J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.  And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad.  But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Ilúvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly.  Yet ever as they listened they came to greater understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.

And it came to pass that Ilúvatar called together all the Ainur and declared to them a mighty theme, unfolding to them things greater and more wonderful than he had yet revealed; and the glory of its beginning and the splendour of its end amazed the Ainur, so that they bowed before Ilúvatar and were silent. (p. 15)

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion is a challenging text for reader and critic alike to parse.  It is not precisely a novel, nor is it merely a collection of short fiction; it contains elements of both, yet even applying the descriptive "mosaic novel" only scratches at the complexities of this posthumous 1977 publication culled from nearly six decades of work on the mythology of Middle Earth and of Arda as a whole.  Reading it closely reveals certain odd constructions, things that jar readers who come to The Silmarillion from reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  Yet there is something moving within these oft-truncated stories, something that amplifies the echos of those wondrous murmurs from the hobbits when they heard an Elrond or Aragorn chant a snippet of tales from the Elder Days of Middle Earth.

Although Tolkien does not open here with an "In the beginning," the opening section, "Ainulindalë" (the singing of the Ainur), certainly reveals the beginning of the Kingdom of Arda, of which Middle Earth is but a part, with the singing of the angelic host of the Ainur of themes introduced by the God-analogue Eru Ilúvatar.  The language here hearkens back to several creation myths in its lofty, at-some-remove, style.  It works on a cosmological level, but it certainly differs significantly from the later, more action-packed tales in the book.  The first Fall, that of the mightiest Ainur, Melkor, presents this Satan in a more comprehensible fashion than the Tempter found in the three Abrahamic religions, but when read independently of the rest of the tales, it is weaker precisely because there can be no further levels that it can tap; it is the source, the beginning, and many sources are small rivulets compared to the raging rivers that they begin.

The second section, "Valaquenta," is a recapitulation of the end of "Ainulindalë" and it traces the origins and diverse nature of those Ainur, the Valar and their lesser brethren the Maiar, who chose to enter into Arda at the Beginning after Ilúvatar's Three Themes were sung in order to make concrete the vision they beheld of the music they had sung.  It too is fascinating on a mythological establishment level, but it too is weaker because there are few connections to the later stories and to the two Third Age stories published during Tolkien's lifetime.

The third and largest section, the "Quenta Silmarillion," tells of the first battles on Arda between Melkor and the other Valar and how the Children of Ilúvatar, the Eldar Elves and Men, along with the adopted race of Dwarves, came into being.  The language in these tales is compressed, in part because many of these tales seem to be intended more as linking sections to three greater tales (those of Beren and Luthien, of the children of Húrin, and of the fall of the hidden Elvish city of Gondolin) than as anything that might otherwise constitute novella or novel-length stories of their own.  But yet in reading them and considering their placement, a case could be made for these tales to be a sort of echo of the Three Themes in how they unfold, with certain rises and falls of tone, as the hope of the exiled Noldor fades as they learn that their rebellion and kin-slaying before returning to Middle Earth will render any attempt to subdue Melkor/Morgoth ultimately futile.

Certainly there is a melancholic beauty to many of these stories of valiant stands and heroism in the face of calamities.  The duel of the Noldorian king Fingolfin and Morgoth, the cursing of Húrin's family by Morgoth, the three Kinslayings due to the lust for the stolen Silmarils (the foremost reason for the war of the Elves and the Fathers of Men, the Edain, against Morgoth), each of these feels like a grandly tragic tale, one that might induce weeping from those presenting it.  It is here that the necessary editorializations by Tolkien's son, Christopher, and Guy Gavriel Kay, are most apparent.  The two had to cobble together tales that were either completed in 1920, 1930, 1937, or maybe post-1955 LotR and make them feel uniform.  Some tales, like the end part of the "Fall of Gondolin," were never extensively revived when others were.  Others were complete, yet their cosmology was at odds with other stories.  Although much of this was not readily apparent in 1977 when The Silmarillion was first published, the later volumes of Christopher Tolkien's The History of Middle Earth reveal that some of the choices he and Kay made in 1977 might have been in error in light of certain textual evidence that emerged from a more careful study of Tolkien's notes and alternate versions of certain tales.

Although these later revelations mitigate some of the concerns about the consistency of the text, The Silmarillion as presented certainly is a flawed book.  It contains powerful stories, stories that readers can find in more fleshed out (and yet "incomplete") forms in later Middle Earth-related posthumous releases, but there is an enforced flatness to them that makes it feel that the reader is reading a detailed synopsis of a series of wonderful tales rather than moving works of their own.  The Silmarillion ultimately is just a halfway-work; it is halfway between being a collection of tales and a unified work in which the tales flow smoothly into one another.  Yet even in its unfinished, sometimes inchoate state, there is a charm about the tales that does make the reader want to learn more, to see deeper into the tale, and to experience just what it was that drove Tolkien to make this the work (with several interruptions) for nearly his entire adult life.  Despite this, The Silmarillion just is not a work that can be read independently of Tolkien's other works; for a fuller effect, the more scholarly The History of Middle Earth will enhance these tales, provided one has the stomach for copious notes.  Sadly, the most striking thing that came of this first re-reading of these stories since my early 20s back in the mid-1990s is that there were so many promising angles that were abandoned.  What could have been!  Yet marred, like Arda after Melkor's corruption of it, as it is, The Silmarillion certainly provides glimpses into the myriad literary and mythological concerns that Tolkien had and for this alone, The Silmarillion as is provides us with much more than if it had been left only as a series of brief allusions in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Before Peter Jackson made his bloated The Hobbit movies, the Soviets took a crack at it

I'll just let the jokes tell themselves right now on Hobbit Day.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Hobbitus Ille (Latin translation of The Hobbit, tr. by Mark Walker)

in foramine terrae habitabat hobbitus:  nec foedum, sordidum madidumque foramen, nec extremis lumbricorum atque odore caenoso impletum, nec etiam foramen aridum, inane, harenosum, in quo nihil erat ad considendum aut edendum aptum; immo foramen-hobbitum, ergo commoum. (p. xv)

It was not on September 22, 1986 when I first read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, although it certainly would have been an auspicious day, considering it was Bilbo Baggins's birthday (if only the publisher had waited a day, as the first edition came out September 21).  No, it was sometime in the spring of 1987, around the time that school was finishing up and I, a seventh grader at the time, found a used paperback copy of The Hobbit in my mother's classroom.  I took it home with her permission and I remember it was around this time also that I first saw the Rankin-Bass animated version.  Or was it that I saw the cartoon first and then stumbled upon the book serendipitously soon afterward?  I myself am not sure, but I only know that it was the first fantasy, besides C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia books that I read when I was 9-10 years old, that ever interested me.  Over twenty-seven years later, I can still recall the opening paragraph to The Hobbit:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. 

There is an informal, cozy language in that brief passage.  Without knowing at first what a "Hobbit" is, Tolkien has established two things:  This creature lives in a hole, but not just any old hole, but one full of creature comforts.  It is easy to picture a pipe-smoking member of the now-bygone landed gentry class, minding his P's and Q's, keeping up all appearances of wealth without being so vulgar as having to flaunt his good fortune in front of others.  The descriptions in the opening chapter, "An Unexpected Party," certain convey this message clearly and concisely, living the reader to plug in his or her interpretations of certain particulars.  The prose here and through the book is uniform in its unadorned and yet excitement-tinged narrative.  It is a story that could be read by a third or fourth grader and be enjoyed, and yet if one were a parent reading this tale to a child who might think reading books aloud are solely for babies, there might be pleasure derived from this for both parent and child alike.

But how does one go about translating such a carefully-constructed novel into a foreign language, particularly a "dead" language such as classical Latin?  When I stumbled across a copy of Hobbitus Ille in a local bookstore this past spring, I bought it in part because I was curious to see how the translator, Mark Walker, would approach bearing across Tolkien's colloquial language into Latin.  In order to evaluate this translation more fairly, I read this Latin translation in tandem with the Spanish and Italian editions (no, I purposely did not re-read it in English) in order to have fresh on my mind the difficult choices the translators had in choosing how to render Tolkien into their native tongues.

Of the three translations, Walker's has the hardest row to hoe.  Whereas there are roughly equivalent social registers in both Spanish and Italian to render the various dialectal shifts (in particular, that of the three trolls near the beginning of the story), classical Latin does not easily lend itself to convey informal speech, since the preserved language is more of an artificial construct that dates back two millennia to the divergence of written and spoken (or Vulgar) Latin.  The Spanish and Italian languages are derived in large part from this Vulgar Latin and being that they are "living" languages in which a whole host of dialects are readily available for selection to represent the source English expressions into their target languages, it is much easier for them to convey a sense of informality when the situation merits it.

