The demands made on the writer's powers in an epic as long as "The Lord of the Rings" are enormous and increase as the tale proceeds-the battles have to get more spectacular, the situations more critical, the adventures more thrilling-but I can only say that Mr. Tolkien has proved equal to them. --W. H. Auden This book merits a much longer review than I will give it. But, in the presence of two masters, Auden and Tolkien, I am humbled. I will only take occasion to mention a couple of brief highlights of the most masterfully told hero-quest I've yet read. I will try to limit my attention to where others have not shined so bright a light just yet. First, a striking feature of the ring, which makes it much more compelling as a "numinous object" (Auden) than, say, a scepter or sword would be, is its circular shape. In quest tales of tradition (e.g. Arthurian legends), the object or device the hero must conquer or obtain is usually a weapon of some kind, a sword or a spear. In other legends magic rings were used, but Tolkien's unique re-imagination of the ring has to do with its power to turn whoever uses it, without exception, to evil. The ring's circularity shows the constant self-reference of evil, which is the source of its power in Middle Earth as well as the cause of its undoing. The great "I," purporting to see all, sees only itself, and Sauron's downfall is directly tied to the fact that the hobbits are so obviously unlike him that he cannot begin to formulate the kind of defense he would need to stop them. Second, there is the poetry, the song-craft, of the book. Tolkien, writing as a contemporary of T.S. Eliot, Pound, and Auden himself, nevertheless writes poetry of a completely different soil than theirs. Tolkien's poems, scattered as parts of the story, throughout the book, are usually narrative, playfully metrical, and recited rather than read. Pound originally tried to capture the ancient spirit of medieval poetry, but his imagination was naturally tilted in a different direction. His "classicism" most readily expressed itself through an expansion of poetics, drawing from the tradition and moving forward. Tolkien does another thing altogether. Returning, as Pound did, to the roots, Tolkien begins and moves in another direction, imagining how poetry would be if it never stopped being publicly recited! So whereas Pound imagines new possibilities for poetry from the tradition all the way to him, and finds new places where it can go, Tolkien imagines where it could have gone. Tolkien is thus an example of what Milan Kundera discusses when he talks about unmined possibilities: "yes, it's possible to imagine a whole other history of the novel." Time will tell whether more poets move towards Tolkien's particular poetics to draw from it, but one place it is sure not to lead is back through the Rennaisance to modernism. What Tolkien did requires a certain boldness and casting-off of convention; to do it againwould require a broguish genius, a particular kind of eccentric, someone like... ...Tolkien! Yet this difference is exactly what I have determined to be the reason for his startling popularity among those who do not write or aspire to, and his dismissal by those trying to eek out a place in the literary establishment. It has been my prediction that the only place for art to go from the current madness will be to something like a return to the freedoms of medieval art. One already sees hints of it in what is called "magical realism" in the novels that come from the tropics of the earth (e.g. Salman Rushdie, Fuentes, Garcia-Marquez). Yet these writers, bound by the realism that reaches through the 19th century, still do not compare to the boldness of Tolkien's achievement, which, unfortunately, has spun a legion of sad imitators, rather than the succession of innovations that could fully mine the possibilities he opened. Will the future produce not one but two great literary traditions?