When Tolkien didn't make the grade.

[Katie-Ellen]

Committees? Just because they are Nobel Prize Committees, so what? Only as wise or as crass as the sum of their parts.

In 1961, Tolkien was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature by his friend C. S. Lewis. Although the two writers did not see eye to eye when it came to the other’s work, Lewis thought highly enough of Tolkien’s fiction to recommend him for this prestigious honour. However, the Nobel Prize committee rejected Tolkien for the honour, stating that his work ‘has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.’ Tens of millions of readers would disagree.

Source: Five Fascinating Facts about J. R. R. Tolkien

They could not visualise ?

See actor Benedict C visualising in order to act Smaug with motion capture? Carryon watching to see what the finished film scene looked like.

And was this what Tolkien was doing, - pulling Smaug faces while writing this scene? I'm pretty sure I pull some pretty funny faces while I'm working my way through this and that scene in my head, or as I type.

They could not jump that gap?

Hindsight engineering says hidebound nitwits.

 

[Howard]

The views of committees, boards or any gathered sort of supposedly learned minds rarely bears any functional relevance to what actually matters to the consumer. Having drunk all of their own Kool-Aid, they genuinely think that their opinion on a given subject is the final word.
It has always baffled me, and is the reason I steer clear of anything with the term "award winning" plastered on its cover.

 

[Marc Joan]

What I found particularly interesting was Tolkien's assertion that 'cellar door' is a beautiful phrase, followed by his comment that 'in Welsh, cellar doors are frequent for me' (I may be paraphrasing slightly). It's interesting because in Welsh, 'dwr' means 'water'; I wonder if there is also a Welsh word phonetically equivalent to cellar? Perhaps as a prefix to dwr? ... I suspect Tolkien may have been having a bit of fun. If I had the time, I'd do a search on Cel-y-Dwr and similar variations.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

No immediate sign at a quick glance of a phrase cel- y- dwr. It is a beautiful sound, I agree, and he liked it, he said, even disassociated from any meaning. There's dan- y- dwr ,meaning underwater, but cel may also mean water, or a shelter.

 

[Carol Rose]

Winning an award doesn't mean those who didn't like your work before will like it after you win. Failing to win it doesn't mean those who liked your work before will stop liking it.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Indeed. It's just publicity...for the committee, too.

 

[Matnov]

Is it so very wrong to admit to not liking 'Lord of the Rings?'. I hate to think how many times I started to read it, from when I was back in primary school, because everybody raved about it, only to give up because I found it beyond turgid. I just could not give a monkeys about the furry footed little bastards and their plight, finding myself urging on the bad guys. Eventually, well into my 30's, I finished it because I set myself the task and took almost no joy from it. Oddly enough somebody bought me the recent film adaptation and much to my surprise I thoroughly enjoyed it but the book left me cold. So I have to say that I find myself in illustrious company with these Nobel people.

A good call as far as I am concerned.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Heheheheee....

Nah! How could it be wrong! We didn't do it at school. First I was given the Hobbit. LOTR later. Loved it. Did I love it more than The Once and Future King? No, but aged 14 it drew me in for definite. The hobbits, well, yokels, you know, but the films...prettyyyygood fun.

Cue the incredible Tay Zonday singing that song from The Hobbit, not such a good movie by a mile as LOTR, but still better than lots of other wallopings of the cod.

Misty Mountain

 

[MaryA]

Tolkien was born in South Africa, in Bloemfontein in the Free State. His father was an English bank manager who died when Tolkien was three, so he grew up in England. He was apparently bitten by a baboon spider as a toddler. There's a Hobbit Boutique Hotel in Bloemfontein and the bank is still there, as is the Anglican cathedral (St Andrew & St Michael) where Tolkien was baptised, but the house where he was born was swept away in floods in the 1920s. I haven't seen any associations with the Free State landscape in Tolkien's work, he was far more influenced by the mysterious places of Europe and Britain.

I also began with the Hobbit and loved that. What fascinated me in LOTR was Tolkien's fascination with etymologies and different languages because I grew up polylingual, speaking Shona to my mother's family, learning some Gaelic phrases from my Scottish father, speaking English at school and Afrikaans to farming friends, studying Latin and French from the age of eight or nine. All around me I heard multiple languages spoken (Portuguese in Mozambique where I did some schooling at a Catholic convent, Swahili in Kenya, Greek from the local cafe owner, a schoolgirl code called' gibberish') and I wanted to know the histories of words, their roots shared across languages. I never invented a language but I did make up words with secret meanings or encrypted codes.

