric of predictability is broken by his speech defects, his gollum and his ss-sounds. He is a thing for a thing's sake, and so a coffee break from the business of the Rings, a reminder of surprise, singularity, and the new. It is perhaps with that first swerving motion of Gollum from the dead center that Tolkien, in a sense, gained and lost the Tolkien Society. For the present indications are that the young members tend to read their master in a spirit of impropriety. They express no enthusiasm for the Middle style and give no evidence as yet of having perfected it themselves. Their attention seems instead almost entirely directed toward those further eccentricities of background out of which Tolkien drew his Everyhobbit; and the long sleepy lessons of the book, like those of a late spring afternoon seminar, are passed over in an indecent hurry to play with elven penmanship or the Baggins family tree. An opportunity, rare in its pedagogical calm, is submitted to hectic and frivolous abuses. Even our estranged youth show our old incapacity to turn aside from any conceivable source of invention. (pp. 228-29)