I’m not much of a Tolkien fan - not since I was about twelve or fourteen anyway (which, it strikes me, is about the right age to read and enjoy his stuff). But it would be a foolish writer in the fantasy field who failed to acknowledge the man’s overwhelming significance in the canon. And it would be a poor and superficial reader of Tolkien who failed to acknowledge that in amongst all the overwrought prose, the nauseous paeans to class-bound rural England, and the endless bloody elven singing that infests The Lord of the Rings, you can sometimes discern the traces of a bleak underlying human landscape which is completely at odds with the epic fantasy narrative for which the book is better known.
One is tempted to read this as a gentler version of the polemic directed against Tolkien in recent years by writers such as China Mieville. Me, I see and acknowledge all of the flaws people note in Tolkien; but I also think the books are big enough and complicated enough (reading them after grad school is a very different experience if you've had coursework in medieval lit) that they're impossible to boil down into a polemical talking point.
1 comment:
Unlike the rest of the world, I read LotR during a college course while studying the medieval lit Tolkien taught. I will agree that the majesty of the epic fantasy people refer to all the time has a much different shape for me.
However, the reason I didn't finish Two Towers until I was an adult was precisely because of the all the flaws people have been talking about lately. I thought it was just too boring and cliched to be bothered with. (I was so angry when I got to the last scene with the spider, though, and couldn't believe I had been missing it all those years!)
Perhaps an understanding of Tolkien and his literary background rather than military background is more useful/less disappointing.
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