B2MEM
Here is my last quote for Back-to-Middle-Earth Month. It is from J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey.
There is an awful lot I would love to quote from this book, which sets out the premise that JRRT was the greatest author of the twentieth century. No arguments from me on that! Although there are some from many critics, whom Shippey shows simply do not understand the reasons behind Tolkien’s popularity.
However, the section I am going to quote from first seems to me to have particular relevance to our little fanfic corner of the fandom, as he speaks to the influence Tolkien had on other writers. While Shippey is talking about published professional authors, I think much of his observations apply to those of us who merely write for love instead of money. Since these are rather lengthy quotations, I will put them behind a cut.
It is a relief to turn from hate and fear to love and admiration. Any full study of Tolkien’s many imitators would have to be at least book-length-incidentally, and to be fair, the entry on ‘Fantasy Fiction’ in the Drabble Companion is just as long as the one on ‘Modernism’: modesty prevents me from recommending it,. But there is some interest in recording what a few of his most evident emulators have found inspirational in Tolkien, as in noting what they leave alone, or cannot approach.
At the most elementary level, reading Tolkien produced a strong desire for more stories about hobbits--a desire which Sir Stanley Unwin had identified as far back as 1937. Writing stories about hobbits pure and simple has remained difficult, however, as hobbits (in spite of The Denham Tracts and the OED) remain so clearly a Tolkien invention. Various evasions have been tried--there is an anthology called, rather unfortunately, Hobbits, Halflings, Warrows and Wee Folk; the Martin Greenberg anthology of stories in honour of Tolkien, After the King contains Dennis McKiernan’s ‘The Halfling House’. None of these efforts is very successful at catching the hobbit flavour, of course, increasingly anachronistic evening its modern or Edwardian aspect, especially for American writers and readers.
At a slightly higher level, some fans seem just to want to write (and read) The Lord of the Rings all over again. In Diana Wynne Jones’s excellent and not at all Tolkienian fantasy Fire and Hemlock (1984), the girl-heroine discovers The Lord of the Rings at the age, seemingly, of about fourteen, and reads it through four times running. She then immediately writes an adventure story about herself and her own mentor/father figure.”
Shippey goes on to discuss several modern fantasy writers’ works and what they borrowed ( and failed to borrow) from Tolkien.
He also talks about the critics of fantasy who denigrate it with the argument that such stories are “not true” because they have fantastical and supernatural elements. But he quite correctly points out that “realistic” fiction is “not true” either, since it is also about made-up people and situations. He argues that fantasy’s greatest strength is its ability to cast the world around us into metaphorical terms. And he concludes:
“I believe that it is our ability to read metaphorically which has made Tolkien’s stories directly relevant to the twentieth century. We do not expect to meet Ringwraiths, but ‘wraithing’ is a genuine danger; we do not expect to meet dragons, but the ‘dragon-sickness’ is perfectly common; there is no Fangorn, but Sarumans are everywhere. It may indeed be the readiness with which these points are taken which has made Tolkien seem, not irrelevant, but downright threatening to members of the cultural Establishment. Be that as it may, what Tolkien certainly did was introduce a new, or possibly re-introduce an old and forgotten taste into the literary world. A taste, a trace-element, perhaps a necessary literary vitamin? Whatever one calls it, to use the words of Holofernes, Shakespeare’s pedant-poet in Love’s Labour Lost, if not in the way that Holofernes meant them:
‘The gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it."
I hope all of you have enjoyed these quotations. It has been fun to search them out and present them to you. And if you have never read some of the books in question, I do hope that you get the chance at some point to do so. All of them were written by those who also love Tolkien and his work.
There is an awful lot I would love to quote from this book, which sets out the premise that JRRT was the greatest author of the twentieth century. No arguments from me on that! Although there are some from many critics, whom Shippey shows simply do not understand the reasons behind Tolkien’s popularity.
However, the section I am going to quote from first seems to me to have particular relevance to our little fanfic corner of the fandom, as he speaks to the influence Tolkien had on other writers. While Shippey is talking about published professional authors, I think much of his observations apply to those of us who merely write for love instead of money. Since these are rather lengthy quotations, I will put them behind a cut.
It is a relief to turn from hate and fear to love and admiration. Any full study of Tolkien’s many imitators would have to be at least book-length-incidentally, and to be fair, the entry on ‘Fantasy Fiction’ in the Drabble Companion is just as long as the one on ‘Modernism’: modesty prevents me from recommending it,. But there is some interest in recording what a few of his most evident emulators have found inspirational in Tolkien, as in noting what they leave alone, or cannot approach.
At the most elementary level, reading Tolkien produced a strong desire for more stories about hobbits--a desire which Sir Stanley Unwin had identified as far back as 1937. Writing stories about hobbits pure and simple has remained difficult, however, as hobbits (in spite of The Denham Tracts and the OED) remain so clearly a Tolkien invention. Various evasions have been tried--there is an anthology called, rather unfortunately, Hobbits, Halflings, Warrows and Wee Folk; the Martin Greenberg anthology of stories in honour of Tolkien, After the King contains Dennis McKiernan’s ‘The Halfling House’. None of these efforts is very successful at catching the hobbit flavour, of course, increasingly anachronistic evening its modern or Edwardian aspect, especially for American writers and readers.
At a slightly higher level, some fans seem just to want to write (and read) The Lord of the Rings all over again. In Diana Wynne Jones’s excellent and not at all Tolkienian fantasy Fire and Hemlock (1984), the girl-heroine discovers The Lord of the Rings at the age, seemingly, of about fourteen, and reads it through four times running. She then immediately writes an adventure story about herself and her own mentor/father figure.”
Shippey goes on to discuss several modern fantasy writers’ works and what they borrowed ( and failed to borrow) from Tolkien.
He also talks about the critics of fantasy who denigrate it with the argument that such stories are “not true” because they have fantastical and supernatural elements. But he quite correctly points out that “realistic” fiction is “not true” either, since it is also about made-up people and situations. He argues that fantasy’s greatest strength is its ability to cast the world around us into metaphorical terms. And he concludes:
“I believe that it is our ability to read metaphorically which has made Tolkien’s stories directly relevant to the twentieth century. We do not expect to meet Ringwraiths, but ‘wraithing’ is a genuine danger; we do not expect to meet dragons, but the ‘dragon-sickness’ is perfectly common; there is no Fangorn, but Sarumans are everywhere. It may indeed be the readiness with which these points are taken which has made Tolkien seem, not irrelevant, but downright threatening to members of the cultural Establishment. Be that as it may, what Tolkien certainly did was introduce a new, or possibly re-introduce an old and forgotten taste into the literary world. A taste, a trace-element, perhaps a necessary literary vitamin? Whatever one calls it, to use the words of Holofernes, Shakespeare’s pedant-poet in Love’s Labour Lost, if not in the way that Holofernes meant them:
‘The gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it."
I hope all of you have enjoyed these quotations. It has been fun to search them out and present them to you. And if you have never read some of the books in question, I do hope that you get the chance at some point to do so. All of them were written by those who also love Tolkien and his work.