"Taking the Part of Trees" (Post Number One Thousand)

So, in the five or six years I've been blogging, it turns out I've written a thousand posts, or about a post every other day. Sometimes I go through droughts where a week or two will pass without a post, either because inspiration failed or because I'm very, very busy and/or under the weather (or both).

Of course, not all those posts got posted. Some I drafted but never hit "Send" on, not being satisfied with how it came out. Others were left unfinished, till the pot went off the boil; it might be interesting to revisit some of these one day, though many no doubt wd now be moot. And a few were finished and ready to go but I thought better of sending them; most of these were snippy bits about politics, so it's probably just as well.


This being mainly a Tolkien blog, I thought #1000 shd be Tolkien themed. I was recently reminded by something I was reading of one of the best Tolkien discussions I've ever taken part in, way back in Milwaukee days at a session of the Burrahobbits (the local fantasy discussion book group, dating all the way back to 1984 and still going strong). One of the times we did THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the question came up of what was each of our's favorite part. The result was a real eye-opener. I'd always just kinda assumed my response to the book was the same as everybody else's, and that folks who really, really like Tolkien like him for the same reasons and so would have the same favorite scenes. Such did not prove to be the case. Pretty much each of us had a different favorite scene or thing in the book that had first moved us, that kept drawing us back to re-read it again and again. I know of one friend for whom it's the arrival of the Rohirrim at the Siege of Minas Tirith. I suspect for many it must be the scene of Eowyn against the Nazgul, given how many artists have illustrated the confrontation (it must be hundreds by now). For myself, it's two chapters from THE TWO TOWERS: "Treebeard" (Bk III. Ch iv) and "The King of the Golden Hall (Bk III. Ch vi); when I feel drawn to re-read the book, it's often to read these two chapters, after which I get drawn in and start from the beginning and read all the way through.

But the one thing that first and immediately attracted me to Tolkien was the trees. I'd never met anyone, aside from my mother, who felt about trees the way I did; Tolkien was the first writer in which I had what C. S. Lewis described as that "What! You too?" moment.  When he described a tree being cut down and then just left laying there, I'd seen and felt just the same thing with a tree a few blocks from my junior high. When he described mourning for individual trees after they were gone, there too I knew exactly what he was talking about.

It's not unusual to have an interest or feeling no one around you shares, or to conclude that no one else anywhere feels the way you do. But to suddenly discover that yes, there's someone who agrees, and who can express that point of view far better than you ever could, is one of the things that can make reading a book a life-changing event.

So, thanks to the Professor for that.

--John R.

Tolkien Among the E-Books

So, one of the v. first (indeed, I think THE first) e-books I bought when we first got the Kindle, several years ago now, was THE LORD OF THE RINGS and THE HOBBIT, quickly followed by THE SILMARILLION and THE BOOK OF LOST TALES (vols. I & II).

I'd been wanting a searchable copy of Tolkien's books for years, and here they were, available at last. At that time there were relatively few books on/about Tolkien available either as e-books or as audio-books. And, oddly enough, they tended to be not the great classics of Tolkien scholarship -- Carpenter, Kocher, Shippey, Flieger, &c -- but Xian interpretations of Tolkien's work (Kreeft, Wood, Rutledge, Arthur). By and large that still seems to be the case, but a quick check of Amazon's Kindle store shows that a lot more titles are becoming available, both by (SIGURD & GUDRUN) and about (the Jason Fisher collection, to which I'm a contributor).*

Which made the following paragraph appearing in the newest BEYOND BREE particularly interesting. Coming at the end of a piece about e-books and Tolkien, David Brawn (who oversees Tolkien publishing at HarperCollins), while not divulging sales figures, says that

". . . THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS

are . . . two of the best-selling backlist ebooks

on the market . . . Tolkien's books are once again

experiencing a period of growth as we approach

the 2012 HOBBIT movie . . . while ebook sales are

increasing, so are the sales of the physical books",

concluding that while for some authors ebook sales come at the expense of their tradition books, this does not seem to be the case with Tolkien, whose ebooks seem to be selling both to those who already had the book as well as new readers -- "which is good news for the author".

