There are two ways to review Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, which runs at the Morgan Library & Museum through May 12. The Tolkien in question is John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. How much different would JRR Tolkien’s literary career have been if he’d insisted on the formidability of his full name, rather than going with those intriguingly cool initials?
That career was ostensibly a sideline. Tolkien’s day job was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. The show’s been organised in conjunction with Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, where it ran last year. Perhaps the oddest item on display is one of his academic robes. It’s an example of the nice balance that the exhibition maintains between life and art.
Even so, it’s the making rather than the maker that’s the chief interest of Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth. His books about that imaginary world have sold millions of copies and enlarged the imaginations of millions of readers. Even if you haven’t read the books, you recognise the titles: “The Hobbit”; the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, comprising “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers,” “The Return of the King” and the posthumously published “The Silmarillion.”
Well, maybe not “The Silmarillion,” whose lesser status owes as much to the lack of a movie as it does to literary considerations. It’s important to note that there is nothing in the show relating to the Peter Jackson film adaptations. For a certain type of visitor, this is as it should be and will come as a relief. Count me among them. For many more, this will constitute a real omission. There’s no accounting for Middle-earth taste. One man’s ent is another man’s Balrog.
All right, so one way to review the show is as your standard exhibition. Understood that way, “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” is varied, informative, accessible, and agreeable. It’s also nicely manageable in size: 117 items in one large gallery, the space for temporary exhibitions on the second floor. Those items include letters, family photographs, drawings, books, manuscript pages, even a collection of Tolkien’s coloured pencils and a tobacco tin full of pen nibs. Might that tin have originally contained pipe-weed?
So a visitor who wanders in unawares, having gone to the Morgan to see another show, will likely enjoy it. Tolkien’s watercolours have real charm, he was a natural colourist, and even someone who needs GPS to locate the River Anduin – and the River Anduin is big – will find the maps Tolkien drew of Middle-earth a finically detailed visual treat. One of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor – it could be the name of the law firm representing Roger Stone – is drawn on graph paper.
Of course the probability of someone just wandering in is pretty much nil. Waiting in line tends to have a seriously dampening effect on wandering. On a recent Saturday morning, the line to get to the elevator stretched halfway through the lobby, and this was barely an hour after opening. Overall attendance at the library is up 25 percent since the show opened last month. “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” is also a maker of crowds. If possible, try to go on a weekday.
That brings us to the second way to review the Tolkien show. Call it the pilgrimage factor. People who like these books tend to really, really like them.
Published in Daily Times, March 9th 2019.