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Tolkien Vs. The Critics In 1954
meganthom writes "The BBC is running a story about how the critics viewed The Fellowship of the Ring, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication... One critic's view: 'To have created so enthralling an epic-romance, with its own mythology, with such diversity of scene and character, such imaginative largess in invention and description, and such supernatural meaning underlying the wealth of incident is a most remarkable feat.' One of the most insightful of all the comments at the time was provided by the Spectator's Mr. Hughes, who said, 'I think we should be well advised to remember that what we have before us now is the first volume of a larger work... and be willing to suspend judgement... until we have seen the whole... The pleasure to be derived from this first volume is a pleasure not to be missed.'"
just a reminder of a great article about how close these two great writers were:
tolkien and lewis
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
I wonder how they translate to Klingon...
oops, damn, wrong alternate reality!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Appendices, indeed. Check out the "mythology" too! The entire trilogy chronicles only the very ending of the Third Age. _The Silmarillion_ sets the stage with the creation of the world and a rich history of the First Age (mainly the Elves), explaining where a lot of this stuff comes from. (Not much is known about the Second Age, but that's in _The Silmarillion_ too -- mainly the history of Aragorn's people before they came to Middle Earth.)
If you get really interested, there's lots more.
_The Book of Lost Tales_
_Unfinished Tales_
Christopher Tolkien's _History of Middle Earth_ series which unearths early ideas either reshaped or abandoned during the crafting of all this stuff.
Yes: reading The Silmarillion is the best advice you can give to a LOTRs fan. It's adds so much more depth to the story.
The first couple of times I read the LOTR I skipped over the songs, and many of the tales seemed superfluous. After The Silmarillion though, I had in my mind the whole stories and their context as I read the references to them throughout the LOTR. This gives the LOTR many more layers of depth and adds to the character of the story.
Look here for the sources of what follows.
White literacy was high, well above 80%, in 1870. That was after some years of immigration of illiterates from Europe, and the government schooling which was developed in response to the wave of Catholic immegration (yes, public schooling has some racist roots). Black literacy in 1870 was about 20%. That's about 5 years after the Civil War. It is probable that the pre-Civil War black literacy rate was quite close to that. In many of the slave states, it was illegal to teach blacks to read, so that suggests that even in the South, literacy was very widespread, and bright people could ``just catch it'', like a cold, with little aid.
Given that functional literacy might have required a slightly lower level of reading ability than is needed today, those figures are simply astounding. In a time when an illiterate man could make a decent living, more than 80% of the whites (probably more than 90% of the native born whites; remember those illiterate Catholic immigrants) could read. In other words, most people probably had a higher level of literacy than they needed to function. Today, many people would function better if they could read better, with more understanding.
A century before that, in the 1790s, John Adams wrote that illiterate men were scarce. He was speaking of Protestant New England, of course, where everyone was expected to learn to read, so that he could read the King James Bible. Many people who are considered ``literate'' today find the KJV impenetrable, so perhaps the standards of literacy were higher back then, rather than lower?
Between the Revolution and the Civil War, Cooper's ``Last of the Mohicans'' sold about as many copies per capita as the Harry Potter series has. But contrast Cooper's writing style with Rowling's! I suspect that most of the people who are willing to wade through a Harry Potter story would find one of Cooper's books mighty tough going. Also, the price was over a day's wages for most workers. How many Harry Potter books do you think would sell if they cost a day's wages each? Again, I think it shows that real literacy was wide spread in the 18th and 19th centuries, and perhaps at a higher level than today.
See what I've been reading.
Having just read Humphrey Carpenter's Biography of Tolkien, and in the middle of Tom Shippey's The Road To Middle-Earth, some relevant points are fresh in my mind.
When Stanley Unwin asked for a sequel to the unexpectedly popular Hobbit, Tolkien quite didn't know where to start, other than that the request was for "more about hobbits". There he began, but struggled to find the story for a couple years. He originally expected to produce a work of similar length.
Tolkien begins the Forward to FOTR with "This tale grew in the telling", and by telling he meant "writing". The Ring's purpose was not conceived until the writing of "The Shadow of the Past", where Gandalf explains its history to Frodo. Several characters were originally very different from their final forms; the most striking to me is that Strider was originally a Hobbit named Trotter, who kept the name long after becoming a Man (though tolkien noted several times that this name was wrong).
The vast majority of the "corrections" came as Tolkien dug deeper into the extant Silmarillion manuscripts, tying the unfolding story into his created mythology.
In several letters to Stanley Unwin while writing LOTR (a process which took 16 years), Tolkien repeatedly reported that the tale was "getting out of hand", and that he was not sure who its audience would be. Upon completion, Unwin was prepared to take the risk, even after upsetting the Professor to the point where Tolkien almost inked a deal for the book to be published by Harper Collins. Post-war paper availability and the well known discussion of splitting the book up and what the three volumes' titles would be contributed to this.
In the end, Tolkien was glad that anyone appreciated his work, with its many layers and facets. It could be said, however, that he was at times annoyed by his fame (he admittedly did not understand it), especially the all-hours phone calls and unexpected fans at his door.
The entire body of work set in Middle-Earth had two ultimate purposes: To create a place where Tolkien's created languages could live, and to attempt to replace England's lost mythology.
Philology was not just his work, it was his life. He loved words and studying how they eveolved, how they migrated and changed from people to people and century to century. From childhood, he either created or helped to create upwards of 20 languages, and spoke or read no less than nine "real" languages of varying ages.
Having studied almost every language of northern Europe, he could see how England's history had soiled its language, as far back as the Romans, then Saxons, Danes, Normans, and French (the last two also forcing Latin back into the mix). Tolkien held that the Normans did the most damage, and drew most heavily from pre-Hastings texts.
Tolkien knew that these reasons, one personal and one patriotic, did not give LOTR very much mass market appeal, having sprung from the mind of an old fashioned English gentleman, a scholar, who had very firm views of the modern world and staunch Catholic beliefs.