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time-traveling with Tolkien
Jun. 13th, 2005 07:22 amYesterday we celebrated our wedding anniversary by having the Mythopoeic Society discussion group over to talk about The Lord of the Rings on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of volume 3. We had a good discussion. I mentioned the curious fact that most attacks on the book miss the point and sometimes - as with complaints that Sauron should have been brought on-stage - actually criticize Tolkien for his wisest decisions. Curiously, hardly any anti-Tolkien writers have ever caught what I consider to be the book's genuine flaws. (No, I'm not going to tell you what they are.)
I've been reading a lot of the earliest reviews, which seem to divide into two classes: those both favorable and unfavorable which seem to be bewildered by the book and uncertain how to describe it, and favorable ones which tend to burble in a way that would be incomprehensible to someone who hadn't read the book. The latter category includes some of Tolkien's best-known advocates, including W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, and Naomi Mitchison.
I kept thinking that I could have done better than that. So I set myself a challenge, a mental exercise. You might try the same.
Here's the setup. You are a person who has read The Hobbit (at whatever age you actually read it at). You are now an adult (if you weren't one already), it's 1954, and you are writing book reviews for a newspaper. Completely to your surprise - for you hadn't heard that such a book was coming out - you are handed The Fellowship of the Ring. The two announced successor volumes haven't been published yet. Your job is to read and review it.
Stepping outside the frame, then: try to cast out of your mind everything you've read and thought in retrospect about the work, and everything that's happened in the fantasy genre since then, and look at the book afresh with memories of your initial unfiltered reaction. And then, as best as you are able, write the review you would have written, for a completely fresh and unknowing audience, in 1954.
( Here's mine. )
I've been reading a lot of the earliest reviews, which seem to divide into two classes: those both favorable and unfavorable which seem to be bewildered by the book and uncertain how to describe it, and favorable ones which tend to burble in a way that would be incomprehensible to someone who hadn't read the book. The latter category includes some of Tolkien's best-known advocates, including W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, and Naomi Mitchison.
I kept thinking that I could have done better than that. So I set myself a challenge, a mental exercise. You might try the same.
Here's the setup. You are a person who has read The Hobbit (at whatever age you actually read it at). You are now an adult (if you weren't one already), it's 1954, and you are writing book reviews for a newspaper. Completely to your surprise - for you hadn't heard that such a book was coming out - you are handed The Fellowship of the Ring. The two announced successor volumes haven't been published yet. Your job is to read and review it.
Stepping outside the frame, then: try to cast out of your mind everything you've read and thought in retrospect about the work, and everything that's happened in the fantasy genre since then, and look at the book afresh with memories of your initial unfiltered reaction. And then, as best as you are able, write the review you would have written, for a completely fresh and unknowing audience, in 1954.
( Here's mine. )
