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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
use tolkiens method! "Tolkien created 37 new languages for 34 books".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Many years ago it was. It was an incredeble experence. One that I repeat every few years. Don't just read the book, check out the appendices too.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
"This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once," said the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, while American critic Edmund Wilson, dismissed the entire trilogy in 1956 as "juvenile trash".
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.
There have been few books I have read more than once and LOTR is one of them, in fact, I found it completely uninteresting and only made it 3/4 of the way through. It's just not my type of book.
I wouldn't exactly say that he "triumphed" over anything. Times and tastes have changed and so have the reviews on his book.
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.
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?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Destined to be movie of the century.
I mean, how can any other movie compete with LOTR's 1200 minutes of greatness (I'm talking about the EXTENDED EXTENDED Extended Super Bonus Box Set Release, scheduled for November '06).
Q: Is LoTR really based on Christian Mythology?
A: Yes. Tolkien wanted to demonstrate that even the mentally and physically challenged were capable of success and that therefore we should love everyone, regardless of their defects.
Q: So who represents the mentally and physically challenged?
A: Well obviously the hobbits are the physically challenged ones here, but the central mentally challenged figure is Gandalf, responsible for the most horrible attack plan in literature.
Q: What's so horrible about a poorly armed team of two hobbits infiltrating Mordor?
A: Well, basically it ignores the fundamental strengths of the forces of light. Anyone who's played C&C or Warcraft knows that if you have an advantage in air units, you have to use it. Remember that elves can ride eagles, and that elven archers are incredibly potent - early on, Gimli dismounts a Nazgul with a single shot! With about a thousand eagles (given elven archers on each one), the forces of good would have matched up pretty well in the air against Mordor's air units: all nine of them. While the leader of the Nazgul cannot be killed by any living man, this does not prevent a team of twenty eagles from tearing him to little shreds, especially if Gandalf rode along for help. So basically an air battle would have been brief unmitigated slaughter of the Nazgul as about a thousand eagle-mounted elves blew them out of the sky in a hail of arrows.
Q: But I thought that there was some other book that said that the eagles wouldn't help?
A: We're not talking about some other stupid book here, we're talking about the Lord of the Rings. And in this book, the eagles most definitely help out, first by flying Gandalf off the tower and secondly by pitching into the Final Battle in full force, attacking ground units (stupid!) at great risk to themselves. So obviously they would have been content to take part in a brief airborne slaughter of the Nazgul.
Q: Ok so you defeat all Mordor's air units... then what?
A: Well with air superiority, you command the skies. Which means that you can fly right over Mount Doom and drop anything you want right in there... like a ring. Mordor only had nine airborne units, and with them out of the way Mordor has absolutely no way to prevent anyone from flying anywhere.
Q: But the ring would corrupt the eagles trying to drop the ring in, silly.
A: Actually, the ring can only corrupt those who touch it or those in the nearby area. This is a trivial mechanism to defeat. The first step is permanently bind the ring to a weak and helpless creature, like a rat. Second step is of course to put the rat on a long rope, so that the creature holding the rope is out of the sway of the ring. Then the eagle carrying the rope, having total air superiority, flies over Mount Doom and drops the rat in the volcano. An utterly trivial victory.
Q: Ok, so why the elaborately stupid attack plan? Why send the physical rejects as the only hope of mankind?
A: The lesson is that, though they succeed at great cost and great risk, they are still capable of success. This, of course, was the lesson of the Holocaust - that we should never feel so superior to the weak or inferior that we decide they have no place. Even idiot tacticians like Gandalf and weak, pathetic creatures like Hobbits can add some value here & there.
Q: Wait a minute. I just saw the movie, and there's this scene where they're like "this is the last stand of the Men of the West", and all the men of the west are white, and they face off in total war against Indians on Elephants and "black orcs" (er... maybe we just call them "blacks" for short) and the white Men of the West achieve a total genocidal victory. Doesn't that invalidate what you just said?
A: Well, um, no. That's all fine & good, but remember that in the Holocaust we were committing genocide against white people
"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer."
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I read it more than once. It might have been because of my girlie crush on Aragorn, though. He's got to be the hottest fictional character ever. (for some reason it's hard to hear comic book guy saying that).
"It is better than any book that has been written in the past. It is better than any book that will ever be written in the future. And I haven't even read it yet."
Tolkien was actually a linguist, not a professional fiction writer. Some of the things he did broke unwritten "rules," e.g. a large number of characters and switching between multiple subplots that the reader needs to remember. Ultimately, he succeeded, but it's understandable that critics seeing his work for the first time would have been surprised.
American critic Edmund Wilson, dismissed the entire trilogy in 1956 as "juvenile trash".
I read the trilogy several times between the ages of 10 and 14. I tried reading it again ten years later before the first movie came out, but I became bored with it and was side tracked by other novels.
