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The popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional universe, remarkable from the start, has continued to expand since the appearance of Peter Jackson's movie adaptations. Wikipedia's list of the best-selling books of all time shows The Lord of the Rings (1954/2004) in third place and The Hobbit (1937) in sixth. Four out of five reasonably broad (although unscientific) polls conducted at the end of the last millennium came out with The Lord of the Rings rated the greatest book of the century, while in the fifth poll it was second only to the Bible (Shippey, 2000). Although Tolkien has been largely ignored by the psychoanalytic journals on PEP, his enormous appeal is worthy of psychoanalytic exploration.
One reaction to his popularity has been to dismiss Tolkien's work as childish escapism: “juvenile trash” (Wilson, 1956, para 7); “The good boys, having fought a deadly battle, emerge at the end of it well, triumphant and happy, as boys would naturally expect to do” (Muir, 1955, p. 11). Other critics have countered that Tolkien addresses head-on and in great depth the traumas of modernity and war (see Croft, 2015; Curry, 1997; Hiley, 2011; Shippey, 2000). On a more psychological level, I have argued that Tolkien addresses the desire to retain experiences of enchantment during maturity (Rosegrant, 2016).
I propose that Tolkien's work can be read as an examination of creative living that grew out of Tolkien's personal experience of creativity. In this first of two interconnected papers, I will present two episodes from Tolkien's creative life and examine how his work at times grew and at other times was inhibited by the struggle to establish and maintain transitional space. In the second paper, I will show ways in which Tolkien's work itself depicts the ongoing tension between transitional experience and perverse experience.