updating the unupdatable
Jul. 12th, 2005 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIt was some ago that I heard that Lin Carter's book on Tolkien had been updated and republished in Britain. For goodness' sake, I thought, why? Carter's brief treatise, published in 1969, had been one of the first books on Tolkien. It's clumsy, superficial, 35 years out of date, and rendered obsolete by a monumental lack of since-released information on Tolkien's biography and the content of his legendarium. About the only thing it'd be useful for today is an extraordinarily breezy four-chapter history of Western epic fantasy through the ages from Gilgamesh to E.R. Eddison.
But it's my job to keep track of Tolkien scholarship, and this book is part of the 2003 crop I have to write about this fall, so I decided I'd better take a look at it. Rather than hope I run across a copy in England next month, I ordered it with a batch of stuff I wanted from amazon.uk. Last night I went through, comparing the new version and the first edition sentence-by-sentence (I said it was brief) to see what had been changed by the reviser, Adam Roberts (whose presence is only revealed in the text in a tiny copyright-page statement).
This is really pathetic. A few of Carter's factual errors in describing The Lord of the Rings are corrected; as many are not. Some time-bound statements are updated; others are not. There's a great example in chapter 13: Carter had written, "A leading contemporary fantasy writer and critic, L. Sprague de Camp, has written that Lord Dunsany probably had the greatest influence on fantasy writers of any writer during the first half of this century." Roberts changes "contemporary" to "twentieth-century" but does not alter "this century."
Gobs of speculations and fumbling guesses about Tolkien's sources, cosmology, and literary intent, which would have been crystal clear had Carter had The Silmarillion and a Tolkien biography to work with, are left virtually untouched. Worst is in chapter 16 where Roberts allows Carter two uncut pages of awkward speculation about what Gandalf is before putting in two sentences - in Carter's voice, not his own - of clarification from the Silmarillion and not getting it right.
The only substantial additions are a page describing The Silmarillion shoehorned into a chapter still titled "Tolkien Today" despite the fact that this refers to Tolkien having been alive at the time; a few pages on Le Guin, Kay, Donaldson, Pratchett, and the other post-Tolkien fantasists added to the post-Tolkien epilogue, showing good taste but as breezily oddball in viewpoint as if Carter had written it himself; and an eccentrically selective supplement to Carter's already eccentrically selective checklist of critical literature.
The only decent thing to have done, and the best way to have respected Lin Carter's memory, would have been to junk at least 3/4 of the book and write a new one.
But it's my job to keep track of Tolkien scholarship, and this book is part of the 2003 crop I have to write about this fall, so I decided I'd better take a look at it. Rather than hope I run across a copy in England next month, I ordered it with a batch of stuff I wanted from amazon.uk. Last night I went through, comparing the new version and the first edition sentence-by-sentence (I said it was brief) to see what had been changed by the reviser, Adam Roberts (whose presence is only revealed in the text in a tiny copyright-page statement).
This is really pathetic. A few of Carter's factual errors in describing The Lord of the Rings are corrected; as many are not. Some time-bound statements are updated; others are not. There's a great example in chapter 13: Carter had written, "A leading contemporary fantasy writer and critic, L. Sprague de Camp, has written that Lord Dunsany probably had the greatest influence on fantasy writers of any writer during the first half of this century." Roberts changes "contemporary" to "twentieth-century" but does not alter "this century."
Gobs of speculations and fumbling guesses about Tolkien's sources, cosmology, and literary intent, which would have been crystal clear had Carter had The Silmarillion and a Tolkien biography to work with, are left virtually untouched. Worst is in chapter 16 where Roberts allows Carter two uncut pages of awkward speculation about what Gandalf is before putting in two sentences - in Carter's voice, not his own - of clarification from the Silmarillion and not getting it right.
The only substantial additions are a page describing The Silmarillion shoehorned into a chapter still titled "Tolkien Today" despite the fact that this refers to Tolkien having been alive at the time; a few pages on Le Guin, Kay, Donaldson, Pratchett, and the other post-Tolkien fantasists added to the post-Tolkien epilogue, showing good taste but as breezily oddball in viewpoint as if Carter had written it himself; and an eccentrically selective supplement to Carter's already eccentrically selective checklist of critical literature.
The only decent thing to have done, and the best way to have respected Lin Carter's memory, would have been to junk at least 3/4 of the book and write a new one.
