It was all a long time ago. :eek:
As a teenager I sent him a short note, and got a polite typed reply with a signature.
It’s always slightly unsettling when you contact your heroes. To be honest, my best moment was when I met Kasparov (the chess equivalent of Tolkien!)
Replying to SampletheDog, who said “Haven’t read Hobbit in a couple decades. It’s not my fave. Probably should go back and dip into it again, though. Would like to read the original side-by-side with the post-trilogy version, in fact. Can the old one still be had, without springing for a rare book?”
The best thing to do would be to get The Annotated Hobbit . The editor lays out and compares the differences between all the various editions. Lots of nice illustrations too. I checked it out from the library.
And in regard to the original post - I find in “real life” I still don’t meet many other Tolkien fans, whether long-term (like me) or recent. Only on message boards.
I find this to still be true. The people I know (in general) think I am nuts for re-reading the books after I saw the movies. They don’t think there’s a point.
My proudest moment, though, was introducing and converting my best friend to the world of Tolkien. I find that she knows the movies better than I do, whereas I know the books better than her.
Still, it’s nice to have someone to talk to about it. And it’s even nicer to meet people who know tons more than I do. I love all the Tolkien fans on the Dope. Thank you for broadening my knowledge.
Allow me to agree with the sentiment expressed here, I’ve got 20 years of enjoyment out of the professor’s works and am glad that that 2 decades now lies ahead of a new generation. The works of the mind are not diminished by being shared among many.
I would agree, and Tolkien certainly did. I’m sure he would have loved to see the new twists on his tales in the films, for example, and the production of entirely new stories of Middle Earth.
But the OP isn’t about that, really. (As I said above, I think the resurgence in Tolkien’s popularity is a wonderful thing.) It’s about that little glimmer of loss one can feel when one’s wishes come true.
When the desert becomes green, that’s a good thing, to be sure… but at the same time, there’s a feeling of nostalgia, or perhaps more accurately “saudage”, irrational though it may be, of knowing that you’re losing the special thrill that comes from stumbling upon the oasis.
It’s kind of like with your kids. What a thrill to watch them grow up. But they’ll never be your little ones again, so especially yours.
It feels kindof like what I think my father must feel when he says that his grandkids will never understand how special it could be to get an orange or a banana in the Christmas stocking. It’s not that he wishes they had less (God knows he indulges them enough) or that we could go back to the old days. It’s just a memory in the mind that can sometimes catch you and give you pause.
There were always lots of people who read the books. The Lord of the Rings is far and away the best-selling novel of all time and it was so long before the movies came out. I’ve spent most of my adult life hanging out with other Tolkien freaks. (And, incidentally, many of us don’t like the movies.) You might be interested in the Mythopoeic Society:
and in Tolkien 2005 this summer in Birmingham, England:
Looks like a wonderful thing! I could go there and have meaningful discussions about the transmogrification of the Wizard-King of Angmar (a Numenorian member of the wizardly order, seduced by Sauron) into the Witch-King of Angmar.
When I try to have a meaningful dialogue about this issue with people at work, they just look at me funny.
According to the Internet Public Library, that distinction belongs to The Valley of the Dolls, followed by Gone with the Wind. A dozen others are listed as “World’s Bestselling Fiction” – Tolkien doesn’t appear among them.
Guinness lists Agatha Christie as the world’s best-selling fiction author. A search on their site for “Tolkien” yields no hits.
Qadgop the Mercotan, I don’t know where you live, but Mythcon is being held in Seattle in 2006 and in Norman, Oklahoma in 2007.
LoTR was one of the first things I and my stepmother bonded over, so the trilogy has had a rather special significance to me since I was about eleven years old. I was really too young when I first tried to tackle The Silmarlillion, but after a few abortive attempts, I really got into it. From then on I read pretty much everything Tolkien wrote on the subject of Middle Earth, though I never got so deep into it that I could speak in Sindarin or write capably using the Fëanorean letters.
I’m ambivalent about the films. Many aspects were well done, but I found some of the characterization of the “smaller” roles (Gimli, especially) to be extremely hokey, and at times a little insulting. I understood going in that changes had to be made, but some of the changes were, IMO, simply egregious. I’ve considered trying to rip the EEs and produce a “Phantom Edit” of my own to excise the bits I found especially grating.
My impression of the new fandom is many of them think the films are what JRRT was all about. My guess is the Professor would have been appalled at this. If the films brought more people to the writings of JRRT (and there’s every indication they have), then that’s a Good Thing. It just pains me somethimes to think that the films are all of Middle Earth that some folks will ever see, and the fans of that adaptation may come to embody the fandom as much as the readers, producing an even more “deplorable cultus” than the hippies, who’s love of a certain “pipe weed” Prof. Tolkien reviled.
According to The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash, The Lord of the Rings has sold over 100,000,000 copies. The list of the best-selling books of all time is given as follows in that book:
A footnote at the bottom of the list says that Gone with the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird have probably sold close to 30,000,000 copies.
