So, hard to believe, but it's already more than half a year since I gave my Marquette lecture ("A Kind of Elvish Craft: Tolkien as Literary Craftsman"). My essay has now been accepted for publication, but in the process of revising it I cut out most of the opening section, which had been focused towards the oral presentation. Still, since I put a lot of work into it, and it's on a topic that means a lot to me, so thought I'd share it here. Enjoy.
Seventy years. It was almost exactly seventy years ago today* that Tolkien scholarship began, with publication of a short review of THE HOBBIT on October the 2nd, 1937 in the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, followed up a few days later (on Friday October 8th) by an even briefer piece in the London TIMES by the same anonymous reviewer (in fact, Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis**). Certainly works in what we now think of as Tolkien’s legendarium had been critiqued before--the early Earendel poems by a rather baffled G. B. Smith in 1914 (Carpenter 75, Garth 64), the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ and Lay of Turin by an equally puzzled Dickie Reynolds around 1926 (HME.III.3, HME.IV.11), and, more perceptively, the Lay of Leithian (the Beren & Luthien story) by an attentive and wholly sympathetic C. S. Lewis in 1929 (HME.III.150–151 & 315–329), the year before Tolkien began work on THE HOBBIT. But only with published commentary on a published work did the tradition of Tolkien criticism properly begin; a tradition that has continued, intermittently but in ever-growing volume, down to the present day.
And on the whole we have been fortunate. While there have been many bad books and misguided articles, from Edmund Wilson’s notorious ‘Oo Those Awful Orcs’ [1956] to more recent but equally inept examples we need not name, and many more inoffensive but unremarkable pieces, or interesting but flawed ones, there have been a number of superlative works, from Paul Kocher’s MASTER OF MIDDLE-EARTH (still after thirty-five years the best single-volume introduction to Tolkien’s work) through Tom Shippey’s THE ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH and AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY.
Indeed, in his recent review of the published proceedings from Marquette’s 2004 Tolkien Conference, Brian Rosebury conveys his sense that
". . . fairly gentle adjustments and additions are now being made to a generally accepted understanding of Tolkien’s art and thought. We are on the putting green of scholarship, as it were, rather than the fairway." --TOLKIEN STUDIES Vol. IV [2007], p. 282
Leaving aside his unfortunate metaphor, which suggests a coziness wholly at odds with the ongoing battles over the ultimate impact of the film adaptations upon Tolkien’s audience, or the continuing fratricidal struggle among Tolkien linguists, or even the exact role Tolkien’s faith did or did not play in his work, Rosebury’s remark suggests that we are now nearing the end of Tolkien scholarship: that little remains to say other than to add a few refinements upon an almost completed picture. Such a conclusion does not accord with my own impression of the field at all; in fact, I am reminded of the apocryphal story about the head of the U.S. patent office who supposedly predicted a century or so ago that there would soon be nothing left to invent; an anecdote invented solely to show that such a prediction would have been egregiously wrong.
And indeed, just the three years since the conference whose proceedings prompted Mr. Rosebury’s remarks have seen the publication of major works such as Verlyn Flieger’s INTERRUPTED MUSIC, which explains better than anywhere else just what it means to sit down and create a mythology; Marjorie Burns’s PERILOUS REALMS, which not only shows how Tolkien drew on a balance of both Norse and Celtic mythological elements but is the best analysis ever of Tolkien’s characteristic ambiguity; Christina Scull & Wayne Hammond’s J. R. R. TOLKIEN COMPANION & GUIDE, with its masses of biographical detail. And more work of comparable importance is on its way: an expanded critical edition of Tolkien’s most important essay, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, is due out soon, shortly to be followed by a collection of all Tolkien’s interviews, an important primary source never before gathered in one easily accessible place. Add to these the relatively recent advent of the journal TOLKIEN STUDIES [debuting in 2004] and the now well-established ‘Tolkien Track’ at the annual Medievalism Conference at Kalamazoo, which has produced several erudite volumes over the last four years,*** plus a number of active Tolkien websites, including the soon to be launched Tolkien Estate website, and I think you could make the case that we are in fact living in the Golden Age of Tolkien Studies, where we have a community of Tolkien scholars in regular touch with each other, constantly exchanging information and critiques of each others’ work, and increasingly beginning to collaborate on joint projects.
