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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."
I can understand that criticism, actually. As the story progresses beyond the hobbit-focused beginning and begins to link with the Silmarillion, the style of writing and characterization becomes more archaic, in the vein of the kind of ancient heroic epics that Tolkien studied, like Beowulf. There's also an enormous focus on the description of landscapes, which can become repetitive, and the constant unexplained references in foreign languages can feel wearisome and arbitrary if you're not already familiar with any of it.
The Silmarillion was written as a mythological history for England, starting with the fall of Númenor, analogous to the myth of Atlantis, and growing from there as Tolkien kept adding to it. The Hobbit, however, was an unrelated story that was later linked to the existing mythology, and if I had to decide, I'd say I'm a bigger fan of the Hobbit because of its lighter tone and sense of adventure. It feels more fun and relatable to me. Lord of the Rings is a long, dense epic that I always plan to read "sometime" but never get around to because it's practically a quest itself just to read the damn thing.
As someone who's never managed to get more than a few chapters into the Lord of the Rings books, I can see why they wouldn't want to give him a prize. It's a good story, but there are only so many thirty-page digressions on Elvish folk dancing that I can stand before my brain turns to mush.
...because his storylines fit in with the sort of thing nerds stereotypically like. And he really did write compelling stories.
But his prose, as the archives note, is not that great. He doesn't display a technical mastery of the language.
I see no problem with this judgment.
I disagree, but 50 years ago, by the standard of those times, the quality of prose was probably lower.
He is the dictionary definition of "purple prose". Pages upon pages of superflouous descriptions of every blade of grass in the Shire.
His poetry is even worse.
The books can be really hard to read in places, though the underlying story is compelling. If you can't see this, you aren't being honest.
A great storyteller, and a great author, aren't always the same thing.
It was never the quality of his prose that made him so renowned, rather it was the quality, depth and originality of his stories. I remember fighting through those books 20 odd years ago, if it wasn't for such an engaging story line I would have never gotten through even the first one.
Meh. I think we know who had the last laugh there.
IMHO Nobel prize in literature is of low quality...
Come on, Dario Fo ? Doris Lessing? Elfriede Jelinek ? Jose Saramango ? and many others...
Nobel Prize in literature is mainly 'crystal tower' thing - no one reads them, no one cares.
On the other hand Tolkien changed imagination of billions - inspired books, movies, games....
And you always loose at Risk or Chess? Have you ever thought what a winged beast would do to your precious eagles, or what Sauron himself would do? There's a reason Tolken let a Hobbit sneak the ring into Mordor.
Looking at all the writers who never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd say Tolkien is in very good company.
#DeleteChrome
...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.
Man, I read the whole 3 books and the only that I would save from them is Tom Bombadil.
Without movie special effects, Tolkien used the best special effects machine ever produced. The Human mind. I have read these books numerous times during my pre-teen, teen years and into adulthood. The detail never ceased to amaze me as well as the images conjured in my head. He was a master!
The 1961 Nobel literature laureate was Ivo Andri of Yugoslavia, who wrote his works in Serbo-Croatian during WWII, publishing them all in 1945. He was awarded "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country".
A short essay translated by Lazar Pascanovic is Paths :
That seems to me the work of a Nobel literature laureate. Though I like Tolkien's writing better, and his stories better than the subject. I expect the Cold War in 1961 gave the Nobel committee the extra reason to nominate a writer in non-Soviet Communist Yugoslavia, who
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make install -not war
Gandalf was afraid to take the ring because the promise of such power was too alluring. In the right hands (i.e. my hands) it could be used to right all the wrongs of the world. Would the Eagle chief be less susceptible? Would *you* trust him to destroy the ring?
Hobbits were resistant to the allure of power because of their live-and-let live ethics, even Gollum showing strength against the ring. The redolent Bombadil episode probably was left in solely to make the pont that the ring had no use for him, nor he for it. It would have been fascinating had Tolkien developed the potential of the ring to other groups like the treelike Ents. But maybe he thought the story was getting overlong.
Not at all a low quality plot!
Being a neurologist doesn't mean you'll have a lot of creative ideas. Being a linguist doesn't make you a stylish writer.
I read LotR three times (first time when I was 9 or 10) and I loved the epic story and the consistent universe, but the language is rather bland. Tolkien was certainly very meticulous, but anyone who praises him for writing style probably hasn't read anything else. Terry Pratchett or Will Self (to name only two) can often get more out of a sentence than Tolkien managed to get out of a whole chapter.
Dune.. If you survive the first 150 pages you just might find an entertaining book..
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
The best part of your post is that it ISN'T the same committee, you blithering idiot of a troll.
Take that, 8th grade English teacher Mrs Wright! For the record I would like to reiterate my assertion that Herman Melville was a pratt who only wrote that book because he liked to hear himself talk, and that the writings of George Orwell, CSS Lewis and JK Rowling are sufficient evidence that the British consider consumption of literature to be a masochistic enterprise! And don't even get me started on the insufferable writings of Charles Dickens! I eagerly await the day when age-related dementia erases from the annals of my memory all those books you worked to put there! If there is a bright side to having to wear adult diapers and not knowing who you are, that would be it!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Like with Les Miserables, the key is to learn when you can skim. If you're after the plot, skim or skip the pages of description of Tom Bombadil's stomping grounds, or the sewers of Paris (in Victor Hugo's case). The next time you read it, you already know the plot, so you're not really looking at "what happens!?" and more at the setting, what's happening, and how things might inter-relate in subtle ways.
