Does Lord of the Rings deserve a place in the canon?

[JaneyGee]

I'm reading it atm and have mixed feelings. Sometimes, it seems like a silly kid's book, written by an overgrown Edwardian schoolboy. Then there will be a beautiful sentence, or a profound observation, or a snatch of poetic prose, and I begin to think it's an epic masterpiece.

I'm also re-reading Harold Bloom's 'Western Canon,' in which he lists what he considers the true canon of 'great books'. He lists most of the stuff you'd expect (Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Jude the Obscure, Sons and Lovers, To the Lighthouse, etc), but not Tolkien.

I doubt you'll ever see it taught as part of a literature degree either. You might have it on the 'fantasy' module, or something like that, but nowhere else. Should it be taught alongside other major 20th-century novels? I'm thinking of stuff like Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, Atonement, and so on. I'm not making a case one way or the other. I'm just curious to hear what others think. Is it serious, great literature? Or just very good escapist fantasy?

I can think of few other books that have had so much of an influence on an entire genre. For me, the answer is yes.

I'm not a massive fan of LOTR, but I do think that some readers tend to be unnecessarily snooty about fantasy / sci fi as a genre.

I agree. In fact, I would say he invented the genre. You could argue that most fantasy writers are just trying to write their own Lord of the Rings.

Actually, I suspect that LOTRs isn't taken seriously because Tolkien gets lumped in with his imitators. But Tolkien himself wasn't writing a fantasy novel. There wasn't a fantasy genre when he composed LOTRs. He was trying to compose an epic – something like the Icelandic sagas. And he drew on his vast knowledge of languages and myth to do so. We forget that he was an Oxford professor. This was someone who knew a dozen languages, who read books in anglo-saxon and ancient Greek, who knew Latin like the back of his hand, etc. Unfortunately, most people put him in the same category as Star Wars, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones.

Yes, I agree. I once heard a literature professor say that the next great masterpiece will be a work of science fiction. As for fantasy, there is definitely a hunger for that kind of thing. People are tired of irony and cynicism and anti-heros.

All fantasy novels written after LOTR lie in its shadow. Of course it belongs in the canon.

Yes, I agree. I once heard a literature professor say that the next great masterpiece will be a work of science fiction. As for fantasy, there is definitely a hunger for that kind of thing. People are tired of irony and cynicism and anti-heros.

A. S Byatt has said that Terry Pratchett should be considered on a par with Dickens, if I remember correctly.