An author dies a little when he publishes. He has no further control over his work or how it is read, and it takes on a life independent of him. Readers and critics will construct what meaning in it they will, within what the text allows them: the author may even become hermeneut of his own work, not always consistently, as Tolkien's letters plentifully reveal. Moreover, what readers can make of the text will vary even within a few short years, as cultural epistemes change and mutate. Tolkien, on publication of LR, released something the nature of which no-one could have anticipated.

The Hobbit was in its seventh impression when LR appeared in 1954–5, but LR far outstripped its success. Reviews were mixed. From the outset it divided readers into those who passionately admired it and those who loathed it, and few were neutral. Auden, for example, admired it greatly; Edwin Muir, reviewing all three volumes in The Observer, accused it of irretrievable immaturity, heading his review, ‘A Boy's World’.

But many loved LR. There were fourteen impressions of the first volume, eleven of the second, and ten of the third in the first twelve years, and it was not a cheap book. A New York publisher pirated it in 1965; which, ironically, only served to generate extra publicity and extra sales for the official US edition. By 1968, Allen and Unwin had produced it in various formats, including a one-volume edition on India paper in black limp covers in a slip-case: a format reminiscent of the Bible and major ‘classics’ of the canon. More than forty years later, none of Tolkien's fiction has yet been out of print. The demand for ‘more of the same’ meant that when The Silmarillion appeared in 1977, long after it was known to exist, an eager demand awaited it. Perhaps not since Dickens had a serious author achieved such widespread popular fame; and Dickens sought it, while Tolkien certainly did not. People stood on railway platforms awaiting the number of The Old Curiosity Shop that told of the death of Little Nell; people badgered bookshops and Allen and Unwin to find out when the ‘new Tolkien’ was due.