I need not have worried, of course. From the moment the lights dimmed in the Odeon, Leicester Square on 10 December 2001, the Lord of the Rings films were a phenomenal success. And although poor Tom B. never made it onto the screen, Jackson’s trilogy carried all before it, grossing a staggering $3 billion and winning a record-equalling 11 Oscars for the final instalment alone.

Two decades on, the films stand up remarkably well. As for the wider Tolkien industry, the bestselling books just keep on coming: The Fall of Arthur in 2013, Beren and Luthien in 2017, The Fall of Gondolin in 2018. And next autumn sees the release of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel series – at a cool $1 billion over five seasons, the most expensive television project in history. Not bad for a writer who’s been dead since 1973.

To some people, all this could hardly be more infuriating. For as we all know, Tolkien is still associated in the public mind with a sweaty, furtive gang of misfits and weirdos — by which I mean those critics who, for more than half a century, have been sneering at his books and their readers.

As far back as the mid-Fifties, the American modernist Edmund Wilson published a comically wrong-headed review dismissing Tolkien’s work as “juvenile trash”, marked by — of all things! — an “impotence of imagination”. Decades later, Philip Pullman, never happier than when sneering at his Oxford forebears, called Tolkien’s efforts “trivial”, and “not worth arguing with”. And whenever some new survey crowns The Lord of the Rings as the public’s favourite novel, the reaction is always the same.

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“Another black day for British culture” was Howard Jacobson’s verdict after a Waterstones poll put Tolkien’s work well clear at the top. “Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964,” agreed Germaine Greer, “it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century. The bad dream has been realised.” Yet by her own admission, she had never even read him.

So are Tolkien’s works “trivial”, as Pullman claims? Surely not. Even if you can’t stand them, only a fool would deny that The Lord of the Rings occupies an extraordinary place in the modern imagination. Indeed, in his trenchant defence of Tolkien’s reputation, the literary scholar Tom Shippey suggests that much of the criticism is rooted in pure social and intellectual condescension, not unlike the rank snobbery that Virginia Woolf directed at Tolkien’s fellow Midlander Arnold Bennett. Shippey even argues that in the future, literary historians will rank The Lord of the Rings alongside post-war classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Lord of the Flies and Slaughterhouse-Five. Who’s to say he’s wrong?

One reason highbrow people dislike The Lord of the Rings is that it is so backward-looking. But it could never have been otherwise. For good personal reasons, Tolkien was a fundamentally backward-looking person. He was born to English parents in the Orange Free State in 1892, but was taken back to the village of Sarehole, north Worcestershire, by his mother when he was three. His father was meant to join them later, but was killed by rheumatic fever before he boarded ship.

For a time, the fatherless Tolkien enjoyed a happy childhood, devouring children’s classics and exploring the local countryside. But in 1904 his mother died of diabetes, leaving the 12-year-old an orphan. Now he and his brother went to live with an aunt in Edgbaston, near what is now Birmingham’s Five Ways roundabout. In effect, he had moved from the city’s rural fringes to its industrial heart: when he looked out of the window, he saw not trees and hills, but “almost unbroken rooftops with the factory chimneys beyond”. No wonder that from the moment he put pen to paper, his fiction was dominated by a heartfelt nostalgia.

Nostalgia was in the air anyway in the 1890s and 1900s, part of a wider reaction against industrial, urban, capitalist modernity. As a boy, Tolkien was addicted to the imperial adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard, and it’s easy to see The Lord of the Rings as a belated Boy’s Own adventure. An even bigger influence, though, was that Victorian one-man industry, William Morris, inspiration for generations of wallpaper salesmen. Tolkien first read him at King Edward’s, the Birmingham boys’ school that had previously educated Morris’s friend Edward Burne-Jones. And what Tolkien and his friends adored in Morris was the same thing you see in Burne-Jones’s paintings: a fantasy of a lost medieval paradise, a world of chivalry and romance that threw the harsh realities of industrial Britain into stark relief.

It was through Morris that Tolkien first encountered the Icelandic sagas, which the Victorian textile-fancier had adapted into an epic poem in 1876. And while other boys grew out of their obsession with the legends of the North, Tolkien’s fascination only deepened. After going up to Oxford in 1911, he began writing his own version of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. When his college, Exeter, awarded him a prize, he spent the money on a pile of Morris books, such as the proto-fantasy novel The House of the Wolfings and his translation of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga. And for the rest of his life, Tolkien wrote in a style heavily influenced by Morris, deliberately imitating the vocabulary and rhythms of the medieval epic.

