The Times Literary Supplement has put on line a digitized archive of its content since 1902, with some basic search tools. So naturally I jumped in. Numerical analysis of such a database won’t tell us much about literature, but it has things to say about the reception of literature.
Vertical lines indicate publication of The Hobbit, LotR, and The Silmarillion
This is the number of times articles mentioning “Tolkien” appear in the TLS by year. The blue line is the Loess1-smoothed trend. With this kind of smoothing important things are slopes as much as levels.
Professor Tolkien appears occasionally in his capacity as a scholar of ancient languages before the publication of The Hobbit. The publicity campaign for the book gives him a brief spike upwards (advertisements are digitized the same as editorial content), but the mentions drop back quickly. Children’s book, you know. After The Lord of the Rings appeared and sold a hundred million copies, the attitude at the TLS changed. In this period, Tolkien became a cultural touchstone. Most of the mentions come from people comparing other things to LotR, which got more common over time.
Then came a big change. 1977 was the year The Silmarillion was published, but that’s not what drives the bolus of Tolkien mentions. (The TLS reviewer didn’t like it.) The big push comes from the publicity for, reviews of, and references to Humphrey Carpenter’s biography. That’s the thing about counting words in a database: If you put Tolkien’s name in the title of your book, you get one count for the Table of Contents, one for the review itself, and one from the contributor index at the end of the year. I didn’t remove those as redundant because by this point I’d realized I was looking at popular reception, not scholarly. Popularity drives mentions in the TLS, and when publishers put a word in the title of a book, it’s because of popularity. Same impulse.
After the surge of publicity in the late 1970s, Tolkien stays in the pages. Now it’s not because of publication announcements. The History of Middle-earth hardly gets mentioned. The level of references is steady for a few decades. Almost always, it’s because reviewers are saying whether a new book is like LotR or not. Some years there are few mentions, some years over a dozen, but it’s a steady state.
Then at the turn of the millenium come two big changes in the world. First, Peter Jackson made movies that brought in six billion dollars. Second, Tolkien scholarship started getting noticed. The second-highest year for Tolkien mentions was 2004. This year included Tom Shippey’s review of the movie version of The Return of the King (he liked it), but also John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War. According with the aforementioned principle, Garth gets a triple word score. Then there was a review of books by Jane Chance and Verlyn Flieger. That’s what “getting noticed” means. The number of mentions didn’t drop off from the peak as it has in the past.
For the last decade and a half, with no particular events to drive engagement, the level of mentions is 8-16 per year and slightly rising. For comparison, that’s 1/10 of Shakespeare’s level. In 2019, the chances were one in four that any given issue would mention Tolkien. He even shows up in clues for the crossword puzzle now.
Coda
The first mention of the Professor in the TLS is from October 5, 1922. Reviewing Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose by Kenneth Sisam, says, “The glossary has been prepared by Mr Tolkien. So far as we have tested it it is above the average.” High praise!
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