As a child I thought it was the most thrilling read ever. I suppose our imaginations are more suited to fantasy as children. Everyone knows how imaginative children can be.
It's not "juvenile trash", but I understand his sentiment.
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
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?
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
I read "The Hobbit" as a teenager, and managed to like that one okay, but just couldn't get past the writing style of LOTR. I finally managed to start it over again when the film came out, and loved it. I guess I wasn't appreciating the prose-like style he has. I wanted more explosions and blood.
My daughter, however, at the tender age of 12, read all of Tolkein's stuff, along with the complete works of Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams. I probably should have had her explain it to me back then.
So when is the Hawkeye movie coming out?
If such a manuscript existed, Christopher Tolkien would have already released 347 editions, including one with solid gold covers.
;-)
So I think we can conclude it doesn't exist
sPh
The Appendecies are great. You should also get the books on tape...the performance is amazing. And you'll get Tom Bombadil's song stuck in your head, as the reader sings all the songs.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Throughout history, there have been divergences between that which is popular and that which is good. The Lord of the Rings is one of those truly rare works that has bridged that gap. Historically it has had many critics. Most of those seem to be people that respond to it as part of a genre they don't understand or believe in, as opposed to legitimate literary criticism. It also gets criticism to the effect of "I can't get through it." I still remember my AP English teacher, years ago, telling the class he couldn't get through the Hobbit. Ouch. It's a shame, really, that such a world is not truly accessible to all. There are the movies, of course, but they're not the same thing. There's an inherent beauty to the language that Tolkien understood and crafted. It's the kind of thing that makes the NEA report on decreasing reading for pleasure among Americans such a concern. There are whole worlds that begin to dissappear.
You read it for the first time every few years? Unforseen advantages of Alzheimers disease ...
'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.'
Is that why Return Of The King was the only film of the three to get an Oscar for best film ?
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
It takes imagination, creativity and research to write believable fiction and/or fantasy. Tolkien not only did this, but he built up the finer details to such an extent that the level of submersion in his books is something that has to be experienced to be believed.
Usually, when you read a fantasy novel, you are transported into another world and the story takes off. With Tolkien, he builds that world around you so that you are intimately aware of it's finer details and not just the storyline. This means, it's not so much a story any more to you - it's more like an alternate reality.
There are no boundaries to the imagination and Tolkien proved it through his works. I salute him. There is simply no other way to put it.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
If they're not one word reviews, they're not worth reading... who has time anymore for such language... just tell me if I should read it or not.
*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.
Read some of the Horatio Hornblower stuff, great series of books if you want to read about adventures on the high seas.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I remember reading that the original Star Wars reviews were themselves pretty scathing. Anyone have links to the originals?
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.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Jeez, the reviews all sound like James Lipton on In The Actors' Studio!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
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.
No, he wasn't happy with the battle at Helm's deep, and so in the new revised Extended Special Edition, the Orcs shoot first!
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
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.
It was called the "New Shadow," and was an attempt to write about the Fourth Age. Tolkien realized the story was going nowhere and abandoned it. Most fans know about this and have read it (Christopher did release it).
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.
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.
Well, for my part, I remember reading about how every Led Zeppelin album when it was released got uniformly miserable reviews, especially from Rolling Stone.
:-(
Compared to what passes for 'music' in the 21st Century so far, Led Zeppelin looks like art in musical form nowadays.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
I like you're air power theory, its kind of funny. I always imagined that Sauron has some sort of anti-flying magic defences! Tolkein might have had some familiarity with air power from WWI, and may have been less than impressed! Since WWII, airpower is now considered an integral part of military strategy, and its hard to imagine a military campaign without it
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.
The other characters, though superficially more interesting also have arrested character development. Aragorn is perhaps the best, starting as a dishevelled drifter who is revealed to be a king. But once this is revealed at the end of FOTR, anything interesting about Aragorn pretty much stops. Gandalf is interesting, but again once he comes back as the White its over for him too. Don't even the mention the sentimental relationship between Sam and Frodo that became almost laughable in the movies.
Tolkein's "significance" might be as the first to create a self-contained mythical world on a grand scale, though there were others before him going back through Edgar Rick Burroughs, Jonathon Swift to Sir Thomas Moore. This is hardly can be considered a grand literary achievement, however, and is more in keeping with his dayjob as an academic.
I don't like Harry Potter. I read the first one, and no matter what anyone tells me, these are childrens books.
I think you're getting your singular and plural mixed up here. The first one (Sorceror's Stone / Philosopher's Stone) is a children's book. The second is more advanced, but still basically a children's book. Prisoner of Azkaban really isn't a children's book, anymore.
The reading level of the books advances with the age of the characters.
