I am aware of the failings of Tolkien's prose from time to time, and the stodginess of his poetry.
At the same time, Tolkien did something that was completely new. There had been some "fantasy" prior to Tolkien. One example that comes to mind is The Worm Ouroboros. Like Tolkien, it has tendentious prose, and like Tolkien, it is based on epics and strives to create a vivid and realistic "other world", though it does so mostly through overly florid descriptions rather than through heavy background information.
But to play off of your title, it is equally difficult to discern then what happened after his death in 1973 (outside of the Ballantines bringing older stories back into print 1969-1974, there really was nothing that capitalized on Tolkien's post-paperback release success during his lifetime); it just wasn't new as much as it was something that seemed more "cult" or "fad" than anything sustainable. That's the tricky part about assessing this; I think pre-1961, it would have been very hard to imagine what transpired after and that to take that into account is a risky proposition.
Despite the similarities, what Tolkien did was really remarkable, unique and above all, experimental. He wrote a story in the style of an old epic, he eschewed Latin roots ("orc" notwithstanding) and he built linguistic systems, histories and national characters for various nations. The whole series was heavily coded in symbolism, making it something of a fairy tale for adults. While there had been some works that came before him, he developed an entirely new set of concepts for fiction.
Outside of a wholly-invented setting and the stripping of Romance/Latin/Greek roots from the stories' vocabulary as much as possible, I don't find what he did to be all that inventive. Certainly having a symbolism-soaked text was something that several Modernists experimented with decades earlier (including Joyce, which I know you find to be execrable), and before them the French Symbolists did something akin to it, albeit for a mostly realist setting. I'm not discounting his importance for a certain branch of literature as much as suspecting his work probably could be placed in context of a certain evolution in approach.
The lowbrow fiction that he spawned is nothing if not tribute to his talent and ability to move fiction in an "ideal direction", meaning that the direction in which he moved fiction was one based on ideals and ideas, realized in symbols that someone like Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung would find pregnant with meaning.
Tribute? I would have thought "an albatross around his legacy" would have been more apt
Seriously though, I suspect the "ideal direction" is best viewed in the intent of the other awards and not in the creation of purely imaginative works (by this I merely mean invented settings) that while they may have entertained certain deep themes, on the whole such are not what most readers take from the works.The shit that has tried to imitate Tolkien should not be allowed to cloud the bowl (yes, I'm full of it today). Despite whatever stylistic complaints you may have with his style, you have to recognize that it was experimental, and as such, some things work better than others in retrospect.
Ha! Toilet imagery is not what I expected there, but I could have misinterpreted willfully there
Complaints aside, I will grant "experimental" mostly in the sense of him literally experimenting over the course of his life with his pet project and that some worked much better than others. His prose, while uneven when it comes to balancing description and dialogue, not to mention the types of dialogue employed, certainly is more original in its aims than was his poetry.Also, some of the issues you have with his style probably have to do with the era in which he grew up, of overly romantic classicism that ended up being tempered by machineguns on the Western Front.
Yes, and when I comment on E.M. Forster this weekend, that certainly will be noted, as Edwardian literature has never appealed that much to me. Post-World War I literature, on the other hand, that fascinates me, especially when juxtaposed with the previous decade's output.
Illusions fall like the husk of a fruit, one after another, and the fruit is experience. - Narrator, Sylvie
Je suis méchant.
Je suis méchant.
1961 Nobel Finalists: J.R.R. Tolkien
- 19/01/2012 09:27:46 AM
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It's difficult to assess Tolkien's relative merits then 51 years later.
- 19/01/2012 02:41:52 PM
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Yes, Edwardian prose does not thrill me
- 19/01/2012 02:58:00 PM
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Tolkein is an excellent example why I usually dismiss literary critics/critiques
- 23/01/2012 05:57:51 PM
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Tolkien. Please. You're doing your entire argument a disservice there. *NM*
- 23/01/2012 06:42:12 PM
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You can't dismiss his impact, even if you do not like his storytelling.
- 23/01/2012 07:40:19 PM
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That's an odd argument
- 23/01/2012 07:51:49 PM
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Not really
- 23/01/2012 10:35:39 PM
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Depends on what you see as the point of literature.
- 24/01/2012 08:14:07 AM
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