There's little debate that J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy is one of the most read works of the 20th century.

In a 1999 amazon.com poll, readers voted the book as the best of the millennium over works by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Charles Dickens. A similar readers poll conducted by Britain's Channel 4 in 1997 yielded the same result.

Yet Tolkien's epic fantasy made few, if any, critical lists of the best works of the 20th century. Is this a case of elitist snobbery, or is "The Lord of the Rings" merely an overblown fairy tale?

Michael Drout, a 1990 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and an assistant professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., believes Tolkien's work deserves a lofty spot in literature.

"I'm not so didactic to say he's the author of the century," Drout says. "But I would put him up there in the pantheon with James Joyce and Hemingway and Virginia Woolf."

Drout is an admitted fan of "The Lord of the Rings," and re-reads the trilogy every summer. But Phil Klass of Mt. Lebanon, who writes science fiction under the pseudonym William Tenn and is one of that genre's most esteemed figures, takes a less enthusiastic view of Tolkien's work.

"I enjoyed reading it," he says. "I was held by it, I finished it, and never picked it up again, which is not the way I react to books I enjoy reading as a rule."

Klass, 80, was a contemporary of science fiction legends such as Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Frederick Pohl, Harry Harrison, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg and Theodore Sturgeon. In 1999, he was honored as Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Earlier this year, his complete stories were released in two volumes, "Immodest Proposals" and "Here Comes Civilization." He says Tolkien's works are filled with interesting ideas, but they "don't leave a modern man really much to chew over."

"First, it's a quest novel, and the quest novel is essentially a medieval story, a medieval construct," he says. "Tolkien, of course, was a medievalist, and his books are a paean to medieval thinking. ... It's got color, it's got excitement, but essentially, it's a story that should be told in a castle to the lords and ladies while a minstrel is playing, maybe 500 to 800 years ago."

But Drout (who teaches medieval literature at Wheaton) points out that while Tolkien studied and was influenced by such works, he did more than just regurgitate old themes and stories.

"What Tolkien does is take all this amazing, great stuff - dragons and quests and kings and magic and prophecy - and he rewrote it as a 20th-century novel with all the fiction techniques that hadn't been invented in the Middle Ages," he says. "People don't think storytelling has evolved and changed, but it has. People invented flashbacks, people invented stream of consciousness, people invented what characters are thinking vs. what they are saying. ... And none of that is on the radar screen in the Middle Ages. So Tolkien takes all these great techniques and puts this great material into it, and he made something of that amazing material that was acceptable to 20th-century audiences."

Drout also points out that Tolkien was a linguistic scholar whose 1936 lecture, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," changed the way medieval literature was perceived.

"Anglo-Saxonists agree on few things, but they all agree he changed the shape of criticism forever," Drout says. "He basically says, 'Stop looking at this poem as a historical document. It's a poem, and it's a great poem, and the monsters are not just strange things to have in there, but absolutely essential to the whole thing.' "

From that love of medieval literature came Tolkien's own fantastic creations and stories. Drout calls it "the most beautiful Earth that anyone has ever imagined," a place he and fellow enthusiasts would dearly love to go.

But Klass says that's a trip he'd prefer to miss.

"I don't want to take away from the fact that it's terribly exciting and colorful. It is," he says in reference to the "The Lord of the Rings." "There's a whole strange world there that holds together very well.

"But fantasy is what people wrote when they didn't have the knowledge to build upon knowledge," he adds. "Science fiction is based on the word 'scientia,' which is knowledge, and therefore it's knowledge fiction. Fantasy, and I hate to put it this way, is almost superstition fiction, zombies and werewolves and elves and dwarves."

Author's son airs doubts

LONDON (Reuters) - The son of J.R.R. Tolkien says the forthcoming Hollywood adaptation of his father's classic "The Lord of the Rings" will not do justice to the magical Middle Earth tale.

In a statement, Christopher Tolkien, who is literary protector of his father's works, said he did not disapprove of the film but was dubious about the adaptation.

"My own position is that 'The Lord of the Rings' is peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form," he said.