Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and the wonderful Silmarillion are all false documents–that is, part of the narrative conceit is that they are translations of much older works rather than the creations of Professor Tolkien’s fertile imagination.
Imagine that the idea that the stories are not original is, itself, the falsehood. Imagine that JRRT did in fact come into possession of ancient manuscripts and translated them, and was obliged to publish them as fiction rather than folklore simply because no one would believe him otherwise. Would that change your opinion of him for the better or for the worse?
Translating a work from another language, especially from an extremely obscure language (as Adunaic must be, to anyone modern) or from fragmentary sources (as any book so old must be), and doing so well, is a task nearly as difficult as writing the work in the first place. Plus, there’s whatever work must have gone into recovering the original manuscripts in the first place. So overall, I think my opinion, if anything, would go up.
As is clear from the Unfinished Tales, even the sources we have- whether original to Tolkien or not- have different versions and accounts of events (and in some cases, literally how handwriting is interpreted). So it works either way.
I think you’re basically asking what we think of Tolkien’s writing style, yes?
I am one who finds his prose to be tedious for the most part. I tried reading The Silmarillion a couple of times, but I always fell asleep within minutes of opening the book. I think LOTR is more readable–but it’s a great story in spite of his style, not because of it. I’ve read LOTR multiple times, and each time the faults (IMHO) in his writing style are more apparent. Especially the lack of a more personal, emotional connection to the characters.
I (and I think most of his fans) appreciate the richness in breadth and depth of the world he created*. If he hadn’t written the story and invented Middle Earth from his own imagination (heavily influenced by “real” mythology, of course) then yes, it would lessen my opinion of him. In other words, he was a great ‘idea man’ but not a great writer of prose. If the ideas weren’t his, then he wouldn’t be anything special.
*Granted, if it weren’t for his meticulous attention to detail, then Middle Earth might not feel as real, but that depth could have been conveyed in a more economical way in the novels.
Mrs. Rhymer’s official position is that the books are exactly what they say they are. When I bought HOME last year, she commented that Christopher Tolkien is a lying hack. Tangent, you’re entitled to your opinion of the Greater Perfesser’s* writing style, wrongheaded though it may be. What I mean is–for example-- that some persons object to LOTR, in particular, because of the scarcity of women in the story, and the idealized portrayal of the non-Eowyn female characters. If the GP’s most famous works were exactly what he claimed, that would be a less valid critcism.
Although I love Lord of the Rings itself (I’m not a huge fan of JRRT’s other writings), it never really occurred to me to have an “opinion” of Tolkien himself. So the answer is no, it wouldn’t change.
Absolutely (actually, doing the translation as well as Tolkien would have had to have done, would very likely have been much much harder than merely writing the books - creating a new translation of “The Aenied” is a task that takes a devoted scholar many years of effort - and that is translating from a language that is well known, and from a cultural matrix that is well known also).
My opinion of fiction writers would generally be made up of two broad categories - what I think of their work technically/stylistically, and creatively/imaginatively. If Tolkien were a translator, with respect to the LOTR extended body of work, and not the author of a fiction series, then only the first would apply, and I’m not a big fan of the writing style, though ‘the hobbit’ is much better than LOTR itself in that respect.
The whole thing ranks very high as a work of the imagination, in terms of the strength of the characterization and so on, but if they were translations, then little of that would be a credit to JRR.
You have to understand that I really enjoyed all of the academic pedantry that LOTR was decorated with. So I’m kind of of two minds on the subject. On the whole, I think that having the academese be real would be excessively cool. Although I think that if the academese had been real, there would have been more of it.
That’s basically how I responded, but it appears Skald is looking for something different. The OP isn’t very clear, but his response to my first post clarifies things a little. I guess it’s more about the societal ideas and values presented in Tolkien’s work.
Would it lessen my opinion of JRRT if hobbits were real, and were possibly still around? Hello? I’d go looking for hobbits immediately. And JRRT would be the first person to discover another living cousin of H. Sapiens, so I figure he’d do rather well as well.
I think my opinion of Tolkien would go up considerably.
I love LOTR, but for the most part the guy wasted his life and his considerable intellect making up a history, languages, and vast rambling mythology for a world which did not exist. We got one one long, complex and marvelous story out of it, and one decent children’s book, but LOTR and The Hobbit are just the tips of the iceberg. Most of the rest of what he wrote is tedious and/or fragmentary, and really for fanatics only. For the vast effort Tolkien putinto his world, we got precious little readable stuff out of it. (Also, in some ways I feel that knowing too much about the whole mythology of Arda actually diminishes the impact of LOTR. Much of its appeal comes from the sense of hidden, mysterious depths, and when you find out what was in those depths it can be disappointing. I kind of wish I had never found out about Iluvetar and Beleriand and all that.)
On the other hand, if these were real, manuscripts that he had translated, either based in historical fact or some real culture’s mythology, he would have been doing valuable historical and anthropological work, and we would still have got LOTR out of it.
That seems harsh. Tolkien had a long and respectable academic career. His published lecture “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics” is considered a turning point in its field of literary criticism. Fiction was an unexpectedly profitable sideline and world-building was something he loved doing.
But that’s far more than we get from most writers.
Yeah, that’s right, I said it–Lewis is lesser than Tolkien. With the qualification that Till WE have Faces is better than Lord of the Rings.
(Though either is greater than Donaldson. Far, far greater.)
Wanna make something of it?
I don’t think you need the adverb in that last sentence. Or, rather, you should change it to pretty damn.
What I mean is–for example-- that some persons object to LOTR, in particular, because of the scarcity of women in the story, and the idealized portrayal of the non-Eowyn female characters. If the GP’s most famous works were exactly what he claimed, that would be a less valid critcism.