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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.'"
The Army reading list
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?
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*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.
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
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.
SHE does throw dice.