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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
"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!
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).
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.
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
You read it for the first time every few years? Unforseen advantages of Alzheimers disease ...
*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.
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.
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.
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...
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.