Critic Michael Straight has hailed it as one of the very few works of genius in recent literature. Middle-earth is a world receptive to poets, scholars, children, and all other people of good will. Donald Barr has described it as a scrubbed morning world, and a ringing nightmare world...
Especially sunlit, and shadowed by perils very fundamental, of a peculiarly uncompounded darkness. The story of ths world is one of high and heroic adventure. Barr compared it to Beowulf, C. Lewis to Orlando Furioso, W. Auden to The Thirty-nine Steps.
In fact the saga is sui generis - a triumph of imagination which springs to life within its own framework and on its own terms.