In 1926, a young W. H. Auden attended a lecture at Oxford, where he heard J. R. R. Tolkien recite a passage from “ Beowulf” so beautifully that he decided, right then and there, that Anglo-Saxon was a worthwhile academic pursuit. Auden became a close friend of Tolkien’s and an ardent champion of his work, defending him in public and in print against a host of early skeptics; he was one of the first serious writers (along with C. S. Lewis) to ask whether Tolkien’s narratives of heroic quests and imaginary worlds could be considered something more than simply escapist reading. This weekend, as many head to movie theatres to see Peter Jackson’s adaptation of “The Hobbit,” it’s easy to forget that there was a time when Tolkien’s work was largely confined to the ranks of children’s literature and cult fiction, and that it was Auden and others like him who helped legitimize Tolkien for today’s mainstream reader.

In the late nineteen-sixties, Tolkien’s books were just beginning to enjoy a renaissance on American campuses. “The Hobbit” had been published in 1937, followed by “The Fellowship of the Ring,” in 1954; then, in 1965, an unauthorized paperback version of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was released by Ace Books, renewing interest in the series. At universities across the country, Hobbits quickly become more popular than Salinger, Heller, or Vonnegut. (Drugs probably helped: in a 1967 Times interview, a U.C. Berkeley official said that the Tolkien phenomenon was “more than a campus craze; it’s like a drug dream.”)

Some early critics admired Tolkien’s intricate knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and his inspired updating of old Germanic themes. But most people still viewed his work as rambling, juvenile fantasy. The critic Edmund Wilson famously panned “The Lord of the Rings” as a “children’s book which has somehow gotten out of hand.” In The New Yorker’s 1954 Briefly Noted review of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the writer concluded that the novel had “the air of having been written as a hobby by a man with a ferreting imagination and a capacity for industry that will not allow him to stop inventing long after all the facts are down and the picture is clear.” The books, the reviews suggested, were driven by an essentially childish desire for a never-ending story.

Auden repeatedly challenged the idea that Tolkien’s work was only suitable for children. Tolkien’s world may not be the same as our own, Auden wrote in a 1956 review of the author’s work for the New York Times, but it’s a world “of intelligible law, not mere wish,” that represents our own reality. Moreover, Auden wrote, Tolkien’s moral sensibility was profoundly grownup, especially when it came to theological questions. “The Lord of the Rings,” he wrote, aimed to reconcile “two incompatible notions” we have about God. On the one hand, we envision “a God of Love who creates free beings who can reject his love”; on the other, we picture “a God of absolute Power whom none can withstand.” It’s a story about how, as we gain power, we lose freedom. “Mr. Tolkien is not as great a writer as Milton,” Auden conceded, “but in this matter he has succeeded where Milton failed.”

A decade after Auden wrote that review, a young Brooklyn high-school student named Richard Plotz founded a new group, the Tolkien Society of America. The seventeen-year-old Plotz was a junior at Erasmus Hall, and the group had their first meeting in February, near the statue of the alma mater on the Columbia University campus. Within a year, the organization’s membership had expanded to include people who weren’t in high school: doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and Army officers. The group held regular meetings throughout the five boroughs, on all matter of Tolkienalia.

In 1966, Plotz invited Auden, who was spending his winters in New York, to come speak at one of the Tolkien Society’s gatherings, and the New Yorker writer Gerald Jones covered the meeting for the magazine. The fifty-person meeting was held at Plotz’s family home, in Brooklyn, and it included a true cross section of Tolkien fandom; high-school kids, college professors, Plotz’s two younger brothers, and the author of “September 1, 1939.” Auden and the other guests were served non-alcoholic eggnog and cider, and a snack of fresh mushrooms, a favorite Hobbit dish. The discussion spanned a variety of Tolkien-related topics: the correct method of writing in Elvish, the best way to assemble an accurate cosmological model of Middle-Earth. A contentious debate broke out between a high-school student, who argued that Middle-Earth was “essentially spherical,” and a professor at Queens College, who countered that Middle-Earth was “undoubtedly saucer-shaped.”

Then it was Auden’s turn. He began by talking about his personal relationship with Tolkien and the major influence his former professor had had on his life. Tolkien, he said, had originally fallen in love with the Finnish language, which has affinities with Elvish, because it has “fifteen or sixteen cases.” (“Fifteen!” one of the young attendees exclaimed.) Auden went on to tell the group how Tolkien had often admitted that he really had no idea where “The Lord of the Rings” was going when he first started the trilogy. In fact, Auden said, he wasn’t even sure how the pivotal character of Strider would develop as the narrative grew. Auden also let his rapt audience in on Tolkien’s fascination with “the whole Northern thing.” For Tolkien, Auden said, north is “a sacred direction.” (That’s north as in Scandinavia, not Riverdale.) After his talk, Auden stayed and chatted with his fellow-fans. He looked, Jonas wrote, remarkably like “a Tolkienish wizard surrounded by a crowd of young and eager Hobbits.”

After Auden had left, one of Plotz’s high-school classmates spoke to Jonas about why he became a Tolkien fan. “I started reading it,” he said, “when a group of people at school started writing phrases like ‘Frodo lives’ all over the walls.” Another classmate agreed, saying that after being introduced to Tolkien, she started writing her notes in Elvish. “Even now,” she said, “I doodle in Elvish. It’s my means of expression.” (If it had been left to him, Tolkien once said, he would have written all his books in Elvish.) As the meeting broke up, Jonas observed what was surely an uncommonly successful attempt at Tolkien-themed romance: a girl and a boy sitting closely next to each other, the girl’s right hand holding a pen, while the boy’s hand clasped hers over it, as they traced, as one, the elegant lines of Elvish calligraphy.

In his reviews, Auden argued that Tolkien’s work wasn’t just rambling juvenilia; it was part of a literary tradition of reinterpreting ancient archetypes to create a modern mythology. Yet the rambling nature of Tolkien’s universe is part of what drew those nerdy Brooklyn students to his work. We love to think about the dorky minutiae: how Hobbits invented the art of smoking pipe-weed, why trolls speak with Cockney accents, whether Middle-Earth is spherical. These elements aren’t distractions; they’re the magical details that elevate Tolkien’s books. People may come to Tolkien for the Milton-esque struggle between good and evil, but they stay for the fresh mushrooms and the Elvish.

Photograph by Imagno/Getty.