Fifty years ago, on 2 September 1973, J.R.R. Tolkien died of a gastric ulcer at the age of eighty-one. The news received a surprisingly muted response from the press. While the obituaries acknowledged the extraordinary impact that The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954) made upon a generation of readers, they implied that their author’s death was likely to bring an end to his literary acclaim. To The New York Times, Tolkien was the man who “cast a spell over tens of thousands of Americans in the nineteen-sixties,” while The Guardian placed him in the ranks of Dennis Wheatley and Harold Robbins, sometime superstars of genre fiction whose flames have long since tapered out.
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