SOURCE: Reilly, R. J. “Tolkien and the Fairy Story.” In Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, pp. 128-50. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.

In the following essay, Reilly analyzes The Lord of the Rings in terms of Tolkien's theory of the fairy story.

When J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, appeared some seven years ago, it accomplished on a modest scale the sort of critical controversy which The Waste Land and Ulysses had occasioned a generation earlier. Like them, it could not be easily reviewed; it was anomalous; it forced examination of critical principles; it demanded a judgment that necessarily became a position to be defended. Before the quarrel subsided, the trilogy had been compared to the Iliad, Beowulf, Le Morte d'Arthur, and...