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But there’s more to Tolkien than nostalgic medievalism. The Lord of the Rings is a war book, stamped with an experience of suffering that his modern-day critics can scarcely imagine. In his splendid book Tolkien and the Great War, John Garth opens with a rugby match between the Old Edwardians and the school’s first fifteen, played in December 1913. Tolkien captained the old boys’ team that day. Within five years, four of his teammates had been killed and four more badly wounded. The sense of loss haunted him for the rest of his life. “To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years,” he wrote in the second edition of The Lord of the Rings. “By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.”

Tolkien arrived on the Western Front in June 1916 as a signals officer in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, and experienced the agony of the Somme at first hand. In just three and a half months, his battalion lost 600 men. Yet it was now, amid the horror of the trenches, that he began work on his great cycle of Middle-earth stories. As he later told his son Christopher, his first stories were written “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candlelight in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire”.

But he never saw his work as pure escapism. Quite the opposite. He had begun writing, he explained, “to express [my] feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalise it, and prevent it just festering”. More than ever, he believed that myth and fantasy offered the only salvation from the corruption of industrial society. And far from shaking his faith, the slaughter on the Somme only strengthened his belief that to make sense of this broken, bleeding world, he must look back to the great legends of the North.

Yet The Lord of the Rings is not just a war book. There’s yet another layer, because it’s also very clearly an anti-modern, anti-industrial book, shaped by Tolkien’s memories of Edwardian Birmingham, with its forges, factories and chimneys. As a disciple of the Victorian medievalists, he was always bound to loathe modern industry, since opposition to the machine age came as part of the package. But his antipathy to all things mechanical was all the more intense because he identified them — understandably enough — with killing.

And although Tolkien objected when reviewers drew parallels between the events of The Lord of the Rings and the course of the Second World War, he often did the same himself. Again and again he told his son Christopher that by embracing industrialised warfare, the Allies had chosen the path of evil. “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring,” he wrote in May 1944. “But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.” Even as the end of the war approached, Tolkien’s mood remained bleak. This, he wrote sadly, had been, “the first War of the Machines … leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines”.

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“Trivial”, then? Clearly not. Tolkien was at once a war writer and an ecological writer; a product of High Victorianism and also a distant relative of the modernist writers who, like him, were trying to make sense of the shattered world of the Twenties and Thirties. But he wasn’t just a man of his time; he remains a guide for our own.

His portrait of the tortured relationship between Gollum and Frodo — both of whom yield to the temptations of power and knowledge embodied by the Ring — could scarcely be a more powerful vision of man’s inherent weakness and sinfulness. And his themes might have deliberately chosen to appeal to modern readers, anxious about the consequences of science, the environmental costs of industry, the dangers of war and the fate of the individual in the face of the vast forces reshaping Western societies in the early 21st century. To put it simply, then, Tolkien matters. How many writers can you say that about, these days?

As Arthur C. Clarke put it:“I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.” It’s a justified parallel. Dune is as central to science-fiction as JRR Tolkien’s masterpiece is to fantasy.

With Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) on general release we finally have a decent film adaptation. Villeneuve has done for Herbert what Peter Jackson did for Tolkien in the Rings trilogy (2001-2003). But dig a bit deeper into the comparisons, and I fear that team Tolkien comes off worse.

Let’s start with the central character in each story: Frodo Baggins in Tolkien’s epic and Paul Atreides in Herbert’s. Both embody the archetype of the reluctant hero. On screen, they’re portrayed by similar actors — Elijah Wood as Frodo and Timothée Chalamet as Paul. These are very much of a type: one part leading man, two parts haunted Victorian doll. Chalamet, though, oozes charisma, while Wood merely gains our sympathy. Score one to Dune. 

Then there’s the rest of the cast — which in the case of Dune meets the multi-ethnic criteria of contemporary film making. The Rings trilogy, almost 20 years older, does not. This is hardly Jackson’s fault — nor Tolkien’s for that matter. There’s an obvious difference in context between a fantasy world inspired by Nordic legend and the galactic melting pot of the far future. 

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As for gender balance, it must be admitted that Tolkien’s tale is a bit of a Boy’s Own adventure. Nevertheless, Jackson did his best to push female characters to the forefront. It hasn’t been so difficult for Villeneuve. For a start, the source material provides more to work with — for instance the “Bene Gesserit”, an order of terrifying space-nuns. Also Villeneuve was able to change the sex of one of the originally male characters, the scientist Liet Kynes, without it making much difference to the plot. I’m not sure Jackson could have done the same to, say, Gandalf. 