This is, I think, a development after Tolkien’s own heart . . .
*[Nt 1]This paper was originally delivered as the 2007 Blackwelder Lecture at Marquette University on October 4th, 2007.
**[Nt 2]Both these two brief reviews together total only a little over seven hundred words. In them, Lewis compares THE HOBBIT respectively to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and to Grahame’s THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, praising Tolkien’s world-building. Lewis of course had the advantage of having been the first outside Tolkien’s immediate family to read the book back in February 1933, immediately upon its completion, and had more recently heard it read aloud to the writers’ group to which both men belonged (and indeed had co-founded), the Inklings. The first piece is reprinted in ON STORIES, ed. Walter Hooper [1982], pages 81–82, while Douglas Anderson quotes a goodly portion from the second piece in THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT [rev. ed., 2002], page 18.
***[Nt 3]The three volumes so far are TOLKIEN THE MEDIEVALIST, ed. Jane Chance [2003]; TOLKIEN AND THE INVENTION OF MYTH, ed. Jane Chance [2004]; and TOLKIEN'S MODERN MIDDLE AGES, ed. Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers [2005].
--JDR
Monday, April 7, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Peake on Tolkien
So, today I was at Half-Price Books, buying a book I'd seen on my last visit there some weeks ago,* and I happened to come across a biography of Mervyn Peake I hadn't seen before: MERVYN PEAKE: MY EYE MINTS GOLD by Malcolm Yorke [2002]. Thumbing through the index, I found several references to Tolkien, one of which gave a second-hand account of Peake's opinion of JRRT.
"The three men [Peake, Jn Wood, and Aaron Judah] discussed ULYSSES and then Mervyn had a rather trenchant comment to make about Tolkien's THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, which had just been published. He described it as 'rather twee' and mildly mocked the character of Goldberry, Tom Bombadil's lady-friend, as 'precious' -- which proves that Peake was well aware of his better-selling rival. He always resented the critics' habit of linking them, thinking that Tolkien wrote primarily for children whilst he [Peake] wrote for adults. Tolkien's creation relied on magic and supernatural props, while Peake's fantasy world never did." (page 221)
Yorke's source for this is John Wood's piece 'Mervyn Peake: A Pupil Remembers' by one of the art students Peake tutored, published in MPR (the Mervyn Peake Review) No. 13 (Spring 1981), page 28. It's interesting to see that Peake knew about Tolkien, but cd not appreciate his work (the children vs. adults comment sounds remarkably like the sort of chuckle-headed remark that has made Edmund Wilson's name a hissing and a byword among Tolkien scholars); rather odd that it was Goldberry rather than Bombadil himself he was dismissive of. The book also included a reference to Lewis, who first read Peake in 1958 and wrote him a letter of high praise (no doubt a genuine expression of CSL's response to the first two Gormenghast books but also probably an act of charity, since Lewis knew of Peake's mental and physical breakdown of the year before); both this and another letter, I now see, are printed by Hooper in COLLECTED LETTERS OF CSL Vol. III.
--John R.
*THE FIRST EMANCIPATOR: THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF ROBERT CARTER, THE FOUNDING FATHER WHO FREED HIS SLAVES by Andrew Levy [2005].
"The three men [Peake, Jn Wood, and Aaron Judah] discussed ULYSSES and then Mervyn had a rather trenchant comment to make about Tolkien's THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, which had just been published. He described it as 'rather twee' and mildly mocked the character of Goldberry, Tom Bombadil's lady-friend, as 'precious' -- which proves that Peake was well aware of his better-selling rival. He always resented the critics' habit of linking them, thinking that Tolkien wrote primarily for children whilst he [Peake] wrote for adults. Tolkien's creation relied on magic and supernatural props, while Peake's fantasy world never did." (page 221)
Yorke's source for this is John Wood's piece 'Mervyn Peake: A Pupil Remembers' by one of the art students Peake tutored, published in MPR (the Mervyn Peake Review) No. 13 (Spring 1981), page 28. It's interesting to see that Peake knew about Tolkien, but cd not appreciate his work (the children vs. adults comment sounds remarkably like the sort of chuckle-headed remark that has made Edmund Wilson's name a hissing and a byword among Tolkien scholars); rather odd that it was Goldberry rather than Bombadil himself he was dismissive of. The book also included a reference to Lewis, who first read Peake in 1958 and wrote him a letter of high praise (no doubt a genuine expression of CSL's response to the first two Gormenghast books but also probably an act of charity, since Lewis knew of Peake's mental and physical breakdown of the year before); both this and another letter, I now see, are printed by Hooper in COLLECTED LETTERS OF CSL Vol. III.