If you find you skipped too far, it's easy to turn back and re-read a few pages, or a chapter... but for example you can skip almost the entire chapter of Les Miserables about Waterloo. "Waterloo happened ... ", and then read the last page of the chapter to see how it relates at all to the rest of the story. You miss a very vivid description of the battle, but lose nothing plot-wise by skipping it. I found it helpful at times to suspend my burning thirst for plot development, and instead (sometimes) read as if I were listening to someone tell a series of fireside stories, which always start out disjointed, and then end up weaving into a larger narrative in ways I can't always predict.
It sounds a bit silly when you never think about media but just consume it but all the types of story telling, even story telling itself were at one time inventions made by a person and then carried on. The ancient greeks had theather, had comedy, had musical performance but they would be amazed if they were transported to our time, amazed and probably very confused. Same if you put us back in their time. You would be wondering what the fuck is going on on stage. You can see an example of it with black and white silent movies. The story telling, the acting, the presentation, they are alien to a modern audience. The only reason they survive is because some of the actors made the cross-over to talkies and longer movies and they been parodied enough that we think we get it. Except when the exaggerated acting was done back then, it was not meant to be a parody.
Lord of the Rings Online reads like an old novel, older then it even really is but it has managed to lodge itself so firmly in our modern culture that we are willing to make an exception for it. It reads just like most older novels, one were modern pacing has yet to be invented. It is NOT an action novel. It reads closer to a travelogue. A lot of people that like the general setting have never actually read the book because... well... it ain't all that interesting.
The novel of The Princess Bride is a bit different from the movie as in that the writer tells it as if he is rewriting a novel written by an older person whose description doesn't half match that of Tolkien and how he loved the book when his father read it to him but then finds out later that his father edited the book to only have the good bits as the REAL book has a lot of dry passages where the original author describes the currencies used or court procedures.
Gosh, sound familiar? The fans would scream bloody murder but what if the Tolkien books were reworked by a movie novelist into a more condensed, fun version?
I wonder how many Tolkien fans love the books because they don't quite get it and think it must be better then them. No it isn't. The books aren't hard to read because they are so good, they are hard to read because they were written for a different era. That doesn't make them better anymore then classical music is better then modern music. Yes, there is a lot of crap in modern music but so there was in ancient times. just that only the good bits survived.
Tolkien wrote an intresting bit of lore that caught a lot of peoples imagination indirectly (they read other peoples work based on Tolkiens fantasy) but that doesn't mean the books are anything else but not so good writing that goes on far to long and fails the simplest lesson of writing: Less is More.
Some people complain that the movies ruined their imagination... but Tolkien never left any room either. Pratchett is a far greater writer by leaving gaps for your imagination to fill in. If Tolkien ever wrote a one-liner he would next spend three chapters explaining it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm in shock that so may people here agree that Tolkien's prose is a problem. Far from that being the case, Tolkien is so sensitive to prose rhythm that I use it from time to time to teach how to appreciate rhythm in prose or poetry. Take, for example, the ride of the Rohirrim, at the end of chapter 5 of the Return of the King. It starts off at a walk ("Then suddenly Merry felt it at last, beyond doubt: a change. Wind was in his face! Light was glimmering.") picks up a bit to a trot ("But at that same moment there was a flash, as if lightning had sprung from the earth beneath
the City. For a searing second it stood dazzling far off in black and white, its topmost tower like a glittering needle: and then as the darkness closed again there came rolling over the fields a great _boom_.") a canter ("With that he seized a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains."), and then a full-out gallop ("Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first _éored_ roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken.") Then, once the cavalry has bashed through the enemy lines and the fighting's intensity lags, we slow down to a walk again ( And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.") I could also point out the careful word choice for alliteration ("and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder") and assonance ("the host of Rohan"). Reading this page aloud is a joy. If you appreciate the King James Bible, or Old English poetry, you can appreciate this.
But he doesn't always write in this style. There are homely conversations between country folk, and orders in the field, and descriptions of landscapes, and "dropped in" details that suggest thousands of years of history that are simply not explained, but make Middle Earth seem real.
By the way, I would take Ursula Le Guin's opinion on prose quality pretty seriously. She is a fan of Tolkien's writing, too, calling it "a great wind blowing" that could have overwhelmed her own voice if she had read it earlier than she did. (http://greenbooks.theonering.net/tributes/files/ursula_leguin.html)
So, again, I don't get where this opinion that Tolkien writes badly. The man put more care into a sentence than others do in a chapter.
-Gareth
Yeah, within the context of the world itself, trying to fly the ring in on an eagle would have been a stupid risk. People who bring that up as a criticism haven't thought it through, in my opinion. Sauron would have seen them coming miles away and been able to focus all of his attention in one area.
That is why you send some blokes to distract Sauron first...
How Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended.
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. . . that lots of great writers will never get the Nobel Prize (or Great Scientists, etc). They can only give one per year (in each category), they can't award it to the dead. Which means, that some years (probably most) you'll have a number of nominees who really are "Nobel-material", but who get disqualified in favor of whoever gets chosen. That's the nature of arbitrary, number-limited awards.