J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times, in 1961, 1967 and 1969. According to the declassified records of the Swedish Academy, which this newspaper has consulted, the 1961 jury alludes to his “very particular mixture of joke and seriousness” in an “imposing and curious game of fantastic literature” whose “result is not up to the level of a narrative work that is considered to be of high quality”, according to the academician Anders Österling, for which reason “we do not find that , for the time being, the candidacy is in accordance with the requirements of the award”. Tolkien had been proposed by his friend and writer C.S.Lewis, author of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’. The winner that year was the Yugoslav Ivo Andric.
In 1967 and 1969, Tolkien was again a candidate, proposed successively by the Swedish professor Gosta Holm and the British professor Richard Ernest Wycherley, but the jury dismissed him without much debate, simply referring to the “previous observations” of 1961, so the author of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ never became part of the ‘shortlist’, the set of five names among which the juries finally choose the winner. In 1967, the winner was the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias; and, in 1969, the Irishman Samuel Beckett.
As professor of literature at Oxford University, Tolkien was also empowered to nominate candidates for the prize. In 1954, he made use of this prerogative to propose the name of E.M. Forster, the author of ‘A Room with a View’ and ‘A Passage to India’. He was not successful either, since the winner that year was the American Ernest Hemingway.
