I talked with an English prof friend of mine today about The Lord of the Rings. I’m reading it again though it’s not my thing because I know it resonates with devoted readers in general and Christian readers in particular. As someone who cares about readers (i.e. people) more than books, I am interested in books that excite people, even if they’re not the kind of books that excite me.
The Lord of the Rings is an outlier. Its longevity isn’t owing to its being a part of the official school curriculum.
Rather, the book has an incredible word-of-mouth reputation. Readers tell readers about the books. This is where the power of connections begins.
Moreover, as a trilogy, the books offer readers an extended world that, combined with books like The Hobbit and the Silmarillion, comprise a contained universe. If you want more of the world Tolkien has created, there’s more. None of the books are duplications of the others. They’re all parts that work together. Fellowship wouldn’t work without Two Towers, and none of them would work as well without The Hobbit.
Finally, the book thrives on its connection to a particular context. It is a book where the reading experience is particularly memorable because it is often solitary and done outside of school. Readers who encounter it at a young age want to have the experience of rereading it, even though the world they encounter inside it is nothing like the world they know.
I describe these three connections from Bharat Anand’s The Content Trap here. Even more interesting is that they all describe the Bible: the word shared among people in the community, the way the Bible’s books connect to each other, and finally, the contexts of the community and those intertextual connections.
If one was looking for a taxonomy to explain literary power, you could do worse than this one.
Experiments in Criticism 