> As for checking, I’ve spoken to many people who greatly enjoyed both the
> book and the film. However, I’ve never heard anyone claim there was any
> great meaning behind it.
I don’t think you’ve talked to a particularly representative sample if you’ve never heard anyone claim that there’s great meaning behind it. I’ve spent much of my adult life reading books about Tolkien, reading fanzines and literary journals about him, going to conferences about him (with both academics and well-read, intelligent amateur fans of him, and, more recently, discussing Tolkien almost daily in an E-mail mailing list. My sample isn’t exactly representative either, but I’ve met a lot of people who do claim that there is a great deal of meaning behind the books.
Here are some more places that teach Tolkien:
Middle Tennessee State University
Bucknell University
University of Georgia
Illinois Central College
Florida Southern College
Rutgers University
Ava Maria College (Ypsilante, MI)
State University of New York at Oswego
Pasadena City College (Pasadena, CA)
Southern California College (Costa Mesa, CA)
Florida Atlantic University
Rollins College (Winter Park, FL)
Bradley University (Peoria, IL)
Loyola University (New Orleans, LA)
Bates College (Lewiston, ME)
Slightly OT, but one of my more interesting academic experiences was a series of Old English courses I took as a grad student. (The first was ostensibly OE prose, the second poetry. The third would’ve been a close reading of Beowulf but I was unable to take it.) The courses were taught by an extremely erudite New Zealander who, in addition to being able to speak Old English fluently, knew Tolkien inside-out. He was able to point out many sources for Tolkien’s words and ideas in our reading, and quite a few I noticed anyway: mathom, an old hobbit word meaning “gift” or “treasure,” has its origin in the OE * maþþom*, meaning, well, the exact same thing. I’d recommend a primer in Old English to anyone who really wants to “get” Tolkien.
The major academic organization in the U.S. devoted to the genre is the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA). Despite the name, their focus is also on fantasy, utopians, magic realism, and all kinds of non-mimetic fiction and media. In the past they’ve published lists of courses on the genre from over 400 colleges. Many of these are on Tolkien or cover his works. There will also be a huge number of papers on Tolkien published in its journal The SFRA Review.
Another major group is the The International
Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA), which holds a major conference each year on similar topics. If you click on the conference link on that page, you’ll see a number of papers and papers planned on Tolkien.
Academics, like everyone else these days, go where the money is. If students are interested enough to fill a course, then one will be held. So there is of course enormous academic interest in Tolkien. There is also enormous academic interest in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and no I am not in the least kidding. See the conference schedule.
In the greater scheme of things Tolkien is minor literature at best, and a wonderful example of how not to write a book unless you are a major-league obsessive on one aspect of a subject. But I read worse books at college and, as with Harry Potter, I hope that reading him will lead students on to reading real literature.
My wife, who is a professor of music history at UCLA, will be offering a course in a few weeks on Medievalism that will include a fair amount LOTR.
The course isn’t about the actual middle ages, but rather about the way in which imaginary versions of the middle ages have been used and reinterpreted by later centuries. So she’ll be talking about Wagner and German nationalism, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Howard Shore’s score for the Peter Jackson films, Walt Disney’s fairy tale movies, the early music revival of the 70’s, the New Age music movement of the 80’s, even the soundtrack for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
LOTR is certainly literature. Yes, it doesn’t demonstrate the deep psychological analysis of character that is the hallmark of the Modern novel, but then Tolkien, as a medievalist attempting to reimagine a lost mythic past, wasn’t really interested in that aspect of story-telling. One of my greatest quibbles with Jackson’s LOTR is that by introducing psychological motivations for the characters he actually has undermined Tolkien’s critique of Modern sensibilities.