This is not to say that Walker fails to invent adequate solutions to many of these issues.  While there is an unavoidable flattening of dialect due to the need to preserve the structure and inflectional endings of the Latin words, Walker does at times substitute expressions that might make a Ciceronian stammer and fuss.  For the seemingly most difficult sections, the near-doggerel poesy of the Rivendell elves teasing Bilbo and the dwarves, Walker doesn't as much try to ape the stress-timed metres of English prose as he utilizes a host of Latin poetic forms to serve in their stead.  While at times this leads to a more serious tone, this is not necessarily a bad thing.  Consider the tone derived from this translation of the dwarves' sonorous poem about the loss of Erebor:

trans Montes Nebulae frigore dissitos
altas ad latebras et ueteres specus
discedamus abhinc, ante oritur dies,
quaesitum in magicis auriferis locis.

maiores faciunt carmina pristine
tinnituque sonant uerbera mallei
altis in spatiis quis mala dormiunt
effossis domibus sub scopulis iugi.

et reges ueteres et Dryadum duces
thesauros nitidos et simul aureos
fingunt et fabricant, luminaque auferunt
quae gemmis tegerent in capulis ibi.

pendent florea nunc stella monilibus
albis, flectitur et uertice regio
anguis flammiferus, stamine ferreo
nunc nocturna ligant soleque lumina. (pp. xxvii-xxviii)

Here is the English original:

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold.
The dwarves of yore made mighty spells,
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep, where dark things sleep,
In hollow halls beneath the fells.
For ancient king and elvish lord
There many a gleaming golden hoard
They shaped and wrought, and light they caught
To hide in gems on hilt of sword.
On silver necklaces they strung
The flowering stars, on crowns they hung
The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
They meshed the light of moon and sun.

 Latin poetry is not as dependent upon end-syllable rhyming as is English poesy, and instead of trying to replicate Tolkien's eight syllable verse, Walker instead employs (as he notes in the appendix) a type of quantitative verse (with elisions as needed between end-sound vowels and opening-vowel neighbor words) called First Asclepiad.  This alternation between "long" and "short" syllables creates a different sort of sonorous passage, one that may hearken more to Horace and Vergil than to Norse sagas, yet which manages to maintain its captivating sense despite the shift in tone and metre.  Indeed, Walker's renditions of Tolkien's various poetic styles are mostly spot-on, as he demonstrates enough range in style and form to create poems that remind the reader of the English originals without feeling as though they were but poor attempts at being English verse with Latin words.

On the whole, Walker's translation, coupled with the generally decent Spanish and Italian translations (done respectively by Manuel Figueroa and Elena Jeronomidis Conte, although there were some questionable name choices in Conte's original 1973 translation, specifically translating Trolls as "uomini neri," or "black men) reminded me favorably of an adolescent favorite.  Although my Latin is a bit rusty after twenty years since my last college course in it, Hobbitus Ille was relatively easy for me to follow.  While some of the word inventions/parallels that Walker chose were a bit confusing at first, namely using "Dryad" for "elf," for the most part he manages to preserve the essentials, namely the feel of this being a hearth tale that harkens back to a different age.  The result was a good reading experience in my fifth-best language that served to remind me of just how much I enjoyed reading and re-reading The Hobbit over a quarter-century ago.  If only more books, whether in their original language or in translation, could remind us of those treasured reading moments.

Going to be doing a Tolkien (re-)reading/reviewing project this month

Some things just occur spontaneously, I suppose.  After finding Serbian editions of The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin in a used bookstore last week, I found myself musing that I had never reviewed those books or The Hobbit.  Then I also realized that even though I owned Spanish translations of each of those books and The Lord of the Rings and the recent Latin translation of The Hobbit, I had never read them cover-to-cover.  Then I discovered Italian e-book editions of LotR and The Hobbit on iBooks.

This led me to reading the Spanish, Italian, and Latin translations of The Hobbit last night.  Now reading the English, Spanish, and Serbian editions of The Silmarillion, taking mental notes on the choices the translators made for names and descriptions.  Contemplating buying the Portuguese edition of LotR and reading that with the Italian and Spanish editions sometime next week.  Out of these readings will likely emerge the following:

• A commentary on the Latin edition of The Hobbit, but written in English (it's been 20 years since my last Latin course, alas)
• A review of The Hobbit
• A review of The Silmarillion, with discussion of the editions read
• A review of The Children of Húrin, with discussions of the translations consulted

Should be a nice break from all of the current releases I'm reviewing during the same time.  It's fun having to "think" in a different language as I read.  Certain things become clearer, others more opaque and the reasons for both makes me more eager to read more in order to discover why this is so. 

Now there are other languages available on iBooks, but these are the languages in which I can understand at least a little bit without resulting to a dictionary or parallel text.  Wish the French edition was available in e-book form...

J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary

Lo!  the glory of the kings of the people of the Spear-Danes in days of old we have heard tell, how those princes did deeds of valour.  Oft Scyld Scefing robbed the hosts of foemen, many peoples, of the seats where they drank their mead, laid fear upon men, he who first was found forlorn; comfort for that he lived to know, mighty grew under heaven, throve in honour, until all that dwelt nigh about, over the sea where the whale rides, must hearken to him and yield him tribute – a good king was he!

To him was an heir afterwards born, a young child in his courts whom God sent for the comfort of the people:  perceiving the dire need which they long while endured aforetime being without a prince.  To him therefore the Lord of Life who rules in glory granted honour among men:  Beow was renowned – far and wide his glory sprang – the heir of Scyld in Scedeland.  Thus doth a young man bring it to pass with good deed and gallant gifts, while he dwells in his father's bosom, that after in his age there cleave to him loyal knights of his table, and the people stand by him when war comes.  By worthy deeds in every folk is a man ennobled. (p. 13)

Ever since I read extended excerpts of the poem in translation when I was a high school senior over twenty years ago, Beowulf has fascinated and frustrated me.  It contains a depth of character and theme that is uncommon even among the best epic poems of the past three millennia.  Yet there is a remoteness to it, perhaps due to the distance between Old English and its modern descendent and the attendant difficulties in rendering idioms precisely, or maybe it's because it is difficult for teachers to convey adequately the poem's riches to students who struggle with its form.  Whatever the reason, each time that I've revisited the poem, whether it be in prose or poetic translation/adaptation, it has been akin to staring at bright wonders through a smoky glass screen.

Therefore it was with great interest that I received the news that after decades of delays, J.R.R. Tolkien's translation notes on Beowulf would finally be published in book form.  I have been long aware of Tolkien's expertise on Beowulf and the Old English language in general and his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I found to be entrancing when I read it around twenty years ago.  But there was some trepidation as well.  Having dabbled in translations ever since a college Latin course on The Æneid twenty years ago, I am well aware of the distortions that occur when going not just from one language to another, but also from the metered poetic lines to prose.  The sense of the lines may be preserved better in prose, but the elegance is almost certainly lost. 

Tolkien's Beowulf was originally done as a sort of extended notes, one that would allow Tolkien to make easier references to specific lines in modern English without needing to translate repeatedly to suit the context of the cited passages in his lectures.  Completed by 1926, when Tolkien had recently accepted the position of Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, his Beowulf translation largely remained locked up in his study, only updated occasionally in light of new research that indicated different ways of restoring and reading the burnt original manuscript.  Although in the intervening decades Tolkien became one of the foremost experts on the poem, there never really was any intent on his part to have his prose translation published.  Yet it still played a role in his research, serving as a point of reference whenever he would write commentary notes for his lectures on the poem, particularly its first half (which was the part studied by English students who were intrepid enough then to complete their degree through the Anglo-Saxon path).

So what value does this translation have in 2014, besides showing how one of its foremost mid-20th century experts approached the material?  Sadly, not much at all, except as a curio.  The translation itself is decent enough and after having read three 1990s-2000s verse translations (Rebsamen, Liuzza, Heaney), Tolkien's rendering of certain expressions (such as "Lo!" for "Hwæt!") certainly stands its ground with these translations (of which, I found the Rebsamen to best capture the alliterative poetic structure of the original).  There are moments of livelihood in Tolkien's translation, and he certainly utilizes the original's use of stock expressions (under the clouds, under heaven) to great effect when establishing scene and mood, but there are some flaws to his approach.  In particular, his use of now-archaic expressions, such as the above-quoted "throve in honour" or "thus both a young man bring it to pass," while occasionally bestowing a sense of ancient grandeur, often creates stilted dialogues that weaken the effectiveness of pivotal scenes.  But these lapses can be forgiven, especially considering the apparent intent behind writing this prose translation.