Reading the Silmarillion is the worst advice you can give to a LOTR fan, they are bound not to be a fan after it. It is as dull as dishwater, and not as useful for cleaning dishes with.
There are actually a couple of very good reasons.
Both Gandalf and the eagles are servants of Valar (middle earth gods effectively). They are there to try to influence events to come out right, but they are not there to get up and do all the hard work themselves - essentially the Valar want the races of middle earth to sort their problems out on their own, and send Gandalf as someone to help guide things in the right directions. Similarly, the eagles will step in occasionally, but for the most part they seek to remain uninvolved. End result: The eagles aren't going to carry anybody anywhere unless some serious meddling is required.
Why do the eagles carry Gandalf away from Saruman? Saruman, like Gandalf was sent by the Valar to help guide events along the right paths. He got corrupted. The Valar are happy enough to have the eagles step in to help clear up a mess that the Valar themselves essentially made - save Gandalf from Saruman.
Why do the eagles come and fight at the gates, and rescue Frodo? The people of middle earth had done all the work by that point - they'd made their stand against Sauron themselves as the Valar wanted - at that point it's acceptable to the Valar to send the eagles to make sure everything comes out nicely.
The other main reason this doesn't work is Sauron. He is actually rather powerful, and often neglected in such thinking. Sure, the nine represent air power on the fell beasts, but any frontal assault on Mordor has to face Sauron as well. Remember what happened to Frodo whenever he put on the ring, or Pippin when he looked in the Palantir - that's because they came to Sauron's notice. An eagle with a ring bearer on it's back heading straight for Mount Doom pretty quickly comes into Sauron's focus, and he can cause pretty nasty things to happen to eagles and any hobbits aboard should he deign it necessary. Sending a small band, and particularly a hobbit was all about stealth. Sauron wasn't expecting them to try and destryoy the ring, he was expecting them to use it (hence the scene missing from the movie where Aragorn looks into the Palantir and effectively announces to Sauron that he has the Ring, and he's coming to take Sauron out which deflects Sauron's interest in Frodo and hobbits).
HTH
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Mr Tolkien describes a tremendous conflict between good and evil... but his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil," wrote the Observer's Mr Muir.
I can understand (yet disagree with) most of the criticisms, but if someone pulled out this one today, I'd accuse them of not reading the books. A major - if not THE major - theme is the internal good vs evil conflicts of the characters. The whole point of the ring is that it corrupts even good people. It's something Frodo and even Gandolf struggle with. The reason it's given to a hobbit is because they have the greatest chance of getting rid of it before it corrupts them completely. Then you have Golumn who is completely corrupt, struggling to become good and can't quite do it.
The criticisms were just about the first book, though, so maybe I'd let the old chap Muir off...
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.
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.
Amazing. I have no problem seeing stories there. Although "quenta" can be read as "history", "tale" is closer. Both senses actually occur in that volume: "Valaquenta" should probably be "history of the Valar", while "Quenta Silmarillion" is definitely a "Tale" although it does cover the full history of the Silmarils.
Wait, I think I see what you mean. There's not a single thread sweeping the reader from a definite beginning to a definite ending. (The beginning is *definitely* there in "Ainulindale" but there is no end since at the close we still have two Ages to go.) In the middle there's sort of a swamp of smaller tales which bear on each other here and there, and it's easy to lose the broader flow. But I *like* a bit of complexity, a bit of world-building.
I think a lot of people also get put off by the author's indulgence of his interest in language. I happen to like tasty written expression, but that sort of style is definitely not for everyone. A lot of 20th century writers tried to breathe life into their language by making it new in various ways, but I much prefer the work of those who made their words young by drawing me back to a time when older modes of expression *were* young. Tolkien's use of English wields a kind of power that SFX can never command.
Is that the ENTIRE thing was completely unnecessary.
The EAGLES (you remember them don't you. They always conveniently appear when someone needs to be whisked out of danger) could have simply carried Frodo above Mount Crumpet, er, I mean Mount Doom, to drop the ring from 10,000 feet up.
The entire 'venture would have take 2 hours tops, with time for lunch.
Silly story, silly broken characters like a wizard who can't even fight another wizard, but can combat an ancient demon 100 times his mass and win.
Personally, I read LotR and the Silmarillion umpteen times as a teenager. At some point, I just became tired of the world and the flaws that I glanced over in my initial readings started glaring.
David Brin does a good job of ripping LotR as far as I am concerned.
Fantasy-wise, I am enamoured with the traditional high fantasy of Steven Erikson (Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, etc.) and the inventive steampunky fantasy of China Mieville (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, etc.). Both Erikson and Mieville have anthropologist backgrounds and it shows.
As a philologist, Tolkien just had an odd retro-way of playing with words, but an anthropologist is much better at fleshing out actual worlds.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.