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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."
Part of the problem is that JRR Tolkien used probably the least efficient method of writing ever devised. He would start writing until he hit a brick wall and then he would start over from scratch. It's not necessarily wrong to do it like that, but it does take a lot longer than doing it the more standard way.
That being said, he did write more than just the LOTR trilogy and in recent times we've had much stronger writers being passed over for what will almost certainly be even more trivial crimes against literature.
Tolkien had a lot of beautiful imagery and ideas, and that invited the reader to make up their own fascinating thoughts of what the world looked like, simply because the prose was really difficult to read. As a trilogy that forces the reader to envision Middle Earth in their mind, it succeeds brilliantly beyond the bad prose.
Agreed.
Tolkien's strengths were never in the quality of his writing. (though it's still tons better than a lot of authors)
His strengths were always in his ability to build a world - to make a place and its inhabitants so memorable that they'd be remembered for ages. He succeeded greatly in that, and has likely influenced the fantasy genre more than everybody else combined.
Peter Jackson?
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
I find it disturbing that you critique LOTR the way you have, yet admit you've not read them. My 10 year old children have read and loved both the Hobbit and LOTR.
Tolkien's prose does assume a higher level of reading comprehension than is common today, this is very clear. Compare any Tolkien to JK Rowling. She tells nice stories, but with such stark simplicity that I find them painfully droll.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
The Silmarillion was written as a mythological history for England
Have you ever stopped to think how weird it would be if Tolkien had tried to pull a L Ron Hubbard Scientology move and turn the LOTR into a "real religion"?
I stopped to think about it, and it was weird, let me tell you.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And yet strangely enough, the post you reply to is at 5, Insightful
That, despite mostly being a discussion of writing that was not available for the Nobel Committee to consider in 1961 since The Silmarillion was not published until 1977, well after Tolkien's death in 1973. And despite the poster admitting that he had not read the books that were published and available for the committee to judge at the time JRR was nominated for the Nobel.
So, I would say instead that when a commentator that has not read the relevant books and talks instead about material that was not yet published is modded as insightful, then you know that slashdot is dead.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
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
There's a huge difference between being able to do detailed analysis as a theorist and produce academic monographs and being able to write good prose fiction. In fact, they tend to be mutually exclusive.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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
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.
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
I think the original statement that Tolkien "didn't display technical mastery" isn't correct. However, just because he had as much knowledge of the functioning and (especially) history of the English language as anyone on the planet doesn't mean that he was going to be a technically proficient writer. My partner is getting a PhD studying English Renaissance literature and I spend almost all of my time hanging out with literature students and professors. These people know an incredible amount about language, far more than I ever will, and some of them couldn't write their way out of a paper bag (and some of them are brilliant stylists). The writing is always "technically masterful" in the minimal sense that it has proper grammar and so on, but demonstrating an ability to write correctly is much different from true technical mastery. True technical mastery is the ability to deploy the elements of language in ways that are incisive and surprising and exactly correct for whatever purpose the writer has in mind. This requires knowledge, but it also requires talent.
So, in this case, you can't merely appeal to Tolkien as literary authority, you have to give examples in his writing. Fortunately, this is trivial to do. He wasn't a constantly great stylist, but he has moments of real greatness. A simple one is the bit of Rhyme of Lore that Gandalf recites to Pippin:
Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing Sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.
(The 2nd, 4th, and 6th lines should be indented, but I can't figure out how to do that.)
This is a very simple little poemlet, and yet it does a good job of evoking the Old and Middle English remnants in our language and literature that Tolkien is always interested in bringing up. It has two fine alliterative lines ("Three times three" and "Seven stars and seven stones"), reminding us of Old and some Middle English poetry. We read the indented line breaks almost like a caesura, making this more of a three line poem with a break in the middle of each long line, the second half of each long line modifying the first half, just like Old and some Middle English verse.
The second and sixth lines are very short and staccato. If we again look at the poem as three double lines, we have pretty staccato first and last lines -- in my reading, 7 of the 8 syllables in the first double line are accented, and 7 of the 11 in the last double line are. There are precious few places for the tongue to rest, to easily tumble into the next syllable. In the middle is a wonderfully flowing double line. "What brought they from the foundered land" is straight iambic tetrameter, a verse form that just hurtles off of the English tongue. "Over the flowing Sea?" is an iambic trimeter (with a trochaic inversion at the beginning). Put the two lines together and you have a line of ballad verse, a "fourteener", which was the great English verse line before they took up the iambic pentameter in the 16th century. The contrast of this flowing central part with the first and last double lines is startling and works to emphasize especially the last double line
Also, and most importantly, the little poem just sounds good.
This is how you argue that Tolkien was a technical master. This is just a tiny little poem, six lines only, but it evokes the whole of English poetry before it fell completely under Frenc
Nah, you wanna do that, you need to read Two Years Before the Mast.
If I hadn't read the book for a college class with a fantastic professor, I probably would have thought the same thing.
As I learned, though, Moby Dick isn't about the story of the Pequod - it's about the inadequacy of language to convey the awe and terror that [the whale|nature|god|death] embody. Melville tries to examine the whale from every angle - biological descriptions, literary narrative, discussion of the economic system whaling sits within, etc. and they all fall short. The only glimmer of hope he holds forth is in the human companionship and camaraderie seen in the chapter "The Squeeze of the Hand," and more narrowly, in Queequeg's cheerful [defiance of death|acceptance of fate] in the business with the floating coffin at the end.
I have reread Tolkien once or twice. I recommend a policy of skipping all songs and poems out of hand. Every time you get bored, read only a few lines from each page until you realize that you've hit the meat of the action or you've switched to a new scene.
Not only does it take a lot less time, it's actually a reasonably entertaining story.
I have no illusions about people here reading TFA and TFS. However, since it was my submission, I felt compelled to defend it.
Specifically, no, it's not news that Tolkien was denied the Nobel 50 years ago. We have indeed known that for 50 years. The news is in why Tolkien was denied the Nobel. That information was only just released.
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
True technical mastery is the ability to deploy the elements of language in ways that are incisive and surprising and exactly correct for whatever purpose the writer has in mind. This requires knowledge, but it also requires talent.
you have to give examples in his writing. Fortunately, this is trivial to do. He wasn't a constantly great stylist, but he has moments of real greatness. (And yes, I know I should really be writing about Tolkien's prose here, but poetry is so much easier to go into depth about.)
Nice explication, and to help out, I'll supply the prose:
And far away, as Frodo put on the RIng and claimed it for his own, even in Sammath Naur the very heart of his realm, the Power in Barad-Dûr was shaken, and the Tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown. The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door that he had made; and the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash, and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him. For he knew his deadly peril and the thread upon which his doom now hung.
From all his policies and webs of fear and treachery, from all his stratagems and wars his mind shook free; and throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired. For they were forgotten. The whole mind and purpose of the Power that wielded them was now bent with overwhelming force upon the Mountain. At his summons, wheeling with a rending cry, in a last desperate race there flew, faster than the winds, the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths, and with a storm of wings they hurtled southwards to Mount Doom.
The Return of the King, second edition, 1955, p. 223
Though many here malign his style, Tolkien's prose here is purposeful and effective. Note that Sauron's recognition and ensuing panic are reflected rhetorically in the cadence of the sentences, aided by polysendeton, parallelism, and a combination of varying sentence lengths--telegraphic, medium, and long. Syntactically purposeful, the prose also includes a smattering of lyricism reminiscent of the epics he attempts to emulate.
Form married to function is a touchstone of quality prose.