Reading with some interest Carpenter’s bio of Tolkien, which though guilty of verging on eulogy at times, as well as evincing a tendency to gloss over important points and make unsupported assertions*, is exceptionally well written, I was particularly struck by a comment Tollers made in respect of the fan mail he received from readers who took the book “almost as history” and wanted more details on various arcane points. “I’m not at all sure,” he wrote, “that the tendency to treat this whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good - certainly not for me, who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive.”
On a personal note, how strange to reflect that I had performed before a packed Merton College Hall in the Merton Revue almost 20 years to the day after Tolkien had given his valedictory address at the same venue.
*The reader is struck in particular by Carpenter’s unsupported claim that Lewis was possessed of many more prejudices than Tolkien.
Oh, Gil-the-Lad was an elven king, doo dah, doo dah
Ob him de harpers sadly sing
Oh, de doo dah day
Gwine to mourn all night
Gwine to mourn all day
We’s all goin’ to de West
Hence this four page lay.
I read the Carpenter Bio over 20 years ago so I don’t remember much about it anymore.
I recall Tolkien was surprised by the huge response in popularity he got in the 60’s. When he found that people wanted to Journey to Middle-Earth and were using the LotR as a form of escapism he was disappointed. I never fully understood why.
I recall a humorous anecdote that I think I read in the Carpenter Bio.
Tolkien was at a function in the mid 60’s and he was introduced to Ava Gardner the Hollywood actress. His reply was something along the lines of “I hope that works out for you”. Neither one had any idea who the other was.
I read the biography relatively recently, but have forgotten much of it. Is this the book that quotes the prof as referring to LOTR fans as “My deplorable cultus?”
What can one say? Tollers was a geek. A language geek, a puzzle geek, a history geek, and really, really, really into mythic tales.
He did an amazing job in creating his universe, and managed to have millions upon millions of folks want to come and play in it. Hell, I love my hot tub, but I don’t want just anybody jumping in it with me!
Not sure if that made sense, but it’s been a hell of a week.
I think Tollers would not have taken kindly to being called a geek, although he acknowledged, and felt a great deal of guilt about, his obsessiveness, and the huge amount of time he wasted, which otherwise might have been spent more profitably on his academic work and his family.
I’ll dig out some of the contemporaneous reviews of The Lord of the Rings, which make for splendid reading and echo many of the comments, both positive and negative, that have been made here over the past year or so. The one-dimensional depiction of women was picked up by both appreciative and not so appreciative critics and commentators.
I was interested to learn that Lewis wrote T’s obit more than a decade before he (Tollers) actually died.
Smiling Bandit, just seen your question. Nothing off limits. All questions, comments, opinions, reflections welcome.
Yeah, well… truth can be painful. I’ve not liked some of the labels applied to me, yet many of them had more than a grain of truth to them.
I respect the man’s work quite a bit, and consider him to have been quite a decent person, based on what I’ve read of him. But he did have that magnificent obsession. It cost him some things, even as it enriched him and his family. It enriched many other people too, in many ways.