I am less charitable when it comes to the remainder of the book.  The commentary section, comprising roughly half of the 425 page book, is interesting enough at times, but it lacks enough editorial framework to make it readily accessible to general readers.  While it was mostly clear for myself, I have had some background in academic discussion of texts.  Readers who have not can easily find themselves skipping over this section, as it is not worth their time trying to decipher what exactly Tolkien is referring to in quoting certain passages and explaining their word meanings.  Christopher Tolkien could have done a better job in providing more context for these discussions instead of just posting the poem commentaries whole cloth.  The remaining two sections, "Sellic Spell" and "The Lay of Beowulf" serve little purpose beyond illustrating how the poem sparked some playing around with the language and structure of the original poem in his creation of two (or three, counting a revision) minor poems.  Even worse, Tolkien's famous 1936 essay on the poem's monsters is left out of this book.  The structure of the sections is just very poorly-done.

Yet despite this lack of interesting material outside the translation itself, I mostly enjoyed reading Tolkien's translation.  Yes there are flaws in this 1926 prose rendering, but as I noted above, these are interesting not just because they show a writer trying to render as literally as possible words constructed in a different language and in a different medium, but because the care with which Tolkien had done this appeals to me as an occasional translator.  But outside of reading it as a look in how a 20th century expert approached his subject, there is little to recommend Tolkien's translation to those who are already familiar with the story.  It is a good prose translation, but there are other, better translations, especially into verse, that reflect the changes in Beowulf scholarship since Tolkien's 1973 death.

A quote from Tolkien's translation of Beowulf

I've been reading J.R.R. Tolkien's just-published prose translation of Beowulf for the past few days, alternating between that and the bilingual verse translation done by Seamus Heaney.  While I recognize that Tolkien's prose translation was more of a "working notes" edition that perhaps could have been polished a bit more (and sadly, a direct verse translation, incomplete as it was, was not included in this book), there certainly are passages that have charmed me, such as this one:

The flame flashed forth, light there blazed within, even as of heaven radiantly shines the candle of the sky.  He gazed about that house, then turning went along the wall, grasping upraised that hard weapon by the hilt, in ire undaunted the knight of Hygelac.  That blade the warrior bold did not despise; nay, he thought now swiftly to requite Grendel for those many dire assaults that he had made upon the Western Danes, far oftener than that one last time, slaying in slumber the companions of Hrothgar's hearth, devouring as they slept fifteen of the people of the Danes, and others as many bearing forth away, a plunder hideous.  For that he had given him his reward, that champion in his wrath, so that on his couch he saw now Grendel lying weary of war, bereft of life, such hurt had he erewhile in battle got at Heorot.  Far asunder sprang the corpse, when Grendel in death endured a stroke of hard sword fiercely swung; his head was cloven from him. (pp. 58-59)

For comparison's sake, here's Heaney's verse translation of the same part:

A light appeared and the place brightened
the way the sky does when heaven's candle
is shining clearly.  He inspected the vault:
with sword held high, its hilt raised
to guard and threaten, Hygelac's thane
scouted by the wall in Grendel's wake.
Now the weapon was to prove its worth.
The warrior determined to take revenge
for every gross act Grendel had committed –
and not only for that one occasion
when he'd come to slaughter the sleeping troops,
fifteen of Hrothgar's house-guards
surprised on their benches and ruthlessly devoured,
and as many again carried away,
a brutal plunder.  Beowulf in his fury
now settled that score:  he saw the monster
in his resting place, war-weary and wrecked,
a lifeless corpse, a casualty
of the battle in Heorot.  The body gaped
at the stroke dealt to it after death:
Beowulf cut the corpse's head off.
(lines 1570-1590, p. 109)

I'll leave it up to you to decide which version appeals to you most.

Best of 2013: Poetry

2013 Poetry Collections Read: 

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur 

Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke 

Mary Szybist, Incarnadine 

Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion 

Matt Rassmussen, Black Aperture 

Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog

Each year I try to make a resolution to read more recent poetry collections and each year most, if not all, of that year's releases that I read end up being from the National Book Award shortlists.  So it was this year (although if I counted pre-2013 poetry read, I would have had dozens from which to consider).  Five NBA finalists and a posthumously-published epic poem fragment from J.R.R. Tolkien.  Yet the overall quality was high.  This is not the space to devote to in-depth explorations (after all, these Best of 2013 merely are what moved me most in 2013), but I will say that each and every one of these collections deserves to be read.  But there shall only be three listed on these shortlists, so here we go:

3.  Mary Szybist, Incarnadine 

Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry, this collection combines mystical, religious, and deeply personal themes to create a haunting collection that lingers in the reader's mind days after the final poem is read.

2.  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur 

My June review covers why I loved this unfinished poem, so I'll just suggest that you click on the link above.

1.  Matt Rassmussen, Black Aperture 

Rassmussen took a tragic event (his brother's suicide) and wrote a collection that examines this trauma from a plethora of angles.  I was greatly moved by collection's end, so this is why I have selected it as my favorite poetry collection for 2013.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

So another December has come bearing with it another Peter Jackson adaptation of a J.R.R. Tolkien story.  With each passing movie, my enjoyment has declined to the point where I decided that I would make the effort to see the second The Hobbit adaptation, The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug more out of a morbid curiosity to see how I would react this time to the sundry changes than out of any real expectation that what I would view would be engaging entertainment.  With such expectations, it is hard to be disappointed, as the critic then is, if not suspending her judgments, involved more in a meta-evaluation than a full-scale critique of the film at hand. 

This is, of course, merely a long-winded way of saying that some films provide exactly what they promise, dammit if viewers would have liked something more from it.  Before commencing with this review, I re-read my 2012 review of the first film and found myself thinking that I could copy/paste almost the entirety of that review here, changing only the title and specific details and it would encapsulate well what I thought of the second installment.

As I said in that earlier review, I am no "purist"; I understand that cinema and novels are very different storytelling forms and that there are things that have to be adjusted to fit the medium in question.  That being said, the questionable alterations that Jackson did in order to split the story in three (presumably in order to spend more time on the Gandalf/Necromancer side-plot) bear their dreadful fruit here.  For those who favor a tauter narrative less filled with repetitive scenes, The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug is not the movie for you.  Now onto an exploration of some of the issues I had with it (filled of course, with those ever-so-dreadful "spoilers" that some drone on about for some reason or another.)

The film begins roughly a day or two after the final events of the first installment.  While Beorn does make an appearance here (and Jackson provides a great visual of his home that suits the descriptions found in the book), his entire history and his interactions with the war party are so haphazardly presented that one might question, if it were not for the fact that the dwarves needed ponies for a little while, why this scene appeared here if it to be so sketchily presented.  But mercifully, the scene quickly shifts to Mirkwood and the visceral horrors of that place are well-rendered.

But even here there are issues with the narrative.  Jackson's Bilbo does not get that moment of character development present in the book when he fights the spiders.  Instead, this scene devolves into a more generic action-adventure scene with dizzying spirals of action as the dwarfs, hobbit, and then some elves dance hither and fro slashing at and filling their enemies full of arrows and pointy objects.  There is nothing outright "bad," per se, about having such depicted in detail (conceding of course that this alters the themes of the source material), but there is really nothing spectacular here.  In thinking back to this scene and to subsequent fighting scenes (and there are a lot of fighting scenes, since one cannot keep a good orc down, it seems), I found myself thinking of two movie trailers that appeared before the opening scene, Seventh Son and the 300 sequel.  In those trailers and here in Jackson's film, the cinematography is very similar.  The camera moves in such a vertiginous fashion that it is difficult to keep the eye focused on the movements.  The grim-faced characters, speaking with voices reminiscent of 300's King Leonidas yelling "Sparta!", back-handing foes and having evil beasts roaring in their faces – all of this runs together into a prosaic, forgettable mash-up of action at the expense of any real storytelling.  Yet for many who "like this sort of stuff," these action scenes, which comprise at least 1/3 of the film's nearly three hours, will be appealing to them (as it was for my dad, who has never read the Tolkien books).