--John R.
*THE FIRST EMANCIPATOR: THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF ROBERT CARTER, THE FOUNDING FATHER WHO FREED HIS SLAVES by Andrew Levy [2005].
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Ben Ladin as Sauron
So, I was lying on the couch last Saturday evening (a bit past six pm on Sat. March 29th), letting the over-the-counter cold medicine do its work, when I came across something both surprising and appalling. Not feeling up to watching something with subtitles and no longer having access to Book TV, I was switching back and forth between the four cable news channels (as opposed to the two I usually watch), when I caught a Tolkien reference on one of them. Fox News, which I rarely watch, was running some kind of special designed to stir up fear and trembling in the viewers, one of those Are-You-Scared-Yet?/We-Can-Make-You-Scared things. This particular one was called "JIHAD USA: HOMEGROWN TERROR" and was looking at the phenomenon of copycat attacks and would-be attacks by people who have no connection to al-Qaeda. Rather than drawing what would seem to be the obvious conclusion -- such hairbrained plots are a predictable side-effect of the war, and our conduct of the war, and unpreventable in a society as heavily (and irresponsibly) armed as ours -- they had a pundit (whose name I unfortunately missed) who saw the whole thing in terms of a Tolkien analogy:
"ben Ladin is the Lord without the Rings".
Granted, this is not an exact quote and I missed the context that had led up to this remark, but if I understood him rightly he was claiming that Ben Ladin was like Sauron, holed up in his lair, but that he'd sent the Rings of Power (jihadist doctrine) out into the world where they were working his evil (inspiring terrorist plots).
Like I said, appalling.
I consider this the down side of Tolkien's permeation of our culture: he now has admirers across the board, from the white supremacists who are forging evidence that he was sympathetic to their cause (a fraud exposed by David Doughan in a recent issue of AMON HEN) to, well, this guy.
Gah!
--JDR
current audiobook : JOHN ADAMS by David McCullough (still)
"ben Ladin is the Lord without the Rings".
Granted, this is not an exact quote and I missed the context that had led up to this remark, but if I understood him rightly he was claiming that Ben Ladin was like Sauron, holed up in his lair, but that he'd sent the Rings of Power (jihadist doctrine) out into the world where they were working his evil (inspiring terrorist plots).
Like I said, appalling.
I consider this the down side of Tolkien's permeation of our culture: he now has admirers across the board, from the white supremacists who are forging evidence that he was sympathetic to their cause (a fraud exposed by David Doughan in a recent issue of AMON HEN) to, well, this guy.
Gah!
--JDR
current audiobook : JOHN ADAMS by David McCullough (still)
Ubiquity
So, today I was in the bookstore looking at the history magazines, and the headline "FARMER GILES VERSUS PETER RABBIT" caught my eye. The magazine in question, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE (Vol. 9 no. 3), isn't one I've read before, and a quick glance showed that the article ("Myxomatosis and the Rabbit's Fight for Survival" by Peter Bartrip, pages 48-49) had nothing whatsoever to do with Tolkien or his characters but was instead a two-page account of a rabbit plague (myxomatosis) I'd only previously heard about through passing references in WATERSHIP DOWN. That made it all the more striking, to me, that they'd used the name of a Tolkien character in the attention-getting lead on the cover, especially since FARMER GILES OF HAM, while possibly the best of all Tolkien's 'minor' works, isn't exactly a household name the way, say, hobbits are. Or at least that was my impression; perhaps the Tolkien penetration of our culture goes not just wider but also deeper than I realized. Or perhaps, given the collaboratory evidence of FOYLE'S WAR, FGH might just be more popular in the UK than over here. If so, good to see it getting the attention it deserves.
current reading: THE EVOLUTION OF MIDDLE-EARTH by Eliz. Whittingham.
current reading: THE EVOLUTION OF MIDDLE-EARTH by Eliz. Whittingham.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
best GOLDEN COMPASS comment yet
Saw the following in a piece by one Colin McEnroe, reprinted in THE FUNNY TIMES (March '08 issue, page 20):
"THE GOLDEN COMPASS. That sounds like something . . . bestowed by angels and buried in a hillside in upstate New York, but it's actually a movie starring Nicole Kidman.
