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.'"

Comments

LOTR winning "Book of the Century"...

[tcopeland]

...in 1997 had more lively responses:

In January 1997, reporter Susan Jeffreys of the (London) Sunday Times informed a colleague that J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy "The Lord of the Rings" had been voted the greatest book of the 20th century in a readers' poll conducted by Britain's Channel 4 and the Waterstone's bookstore chain. Her colleague responded: "Oh hell! Has it? Oh my God. Dear oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear."

More on that here.

Re:LOTR winning "Book of the Century"...

[1arkhaine]

James Joyce's Ulysses springs almost instantly to mind. When it was released, it was banned in many countries, declared an abomination by many respected authors (Including, famously, Virginia Woolf), and considered a mass of loose fragments.

Now, of course, it is considered a masterpiece, and has a huge reputation - almost too huge, as any Irish author would attest.

Re:LOTR winning "Book of the Century"...

[ackthpt]

In January 1997, reporter Susan Jeffreys of the (London) Sunday Times informed a colleague that J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy "The Lord of the Rings" had been voted the greatest book of the 20th century in a readers' poll...

There have been some truly great works of literature and fiction over the 20th century. I've found myself going back to some and reading them over several times, including Watership Down, which was my first true introduction to fantasy with depth. From my perspective, the Harry Potter series doesn't come close, but is an entertaining yarn, which stunned me when I saw 12 year olds reading 800+ page books. It's promising that people continue to read in an age of diverse video entertainment.

Re:LOTR winning "Book of the Century"...

[pamri]

The New York Times has reviews of the books published way back when they were released. Of the three, the first and the second are by W.H.Auden, who was one of the staunchest fan of Tolkien and it's quite interesting to read what he thinks about fantasy.

Blurred Lines

[Apreche]

quoth the article

These days, of course, the dividing line between children and adult audiences has blurred.

A major factor to this phenomena is literature that so generically entertaining that anyone can read it. LOTR is the chief example.

But the other factor is obviously the lower level of intelligence of adults in our society. As people get dumber the more difficult books sell fewer copies. If LOTR was released today, for the first time, with no movies, fame or promotion how well would it do? How much of that has to do with the average adult reading level?

Re:Blurred Lines

[jandrese]

Yeah! We need to bring back all of those books that are no fun to read and serve mostly to browbeat you into the authors way of thinking! If we keep up this trend, what are schoolteachers going to assign their students to crush their joy of reading?

IMHO, authors should not hide their ideas behind obtuse syntax and plodding plotlines. Unless a book is technical in nature (like a textbook or perhaps a Philosophical tome), the author should not mask his ideas behind excessive jargon or overly convoluted construction.

I know this will be a major problem to people who like to read difficult works to impress their friends. "Wow, you finished Gravitys Rainbow? I never got past chapter 2!" I also don't think you need to make your book excessivly hard to read to discuss weighty issues, especially since most of these issues are not particularly difficult to describe once you boil off the excess jargon and technical terms in my experience. The solution may be difficult to arrive at (in fact many dilemmas have no "good" solution), but the problem should not be difficult to understand, especially at a basic level.

Re:Blurred Lines

[Sgt York]

You can't assume that the average adult has a lower level of intelligence. That "obvious" fact of yours is merely an opinion unless you have stats to back up such a statement. Is the average adult ignorant of many things?

This brings up an interesting point. There is certainly a perception among many people that people are less intelligent today than in the past. Perhaps what we really see is an increase in ignorance, not a drop in intelligence. And they are not the same thing. In fact, the increase in ignorance may merely be an artifact.

Today, there is much more known to humanity as a whole than there was 5 decades ago. This means that individuals have a lot more to be ignorant about. It's kind of a side effect of the information age. We can only learn so much, so fast, and we tend to focus on what is useful to us. For instance, I know a lot about molecular biology, because it is what I do for a living. As a result, the majority of people on /. are ignorant of molecular biology compared to me. However, I am ignorant of programming when compared to the majority of people on /. (Keep in mind that this says precisely squat about anyone's intelligence). Fifty years ago, you would be hard pressed to find people that knew what those two fields were. Today the average guy on the street can at least tell you something about them, at some level. Anyone that's been to college can probably carry on a conversation about the topics for a while (except, perhaps, for english majors*)

I have always considered intelligence to be a measure of how fast you can learn. If that holds true, and people today are as intelligent as the people of 50 years ago, there are going to be areas in which they were well-versed in which we are not (comparing people of the same age). We have had to sacrifice certain areas to learn new ones.