Other additions are a bit more tedious.  While the latest elf-maiden stand-in wasn't as incongruous as the Arwen character in the LotR films, the story becomes bogged down in its own need to justify its length around the point of the elvish appearance.  Instead of a simpler means of explaining the dwarfs' escape, Jackson feels the need to provide drama in the form of extraneous attacks (and lots of fighting, some of which, like the running across the heads of some of the fighters, was ridiculous to behold).  This does not add tension to the narrative as much as it drags out the scenes, making the flight-then-fight sequences feel redundant, as if the characters were trapped in some sort of Middle-Earth Groundhog Day.  Add to that a half-developed political conflict interlude in Lake Town and the entire affair just feels bloated in order to justify earlier bloatedness.

The Gandalf scenes, left undescribed in the book, also suffers from this bloating, not so much in the scenes themselves, but in the lack of development in contrast to the too-long time devoted to going from the elvish halls to the Lonely Mountain of Erebor.  While some of the scenes in this sub-plot are well-rendered, there is a discernible lack of connection with the greater narrative, something that perhaps could have been redressed by judicious edits in the larger plot coupled with perhaps a furthering of Gandalf's narrative.  As it stands, however, his scenes feel superfluous and they too add to the sense that Jackson has delayed overlong in having the war party reach Smaug's lair.

The final hour or so of the film is pretty much non-stop action, which again will appeal to some, but for others such as myself, will be another tedious exercise in repetitive fighting.  Smaug's initial scene with Bilbo is well-done, but Jackson's choice of having the dwarfs emerge to fight the dragon leads merely to a series of capers that quickly becomes dull.  There is nothing that occurs here that justifies over 45 minutes of movements and dumping of copious amounts of ore and molten metal ad nauseam.  Even if only 20 minutes (I would have preferred less than 10) were devoted to this fight, it might have been bearable, but near the end, I began to lose focus as I kept wondering, "when will this damn thing ever end?"  Finally, it does, with a series of (expected) cliffhangers that remain to be resolved in a year's time.

The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug is not the sort of movie that I ever would enjoy.  If it weren't for the fact that I loved the book when I was 12 in early 1987, I wouldn't have considered watching it, knowing that it would be chock-full of the sorts of generic action/adventure scenes that I have come to loathe.  For this cinematic genre, however, it is decent, albeit not the sort of plot one should lose any sleep over considering its cohesiveness (or lack thereof).  But it certainly is a film that reveals in painful detail just why so many people questioned the need to have a 300 page book split into three movies that will cover nearly a combined nine hours.  A thoroughly mediocre production that illustrates well the declining abilities of its producer.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur

'Now never again     from northern wars
shall Arthur enter     this island realm,
nor Lancelot du Lake    love remembering
to thy tryst return!     Time is changing;
the West waning,     a wind rising
in the waxing East.     The world falters.
New tides are running     in the narrow waters.'

– from Canto II, lines 144-150 (p. 32)

For nearly a millennium, ever since the fanciful writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth gained a wide audience and inspired generations of poets and prose writers to write about the Round Table, the betrayal of Mordred, the Holy Grail, the legend of King Arthur has fascinated listeners and readers alike.  No matter the medium selected for the story, the tale entrances readers who already know the basics by rote.  Its themes and tragic elements mixed with romance are not just the stuff of which dreams are made, but they are more "real" to us than even ground upon which we trod or the air which we breathe. 

I have been a fan of "The Matter of Britain" for nearly three decades now.  I have read Arthur's story in many forms, ranging from Tennyson's The Idylls of the King to Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles.  Each storyteller, great and lowly alike, have explored facets of the legends that most fascinated them, often with good results.  Therefore it was with great interest that I look forward to reading the incomplete poem that J.R.R. Tolkien left behind on the downfall of Arthur and his kingdom.  Although the unfinished poem runs only just over 950 lines divided over four complete cantos and a partial fifth, there certainly is much to admire about the poem.

Tolkien decided that alliterative verse, traditionally used in pre-Norman conquest England and other Germanic-speaking lands, best suited the tale he wanted to tell.  He stripped away most of the courtly romance, focusing instead on the final, tragic part of the Arthurian legends:  the news of Guenevere's tryst and Mordred's betrayal.  The action begins in media res, with Arthur returning from his "Eastern campaign" to surprise Mordred and his Saxon allies:

Arthur eastward     in arms purposed
his war to wage     on the wild marches,
over seas sailing     to Saxon lands,
from the Roman realm     ruin defending.
Thus the tides of time     to turn backward
and the heathen to humble,     his hope urged him,
that with harrying ships     they should hunt no more
on the shining shores     and shallow waters
of South Britain,     booty seeking.

– from Canto I, lines 1-9 (p. 17)

There is a sonorous quality to good alliterative verse, the way that "war" and "wage" rise and then on the second half-verse (the spaces denote a caesura or breath break) it descends to "wild."  There is no rhyme nor set metre, but instead a dependence upon a rhythm set by the rise and fall of words whose first syllables alliterate.  It is not a poetic form often seen in Modern English and there is a portion of the book devoted to explaining how to read this.  Being somewhat familiar with alliterative verse, primarily through some translations of Beowulf, it was easy for me to settle into the rhythm of the poem.

Rhythm is very important here in The Fall of Arthur, as Tolkien attempts to capture a bleaker, more urgent movement of forces.  Arthur here is more the hero of an edda than the king in background of the medieval romances.  He is driven, relentless in his purpose.  Time is changing, all is under assault.  This mood might remind some of the tone present in his fantasy writings and there certainly are thematic similarities, such as the passage quoted at the beginning of this review.  The west wanes, the world falters, new tides are running.  Here the struggle against the forces of Mordor finds its immediate predecessor, as The Fall of Arthur was composed sometime between 1933-1937 according to internal evidence.  And yet here are other connotations present:  the Celtic west falling before the Saxon east, the world of the Britons changing irrevocably.  Tolkien does an excellent job of foreshadowing that calamity throughout The Fall of Arthur.  Doom certainly is more present here, with religious imagery used to underscore the differences between hero and heathen:

Foes before them,     flames behind them,
ever east and onward    eager rode they,
and folk fled them     as the face of God,
till earth was empty,     and no eyes saw them,
and no ears heard them     in the endless hills,
save bird and beast     baleful haunting
the lonely lands.

–  from Canto I, lines 61-67 (p. 19)

The overall effect is a melding of the later accruals of Arthurian myth (Lancelot, however, is relegated to a relatively minor role and Gawain instead rises in importance) with the style and imagery present in Beowulf.  In some respects, The Fall of Arthur feels like a "lost" work of the 10th century that has been translated into modern English; the metaphors and imagery can apply equally to the invasions of the 5th and late 9th centuries.  It is little wonder, then, that one of Tolkien's fellow academics, R.W. Chambers, wrote to him in December 1934 saying:

"It is very great indeed... really heroic, quite apart from its value in showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English."..."You simply must finish it." (p. 10)

But yet like so much of his superior work (The Lord of the Rings I consider to be one of his lesser achievements as a writer), The Fall of Arthur tragically was left undone.  If it were complete and published during the author's lifetime, it easily could have cemented Tolkien's legacy as a writer.  Instead, he is now primarily known for a lesser-accomplished work that influenced over two generations of pulp writers to write fictions that are bereft of the soul of the original masters.  But for those who do love Arthurian tales and who do have some knowledge of the various poetic and prose compositions over the past millennium, The Fall of Arthur will certainly be a work well worth reading.  For those who are not as familiar with these works, Christopher Tolkien has provided three long essays on the poem's origins, its connections to his father's fantasy writings, and how the poem evolved during various drafts.  In addition, Tolkien's 1938 BBC radio lecture on "Anglo-Saxon Verse" is provided as a coda to the work.  Some will find these essays to enhance the work, others might find them to be less useful due to their own prior knowledge of the subject.  Regardless, The Fall of Arthur, incomplete as it is, I consider to be Tolkien's best composition and it is a shame that it was left unfinished during the final 30+ years of the author's life.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

It is hard to go into a cinema adaptation of a book that you have read, much less one that you read over a dozen times between 12 and 23.  There are mental images formed from the prior reading that colors impressions, making it harder for the viewer to replicate what the reader experienced.  Add to that memories of watching the Rankin-Bass animated version of The Hobbit and it was always going to be difficult for the three-film, Peter Jackson-directed version of The Hobbit to live up to expectations.

