There’s a very interesting & (I’m afraid) long article on Tolkein at
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n22/turn2322.htm
which I thought people here might find worth reading. I’m sure it will offend Rings fans since, while it’s not a mere debunking, Diski certainly doesn’t rate the Rings very highly–but it’s got interesting things to say.
eeeeeee…
intelligentsia glurge
“This is familiar theory-of-Postmodernism territory, but with another curious turn. For this strange emotion - what Douglas Adams might have called ‘the long toothache of the soul’ - isn’t a late 20th-century Hollywood add-on, but Tolkien himself, through and through…”
i cant i cant i cant
[helpless whimpering noises]
going back over to gq now…
jesus h christ i have spent what seems like an hour and read less than half of it!
It IS long, and rather tedious, yet not quite as annoying as that pompous useless logorrhea-ridden Tolkien.
Damn interesting article. I had never seen it that way before.
I agree the article was interesting, but his comments make me want to ask, “And he’s got a hair up his butt about it, why, exactly?” His thesis seems to be that since the book was panned by critics when it first appeared, it must be garbage. This notion is only reinforced by the fact that Tolkien was an anal-retentive nut with Luddite and proto-environmentalist leanings, and that his novel was therefore embraced by (horrors!) the 1960’s counterculture. And so Diski repents of his former infatuation with LOTR, much as a recovering heroin addict abjures his former enslavement by the drug.
What a sad shame. If only he’d been arrested at an early age, he wouldn’t have wasted so many neurons on a silly fantasy. But what exactly is the objection? English literature has a proud tradition of fantasy writing, the most prominent example being perhaps Midsummer Night’s Dream. Of course, MND is firmly rooted in Western classical tradition, and even the play within the play is straight out of Greek history. Does that make this fantasy more acceptable than LOTR? I swear, I’ve never been the sort who goes around chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go”, but I can’t help but wonder if some sort of allusion to Cicero, Plato or Aristophanes would have made LOTR more palatable for Diski.
So JRRT was a silly old academic who invented a world and then wrote a very long novel to “run” it. What of it? Most of my favorite novels are long. And for my money, LOTR is one of the great imaginative works of English literature.
So there.