Prizes, awards, sales figures, 'fame' are often a poor guide to the enduring popularity and literary reputation of many books. I often think the Nobel nominations come long after some authors have done their best work and these days wilful obscurity is what Nobel judges look for in candidates.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Really interesting @MaryA. Loving that but not loving the baboon spider. I just looked it up and.....*shudder*. Leetle itty bitty spiders...OK. But that is summat else.

 

[Jay Aitch]

Matnov, Tolkien is the Marmite of Literary world. I know of no-one who remains unmoved after contact: either loving or loathing. That the responses to his work are so profound is testament to his ability to provoke a reaction. And which is better? To be merely acceptable, okay, meh? Or to be the Marmite in peoples' lives? I vote for the latter.

N.B. To appreciate, or love, Tolkien's body of work, is not to ignore its faults. If you found the Lord of the Rings a challenge to read, try the Silmarillion. An incredible piece of imaginative literature. But by Ring-damned Shire-rats, it's hard work.

 

[MaryA]

Scary sight, I agree @Katie-Ellen Hazeldine, but the bite is relatively harmless in comparison to that of smaller spiders in southern Africa, especially the neurotoxic venom of a small button spider or black widow which has a red hourglass or button shape on its belly. The small sac spider has a bite that necroses and takes a long time to heal.

I live in an old house with rain spiders that come in from outdoors during thunderstorms and have a nasty tendency to leap forward when startled which makes for fairly volatile encounters! But large spiders don't worry me as much as a little spider lurking in a dark corner.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Gaaah! That's all I can say.

Here we have wolf spiders as probably our biggest, and I'd say they're non-venomous, but of course they're all venomous, and it's just a question of degree. Anyway, there she was, sitting under the washing machine with two front legs sticking out. I gently...very carefully, pushed the broom past her to see what she would do.

Puh-doingggggg. She sprang on it, landing on the bristles, and ran about to see if there was anything tasty in there, then, deciding there wasn't, jumped back off again and retreated back to her safe spot. Still watching. Waiting. Ready for opportunity. Oh yes.

I wrote a story once about a spider who went on the rampage because a houseproud human wrecked her web. It was shite, written in verse for younger children, so bad I might have to jump off a brick in despair, but I did have fun, and this was my portrait of her, Ida, firstly snug at home, then preparing to go on the rampage.

 

[Carol Rose]

I enjoyed the books a lot more when I was older.

 

[Robinne Weiss]

I loved the LOTR books, and still do...a yarn of epic proportions, set in a lush world. But are they great literature (with a capital L)? Nope. I'd have to agree with the Nobel committee there. Terrible dialogue (the movies improved on that a great deal), action that sometimes wanders WAY off the path (See Tom Bombadil--who I loved, but was irrelevant), and the damned elven songs that go on for PAGES! Nothing a brutal editor couldn't have fixed, but not worthy of the Nobel. I don't think that diminishes what Tolkien did at all--you don't think less of a soccer player because they don't win a baseball award.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

True, and that's why I posted that piece.

That's exactly why.

Though according to this article though, they weren't rating him on literary merit, but as a storyteller. They didn't sufficiently rate the yarn.

 

[Rich.]

Orson Scott Card has some interesting things to say about LOTR in his book Elements of Fiction Writing – Characters and Viewpoint. He talks about four kinds of story type, which he refers to [amusingly] as MICE: Milieu (about place), Idea (about a problem or question to be solved), Character (about someone trying to change their role in life), and Event (about a broken order that needs to be fixed or replaced). He goes on to say that most stories contain a blend of these four elements, but the story can be categorized by the one that is most prominent (for example, almost all modern stories considered Literary are of the character type).

About LOTR he has this to say:

All the MICE factors are present in The Lord of the Rings, but it is the milieu structure that predominates, as it should. It would be absurd to criticize The Lord of the Rings for not having plot unity and integrity, because it is not an event story. Likewise, it would be absurd to criticize the book for its stereotyped one-to-one race characters or for the many characters about whom we learn little more than what they do in the story and why they do it, because this is not a character story. In fact, we should probably praise Tolkien for having done such a good job of working credible story lines and the occasional identifiable character into a story that was, after all, about Something Else.

For my part, I'm a massive fan, more so as I get older. Tolkien's influences were the myths of Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, he first conceived Middle Earth as the (fictional) mythic history of the English; it annoyed him that the English had no mythic history of their own – what there is being largely a hodgepodge of Scandinavian and French.

Anyway, ramble, ramble... I could blather on about this all day. But suffice to say, to my mind, LOTR is about Middle Earth*. And I love it, love it, love it.


