"No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy"
Seventy-two years ago this week, the godfather of high fantasy, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, published the first novel in a proposed three-volume epic “largely concerned with hobbits.”
The Fellowship of the Ring has, in the decades since publication, shifted over 150 million copies and spawned perhaps the most successful film trilogy (when box office numbers generated, Oscars won, and rave reviews received are all taken into account) of all time.
Long before it became the most iconic novel in the now-storied history of the genre, however, it was reviewed in the pages of the New York Times by no less a literary critic than W. H. Auden.
Here’s what the “Funeral Blues” author had to say about Frodo and Co.
