The real lord of the rings

The year is 1956, the place is Folger Shakespeare Library and then-librarian Verlyn Flieger's co-worker has just received three books from her brother overseas. The co-worker passes the books around the library staff, and when they reach Flieger's hands, she is entranced with the whopping volumes by author J.R.R. Tolkien - a writer none of the staff had heard of - and his fantastic novels, The Lord of the Rings.

"We loved it, we talked about it," Flieger said with a smile, remembering that day 50 years ago that sparked her academic love affair with Tolkien that has continued to this day.

Flieger, now a professor in the English department, is the center of a Tolkien craze that has gripped the campus in recent years, partly because of the popularity of the recent Lord of the Rings films and also because of Flieger's honors seminar, HONR208E: J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, a class that has been booked full every semester since its creation five years ago.

At Flieger's lecture Wednesday in McKeldin Library where she explained Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology, her latest book about The Lord of the Rings, a crowd of nearly 40 undergraduates, graduate students and devoted Flieger fans clutched copies of her new work and listened attentively as she discussed Tolkien's influences and self-insertion into his works.

The scene of Flieger adoration at the lecture is similar to one during her honors seminar, during which students argue passionately over Tolkien's desire for the novel to be a pre-Christian mythology for England, why he used only one French name for its characters (Meriadoc Brandybuck, for Tolkien trivia buffs) and how Finnish mythology affected Tolkien's storyline.

The unconventional lectures from a woman who devoted her career to legitimatizing a novel most academics dismissed as fantasy is what the students love, even when - to their chagrin - she's pointing out the novels' flaws, or that Tolkien never intended protagonist Frodo Baggins to meet a happy ending.

And when Flieger, a petite bespectacled woman in her 70s, talks, they listen reverently.

With more than 500 students on Facebook listing Lord of the Rings or Tolkien as an interest, favorite book, author or movie, campus appreciation of the novel shows its universal appeal and demonstrates the continued popularity of a piece of literature Fleiger has dedicated her life to, she said.

After Flieger first read The Lord of the Rings, she put it aside to revisit later in life, she said.

"I loved it, and put it aside [for] sometime later when my children were old enough," she said. "And then I read it to them and they were hooked."

By that time, Flieger had already begun to analyze the novel, noting to herself the striking similarities between Tolkien's work and the epic poem Beowulf. When she began to teach a course in fantasy at The Catholic University of America during her graduate work there, Flieger made sure to include The Lord of the Rings in her curriculum - in fact, the class, entitled Midevil Modes and Modern Narrative, was "really an excuse" to teach the novel, she said.

Flieger soon became known to some as "The Fantasy Lady," a sarcastic nickname that demonstrated her colleagues' reluctance to accept The Lord of the Rings as a valid work of literature. However, their hesitance just gave Flieger that much more incentive to continue teaching her classes, she said.

"I've been fighting for 30 years to get it taught in higher education, as literature and not fantasy, and as a serious piece of literature," Flieger said.

Flieger furthered her fight when she accepted a full-time teaching position at this university and began teaching courses similar to those at Catholic, she said. As her classes in fantasy and comparative mythology swiftly became full and produced lengthy waitlists, Flieger decided to work in conjunction with the university's honors program to create the seminar J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. The 20-person class has been popular for five years now, and its counterpart in the English department, ENGL709A: Seminar in Myth: Tolkien's Mythology for England, has been just as successful.

The Lord of the Rings remains popular with college students because it deals with realistic problems of morality every person must grapple with in their own lives, Flieger said.

"I think the reason college students would read it is because why others would read it - because it's good," she said. "The nature of the story touches some of our deepest concerns as human beings. It's not about good and evil, it's about how good becomes evil."

Junior physics major Meghan Orr, who took Flieger's class after reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time last summer, thinks college students also turn to the book because of their immensely popular movie adaptations in 2001, 2002 and 2003.

"I think it was a good launching point for people who have not read the books before," she said. "If a tool like this can be used to help people read more ... more power to them."

Allen Harp, a junior elementary education major, agreed with Orr that the recent movie phenomenon was a push to draw more readers - especially those outside of the geeky, male, dress-up-as-a-hobbit-for-Halloween stereotype - toward Tolkien.

"I think it's all good ... as long as people are reading it and enjoying it, I think Tolkien would be happy," he said. "It's not like he's going to come back and be angry."

But for fan Eugene Shvartsman, a freshman computer science major, The Lord of the Rings movies pale in comparison to Tolkien's original works, which Shvartsman has read countless times, he said.

"I've read the books probably around a hundred times without exaggeration, just literally over and over and over again just because I love them," he said.