[*not about character; not what the modern Literati accept as good storytelling]

 

[Rachel Caldecott]

Tolkien was born in South Africa, in Bloemfontein in the Free State. His father was an English bank manager who died when Tolkien was three, so he grew up in England. He was apparently bitten by a baboon spider as a toddler. There's a Hobbit Boutique Hotel in Bloemfontein and the bank is still there, as is the Anglican cathedral (St Andrew & St Michael) where Tolkien was baptised, but the house where he was born was swept away in floods in the 1920s. I haven't seen any associations with the Free State landscape in Tolkien's work, he was far more influenced by the mysterious places of Europe and Britain.

I also began with the Hobbit and loved that. What fascinated me in LOTR was Tolkien's fascination with etymologies and different languages because I grew up polylingual, speaking Shona to my mother's family, learning some Gaelic phrases from my Scottish father, speaking English at school and Afrikaans to farming friends, studying Latin and French from the age of eight or nine. All around me I heard multiple languages spoken (Portuguese in Mozambique where I did some schooling at a Catholic convent, Swahili in Kenya, Greek from the local cafe owner, a schoolgirl code called' gibberish') and I wanted to know the histories of words, their roots shared across languages. I never invented a language but I did make up words with secret meanings or encrypted codes.

Prizes, awards, sales figures, 'fame' are often a poor guide to the enduring popularity and literary reputation of many books. I often think the Nobel nominations come long after some authors have done their best work and these days wilful obscurity is what Nobel judges look for in candidates.

My brother was a bit of a Tolkien buff. Here is an extract from one of his books: Can we find Tolkien's Ring in the real world? by Stratford Caldecott

I've just found a little video by my brother (filmed at the hospice where he died a couple of months later) also about Tolkien :

I hadn't seen this video before but found that I can't even bring myself to watch it now...

 

[Katie-Ellen]

So sorry Rachel. So sorry.

And that is one truthful, wise and insightful extract you have shared here from his book, about the Faustian tragedy of Saruman, aka the over- elevation of technology.

 

[Rich.]

My brother was a bit of a Tolkien buff.

Rachel, I'm terribly sorry to hear of your brother's passing.

In the article he speaks of LOTRs applicability -- I believe Tolkien talked about applicability in the mind of the reader -- and I think that's what makes the book so appealing to its fans: from whatever perspective you approach it -- from a Christian one in the case of your brother and Tolkien -- you find meaning and resonance.

Thanks for sharing the links. This evening I shall raise a glass to Stratford.

 

[Marc Joan]

To Stratford.

 

[MaryA]

What a good link, @Rachel Caldecott-Thornton, and I'm so sorry to hear about your brother. I can't view the video from my location but I'll try on Vimeo.

The mix of old Norse and Anglo-Saxon myths and archaic terms look back to a pre-Christian path and it's interesting to see how Tolkien worked from a hidden Catholic perspective. I think I'm right that he saw war on the Somme in WWI and that must have been a terrible introduction to the Age of the Machine.

 

[MaryA]

Popping back in here to say that it struck me last night that we should think of certain books like LOTR as cultural phenomena rather than fiction to be judged by literary criteria. I haven't spent much time with Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Tolstoy's War and Peace, but they are important as historical and cultural landmarks that shifted our understanding of society and relationships, etc. Like Beowolf, Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare, they're significant for reasons that don't have much to do with what we now look for in terms of craft or technique. The son of a friend of mine remembers getting up to queue from midnight for the latest Harry Potter year after year and says that book meant so much to him as a teen that he can't judge it as a piece of fiction. It was what he and his friends did, it shaped their lives.

Also just to say I have been intrigued by Tolkien and the Inklings for a while. This Oxford-based group of friends met through the 1930s and '40s, and included CS Lewis and Tolkien, as well as the strange writer Charles Williams. He wrote Arthurian poetry and Christian fantasy, including a curious fiction based on the Tarot, called The Greater Trumps (1932) -- flagging you here, @Katie-Ellen Hazeldine. I find his writing stilted and odd but his ideas are amazing.

 

[Marc Joan]

Popping back in here to say that it struck me last night that we should think of certain books like LOTR as cultural phenomena rather than fiction to be judged by literary criteria. I haven't spent much time with Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Tolstoy's War and Peace, but they are important as historical and cultural landmarks that shifted our understanding of society and relationships, etc. Like Beowolf, Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare, they're significant for reasons that don't have much to do with what we now look for in terms of craft or technique. The son of a friend of mine remembers getting up to queue from midnight for the latest Harry Potter year after year and says that book meant so much to him as a teen that he can't judge it as a piece of fiction. It was what he and his friends did, it shaped their lives.

Also just to say I have been intrigued by Tolkien and the Inklings for a while. This Oxford-based group of friends met through the 1930s and '40s, and included CS Lewis and Tolkien, as well as the strange writer Charles Williams. He wrote Arthurian poetry and Christian fantasy, including a curious fiction based on the Tarot, called The Greater Trumps (1932) -- flagging you here, @Katie-Ellen Hazeldine. I find his writing stilted and odd but his ideas are amazing.