I am no "purist" when it comes to book-to-cinema adaptations.  I understand the two media differ significantly when it comes to narrative modes and exposition.  Although I preferred David Mitchell's narrative as it made for a very strong, thematically-unified novel that covered quite a few issues simultaneously while playing with the English language over the past and possible future, the cinema version of Cloud Atlas developed its own narrative formula that if it could not replicate all of Mitchell's themes or techniques, it at least chose a few of them to tell a story that I thought was stronger than what several other viewers did, mostly because of the Intolerance-like usage of parallel scenes that switched back and forth rapidly to create a narrative stronger than any of the individual subplots.  So when I went to watch The Hobbit:  An Unexpected Journey, I suspected it might be a narrative that was closer in tone and tenor to Jackson's versions of the three Lord of the Rings films than to the children's classic.  For the most part, this was the case, although there were some questionable decisions made here.

One issue that Jackson's team faced was that of the three The Hobbit movies coming out a decade after the LotR films.  For the "casual fan," the one who may have watched the movies without having read the books (my dad, who watched the movie with me, is one of them), there is a need to establish this "prequel" within the context of the LotR flicks rather than vice versa in case of the books.  Therefore, the opening minutes, which showed the older Bilbo and Frodo around the time of the Party 60 years after Bilbo's adventure, was a good way of establishing a connection between the two stories.  Add to that the scenes of Hobbiton life and the film begins well in establishing links between the two sets of trilogies.  Yet there is a cost to this, as it takes several minutes to go from the montage of flashbacks (the Smaug attack, then the Bilbo/Frodo scene) to the cinematic "present."  However, this may have been one of the more necessary decisions in a film where the director took rather unnecessary roads to reaching specific plot plots.

The characterizations are uneven.  Although the main characters (Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf, and in his brief time, Gollum) are fleshed-out in terms of character traits and action, most of the other dwarves receive only broad characterization stroke or none at all.  Of course, the book itself does not devote much time to the bands of brothers and cousins that make up Thorin's entourage, but at times it seemed what distinguished one dwarf from another were their accents (so many different ones for those who were mostly close kin to Thorin) and occasional slapstick humor rather than anything substantive.  This is not a major flaw, as the cinematic narrative eschews close characterization in favor of focusing on developing a sense of "epicness," yet it was a missed opportunity here and it could affect the next two films if the landscape and action sequences fail to sustain a strong narrative force.

As for the enemies, it too is a mixed bag.  Although I have little problem with having Azog survive the battle outside Moria (seen in a flashback sequence) and having him instead of his son Bolg be the orc/goblin seeking revenge, his revenge story does not make all that much sense within the context of them actively hunting down Thorin's company without there being any apparent word given outside of the Blue Mountains and the Iron Hills that Thorin intended to march east to Erebor.  This lack of clarity is compounded by the dubious relationship between Azog and the goblin king, as the latter seems ready to defer to Azog once the latter arrives.  This felt like Jackson made an unnecessary and complicating departure from the books, as Azog could have easily taken the role assigned to Bolg in the book and that the goblins could have been those of the goblin king alone and that someone from that party could have merely escaped to warn Azog/Bolg and let the troop buildup begin then rather than having a couple of extraneous action/fighting scenes just to have more of those within the first film.

In general, the action scenes did not appeal to me.  Much of that is due to my general loathing for CGI-laden fight scenes, as these feel so artificial that there is little amazement and much annoyance that comes of them.  The fighting within the goblin hall was just so ridiculous even for the very low standards of this subgenre of cinema that its tedium led to answering of emails and checking time.  It just felt too drawn-out.  It didn't help that it followed just after the Bilbo/Gollum scene, which perhaps was the best scene in the movie, as it preserves most of the spirit of the riddle game from the book (both editions) while providing a bit of a hint about the Ring's shifting power between this movietrilogy and the LotR trilogy with the coloring of the Ring/Ghost world.  Sadly, after this there was almost thirty minutes of near-continuous fighting, interspersed with maybe five minutes of the dwarves, Gandalf, and Bilbo reuniting.

By the time the movie ended, it felt as though Jackson tried too hard to stretch elements from the LotR appendices into what amounts to a medium-length children's novel.  It is hard to fault him for trying to create a cinematic cohesion with his earlier LotR movies, but there were times were there was a dissonance between the source material's lighter tone and the more action-oriented tilt of this movie.  Although much of this is due to audience expectations, I cannot help but be annoyed to see that the cinematic Bilbo ends up killing in this movie, as that will likely diminish his later abhorrence of the impending violence between the dwarves, elves, and men over Erebor.  The dwarves go from near-silly to almost deathly-serious in blinks of the eye frequently enough that at times it becomes hard to tell which is predominant for the movie.  In the end, that perhaps is the most fitting commentary on The Hobbit:  An Unexpected Journey:  it is a movie that isn't quite sure what it wants to be and that it spends an inordinate amount of time trying to waffle between preserving the feel of the LotR films and the tone of the original book that the whole is left wavering between a good cinematic experience and a flawed one that may get worse in the following two films.

1961 Nobel Lit Prize finalist: J.R.R. Tolkien (thoughts on why he didn't deserve the award)

This was originally posted on Gogol's Overcoat in January 2012.  I had intended to do a series of posts on the authors mentioned in the below article link, but due to a series of events at the time, I only managed to write three pieces.  Perhaps I'll re-visit this in the near future.

 
Back on January 5, The Guardian posted an article highlighting the previously-unreleased commentaries regarding works considered for the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Although it is fair to say that the article slants the coverage of the notes of one of that year’s judges, Anders Österling, especially in regards to the somewhat surprising inclusion of J.R.R. Tolkien on the list, this column received quite a bit of discussion in divers corners over the past week and a half.  Some have questioned the validity of Österling’s comments on E.M. Forster and Robert Frost, which referred to their advanced age (both died within a decade of the 1961 prize being awarded to Ivo Andrić), while others have speculated that in the case of Tolkien somehow “genre bias” was involved.
Since the list of eight novelists that were mentioned in the article are fairly well-known (to the above mentioned four, Graham Greene, the eventual runner-up; Karen Blixen, who wrote under the pseudonymn of Isaak Dinesan, finished third; and Italian writer Alberto Moravia) to many readers, over the next several weeks (mostly on Saturdays or Sundays), there will be columns devoted to discussing these seven writers and how their writings compare to previous Nobel winners and to the criteria set forth in Alfred Nobel’s will:

“The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: /- – -/ one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction …”

Since the criteria for being selected to be a Nobel laureate in Literature are not similar to a “year’s best,” in that the committee is charged to consider the author’s full work and not just a singular work, not to mention the above-quoted part on “most outstanding work in an ideal direction,” the works considered generally possess a high degree of craftsmanship (in the three genres of poetry, drama, and prose) and have something to contribute to the global “conversation” regarding the human condition(s).  When considered through this evaluative lens, several works that have enjoyed widespread popularity over the years are going to be dismissed due to some combination of their writing and/or the lack of “an ideal direction.”

This seems to be the case with J.R.R. Tolkien.  Out of the seven mentioned for consideration, his is the most intriguing.  If one dismisses the probable bias of his friend and colleague C.S. Lewis (who, after all, was privy to Tolkien’s development of the Middle-Earth mythos for most of the 1930s-1950s period) and accepts his work as a serious candidate for the award, then what should one make of his work in light of the criteria mentioned above?  Does one agree with Österling’s assertion that Tolkien’s prose “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality?”  Or were there other factors at play when his work was rejected in 1961?

In evaluating Tolkien’s candidacy, one has to strip away all memories and associations with his posthumous works and legacy.  There is no “Tolkien as the founder of modern epic fantasy” to be considered here; after all, in 1961 he did not enjoy a huge international reputation, although a few translations of his work were beginning to be published then.  Nor was he associated in public or academic opinion with a particular genre, since there were no marketing spheres then labeled “fantasy.”  If anything, one will have to consider Professor Tolkien as the translator of some Midlands lays from a non-London Middle English dialect who created some quaint tales that were then compared to the works of the 19th century socialist William Morris and early 20th century academic/writer E.R. Eddison.

If evaluated in light of Morris’ lush The Well at the World’s End, which utilizes archaic speech to create an atmospheric effect of loss and desire, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings would doubtless appear to be wooden and turgid in comparison.  Consider the early parts of The Fellowship of the Ring, namely the part where Frodo discusses the Black Riders with the elf Gildor:

‘I am deeply grateful,’ said Frodo; ‘but I wish you would tell me plainly what the Black Riders are.  If I take your advice I may not see Gandalf for a long while, and I ought to know what is the danger that pursues me.’

‘Is it not enough to know that they are servants of the Enemy?’ answered Gildor.  ‘Flee them!  Speak no words to them!  They are deadly.  Ask no more of me!  But my heart forbodes that, ere all is ended, you, Frodo son of Drogo, will know more of these fell things than Gildor Inglorion.  May Elbereth protect you!’

