Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form … balderdash … juvenile trash.

—Edmund Wilson, The Nation, 1956

[The] most backward-looking and fustily word-bound of popular novels … an infantile comfort.

—Jenny Turner, London Review of Books, 2001

---

References

• “most-loved”
• “sainthood”
• “balderdash”
• “backward-looking