Williams sounds interesting -- what ideas did he explore?

 

[MaryA]

I might be wrong here, @Marc Joan, but I think some of Williams' work is available to read on Project Gutenberg. He was a very eccentric thinker, Anglo-Catholic, and slightly heretical with a great interest in the supernatural and medieval traditions of astrology, divination and the Kabbalah. He was a member of AE Waite's occult group, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, for some time and considered himself a practising magician. He was certainly interested in many slightly heretical topics to do with theology and magical practices. This wouldn't be considered odd in 2018, but in the 1930s it made him an outsider.

His work has been linked to the 'magical' coded texts of Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley who both wanted to make oath-bound secret ritual material accessible to those outside the coven or enclosed initiates.

 

[Amber]

I read Tolkien when I was young and haven't re-read it since. I think it would take me much longer to read now that I'm older and I suspect my attention span is trashed. I admire the depth of his world and how he created a whole language for his characters. Maybe there should be posthumous awards -- they would be more practical. It's sometimes hard to see the worth of something until decades have passed and his writing did have a huge influence.

 

[Rich.]

I admire the depth of his world and how he created a whole language for his characters.

Or rather how he created characters and a world for his made-up languages. It's one of the many things that make Tolkien unique. He started with the languages (he was a linguist after all) and then invented a world in which they could be spoken -- not a process many writers would use, I'm sure.

 

[Rich.]

... it struck me last night that we should think of certain books like LOTR as cultural phenomena rather than fiction to be judged by literary criteria. I haven't spent much time with Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Tolstoy's War and Peace, but they are important as historical and cultural landmarks that shifted our understanding of society and relationships, etc. Like Beowolf, Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare, they're significant for reasons that don't have much to do with what we now look for in terms of craft or technique.

I think you're right, Mary. Craft evolves, but a masterpiece is a masterpiece, a new path that didn't exist before.
Arguing the worth of any creative endeavour is so fraught with emotion that consensus is impossible. But we can agree that a work that births an enduring genre is a landmark.

As an aside, and notwithstanding Tolstoy's frequent use of anti-war essays that break the narrative, I've always found War and Peace to be surprisingly modern. Whereas LOTR awes me with its worldbuilding and mythology, W&P goes straight to my heart with its characters. I'm far from the literary heights in my everyday reading, but from my genre-monkey standpoint, Natasha's journey in W&P is one of the best I've ever read. The historian Orlando Figes wrote an excellent cultural history of Russia back in 2002 and it's telling that he chose to call it Natasha's Dance. The title refers to a pivotal scene in W&P in which Tolstoy encapsulates the soul of a people in the dance of a silly (yet iron-willed) young girl. It's scenes like that one that make me want to be a writer!

[EDIT: Of course I've only read War and Peace in translation, never in the original Russian and French. How much that colours my view of Tolstoy's craft, I don't know. But storytelling is storytelling, whatever language you deliver it in.
I'll stop there because this subject really is a whole other kettle of fish.]

 

[MaryA]

Hi @Rich., yes, translation is another topic. Like you, I've only read Tolstoy and the other Russian greats in English (translators, Aylmer Maude, and more recently the controversial Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) but the storytelling is irresistible. I've read different translations of Chekhov's short fictions, though, and was startled at how differently the stories read.

To look back at the original post, there's a great deal coming out right now as researchers and literary historians trawl back through the Nobel archives, Graham Greene was posited as a 1967 winner along with Jorge Luis Borges and Miguel Angel Asturias from Guatemala (the winner). The criteria are very often not simply literary in the sense of an established reputation and lifelong achievement in the West. Right from the 1940s the Nobel committees have looked to global literature and to foregrounding more obscure authors from remote places, or authors dealing with little-known tragedies of the developing world or humanitarian issues. That was another factor that might have kept many better known writers like Greene or Tolkien out of the limelight.

 

[Marc Joan]

I might be wrong here, @Marc Joan, but I think some of Williams' work is available to read on Project Gutenberg. He was a very eccentric thinker, Anglo-Catholic, and slightly heretical with a great interest in the supernatural and medieval traditions of astrology, divination and the Kabbalah. He was a member of AE Waite's occult group, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, for some time and considered himself a practising magician. He was certainly interested in many slightly heretical topics to do with theology and magical practices. This wouldn't be considered odd in 2018, but in the 1930s it made him an outsider.

His work has been linked to the 'magical' coded texts of Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley who both wanted to make oath-bound secret ritual material accessible to those outside the coven or enclosed initiates.

Rosy Cross -- raises its head everywhere...