There is a narrative dissonance here, between the plain hobbit speech of Frodo (despite being educated and well-versed in at least the basics of the Elvish tongues) and the elevated diction of Gildor.  Although Tolkien notes that this effect was intentional, what it also does in certain other occasions, namely in the fighting in the halls of Moria is to create dialogue that sounds odd, if not ridiculous, to the ears of those who are equally familiar with epic poetry of the classical and medieval eras as well as with more modern prose:

‘One for the Shire!’ cried Aragorn.  ‘The hobbit’s bite is deep!  You have a good blade, Frodo son of Drogo!’

The problem here is that Tolkien is trying to adapt the structure of an early medieval saga to the novel genre.  Although there are cases in his writing (although very rare in his pre-1961 original fiction) where Tolkien manages to achieve a striking literary effect through the use of alliteration and judicious repetition of patronymic phrases, often, as in the case above, the desired effect is not achieved.  Those familiar with the “source material” possibly could be left feeling as though Tolkien had struck a flat note, as the dialogue feels off and somewhat anachronistic, especially when the lower speech of the hobbits clash with those of the knights and elves.  In addition, Tolkien is handicapped by his need to introduce elements of his invented setting into the narrative.  Although certainly this is appealing to readers who are familiar with the existence of The Silmarillion, in 1961, the overall effect was, for several readers at least, the sense that the importance of the narrative was being continually interrupted by those other creations.  As a member of the Inklings society, of which Tolkien was a member, was reported to say,  “Oh God, not another fucking elf!”, so might several contemporary readers have reacted to another poem fragment about Eärendil or Elbereth with an eye roll or a despairing thought about another intrusion into the narrative.  Today, such elements are (sometimes pejoratively) referred to as “infodumps”; for others then, they were considered to be asides that weakened the focus on the narrative.

Therefore, when strictly considered on the prose level, Tolkien’s writing plausibly can be seen as not being at the same level of the others considered in 1961.  As will be seen later when I cover their works, there is not the same degree of focus on the narrative, on the characterizations, or on thematic issues, all of which are essential items usually considered by the Nobel committee.  Tolkien in 1961 had not “founded” anything; he was a respected academic who contributed heavily to the understanding of the poems and songs of the Midlands during the Anglo-Saxon through the Plantagenet eras, but his fiction was more of a curiosity than a key contributor to global belles-lettres.  Although Österling’s criticism in the abstract sounds rather harsh to those familiar with Tolkien’s writings in 2012, in 1961 it certainly is a justifiable commentary on his work in comparison to not just the others, but also in how well he was adapt to adapt the mechanics of saga storytelling to the novel mode.  Although short shrift has been given here to comparing Tolkien’s writing to the provision spelled out in Nobel’s will regarding works of “an ideal direction,” it should suffice to say that a work that was considered to be an interesting yet flawed exploration of mapping out a fictional equivalent to a national English mythology was not going to be considered in the same light as those other works who spoke of more contemporary and less mythical social concerns.  Tolkien’s work is undoubtedly influential nearly 40 years after his death, but it would be a disservice to what he did accomplish to claim that his work would fit in well with those who were awarded Nobel prizes in Literature because his prose is not as polished nor are the thematic issues of his pre-1961 works a natural fit with the prize’s legacy.  If it had to be placed among the seven, it likely would rank at or very near the bottom due to the reasons mentioned above.  This may be a harsh assessment, but in light of the others considered in that year, it is the fairest.

Interesting article on racism and sexism found in Tolkien's works

Generally I don't say much about the racist, sexist, and classist attitudes found in much of J.R.R. Tolkien's fictions, as I would think by now that it should be apparent to 21st century readers, but Requires Only That You Hate (one of my new favorites to read because her takes on social/cultural issues in genre fiction and video gaming often makes me reassess my own views) has written a piece on those odious elements in Tolkien's work that is well worth reading.  In particular, her comments on Tolkien's analogy of his dwarves having "Semitic" qualities to their language and their wanderings is very well-argued.

Although I don't mind people leaving comments here, I think it'd be best to leave comments at her blog.

Reviews that you have missed if you have not followed me to Gogol's Overcoat

As I said last month, not many reviews will be appearing here on The OF Blog in 2012 due to commitments elsewhere, namely Weird Fiction Review and Gogol's Overcoat.  But for those of you unaware of what I have written review-wise for the first 18 days of this year, here are some bits for you to consider:

Weird Fiction Review:


Article on Augusto Monterroso

Article on Julio Cortázar (goes live sometime in the next 1-2 weeks; draft completed this morning)


Gogol's Overcoat:


Faulkner Friday:  As I Lay Dying (1930)

Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934)

Faulkner Friday:  "A Rose for Emily" (1930)

1961 Nobel Finalists:  J.R.R. Tolkien

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)


Scheduled for Review January 20-31:


20 - William Faulkner, Sanctuary (Gogol's Overcoat)

22 - 1961 Nobel Finalists: E.M. Forster (Gogol's Overcoat)

24 - Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet (Gogol's Overcoat or OF Blog)

25 - Zora Neale Hurston, Mosses, Man of the Mountain (Gogol's Overcoat)

27 - William Faulkner, "Barn Burning" (Gogol's Overcoat)

28 - Draft due of article on Mercé Rodoreda (Weird Fiction Review)

29 - 1961 Nobel Finalists:  Robert Frost (Gogol's Overcoat)

30 - Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph of the Suwanee (Gogol's Overcoat)

31 - Saladin Ahmed, Throne of the Crescent Moon (OF Blog)


A couple of these might move up or down a few days (minus the Faulkner pieces, which will be set in stone for Fridays), but I think this ought to get some readers excited.  So if you want to read more review pieces by me, be sure to bookmark the sites above and to visit frequently (should note WFR is updated almost daily and my contributions are a very small part to that wonderful site).  Also, if you happen to like one of the reviews, feel free to leave a comment or to forward it onto others, as it'd be nice to have more word of mouth for Gogol's Overcoat, new as it is and all.

Tolkien was nominated for 1961 Nobel Prize consideration...and was found wanting

The Guardian had an interesting article online today about the unsealing of the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature and who else besides the eventual winner Ivo Andrić (who was a very deserving winner, I might add) was considered for the award and the commentaries made in reference to them.  There were some really good names on that consideration list:  Graham Greene (who was the runner-up that year; sadly, he never won the prize), E.M. Forster, Robert Frost (the latter two were dismissed from further consideration largely due to their age and not the quality of their work), Lawrence Durrell (whose works I've been meaning to read for a while; dismissed due to the eroticism in several of his fictions), Karen Blixen (she wrote Out of Africa, which I've heard of at least; she finished third in the final round of voting), Alberto Moravia (whose works were dismissed for a "general monotony"), and then...

J.R.R. Tolkien.

Oh, I know Tolkien has sold more novels than any of the others on this list (although most of the authors mentioned have done quite well for themselves over the years), but it really is the odd duckling in this group and not because it was a seminal work of epic fantasy.  The comments made about his work (incidentally, the work was nominated by C.S. Lewis, so even the Nobel nominees sometimes show the influence of people too close to the author presenting works for consideration) might spark some discussion:

The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality", wrote jury member Anders Österling. 

Trying to disagree, trying to find fault in this, trying, trying...and I can't.  When compared to the others listed above, Tolkien's prose is drab, the storytelling is not as good, and it just is not at the caliber of the others nominated.   Andrić's The Bridge on the Drina is an extremely powerful fiction, one that I will revisit several times in the years to come.  Greene's The Power and the Glory is captivating in its prose and in the narrative itself.  Frost's poetry is memorable, although I don't rate him as highly as many others do.  Forster's work is impressive.  Durrell and Blixen and perhaps Moravia I hope to read in the near future.

