Why J.R.R. Tolkien Should Be Forgotten
The Pitch Nobody Accepts
“Dude, you’ve gotta read this 1,200 page fantasy trilogy from the 1950s, it’s amazing.”
“No. Actually no, I don’t have to do that. I have to do literally anything else than do that.”
“It’s called, The Lord of the Rings.”
“Sounds German. Hard no.”
“It’s English, it’s about this team of humans, an elf, a wizard, a dwarf and four hobbits who…”
“Hob-bats? Do they have leathery wings?”
“No dude, they have beards on their feet…”
“I. Am. Not. Doing. This.”
Background Radiation
Try to remember - when and how you did you first run into J.R.R. Tolkien?
Why did you take an interest?
The answer probably depends on your age, but you didn’t have a friend trying to twist your arm into reading this thing that you didn’t know anything about — because you already knew all about it. It’s been in the background radiation of pop culture for all of your adult life.
Have you ever asked yourself why?
Darklings: Because Tolkien is one of the greatest writers of all time. He’s up there with Shakespeare and Homer.
Dark Herald: If being a great writer meant anything at all, John C. Wright would be at the top of the NY Times bestseller list for months every time he published.
Have you ever considered the possibility that these ‘great stories’ don’t survive on merit… But on maintenance?
I’m not saying that Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolkien aren’t superb or that they are overrated.*
What I am saying is this:
There is no such thing as a self-sustaining masterpiece.
Only stories that are continuously kept alive… and stories that are allowed to die.
You already know there is a shit-ton of people whose livelihoods depend on you continuing to read Dante, Tolstoy, and that depressing blowhard F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here’s the uncomfortable question: what if they’re the ones keeping the classics alive… And not the other way around?
Merit may (occasionally) earn a story its birth, but only maintenance keeps it from obscurity. They only stay relevant because entire eco-systems keep them alive.
Without that maintenance, even the greatest works would eventually enter the void.
The Trilogy That Wasn’t a Hit
Let’s take a hard look at the early lifecycle of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Was it an instant classic? Hardly.
The Return of the King was published in 1956 by George Allen & Unwin in the UK and Houghton Mifflin in the USA. It did mid-list business in America, in no small part, due to cover art that told you nothing about the story and gave you no reason to read it. It caused some buzz in US genre circles, but it didn’t come close to going mainstream. It did do better in Britain.
But it had faded into back catalog status by 1966.
The Pirate Who Saved Tolkien
Enter—Ace Books. A publishing house not noted for its generosity in dealing with its authors.
As Larry Niven told a horrified Tom Doherty after he’d bought Ace, “No one sells to Ace unless they’ve been rejected by everyone else. They never pay royalties, the advance is it.” Harlan Ellison was once so enraged by Ace he mailed them a dead gopher. The company was that popular with writers.
Ace Books noticed that the rights on the Houghton Mifflin 1956 edition were just fuzzy enough to create a loophole for open paperback rights. They printed a completely pirated edition of The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the princely sum of $0.75 a copy. For Ace it was perfect; no royalties, and no advance.
The most important thing Ace did was put incredibly psychedelic covers on them.
If you were a college Boomer and were planning on fiddling with your synapses for amusement’s sake that night, the cover offered the promise of a very good time.
And it delivered.
“That stuff about the fireworks over the Shire was groovy, man. All the colors, I can like SEE them. Did you know my fingers can touch anything but themselves? No wait, they can.”
Incoherent word spread rapidly on campuses, and suddenly The Lord of the Rings was a gigantic bestseller—and Tolkien was seeing none of it.
He appears to have been ignoring it at first on general principle. Before pirating his books, Ace had contacted Tolkien about publication. He had haughtily refused because he would never allow his works to be published in such a “degenerate form as the paperback book.”**
A reader from America named Nan Scott finally got through to him about the scale of the theft. Now that the Inkling had an inkling, he got over his revulsion about paperbacks. Betty Ballantine got in touch with the professor and sold him on an authorized edition to compete with Ace’s edition and then turned the Timothy Leary weirdness up to 11 on the cover art.