"The movie is based on a series of books by Philip Pullman. Some religious groups claim the books are full of Pullman's atheist, humanist rejection of all religion. And that the moviemakers took all that stuff out so the movie would sell better. You'd think that would make the atheists mad and the religious people happy, but it's the other way around, because the religious people worry that children will like the movie and read the books and decide God does not exist. Because children are shallow and untrustworthy, and you can't rely on them to just watch the movie and not go sneaking off to the library later on."
--somehow that last line's neat reversal of the complaints of generations of English teachers really gets the absurdity of the boycotters' position to me.
Speaking of THE GOLDEN COMPASS, the film is continuing to do so well overseas that the studio may go ahead and make the sequels despite their disappointment at the first installment's making "only" about seventy million dollars in the U.S. (as opposed to nearing three hundred million abroad). According to Kristin Thompson's always informative blog, a key factor will be how well the dvd does when it's released at the end of April. If so, the boycotters will have to get ready for another round, if they can distract themselves from the presidential election for long enough to do so.
For more on the story (and the continuing saga of New Line's dissolution), see
http://www.kristinthompson.net/blog/?p=226
and
http://www.kristinthompson.net/blog/?p=233
--JDR
"THE GOLDEN COMPASS. That sounds like something . . . bestowed by angels and buried in a hillside in upstate New York, but it's actually a movie starring Nicole Kidman.
"The movie is based on a series of books by Philip Pullman. Some religious groups claim the books are full of Pullman's atheist, humanist rejection of all religion. And that the moviemakers took all that stuff out so the movie would sell better. You'd think that would make the atheists mad and the religious people happy, but it's the other way around, because the religious people worry that children will like the movie and read the books and decide God does not exist. Because children are shallow and untrustworthy, and you can't rely on them to just watch the movie and not go sneaking off to the library later on."
--somehow that last line's neat reversal of the complaints of generations of English teachers really gets the absurdity of the boycotters' position to me.
Speaking of THE GOLDEN COMPASS, the film is continuing to do so well overseas that the studio may go ahead and make the sequels despite their disappointment at the first installment's making "only" about seventy million dollars in the U.S. (as opposed to nearing three hundred million abroad). According to Kristin Thompson's always informative blog, a key factor will be how well the dvd does when it's released at the end of April. If so, the boycotters will have to get ready for another round, if they can distract themselves from the presidential election for long enough to do so.
For more on the story (and the continuing saga of New Line's dissolution), see
http://www.kristinthompson.net/blog/?p=226
and
http://www.kristinthompson.net/blog/?p=233
--JDR
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Apocalypse That Wasn't
So, thinking of Russians reminded me of a news story I'd seen a few weeks back that I thought particularly striking.
Imagine this scene: it's a particularly tense moment during the Cold War, when one of the two Superpowers has just provoked the other in an incident which left hundreds of civilians dead. Both are on heightened alert; the offender on edge, waiting to see what the retaliation might be. You're the commander in charge in a secret bunker that receives all the satellite information about what the other side's doing.
Then, the unthinkable happens. The screens go red: the satellites report that other side has just launched five nuclear missiles at your country. What do you do?
All this is not a scene from an alternate cut of DR. STRANGELOVE (or, perhaps more aptly, FAIL-SAFE), but something that actually happened on September 23rd, 1983. The officer in charge was Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, who during the crucial minutes that followed disobeyed standing orders to launch a counter-strike, concluding (correctly) that the information he was receiving was erroneous and no such attack was on its way. He thereby averted nuclear war and, as a side-effect, doomed his own career; once the crisis was over, he was forced into early retirement for not following protocols. Lucky for us. If it's possible to receive a Nobel Peace Prize for NOT doing something, Lt. Col. Petrov certainly deserves one.