I just can't associate Tolkien's abilities as a writer with any of the ones I've read.  When I reviewed the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings back in 2009, I found myself thinking the prose was variable in quality and that the story in places just did not interest me.  So while I'm surprised his work was even considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature, I am not shocked to discover that it was viewed dimly by those in charge of selecting the prize winner in 1961.  After all, the trilogy did not receive universal praise when it was published in 1954-1955.  Here is a link to the review that renowned American critic Edmund Wilson wrote about LotR, quoted in part below:

The most distinguished of Tolkien's admirers and the most conspicuous of his defenders has been Mr. W. H. Auden. That Auden is a master of English verse and a well-equipped critic of verse, no one, as they say, will dispute. It is significant, then, that he comments on the badness of Tolkien's verse - there is a great deal of poetry in The Lord of the Rings. Mr. Auden is apparently quite insensitive - through lack of interest in the other department.- to the fact that Tolkien's prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness. What I believe has misled Mr. Auden is his own special preoccupation with the legendary theme of the Quest. He has written a book about the literature of the Quest; he has experimented with the theme himself in a remarkable sequence of sonnets; and it is to be hoped that he will do something with it on an even larger scale. In the meantime - as sometimes happens with works that fall in with one's interests - he no doubt so overrates The Lord of the Rings because he reads into it something that he means to write himself. It is indeed the tale of a Quest, but, to the reviewer, an extremely unrewarding one. The hero has no serious temptations; is lured by no insidious enchantments, perplexed by few problems. What we get is a simple confrontation - in more or less the traditional terms of British melodrama - of the Forces of Evil with the Forces of Good, the remote and alien villain with the plucky little home-grown hero. There are streaks of imagination: the ancient tree-spirits, the Ents, with their deep eyes, twiggy beards, rumbly voices; the Elves, whose nobility and beauty is elusive and not quite human. But even these are rather clumsily handled. There is never much development in the episodes; you simply go on getting more of the same thing. Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form. The characters talk a story-book language that might have come out of Howard Pyle, and as personalities they do not impose themselves. At the end of this long romance, I had still no conception of the wizard Gandalph, who is a cardinal figure, had never been able to visualize him at all. For the most part such characterizations as Dr. Tolkien is able to contrive are perfectly stereotyped: Frodo the good little Englishman, Samwise, his dog-like servant, who talks lower-class and respectful, and never deserts his master. These characters who are no characters are involved in interminable adventures the poverty of invention displayed in which is, it seems to me, almost pathetic. On the country in which the Hobbits, the Elves, the Ents and the other Good People live, the Forces of Evil are closing in, and they have to band together to save it. The hero is the Hobbit called Frodo who has become possessed of a ring that Sauron, the King of the Enemy, wants (that learned reptilian suggestion - doesn't it give you a goosefleshy feeling?). In spite of the author's disclaimer, the struggle for the ring does seem to have some larger significance. This ring, if one continues to carry it, confers upon one special powers, but it is felt to become heavier and heavier; it exerts on one a sinister influence that one has to brace oneself to resist. The problem is for Frodo to get rid of it before he can succumb to this influence. 

            NOW, this situation does create interest; it does seem to have possibilities. One looks forward to a queer dilemma, a new kind of hair-breadth escape, in which Frodo, in the Enemy's kingdom, will find himself half-seduced into taking over the enemy's point of view, so that the realm of shadows and horrors will come to seem to him, once he is in it, once he is strong in the power of the ring, a plausible and pleasant place, and he will narrowly escape the danger of becoming a monster himself. But these bugaboos are not magnetic; they are feeble and rather blank; one does not feel they have any real power. The Good People simply say « Boo » to them. There are Black Riders, of whom everyone is terrified but who never seem anything but specters. There are dreadful hovering birds-think of it, horrible birds of prey! There are ogreish disgusting Orcs, who, however, rarely get to the point of committing any overt acts. There is a giant female spider - a dreadfu1 creepy-crawly spider! - who lives in a dark cave and eats people. What one misses in all these terrors is any trace of concrete reality. The preternatural, to be effective, should be given some sort of solidity, a real presence, recognizable features - like Gulliver, like Gogol, like Poe; not like those phantom horrors of Algernon Blackwood which prove so disappointing after the travel-book substantiality of the landscapes in which he evokes them. Tolkien's horrors resemble these in their lack of real contact with their victims, who dispose of them as we do of the horrors in dreams by simply pushing them or puffing them away. As for Sauron, the ruler of Mordor (doesn't the very name have a shuddery sound.) who concentrates in his person everything that is threatening the Shire, the build-up for him goes on through three volumes. He makes his first, rather promising, appearance as a terrible fire-rimmed yellow eye seen in a water-mirror. But this is as far as we ever get. Once Sauron's realm is invaded, we think we are going to meet him; but he still remains nothing but a burning eye scrutinizing all that occurs from the window of a remote dark tower. This might, of course, be made effective; but actually it is not; we never feel Sauron's power. And the climax, to which we have been working up through exactly nine hundred and ninety-nine large close-printed pages, when it comes, proves extremely flat. The ring is at last got rid of by being dropped into a fiery crater, and the kingdom of Sauron « topples » in a brief and banal earthquake that sets fire to everything and burns it up, and so releases the author from the necessity of telling the reader what exactly was so terrible there. Frodo has come to the end of his Quest, but the reader has remained untouched by the wounds and fatigues of his journey. An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly.

Although there are parts of Wilson's review with which I disagree, I think he has some sound points here to make about the deficiencies of the writing and the plot.  Over the course of nearly 60 years, it is easy to forget that not everyone was enamored with the tale and that when placed in context with certain other works, The Lord of the Rings reads less like a seminal work of fiction and more like a flawed continuation of other strands of fantasy that have existed for well over a century.  In that light, I think the criticisms of Wilson and of the Nobel Committee are worth considering in the Year of Our Hobbit 2941.

Interesting article involving perceived weaknesses of Tolkien's monsters

Currently reading Bloom's Modern Critical Views:  J.R.R. Tolkien, which contains a 1968 essay by Thomas J. Gasque called "Tolkien:  The Monsters and the Critters."  I found his points regarding Tom Bombadil, the Balrog, and Shelob to be similar to my reactions to these character intrusions when I last re-read the series in 2009:

All three [Tom, the Balrog, Shelob] possess an independence that places them outside the central moral concern of the story - the destruction of the Ring.  Their amorality, like their nonhumanity, reveals them as allegorical principles:  Tom of life or nature, Shelob of death or blind appetite, and the Balrog of a central disorder that no creature can withstand.

We could object to Tolkien's inclusion of Bombadil and the two monsters because they are principles rather than personalities.  But allegory in a work of this sort need not be an artistic failure.  Tolkien does fail with these two, however, not because he chose to dehumanize them, but because he failed to make them interesting.  Treebeard, for example, is much more interesting than Tom Bombadil, and the orcs more fearsome than the Balrog.

Although we could not call the adventures with the Balrog and with Shelob dull, they both seem to fail, not in execution but in conception.  Tolkien has invented these monsters rather than created them from the raw material of folklore as he did his other creatures.  We are unable to believe in the Balrog because we have no foundation either outside the work or in it.  Dwarfs, orcs, and elves are familiar enough to most readers to stimulate a response.  Other creatures, including hobbits, the Ringwraiths, and the Dark Lord himself are fully developed within the trilogy.  Not so with the Balrog.  There he is, all of a sudden, whiffling and burbling, a Diabolus ex machina, when the orcs were foe enough.  He is not dull, but the excitement is on the surface, and we only half believe Gandalf when he cries, "'Fly!  This is a foe beyond any of you.'"

Shelob is better executed than her counterpart, but both episodes are artistically weak.  For sheer terror, they are on a level with the invention of dozens of science-fiction writers, but terror is not enough.  Nor is the argument that only such supernatural creatures could cause Gandalf's death or Frodo's paralysis, for there is still the feeling that these demons are not real.  They are unreal because they are extraneous to the traditional framework of the story. (p. 7)

Thoughts on this, keeping in mind that it was written when only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were published?

Reflecting on Tolkien: The Return of the King

In this third and final reflective essay dealing with my first re-reading of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings since 1996 (click on the links for my thoughts regarding The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers), I want to spend more time addressing some of the larger issues surrounding the story, since there is little that I would change about my statements regarding the narrative flow in RotK or its prose that I did not already say in the first two essays. In particular, I want to explore a bit further a comment made by another in a forum thread regarding the "sense that the characters were moving through two landscapes: the real, tangible, beautifully described landscape of Middle Earth itself; and a larger, mythic landscape of past deeds, stories and memories." That statement I think lies near the heart, if not at it, of the divide between those who absolutely adore The Lord of the Rings and those who find much of it to be baffling. Furthermore, I have held back addressing until now the issues of gender roles and "blood" until now, in part because I wanted to finish reading RotK and the almost-interminable appendices before commenting further. But since these essays are meant to be relatively brief (under 2000 words), doubtless this reflection will be but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to discussing thematic possibilities and problems.