Still, such excuses won’t cut much ice with today’s progressives. We can expect their tutting disapproval to be layered on top of previous attacks on Tolkien and everything he supposedly represents. 

Dune is a progressive view of the future — it features a revolution against the established order. Tolkien’s fiction, on the other hand, is portrayed as nostalgic and reactionary — a yearning for a golden age that never existed. After all, what are the Hobbits except idealised Little Englanders who’d have definitely voted for Brexit?

The irony is that Lord of the Rings was once at the cutting edge. Though first published in the mid-1950s, it didn’t become a publishing sensation until a decade later — around the same time as Dune in fact. Both novels achieved cult status with the counterculture of the late 1960s. This was a more comfortable fit for Herbert, the free-thinking Californian, than for Tolkien, the tweedy, Catholic Englishman. Yet the latter did once observe that his political opinions “lean more and more towards Anarchy”.

The narcotic obsessions of the Sixties are lavishly catered for in Dune — whose entire plot (spoilers ahead!) revolves around a perception-altering substance called “Spice”. There is rather less druggery in Tolkien’s fiction, but some have interpreted the “pipeweed” of the Hobbits as consisting of more than tobacco. Certainly, one can see why the hippies were so entranced by the bucolic, laid-back lifestyle of the Shire. 

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A strong current of environmentalism runs through both books. However, while Herbert was a self-taught ecologist, Tolkien’s obvious distaste for industrialisation strikes his critics as sentimental and unsophisticated. Herbert’s ideas appear to be more astute because they’re informed by scientific and technological speculation. Though the events of his novel take place 20,000 years into the future, they clearly relate to the concerns of our own time. 

Let’s start with the desert world of Dune itself, also known as Arrakis. The planet is the only source of the aforementioned Spice — a drug that enables humanity to navigate between the stars. Without it, space travel would be impossible. Wars are therefore fought to control access to this indispensable resource. 

One only has to substitute crude oil for Spice to see what Herbert was getting at. For a book written in the early 1960s — years before oil shocks of the 1970s — he was well ahead of the curve. To drive the point home, his description of Dune and the culture of its native inhabitants is saturated with words and concepts adapted from Arabic and from Islam. 

Herbert tackles some other contemporary concerns — for instance the risks posed by artificial intelligence. In the future he imagines, AI has been forbidden: the most solemn of religious commands is “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.

A technology that hasn’t been banned is the “Axlotl Tank” — an organic machine used by a branch of humanity called the “Bene Tleilax” to give birth to clones. The horrible suggestion is that because the Bene Tleilax are exclusively male, the Axlotl Tanks are all that remain of their females. This is the bio-politics of surrogacy taken to its ultimate, ghastly conclusion. 

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You won’t find biting social commentary like that in the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s story was more expansive; it was about something that will never change, which is the corrupting effect of power. Yet this is where Tolkien is superior to Herbert. His heroes — and heroines — pass the test because they refuse to accept the world-changing power that the Ring would confer upon them.

My favourite passage in all of Tolkien is where Frodo freely offers the Ring to Galadriel. For a heart-stopping moment, the elven queen is tempted. It would, after all, be better for her to wear the Ring than the evil Sauron. Yet she understands that she too would be made monstrous by it: “All shall love me and despair!” And so she refuses Frodo’s gift. 

Frank Herbert’s hero, however, does not refuse. There is no actual Ring in Dune, but there is ultimate power. Paul Atreides takes it. Later he has second thoughts, but not before his galactic Jihad has killed sixty billion people and sterilised ninety planets. Bit late to turn pacifist after that. 

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Herbert did say that the “power attracts pathological personalities” and that his stories were meant as a warning that “superheroes are disastrous for mankind”.

And yet in the sequels to Dune, Paul’s son, Leto, takes up where his dad left off. In fact, he turns himself into a giant worm (don’t ask) and imposes an absolute dictatorship on the known universe for next three thousand years. Crucially, Herbert provides him with an excuse — the “Golden Path” — meaning a super-human vision of the best possible future for all mankind. Any unpleasantness along the way is justified by the greater good. 

I think we’ve heard that one before. 

In 1965 Tolkien was sent a copy of Dune. The next year, he was sent another one. Writing back he confessed that he was familiar with the book — and disliked it “with some intensity”. As usual, the old man was right.