mythopoeic scholarship

[calimac]

I've managed to slot in a day at the well-equipped Stanford libraries, reading up for the Mythopoeic Scholarship Awards, whose first-ballot deadline is coming up. We don't release the first ballot (because the nomination threshold is too small to be meaningful), so I shouldn't tell you which books I liked - some of which I liked a whole lot - and which I didn't, but I can share some tidbits from the latter.

Here's a book which speaks breezily about Tolkien, and has a few insightful things to say about him, but is so packed with minor, niggling factual errors that I can't endorse it.
No, Tolkien did not go to boarding school.
It's misleading to speak of Tolkien's father "taking his young family to Africa," since neither of the children had been born yet.
It's nasty to speak of Tolkien's return to England as if his mother had taken the children and abandoned Africa, and her husband in it, because she couldn't stand the place; and even nastier to imply that Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien's authorized biographer, was dissembling regarding her motives.
Tolkien's mother died of diabetes, because "insulin had not yet been invented." Actually, insulin was invented by God in 3760 B.C. or whenever he did his inventing. What wasn't yet available was injectable insulin for diabetics.
"Wizard ... refers to a species rather than a fantastical occupation." Actually, it's more like the other way around.
No, Christopher Tolkien isn't his father's younger son. He's the youngest of three sons.
There's no Tolkien critic named Scott Lobdell. That's the name of a comic-book writer. You mean Jared Lobdell.
At the point 20 pages in when the critic declares flatly that orcs have no free will and that Sauron's minions are "automatons not dupes" (not true of the Southrons), I gave up.

Then there's the book on cross-media development of franchises, which is interesting but not very mythopoeic, and which the author apparently wrote in an effort to explain to himself why he collected Star Wars figurines as a boy. In a chapter dealing with Tolkien mostly in the form of a plot summary of The Lord of the Rings, he at least avoids creeping Jacksonism, but refers to Frodo as Bilbo's nephew (why do people do that?), calls Denethor a member of the Fellowship, and startles by describing plot references back to The Hobbit as "intramedial links" and compares Gandalf's fall in Moria to the death of Pacman, whom you can resurrect by restarting the game. I really don't think that's equivalent.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, of course Frodo is Bilbo's first and second cousin, once removed either way, as Hamfast Gamgee explained at the Green Dragon, showing a commendable precision in genealogy. But it's not unheard of for older male kin not in the ancestral line to be called "uncle," without careful distinction of exact degree of kinship, rather than do a complete genealogical analysis. Indeed Bilbo himself followed that custom; in the Birthday Speech he referred to "the birthday of my heir and nephew, Frodo." So if readers follow Bilbo's own example I think they are not without excuse, however much you or I might prefer greater precision.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Oh, that thing about children being sent Home from outposts of Empire where Daddy was taking up the White Man's Burden: I seem to be more and more often coming across shock expressed about this as if it were some unique and pathological happening in a person's life because of their Awful Parents as opposed to common form and approved behaviour by caring parents in that situation. (Okay, quite often it was traumatic, see Kipling.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Just to make clear, Tolkien wasn't sent home. He was only 3. His mother took the children home for an extended visit, advanced in date because they were suffering from the heat. His father was to follow later, but press of business (he was a banker in the Boer republics) delayed him, and then he became ill with rheumatic fever and died.

It's true that Tolkien's mother wrote letters describing where they lived as a howling wasteland, but any suggestion that that the trip back to England was either 1) intended to be a permanent move [before Dad died], or 2) amounted to a marital separation, is completely unwarranted by any available evidence.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

That was quite a common thing too - mother took children home to dump on relatives or even total strangers (as in the Kipling case), then returned to outpost of Empire, unless something, e.g. outbreak of war, prevented her.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Again, there's no suggestion in any of the available evidence that Tolkien's parents were intending to return to Africa and leave the kids with relatives. This was a visit.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Aren't we straining at gnats and ignoring the camel(s)? The other errors you cite are more disturbing, and I agree that 20 pages is far enough to see how little fact-checking the book must have had, a not-uncommon problem. The Pac-Man comparison is. . . interesting. Has someone else written about Pac-Man as a type of Christ?

Your subject line needed scare quotes around "Scholarship."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Actually, everything I cited in this post is a gnat, in the sense that none is vital to the substantive argument the author is making, they're just sloppy mistakes - with the one exception of the account of the move back to England from Africa, where the author is deliberately taking dispute with the established narrative, without any evidence to back the revisionist view up.