--BEYOND BREE, current issue, p. 8

So, taken in conjunction with my last post about Tolkien having written not one but two of the best-selling books of all time, add in that for the present sales show no sign of slacking; he remains ubiquitous in our culture, for now and hopefully for a long time to come.

--John R.

still in Grand Prairie, Texas

*indeed, some Kindle-only books on Tolkien can be found there now; I'll have to check some of these out to see if any are worthwhile. Some look potentially interesting, while about others I am doubtful. We'll see.

Tolkien Among the All-Time Best Sellers?

So, many thanks to Allan G. who sent me the link to a blog (Punkadiddle*) which is doing a countdown of the ten best-selling books of all time, as determined by Wikipedia.** Both the blog entry, on THE HOBBIT (which ranks #4 in their listing) and the list itself (and the means by which they determined it, leaving out giveaway books like Gideon Bibles) are of interest. But what particularly struck me was not the gob-stopping news that JRRT wrote the fourth best-selling book of all time (keeping in mind the disclaimers just mentioned) but that he also wrote the third all-time bestseller as well!

That is: THE HOBBIT ranks fourth on their list, with 100,000,000 copies sold. That's one hundred million copies. Which is a lot of books. But it's a distance second among Tolkien's works on the list, THE LORD OF THE RINGS having sold half again as much: 150,000,000 copies (whether sets or individual volumes they did not say). That's a quarter of a billion copies altogether for those two books.

I'm reminded of something Janice said, years ago as we were leaving a Half-Price Books up on the Brown Deer Road in Milwaukee, about imagining how our civilization wd appear to archeologists of the distant future, who wd decide that we had v. few books but really, really liked them.

I'm also reminded of the famous Locus poll (circa 1987/88, I think) of all-time favorite fantasy works, in which Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS came in first. Followed by J. R. R. Tolkien's THE HOBBIT as number two. Followed, I think by Le Guin's A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA as a rather distant third. The poll's compiler I remember went to lengths to point out that the winner of the fantasy poll outperformed the winner of the science fiction poll they ran at the same time (this being after all a science fiction journal) by a magnitude of degree.

The dual placement of both books on the Wikipedia list, which together take up a third of the list of all books that have sold 100 million or more copies, is what's really staggering, and re-inforces once again that THE HOBBIT has an audience of its own. If Tolkien had written only THE HOBBIT, I'd argue, he wd still be remembered as one of the great writers of his time.

Not just King of the Mountain: without him, there'd be no recognized genre of fantasy literature, and the people who wrote what we'd call modern fantasy wd be talented eccentrics following their individual muses, like James Branch Cabell, E. R. Eddison, and Hope Mirrlees.

All hail not the King Under the Mountain but The King Up On The Mountain, for letting us share the view.***

--John R.

--writing from what turns out to be Grand Prairie, Texas

*link:

http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/2011/12/top-ten-all-time-best-selling-books-4-j.html

**link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books#More_than_100_million_copies

***(cf. Tolk's allegory of the tower in The Monsters & The Critics).

---------------

UPDATE (Jan. 27th): thanks to Allan for pointing out that 250,000,000 is a quarter-BILLION, not a quarter-million, as I'd mistyped. I've corrected this above. Thanks Allan! -- JDR

Tolkien's Nobel

So, thanks both to the MythSoc list (thanks Alana) and also friends (thanks Bijee), today I learned about the time Tolkien was nominated for a Nobel Prize. Apparently the Prize Committee seals their records regarding any particular year's deliberations for fifty years, and for the past few years a Swedish journalist named Andreas Ekstrom has examined the newly revealed results. This year it was the 1961 records that were made public, and Osterling discovered that JRRT was one of those up for the Literature prize, along with luminaries like Rbt Frost, E. M. Forster, Grahame Green, and Lawrence Durrell: the award eventually went to Ivo Andrie (whose work I confess I've never read, and know nothing about).