*Feel free to slam my grammar/punctuation/spelling now ;)

I know this is going to get flamed, bue...

[djkitsch]

Is there anyone who can restrain themselves from verbally masturbating over LOTR for 5 minutes?

I am aware that it's very popular, won Oscars etc, but I myself found the book to be very very long winded and the films to be somewhat self-indulgent on the part of, well, everyone in them.

Don't get me wrong, I found them entertaining and they held my attention far better than the novels - but I feel I'm the only one who doesn't think they're the greatest cinematic feat EVER?

Please don't flame me! It's just an opinion, and I respect everyone else's....but am I really alone in this POV?

Re:I know this is going to get flamed, bue...

[astrashe]

I think that the books can be hard for some people to connect with because they're essentially Medieval. Tolkein was a Medievalist, and he wanted to write Medieval books. That's what he did.

I had a lot of trouble with the books at first because the characters seemed so flat. If you compare them to characters if good modern novels -- people in Tolstoy or Proust, or whatever -- Tolkein's characters are pretty cartoony.

Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare "invented the Human" -- that his plays were the first time characters with rich inner lives, complicated motivations, conflicts, and everything else that we think of as "Human" showed up in literature.

But Shakespeare comes after the Medieval period -- if you're writing Medieval books, those are innovations you don't use.

In between the time I first read LOTR and its recent revival, I ended up grappling with Milton, and as part of that effort I read a book by CS Lewis called "The Discarded Image". The discarded image is the old Medieval world view that's been put aside in favor of our more modern views. Lewis felt that if you wanted to understand literature that was written in the Medieval period, you had to have some sense of their outlook, the sorts of things people believed back then. His book is an attempt to help people get up to speed.

I'm by no means an expert on any of this, but it seems to me that LOTR has a lot to offer if you take it on those terms. It doesn't have rich complex characters from a psychological point of view, but it does flesh out that old world view pretty convincingly.

There are a lot of ideas in those books that appeal to me. Sam the gardner is better than a king who makes foolish choices. In the old days, the slot you occupied in society was more or less an accident of birth, and your value was determined when you stood before your maker after your death. A gardner who was honest and true would be better than a king. We don't really feel that way now. Today, a lawyer is almost always better than a garbageman, no matter how the lawyer conducts his business.

There was an old picture of the way society was organized -- people were tied to their lords through bonds of "love and fealty". And in these books, you see a lot of oaths, and loyalty is the highest virtue. That system of values is often contrasted to capitalism, in which everyone is out for themselves, and we all believe that society works itself out pretty well as a result. That seemed coarse to a lot of people at first, though.

I've read some letters that Tolkein wrote to his son Christopher during the war -- he was pretty horrified by the technology and the killing. He seemed to see the direction the world had taken as pretty evil. The winged Nazgul were modeled on military aircraft, I believe.

I once had a teacher who had spent a lot of time studying Medieval thought, and he felt the same way, that we had a fair amount to learn from the old values, that they were superior to our own in many ways. I don't know if I buy that, but there are people who do.

And even though the books aren't explicitly Christian, I think they're very much so implicitly. But it's an older view of Christianity. The corrosive and corrupting nature of sin is a big theme in the books. Just carrying the ring eats away at you. Frodo's problem is an essential human problem -- he's obliged to engage the world pretty directly by carrying that ring, but doing so corrupts him. You have to be willing to engage the world, but those same social connections -- based on bonds of love and fealty -- form your safety net.

I don't know what to make of the massive popularity of the films and the books today. I think their greatness lies primarily in the way they flesh out that old discarded image in a narrative story. As far as I know, there isn't a real Medieval story, dating back from those times, that does it nearly as well. Instead, you have lots of smaller stories that you can sort of cobble together to create a p

LOTR:1954 MMORPG:2004

[Tackhead]

A LOTR reviewer in 1954 wrote: > 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...

*blink* - I was reading this and somehow the LOTR part of my brain shorted out against the "RPG" part of my brain, and I thought about yesterday's thread on designing games for people who work full time (and the inevitable MMORPG discussion spawned therefrom).

50 years later, we have MMORPG developers saying "Don't blame us if the game sucks! We're not done yet! Just keep paying those monthly fees! We'll implement the fun Real Soon Now! Oh, and here's another 10000 orcs for you to mindlessly slay. That oughta be enough 'content' to keep you busy for the time being."