Ack, it’s “Guinness.”
Wow. That’s quite a discrepancy with ILP. But ILP does admit that verifying sales figures is dicey. I wonder if Ash is lumping the sales of all 3 books together, while ILP is considering them separately.
I can’t prove it, and I may even be dead wrong, but what I recall from many of JRR’s letters leads me to think that he would be ok with that – as long as not everybody stopped there, of course.
As a literary traditionalist myself, to my mind JRR’s writings (and much of Christopher’s later publications) should always stand as the canon, such as it is (and it is not without controversy). But if that’s all we ever got, we’d be left with something of a beautiful corpse. For Tolkien’s world to live and breathe, it must be elaborated, reinterpreted, reinvented, added to.
Sure, there are thousands of people who will never go farther than the films. But what’s so bad about that, really? To me, part of the greatness of JRR’s achievement is that it allows for elaboration.
True, folks who don’t go beyond the films will never get the full poignancy of Elrond’s struggle with how to handle his daughter’s love of Aragorn, for example, because they don’t know the backstory, or the parallels with other tales. But then, given the scope and complexity of Ea, that’s simply inevitable.
There is an assumption on the part of many snobs in the arts and in academia that anything which is embraced by the unwashèd masses must, ipso facto, be garbage. Many critics and scholars operate under the assumption that as long as the fan base is limited to a certain enlightened clique of literate souls, a thing can be looked upon as having artistic merit. But now that Tolkien’s works have been accepted by the common steaming herd (albeit in cinematic form), the snobs will decry them as overrated, lacking in depth, politically incorrect (with racist undertones), and unworthy of serious scholarship. Naturally, the true devotees will ignore the turned-up noses and will persist in their enthusiasm for all things Tolkien. But I believe that at least some budding scholars who might otherwise have turned their attentions and their insights to JRRT’s works will discouraged by the more elitist voices in academia.
I welcome the renewed interest. As a matter of fact, I was somewhat depressed near the end of last summer in the trough between the release of the theatrical version of RotK on DVD and the release in December of the EE because there weren’t any discussions going on in here about Middle-Earth. I LIKE being able to talk about the spiritual natures of the Free Peoples and how they differ from each other, or about how the bailiwicks of the individual Valar tended to shape their relationships with the Free Peoples. We don’t get to talk about that kind of thing much when there are only three or four of us here who care.
Now, of course, we’re hitting the ebb portion of the EE wave, and have only a massive Special Edition Trilogy release to hope for to stir conversation…
Kizarvexius writes:
> But now that Tolkien’s works have been accepted by the common steaming
> herd (albeit in cinematic form), the snobs will decry them as overrated, lacking in
> depth, politically incorrect (with racist undertones), and unworthy of serious
> scholarship.
But that’s not what happened. From the publication of The Lord of the Rings to the first wave of popularity in the mid-1960’s, Tolkien’s works were mostly ignored by the literary establishment. There were a few academic types who liked it and a small band of fans, but it was mostly unknown at that point. In so far as the literary establishment thought about it at all, they thought that The Lord of the Rings was beneath their notice because it was fantasy, a genre that wasn’t worth discussing (and, what’s more, it wasn’t depressing and nihilistic, which was always a bonus in making something literarily important in their view). When the first burst of popularity occurred (because of the controversy over the Ace Books editions), the distaste of the literary establishment towards the books continued, although now they felt they had to make their distaste better known.
Over the next thirty years, the attitude of the literary establishment slowly mellowed towards the books. Partly this was because many fans of The Lord of the Rings ended up going into academia themselves. There were thus quite a few people teaching in college English departments who were fans of the books and they published a fair amount of Tolkien scholarship. By the mid-1990’s, the situation in the literary establishment had settled into the way it stands today. There is a fairly large group of literary types who think of The Lord of the Rings as being a great work of literature. There is another large group who think of it as hackwork. There is a larger proportion whose views fall somewhere between. The release of the movies hasn’t really much affected the literary establishment’s view of the books.
My experience has been similar to Wendell’s. Tolkien was largely disdained in the circles I worked in, despite being head and shoulders above nearly all other writers in the curriculum as far as scholarly/academic creds and, now more than ever, casting a longer shadow than many.
Lumping the trilogy etc as “fantasy” really burned my cheese. (I had greater respect for the creative writing faculty who disliked him because he wasn’t a great stylist, which is a reasonable argument, imho.)
So while freshmen, in required classes, were treated to translations of Asian graffiti transcribed from immigration detention center walls, the best writer in one of my level 1 writing classes was refused admission to level 2 because his genre was sci fi.
From the “Note on the Text” in the Collector’s Edition of The Lord of the Rings published by Houghton Mifflin…
Regardless of story structure, for the purpose of sales there are three books. And it is a valid question if Tolkien’s numbers are inflated by each purchase counting three times (except for those people who get it in one volume, of course).