Why is the Lord of the Rings so popular

I have to admit, I have never been entirely sure why people are so enamored of The Lord of the Rings. I know why I am, but it's not at all for its nature as an action-adventure story.

If you watch the LotR movies, that is what you'd think they were about. The battle and action sequences get a lot more screen time than they do in the books. That's partly the nature of the medium, but I think that's what a lot of people see in the books as well, and I just don't.

Here is the way I'd put it: the amazing thing about The Lord of the Rings is what Tolkien called "secondary creation". It is the idea that the writer is not just making up a story and asking you to suspend your belief in the real world so that you can tolerate the fact that it's not real. Rather, Tolkien wants to create a world so rich and deep that you don't have to suspend disbelief. You instead come to a secondary belief in his secondary creation.

Tolkien's world is self-complete in a way no author before or since has ever been. LotR is only the tip, a little piece of that world that pokes up to where you can see it. Even if you never read another word of Tolkien outside of the pieces published in his lifetime (LotR and The Hobbit), you can feel that the rest of the other world is out there. There are passing, unexplained references to Turin and the Silmarils and literally thousands of other names dropped in such a way as to make you realize that there's a fully-worked out story behind it.

And during Tolkien's lifetime, you never did. Some of it is published in The Silmarillion, which he never completed. Few people will ever read it; it is even denser and harder to read than LotR. Reading LotR isn't about actually knowing all of those back stories. It is about knowing that they exist, and that there are even more stories behind them, some of which were little more than notes jotted onto scraps of paper. Tolkien created and revised his world obsessively, and that's what makes it so riveting.

Flipping through LotR the other day I noticed that just the index of the list of songs and poems goes on for several pages. These are poems and songs in dozens of styles and even languages: Hobbit doggerel, poems in both Quenya and Sindarin, fragments of epic verse, different styles of Mannish poetry in Rohan and Gondor... on and on and on. It feels like what it's supposed to be: hundreds of authors contributing separately over thousands of years. But it isn't: it's the secondary creation of one man who created thousands of characters to populate his world.

And then there's the languages. This is the crown jewel. Tolkien created two separate but related Elvish languages, and it can be said that he wrote the whole world in order to give these languages a place to be. Languages need stories; they need myths. The stories are part of the language as much as the words are.

Language is history: nobody knew that better than Tolkien. He was an expert in the history of English, and spoke several English ancestors fluently. The only Gothic poetry in the entire world was written by Tolkien. The language of the Rohirrim is based on Old English, and even if you don't know that, you can feel it. (Actually the culture is more Gothic than Old English, though few outside philological circles would know that.)

Tolkien's secondary creation is so deep that you crave to know more. You can look in the Appendices, and if you like them, undergo the Mount Everest that is The Silmarillion. But even if you don't, even if they were never published, they are the reason that The Lord of the Rings is so utterly brilliant. There is more beyond that, for the reckless and foolhardy. You can spend a lifetime reading his back stories. It is as though he managed to genuinely fill a world, all by himself.