It's not so much that Tolkien didn't get a Nobel that's interesting as the revelation that he was ever considered for one. And so shortly after his masterpiece, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, came out (six-seven years earlier). And that his nomination came from his old friend C. S. Lewis, who'd apparently been asked as a recognition of his status as Cambridge professor.

The reasons for some candidates' rejection are strange. Frost, for example, was rejected as too old (86), while Forster was not only too old (82, I think) but something of a burn-out case (he'd only published one novel in the preceding fifty years, and that'd been over thirty years earlier) Durrell they considered obsessed w. sex. Greene came in second place (while the article doesn't say so I suspect Greene's thrillers counted against him as lowbrow 'entertainments'), and Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen) in third.

Not to have gotten the award is no disgrace -- in more recent years the committee rather pointedly refused to give it to Borges, for example, and one prominent member of the Academy went on record to say that not to have given it to Dinesen was a big mistake. It must also be said that some of the past winners strike most today as decidedly eccentric choices: I've always found it a good trivia question to ask folks if they can name the first writer in English to win the prize (Rudyard Kipling, of all people). And it's hard to feel that purely literary judgments were made when Winston Churchill got it for his histories (explaining the brilliance of his own career). But it's also gone to those whose work has stood the test of time, like Yeats (when he still had a lot of great poetry yet to write) and T. S. Eliot (who received it when he was something of a spent force, though there's no way they cd have known that at the time).

The reason given for rejecting JRRT, however, is striking. In the words of committee member Anders Osterling, "the result has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality". So we can add another name to the Edmund Wilson Hall of Fame of those who Got It Wrong. Here's the link to the piece:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/05/jrr-tolkien-nobel-prize?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly%27s+PW+Daily&utm_campaign=b0403d58d8-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email

One further interesting bit it that we'd known for several years now that C. S. Lewis considered Tolkien Nobel-worthy material, just not that he'd acted on it. In a January 7th letter to Alastair Fowler,* Lewis wrote

"In confidence. If you were asked to nominate a candidate for the Nobel Prize (literature) who wd be your choice? Mauriac has had it. Frost? Eliot? Tolkien? E. M. Forster? Do you know the ideological slant (if any) of the Swedish Academy? Keep this all under your hat"

--Collected Letters, vol. III, p 1224

I'd always assumed Lewis was just expressing an opinion (and one that did him credit), not that he was actually having an imput into who was actually getting nominated. And as we can see three of the four men he mentions did get consideration, while the fourth (TSE) had actually won the award almost a quarter-century earlier.

--John R.

*the same Lewis scholar who authenticated THE DARK TOWER

Steig Larsson and Tolkien

So, having now reached about the mid-point in the audiobook of Steig Larsson's fascinating if occasionally unpleasant novel THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (published posthumously in 2005, tr. 2008), I was surprised to find so far not one but two Tolkien references.

The first comes when the main character, disgraced reporter Mikael Blomkvist, takes time off from his latest assignment to go see a movie for a change of pace:

In the evening he went to the cinema to see The Lord of the Rings,

which he had never before had time to see. He thought that orcs,

unlike human beings, were simple and uncomplicated creatures.

--Chapter 11, page 169

This seems just part of the contemporary grounding of the novel, which is full of references to current events. However, the next goes a bit beyond that. At one point Blomkvist is suddenly confronted by one of his new neighbors, an unpleasant hermit, whose advent is described, apparently from Blomkvist's point of view, thusly:

Gollum had emerged from his cage.

--Chapter 17, page 247

That's the lot so far (I'll add an update at the bottom of this post if I come across any more): another indication of Tolkien's penetration not just into our (American/English/New Zealand/English-language) culture but indeed well beyond it.

--John R.