The war of the editions was won by Ballantine.
J.R.R. Tolkien died seven years later.
The Timeline Where Tolkien Dies
Let’s take a look at what should have happened to The Lord of the Rings without support before we look at how that support changed its fate.
In the 1960s, LotR has cult status among the counterculture. This was its peak.
Along come the 1970s, still riding the paperback boom. LotR stays hot on campuses, word of mouth stays strong. Tolkien is hot… But contained.
By the mid-seventies the boom has tapered off. Sales are still there, but the counterculture is dying off. It’s turning into The Thing Older Guys Are Into.
Now it’s the 80s. Generation X is in college and there has been no real generational handoff. Boomer stuff equals dull and dim. Fantasy has matured and expanded, but Gen X is reading Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, and Terry Brooks. All of them have been influenced by Tolkien, so there is a certain degree of backtrack—but The Lord of the Rings is becoming a niche, connoisseur’s market.
In the 1990s, the light has distinctly dimmed. Generation X has switched to grim-dark, urban fantasy. Neil Gaiman, Tanya Huff, Charles de Lint are ascendant. Tolkien is still influential, still respected, but has entered pre-obscurity.
With the 2000s come the Millennials. J.K. Rowling is blowing it so far out of the water you can’t see the ocean from space. Jim Butcher and Laurell K. Hamilton aren’t doing quite that well, but their impact is felt—while Tolkien’s is not. Sales of The Lord of the Rings are now a few thousand a year, mostly library editions. He’s known to the field, but invisible to pop culture.
He’s the guy Boomers won’t shut up about—like Timmy Hendricks or whoever.
2026—The torch has not been passed for three generations. Tolkien’s publisher dropped The Lord of the Rings a while back. The Tolkien Estate has long ago accepted market reality and self-publishes The Lord of the Rings on Kindle for $2.99 a copy or FREE on Kindle Unlimited.***
The Three Pillars of Tolkien’s Survival
There were three reasons that this alternate history never happened. And Tolkien fans only like one of them.
First Pillar: Christopher Tolkien
Christopher Tolkien assumed stewardship of his father’s work in 1973. He had become his father’s editor, and by the end was nearly a co-author.
Before Christopher, The Lord of the Rings was hot, well-known, and frequently discussed, but it was not fully canonized. Nor was it universally embedded like it is now.
Christopher Tolkien turned Middle-earth from a popular setting into a managed legacy.
Arda was an incomprehensible mess when he took it over—conflicting histories, notes written decades apart, and worse, they were in his father’s handwriting.
He took that chaos and created the Middle-earth Legendarium.
In 1977, Christopher Tolkien published The Silmarillion. The first new Middle-earth book in years. Much more importantly, it gave a spine to the adventures of the Baggins family.
For the next 40 years he continued to publish Middle-earth projects:
Unfinished Tales
The Children of Húrin
Beren and Lúthien
The Fall of Gondolin
And most importantly, The History of Middle-earth.
This last was a massive scholarly project that gave a foundation for Tolkien Studies as a legitimate academic field.
That was the most critical turn because it changed J.R.R. Tolkien from a mere author into a corpus — A body of serious academic study.
It’s the thing that turns you from a James Clavell into a Geoffrey Chaucer. From a simple playwright into William Shakespeare. It invests centuries old institutions with a long term interest in preserving your work.
Relevance isn’t just about quality—it’s about infrastructure.
Second Pillar: Rankin/Bass
On November 22, 1977, NBC broadcast a special.
It is impossible to get across to younger generations how special a network SPECIAL was. In a pre-streaming, pre–home video world, if you missed it when it aired, it was gone.