Density of content appears to be key here, too. LOTR's a huge world/universe with a huge backstory. And although you can tell the story of the One Ring in about half the time it takes to read it, Tolkien made the books work by ensuring that the reader learned something new about that universe in every chapter -- even when it didn't necessarily have anything to do with the plot. (Hence the popularity of both the "movie" and the "mega-extended-remix" DVD set.)

If 2004's MMORPG is the modern answer to 1954's "really long fantasy story", then perhaps the message to aspiring game developers is that as long as you keep the player learning, the story you tell is immaterial.

"The Hobbit" stands on its own, even though from the perspective of LOTR, it's just a paragraph of backstory. But I think we can all remember our joy as first-time readers (regardless of which [quest|book] we [did|read] first) when you put the pieces together. That's good writing, and it makes for great RPG gameplay.

It just struck me as strange that in 50 years, we haven't come full circle when it comes to storytelling in fantasy worlds, we've actually gone backwards.

Association of Geeks Who Don't Care For Tolkien

[SnappingTurtle]

Is there anybody else out there? I just don't care for Tolkien's writing. Every time I try to read The Hobbit I just can't stand it: so slow moving, so ponderous. The only thing that makes me try again from time to time is the quantity and zealousness of my friends who love Tolkien's writings.

I'm not saying it isn't quality literature, just that it just isn't to my taste, any more than Pilgrim's Progress or Moby Dick.

The Narnia Chronicles, now there's my vote for best literature of the 20th century.

Nothing new

[The Bungi]

I believe Frank Herbert was also initially panned by the critics. Actually I think this mentioned on Bill O'Reilly's Herbert essay (which is very good, in case you've never read it and are a fan of the Dune series or FH's other work, like the Pandora trilogy).

LOTR is rather heavy reading and honestly not for everyone. I think the movies did a good job of presenting the ideas and plot of the books, limited as the movie format is to begin with.

I just wish someone would do a decent billion-dollar series of 3 hour movies based on the Dune books. The original Dune movie was OK but short and a bit hokey, and the SciFi series were absolutely terrible. But Dune is not considered "hip" like LOTR, I suppose.

communist critiscism of LOTR

[kyknos.org]

here in czech republic, the LOTR was criticized for being an allegory of war of Evil Capitallist Imperialistic West (Gondor, Elves etc...) against a working class of Good communist Mordor (but because it was a bad book from the west it was trying to depict good as evil and vice versa). I am not kidding. I have somewhere an article from Rude Pravo (Red Justice, leading newspapers of communist Czechoslovakia) where is detailed list of what nation and character from LOTR corresponds with what character and nation in the Real World.

Re:I'll say it

[CommieOverlord]

Well duh, who said Harry Potter wasn't a story for kids?

That being that doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable for adults. For children's books they're extremely well-crafted. They're not high-literature, but they're fun and well-done.

I'm an adult and an avid SF/Fan/Other reader. I'll read Plato, Machiavelli, Hemmingway, Tolstoy for fun. I've acted as a book reviewer for a magazine.

But that didn't preclude me from picking up the Potter books and having fun.

Re:Historical perspective.

[tgibbs]

I understand that it may be difficult for us NOW to understand what the critics were saying in 1954 but you have to remember that writings were influenced by the conservative nature of the times.

I think the modern literary establishment is just as conservative, and has just as much difficulty recognizing brilliant work that does not fit into a standard literary mold. Consider some of the expressions of outrage when Stephen King won the National Book Foundation Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Tolkien's work was a fantasy for adults, written in a serious mode normally reserved for traditional mythology. Hardly surprising that many critics didn't know how to deal with it. Yet even in Tolkien's time, some people, such as WH Auden and CS Lewis recognized the work's value.

there is more

[labyrinth]

I don't really understand why LOTR should be the ulimate book for geeks.
I read it and immensely enjoyed it a long time ago; but I read a lot of other things that spoke more to my geeky side. I enjoy shifting perpectives, playing with structure, recursion etc. When I was younger and mainly read SF, I found that kind of stuff in writers like Philip Dick, who I still like to read; I don't feel the urge to go back to Tolkien. Now, many years later, I'm still reading a lot, and I find those things in writers like Borges, Italo Calvino, Flann O'Brien, Georges Perec...

Anyway, art is not a contest, and any good book should feel like the best book in the world while you're reading it.

I thought the movies were OK for what they are, but they don't seem to have much to do with what I remember enjoying in the books.