There and back again

This morning I came across a great post by Michael Drout, called Children of Húrin or, Tolkien: The Scholars and the Critics. It’s a brilliant response to Bryan Appleyard’s review of The Children of Húrin, and it does a much better job at expressing what I tried to say in a comment a few days ago.

The premise is this: “The Lord of the Rings and, now, The Children of Húrin sets out to do something that was previously impossible: write a new story that gives the reader the impression of reading a very, very old one.” Exactly! People complain that Tolkien’s style is unreadable, overly verbose, etc., but “…we learn that Tolkien was concerned about style, just in, apparently, the wrong way. He was interested in the style of Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Norse sagas ‘and, especially in this latest book… Wagner’” (emphasis in original).

Continuing on:

Unlike other imitative fantasy, Tolkien’s work produces the “feel” of reading myth. His layers of poems, stories, anecdotes, annals and sketches works to produce the kind of textuality otherwise possessed only by works that have been handled by many writers and readers over many centuries. No one else has managed this feat, before or since…

See, not only the style but also all of the accessory elements (the poems and stories and such) come together to create a new myth. Readers need to read it as a myth, not as a contemporary novel. It’s not Dan Brown. ~grateful shudder~ If you do read it as something meant to be old, something that could have come from 800s or 900s, then all of the stylistic “problems” melt away.

Drout goes on to make a lovely case against the critics. One last quote (and I highly recommend the post itself):

Appleyard’s comparison to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is telling. White’s work is infused with irony, that all-purpose condiment of modernist writers, critics and journalists. Tolkien has really very little interest in that kind of irony (which often is, to my mind, superficial, though not in White’s case). But irony is easy for the critic, and it allows him or her to present a pose of superiority, which is essential if you are going to tell people what they should or should not like (rather than, say, explain how an aesthetic artifact produces its effects on different readers). It is an additional layer of irony: not only does the reader know things that the character do not, the critic is assumed to know things, important things, that the author does not.

Bingo. This is why I am not a big fan of literary critics. (Or at least not the modern movements.)

Here here! I completely agree! I don’t understand why people can’t understand what Tolkien was trying and did accomplish. He was trying to make his works look and read as if they were ancient texts - he was creating an epic for England. His works are complete genius when you realize what their intent was instead of trying to read them like you were reading “Harry Potter.”

Bingo. It still utterly amazes me that Tolkien was able to pull off what he did. Nobody before or since has even come close. (They say that Jorge Luis Borges has been closest, but I haven’t read anything by him yet so that’s all I’ll say.)

I was fortunate enough to first read LOTR when I was in fourth grade, before I had many pre=conceived notions about novels, and LONG before I knew anything about criticism. I think it was precisely the sense of layered histories that made it all seem so REAL, and it was the cadence of the language that reinforced the grand sweep of his vision. For several years I regarded Tolkien as THE greatest author of all time, and even now, multiple decades and thousands of books later, I rank him in the top echelon.

Thanks for your comment, Ellen. You have good taste. :) I’ve been reading Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth, by the way, and it’s an excellent book. I’m savoring every page.