This was the first broadcast of the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit. It had 25 million viewers most of whom were young Generation X. Topcraft Studio’s anime style was incredibly meme-able. And since rebroadcasts were not associated with any given holiday, those rare times it showed up were very special indeed. The only other way to relive the experience was through the story album.
Then we heard about it being a “book.” On the basis of this cartoon special Generation X decided to give this “reading thing,” another shot.
Tolkien purists loath it but the truth is Rankin/Bass performed the all important function of making a generational hand-off.
It was no longer just a Boomer thing.
This was the Gen X entry drug.
A story survives when each generation believes it discovered it on its own.
THIRD PILLAR: Gary Gygax
Gary Gygax didn’t preserve Tolkien.
He operationalized him. Dungeons & Dragons didn’t just borrow from Tolkien. It turned Tolkien into something you could use. You didn’t just read about elves and dwarves anymore—you played them. You became them.
This difference is critical.
Reading is passive.
Gaming is participatory.
And participatory systems are far more durable.
Greyhawk may have been the official name, but let’s not kid ourselves—every table in America was running a slightly off-brand Middle-earth campaign whether TSR admitted it or not.
The races were there.
The archetypes were there.
The structure was there.
Gygax took Tolkien and broke him into modular parts. Turned those parts into systems. And finally distributed those systems to millions of players
That is cultural reproduction at scale.
It didn’t even matter if you had read The Lord of the Rings, because now it was background radiation.
You already knew what a ranger was.
You already knew what an elf was.
You already knew what a dwarf was.
(A halfling may have required a moment’s recollection).
Middle-earth stopped being a book and became a default setting for imagination itself.
This is how a story stops being literature—and becomes infrastructure.
THE PROBLEM WITH SUCCESS
At this point, you’re probably wondering, why I’m not including the Peter Jackson Films? While I did love them and still do, they opened the door to long term harm.
They opened the door into turning J.R.R Tolkien from a curated legacy into an industrial franchise.
Conclusion: Maintenance, Not Magic
And that is the part Tolkien fans don’t want to hear.
The Professor did not simply write a masterpiece and trust it to eternity. He was carried there carefully, deliberately, and continuously by systems that kept his work alive long after it should have faded into the dust covered editions of library back shelves. Christopher Tolkien built the canon. Rankin/Bass passed it to a new generation. Gary Gygax turned it into a living system people could inhabit. Each reinforced the others. Remove any one of them and Tolkien weakens. Remove all of them, and he doesn’t disappear overnight but he would have done what every other “great” writer eventually does. He fades.
The Peter Jackson films did something different. They did not maintain Tolkien, they converted him. They took a living myth and handed it over to the industrial content monkeys. And once something enters that machine, it is no longer preserved. It is mined. Expanded. Repurposed. Diluted. Not all at once, not even intentionally but inevitably. Because industrial systems are not designed to protect meaning. They are designed to extract value. Every. Last. Drop. Of. It.
And then discard the ruined husk.
Tolkien should not be forgotten. But the idea that he cannot be forgotten is the real fantasy.
Relevance is not a birthright. It is not secured by quality, sales, or a few moments of fan enthusiasm. It is secured by maintenance. And for the first time since 1973, the people who understood that and acted on it are gone.
Discuss in the Comments Below
*Although, I am saying all those things about F. Scott Fitzgerald.
**In fairness to the Professor, paperbacks were kind of “degenerate” back then. Ads for cigarettes, Sanka, and Sea Monkeys were endemic. And authors saw none of that revenue.
***Lord of the Rings actually is free on Kindle Unlimited, but at a sales rank I would commit murder for.
I have the Ace paperback edition of LoTR. Covers by Jack Gaughan who Wollheim used on Ace's fantasy books. They are not trippy-dippy in execution like the Ballantine paperbacks that followed a year later. The Ace paperback covers are very similar to Andre Norton's "Witch-World" books that were coming out at the same time.
The Rankin/Bass Hobbit was extremely important. Nearly 50 years later and I can still remember some of the songs.