There's an account of the Petrov incident here:
www.gimundo.com/Articles/Daily/805/1/23/2008/The_Man_Who_Saved_the_World_by_Doing_Nothing
What's truly remarkable is that I know of at least one other similar incident on our side, when in the late seventies or early eighties during a routine test of the communications system the actual orders to attack were sent out to our nuclear missile silos in the Montana-Wyoming-Idaho area (I forget which). Not a single one of the two- or three-man crews who received the orders followed them: they all either decided not to launch, spent the time arguing amongst themselves about what to do, or contacted their superior officers demanding more information.
Thank goodness.
--JDR
"What might save us, me and you, is if the Russians love their children too" --Gordon Sumner, 1985.
Imagine this scene: it's a particularly tense moment during the Cold War, when one of the two Superpowers has just provoked the other in an incident which left hundreds of civilians dead. Both are on heightened alert; the offender on edge, waiting to see what the retaliation might be. You're the commander in charge in a secret bunker that receives all the satellite information about what the other side's doing.
Then, the unthinkable happens. The screens go red: the satellites report that other side has just launched five nuclear missiles at your country. What do you do?
All this is not a scene from an alternate cut of DR. STRANGELOVE (or, perhaps more aptly, FAIL-SAFE), but something that actually happened on September 23rd, 1983. The officer in charge was Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, who during the crucial minutes that followed disobeyed standing orders to launch a counter-strike, concluding (correctly) that the information he was receiving was erroneous and no such attack was on its way. He thereby averted nuclear war and, as a side-effect, doomed his own career; once the crisis was over, he was forced into early retirement for not following protocols. Lucky for us. If it's possible to receive a Nobel Peace Prize for NOT doing something, Lt. Col. Petrov certainly deserves one.
There's an account of the Petrov incident here:
www.gimundo.com/Articles/Daily/805/1/23/2008/The_Man_Who_Saved_the_World_by_Doing_Nothing
What's truly remarkable is that I know of at least one other similar incident on our side, when in the late seventies or early eighties during a routine test of the communications system the actual orders to attack were sent out to our nuclear missile silos in the Montana-Wyoming-Idaho area (I forget which). Not a single one of the two- or three-man crews who received the orders followed them: they all either decided not to launch, spent the time arguing amongst themselves about what to do, or contacted their superior officers demanding more information.
Thank goodness.
--JDR
"What might save us, me and you, is if the Russians love their children too" --Gordon Sumner, 1985.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Medvedev the Beorning
So, yesterday's post about bumblebees reminded me of one point I forgot to mention, that the genus name for bumblebees is BOMBUS. I've always wondered if this might have been an element in Bombadil's name, but never followed up on it because I can't see the application.
However, thinking about Tolkienesque names reminded me of the amusement and sympathy I felt when watching the last debate as the two exhausted candidates struggling to both remember and then pronounce the name of the new Russian president who's replacing Putin. When I saw his name in print a few days later I at once realized we now, for the first time so far as I am aware, have a world leader who shares a surname with one of Tolkien's characters.* For 'Medvedev' is simply 'Medved' + the nominclative suffix '-ev', and 'Medved' is just a slightly different spelling of MEDWED. And Medwed is, of course, the original name of the character now more familiar as BEORN. Medwed's appearance in the draft of THE HOBBIT marked one of the very rare usages of a Slavic name by Tolkien, and Medved+ev is a pretty good parallel to Beorn+ing, the name applied in latter days for 'the people of Beorn'.
--JDR
*I know one of the Sackvilles was pretty prominent in English politics back in Elizabeth's days, being in what we wd call her cabinet, but he never rose to head of state.
However, thinking about Tolkienesque names reminded me of the amusement and sympathy I felt when watching the last debate as the two exhausted candidates struggling to both remember and then pronounce the name of the new Russian president who's replacing Putin. When I saw his name in print a few days later I at once realized we now, for the first time so far as I am aware, have a world leader who shares a surname with one of Tolkien's characters.* For 'Medvedev' is simply 'Medved' + the nominclative suffix '-ev', and 'Medved' is just a slightly different spelling of MEDWED. And Medwed is, of course, the original name of the character now more familiar as BEORN. Medwed's appearance in the draft of THE HOBBIT marked one of the very rare usages of a Slavic name by Tolkien, and Medved+ev is a pretty good parallel to Beorn+ing, the name applied in latter days for 'the people of Beorn'.
--JDR
*I know one of the Sackvilles was pretty prominent in English politics back in Elizabeth's days, being in what we wd call her cabinet, but he never rose to head of state.
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