In tone and pacing, Book V of The Return of the King strongly resembles that of Book III from The Two Towers. It is a more martial book, however, since the march to the greater War of the Ring has begun and the pace is near break-neck speed. However, Tolkien still continues to intersperse bits and pieces of a larger imagined narrative within this tale (the Púkelmen, the Paths of the Dead, the twin hills outside the Black Teeth), creating a sense of mystery and wonder...that he later dashes in the appendices and other writings of his. For the most part, these elements work, as long as the reader doesn't bother reading the appendices before finishing the main storyline, because not only is the importance of the events hinted at in these revelations, but the reader is left wondering "How will the Dead play a role in the fight at Minas Tirith?" or "Will the Púkelmen be able to help the Rohirrim arrive in time?" Tolkien does an excellent job in switching back and forth between the Minas Tirith, Rohirrim army, and Grey Company scenes to create narrative tension that makes one want to read faster, while still wanting to have time to ponder what is truly going on around and behind the narrative.

The Battle of Pelannor Field, with its use of a short, direct narrative that echoes that of older sagas and the epic poems of the Matter of Britain, was well-done. The heroism was displayed in full, but without too much space devoted to it, which would have risked distorting the true heroic act that was taking place far from the battlefield. I usually do not care much for action/adventure scenes (not because blood/killing terrifies me, but because I value little such violent acts, even when presented as being "necessary"), but Tolkien appears to have taken great pains to balance this out with the more real, "spiritual" struggle that was taking place near Mount Doom.

Frodo and Sam's plight in Book VI used to be a "hurry up and read it to get to the good stuff" for me when I was younger. Now that I'm nearing middle age and have felt great weariness from my personal burdens (which I will not share here), I have come to have a much greater appreciation for what Tolkien accomplished here. People want to cheer for the hero to succeed; they want him/her to push on through the daunting challenges toward triumph and glory. It is difficult to read of the battered, bruised, and almost-broken Frodo and the steadfast, suffering Sam struggling every step of the way towards Orodruin, while the Ring begins its inexorable takeover of Frodo's will. While some might try to argue that Tolkien never wrote an allegorical tale, I would counter by noting that while the story never is meant to represent a specific action, Tolkien certainly saw parallels between the subject matter of his tale and his own personal beliefs. The temptations eminating from the Ring may not represent Satan's will, but the reader's understanding of what temptation is might be seen readily in how Frodo and Sam have to struggle to maintain their will in the face of the increasing burden of the Ring's temptatous power.

In most heroic tales, the hero triumphs or dies while staving off evil. Frodo however fails. He is no Christ, no matter how much he has grown throughout his wandering and his suffering. He is mortal, and the Ring claims him at the end. Regardless of what one might think of Gollum's intervention (I think it worked well, to highlight another concern of Tolkien's, that of mercy and the possibility of repentance), Frodo's succumbing to the Ring's lure was a stark reminder that humans cannot conquer all obstacles. Perhaps others may wish to debate this point, but I suspect it is central to much of Tolkien's underlying narrative themes.

The Scouring of the Shire works well as a complement to the other events of RotK, showing how pervasive Evil can be and how sorrow has been woven into the world's fabric. While the end of Saruman was sad, I wonder if Tolkien could have expanded the dialogue between him and Frodo a little bit longer to increase the effectiveness of that passage. However, some of the events here and earlier in the trilogy still trouble me.

Much has been made elsewhere over the years about Tolkien's apparent backwards-looking, with his numerous reference to dark machines and foul air that conjures up images of smokestacks and Victorian factories. Some have taken him to task for this, arguing that the world-view Tolkien presents here is reactionary, condemning the good of the Industrial Age by lumping it with the bad. For the most part, I sympathize with his detractors here. At times, there seems to be too much wistfulness, too much bemoaning of what is lost, too little focus on creating an optimistic future. For as devout of a Catholic as Tolkien was, there was not as much hope for righteousness as perhaps there could have been. At times, the story was a bit too bleak, even after Sauron's downfall. While this would jibe well with the notion of Arda marred, or with St. Augustine's idea of Original Sin spoiling God's creation, Tolkien fails to balance this with the eschatological promise of the Millenium and the Second Coming. While doubtless part of this was because he was not creating a 1-to-1 parallel with Catholic Christianity, the distinct, near-total absence of a final hope for Arda was quite noticable. Sometimes, one would love to have just a wee bit more hope in a work.

The gender issue is a very tricky one, one that will reflect much more upon the age/generation of those making the case and not as much on the author's generation. Yes, women played relatively limited roles in the trilogy compared to the men. Yes, Arwen spoke but maybe a couple of times the entire main story. Yes, Eowyn and Galadriel got "screen time" because they were "exceptional" and not because they were representative of women in Tolkien's world. But one could make the argument that Tolkien's faults there (presuming that one accepts that this is a flaw, which is a debatable matter. I think he could have done more) lie more with his conscious copying of older narrative styles that emphasized the trials and tribulations of males, while leading the more wholesome cooking and childrearing duties to the silent, nurturing females. Back in the 1950s, raising the gender issue would have been quaint. Now, it seems odd at times and perhaps at best a "missed opportunity" for Tolkien. More proof that as the times change, so do reader interpretations of fiction.

The race issue is much more troubling to me. The black, "half-troll" men of the Far Harad, the horde-like qualities of the Easterlings - these bring to mind all sorts of prejudical comments on East Asians and Africans that appeared frequently in action/adventure tales of the times. While Tolkien certainly wasn't sympathetic to the racial nonsense of the Nazis and their ilk (he did note in his published letters that there were intentional parallels between the Dwarves and the Jews and their loss of homeland and subsequent wandering), at times there just seemed to be a bit too much there. Perhaps it is the intervening years (the American Civil Rights Movement, the 1968 protests in several countries, Title IX, etc.) that have colored impressions of the years before, but there were several times towards the end of the series that I rolled my eyes at the descriptions of the opposing forces. Yes, Tolkien was careful not to label the Easterlings and Southrons as sub-humans, but it was a near thing in several places.

But what about my overall reaction to the trilogy? I have discussed in these essays how the writing is moving at times, especially toward the end, while the dialogue was more of a hit-or-miss mixture of the rustic, almost "modern" speech and the more elevated, high-born talk that led to several scenes containing stilted language. The characterizations were good for most of the Nine Walkers characters and a few of the more prominent Gondorian and Rohirrim soldiers, but outside of a few fleeting times where the orcs were allowed to be seen as victims of their slave masters as well as being seen as evil, cruel beings, there just was a bit too much one-sidedness to the story's presentation of the sides. However, it is hard to think of how Tolkien could have portrayed a more multi-faceted approach to the good/evil equation without radically altering the story he had set out to tell.

As a narrative, The Lord of the Rings contains many layers, sometimes too many. I still believe that Tolkien's invented "history" intruded too much into the War of the Rings in places, leaving me to wonder if some readers would find the backstory to be more intriguing than the "present" tale. Too bright of a light through a window can deaden the sparkling wonders inside a room, or at least that's how I felt about how the tales told on the travel to Rivendell lessened the narrative impact of the actual, dangerous travel. This perhaps is but a symptom of a greater problem that I had with Tolkien's writing.

Sometimes, authors provide too much information, leave too few mysteries behind. By explicating almost everything, too little is left to the imagination. Instead of having the travelers come upon mysterious, unknown objects from a distant past, there is always some sage (Gandalf, Aragorn, Faramir, etc.) to explain just what this object is/was, why it was built, with the implication that the author's created "past" will lie at the root of everything taking place. While doubtless such "infodumps" can create a sense of curiosity about what else the author might have in store, the sense of wonder is lessened. Sometimes, I just don't want to know the how's and why's of something I read. Give me a mysterious, vaguely threatening monolith and let me create my own imagined past for it.

So in a large sense, my reluctance to re-read Tolkien these past 13 years and my ambivalence now can be chalked up to my irritation that the author has abrogated to a good extent the reader's ability to create alternative understandings or explanations for events. I don't care about "world" creation; I want to read a narrative that remains true to itself and doesn't depend much upon the wires of the underlying setting to draw the reader's attention. Tolkien excels at creating a mythic feel, but often he turns around and ruins much of that by failing to make his backstory remote enough to the unfolding narrative. This was just a case of too much explication, in my opinion. In the end, this re-reading of The Lord of the Rings left me with an appreciation for Tolkien's talents for mimicking the style, tone, and subtlety of older storytelling forms, but it also served to remind me why I rarely read stories in which authors try to create "fully-realized worlds" - authors should be more dead within their texts than any wight from the Barrows crawling about at night.

Next will be an essay about a very different book, one written in 1946, that many consider to be a seminal work for a very different style of fantasy. That essay, on Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, should be up by the end of the weekend. Hopefully, it'll be of as much interest to readers here as the three Tolkien essays might be.