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The lord of the fantasy

It's been 115 years since J.R.R. Tolkien was born, and more than half a century since the publication of The Lord Of The Rings. But interest in his work has only grown stronger over the years

PHOTOS: AP

STRONG FOLLOWING Peter Jackson's cinematic trilogy may have reawakened interest in J.R.R. Tolkien's world of Middle Earth. But, as any fan of the author will testify, the books hardly need the extra publicity

M. Sundar, a freelance writer, is an avid reader who'll read just about anything he can lay his hands on, from Plato to Paulo Coelho, from Mad Magazine to Salman Rushdie. But there's one literary obsession Sundar just can't shake off. "I need a regular fix of Tolkien," he says, "especially when things in my world threaten to get too crazy." So it is that every few days, Sundar drops everything else on his agenda to reread some part of the long journey from the creation of Middle Earth down to the destruction of the Dark Tower of Mordor. He has read J.R.R. Tolkien's iconic fantasy series The Lord Of The Rings and its more ambitious precursor Silmarillion over a dozen times each, but never tires of them. "The sheer scale of what Tolkien has created means that every reading brings something new to the table. There is so much of the Middle Earth to explore, so much of it to experience. In many ways it's a lifetime project," he asserts. In this sentiment, Sundar is not alone.

Fans everywhere

More than 50 years after Tolkien first published his epic tale of the One Ring, hundreds of fan communities and clubs can be found around the world — with more being formed every day — thanks to the renewed interest generated by the cinematic adaptation by Peter Jackson. Communities that not only read and dissect the book, but carry things forward to their logical end, recreating subplots that are left untended in Tolkien's work, discussing the semantics of the languages he created for the books and so on.

For many, this kind of adoration for the writer and the world he created is quite baffling. For Samit Basu, author of The Simoqin Prophecies and its sequel The Manticore's Secret, such devotion to Tolkien despite vast development in the fantasy genre isn't surprising at all. "Tolkien is the founding father of the modern fantasy epic. And although there have been numerous post-Tolkien works that are popular on their own merit, he defined the genre. And since then, all fantasy writers have either deliberately modelled their work on his or deliberately avoided references to it." For fans, what separates Tolkien from the dozens of imitations and tributes that came after was his single-minded devotion to his creation. Most fantasy, they say, including even the better works to hit bookshelves, are myopic in their perspective — creating only as much of the world as is necessary for the story they are telling. Tolkien, on the other hand, created a wealth of background material that gives his tales an earthy reality. "He was always a philologist first, and that passion of a person who loves what he's doing is clearly seen in his books," says Luiza C., an English teacher who cherishes her hardbound, book-of-the-month copies of The Hobbit, Silmarillion and The Lord Of The Rings. "Most of the language he created wouldn't even be seen by the reader. He didn't create the languages statically; he put in mutations and progressions that you see in the normal development of a language. His dedication is simply amazing." Manav Kohli, who visits more than a dozen online Tolkien fan clubs regularly, adds that the author did in fact give a greater priority to the languages he created such as Quenya and Sindarin, and that his stories were only ways to delve into those tongues. "I once read a New York Times article in which Tolkien says that the invention of language is the foundation and that the stories were made to provide a world for the language rather than the reverse. He says: `The name comes first and the story follows.'"

Deft weaving

For Luiza, Tolkien's deft weavings of English are just as awe-inspiring as his forays into imaginary languages. "In some, the prose is so beautiful. Like the story of the making of Middle Earth in Silmarillion, "Ainulindale", or the story of Beren and Luthien. Most of it is so wonderfully written. I recommend it to all my students to show them what you can do with the language."

Of course, there are detractors. Phillip Toynbee, the British journalist and writer, once wrote hopefully in The Observer that Tolkien's work "had mercifully passed into oblivion." And W.H. Auden, in a review of The Return Of The King, wrote that for all the people he had met who thought The Lord Of The Rings a masterpiece, there were just as many who could not stomach it at all.

But simply as a result of the magnitude of his work, Tolkien's spirit can rest in the knowledge that he will not, for a long time to come, suffer the lesser fate of pitiful neglect.

RAKESH MEHAR

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