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JRR Tolkien Denied Nobel Due To Low Quality Prose
Morty writes "In 1961, C.S. Lewis nominated JRR Tolkien for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tolkien did not receive the prize. 50 years later, the archives for that year have been made available, so now we know why. Tolkien's prose was viewed as low quality."
DIDNT DISPLAY TECHNICAL MASTERY?????
The man was not just a writer but the Don of English at Oxford, in other words he was THE authority on how the language worked, its history and how words are used. And in LOTR, it showed, not just in English but in the other languages he invented. The Nobel judges were rank amateur hacks in comparision
...is to skip over all the songs. Read that once on a blog somewhere, and I'd say it's good advice. I've read the series two or three times, and just pretending the damn songs weren't even there would have enhanced the experience.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
List of writers rejected by nobel committee
Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Mark Twain, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie,
and last but not least Karel Capek.
Who is Karel Capek?
The author that coined the term Robot(Rossum Universal Robots) , his 1936 work "The war with the newts" was rejected for being too offensive to the German (nazi) government.
Yep this what exactly they mean when they call a work "timeless" .
Now, perhaps I'm completely wrong, but I remember hearing somewhere that LOTR didn't pick up popularity until much later, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#Reception . As in it was mostly discarded at first and then was rediscovered and remains popular to date.
Right idea, but wrong mythos.
Anglo-Saxon literature and its Scandanavian cousins, plus the ancient lore of his own childhood neighborhood are the roots of Tolkien's legendarium. Undoubtedly, the epics of the various Mediterranean cultures were there too, since they were completely unavoidable to anyone studying Oxford "Greats". But the epic-ness of the Silmarillion and the Ring are pretty much Saxon and Brythonic in character.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It's Saramago, you ignorant troll. And yes, people read him - in fact, it's obligatory reading for all students in my country.
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I've found that his prose improves quite a bit when read out loud. A number of people have observed that it seems to be optimized for speaking rather than silent reading. My advice to anyone who can't get through the prose is to try an audiobook; if you still don't like it, then Tolkien is probably not for you.