The writings of J. R. R. Tolkien might seem a somewhat unusual subject for Marxist analysis, and indeed for me. I usually write about visual art or politics rather than literature, and when Marxists write about literature they are more likely to focus on issues of method, or on figures from the canon of high culture (William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy), or modernism (Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett), or with avowed radical politics (Maxim Gorky, Bertolt Brecht, Seán O’Casey, John Steinbeck).

Tolkien fits none of these categories. Indeed he is a writer to whom many Marxists would take an instant dislike, who some would decline to read altogether (as not serious literature) or who, if they did like him, they might be slightly shamefaced about, almost as if they had a private taste for James Bond or Mills and Boon, for if Tolkien is not pulp fiction, he is not quite regarded as high culture either.

Nevertheless there already exists a small body of Marxist writing on Tolkien. Moreover there is a serious justification for writing seriously about Tolkien; namely, his exceptional popularity and the need to account for that popularity. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy are among the highest-selling novels of all time, having sold hundreds of millions of copies, and the film adaptations based upon those books have also reached a vast audience.