@whenonesees, I'm replying to your comment here "It very funny how wrong people can get", because I feel it's interesting to note that through it's publication, there does not seem to have been a middle of the road response to The Lord of the Rings. It's literally literary marmite: you either love it or hate. I've seen a few examples on Tumblr about it, and I found this review from the critic Edmund Wilson, an American, in his review Oh Those Awful Orcs! written in 1956. I'll give the link, but here's the closing remarks of the review:
Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people - especially, perhaps, in Britain - have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser - both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched.
Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā As for me, if we must read about imaginary kingdoms, give me James Branch Cabell's Poictesme. He at least writes for grown-up people, and he does not present the drama of life as a showdown between Good People and Goblins. He can cover more ground in an episode that lasts only three pages than Tolkien is able to in one of this twenty-page chapters, and he can create a more disquieting impression by a reference to something that is never described than Tolkien through his whole demonology.
