Secondary literature?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I've been reading books by Tolkien since a very young age, but I only started reading books on Tolkien about a decade ago. My conclusion, with a couple of notable exceptions, they are really abysmal.

I'll give you Garth's study of Tolkien and the Great War. And Shippey's Road to Middle-earth is certainly a classic (although blinkered by a disciplinary hatred of literary theory). There are also some good technical studies (e.g. the recent compilation of Tolkien's library, and no doubt some works on elvish language, which I am not qualified to judge). But I challenge anyone to name 5 further general works that are not intrinsically flawed.

PS. If you are tempted to name Jane Chance's A Mythology for England you are obviously living in another dimension and should probably go post on Facebook or reddit, where ignorance is welcomed with open arms.

[Winddancer]

Please tell us how you really feel, simon!
I only have Humphrey Carpenter's Tolkien Biography, but I have to admit I did not read it.. though it was recommended on Old Plaza! Did Christopher ever write one?

Edit: Tidied up the thread!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Actually, Carpenter's biography was the one book I did read as a kid. It is quite decent. But - as is the way of these things - it has now been shown up by all sorts of more recent work (e.g. Garth on the young Tolkien or John Rateliff on the composition of 'The Hobbit').

I'm not including Christopher Tolkien under 'secondary literature.' His work has been editorial. It would be interesting to have a proper plaza discussion of his editing - which is in general superb (far above the level of normal academic editing) but also at times a bit idiosyncratic or just odd.

[onthetrail]

The trouble with most books dedicated to the study of Tolkien is most writers seem to get caught up in their own ideas of what Tolkien meant rather what he actually said in the text. This is why the best works about Tolkien are those that stay closer to the texts themselves, namely editorial and bibliographical entries. Even Carpenter can't help a little adventuring along the way in his biography.

This is why publishers jumping on the bandwagon, self-publishing and online sites like academia.org are not always a good thing. The bar of excellence has been lowered by such a height now one has to wade through a dozen boos or articles to get to a decent one.

On that note I feel there should be a new official biography by now. Carpenter while a decent read is by now very outdated.

[Boromir88]

Out of the secondary literature I've only read John Rateliff's History of the Hobbit and Tom Shippey's Author of the Century. I'm not sure if you are including Karyn Wynn Fonstad's Atlas of Middle-earth, because that's not a book about Tolkien, but I love the maps and details. I think the Atlas is an essential book that compliments The Silmarillion, LOTR, and The Hobbit. Then I've only read snippets of John Garth's book and Verlyn Flieger's Splintered Light.

I've always intended to read Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea novels, but have not done so yet. I've also heard Meditations on Middle-earth is worth reading. It's a compilation of essays about the impact Tolkien had. There are contributions that range from light and humorous to the serious, as I think you would expect when over a dozen other fantasy authors start writing about Tolkien (Le Guin, Pratchett, Orson Scott Card, George RR Martin and many more)

In general though I agree with your essential challenge:

@Chrysophylax Dives...But I challenge anyone to name 5 further general works that are not intrinsically flawed.

I haven't heard of Jane Chance until now. There is another person that I would put in the 'abysmal' and that is Priya Seth. On the old plaza there was a particular member, who I now forget that I was convinced was getting a commission to push Priya Seth's essays. Seth, granted in many ways seemed plausible never sounded very likely. To me that's perfectly fine if that's what an interested reader gets out of reading Tolkien, but the insistence that Seth cracked "Tolkien's secret code" and no one else ever found the answer until Seth cracked the code was putting Tolkien all into Dan Brown territory, which quite frankly is all too zealous for my tastes.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This is why publishers jumping on the bandwagon, self-publishing and online sites like academia.org are not always a good thing. The bar of excellence has been lowered by such a height now one has to wade through a dozen boos or articles to get to a decent one.

Yes. Well said. That is part of why halfir is worth reading. He makes as many mistakes as many of these second-rate 'Tolkien scholars,' but he had the wisdom to make them within an online community rather than 'publications.'

There is a second, recent biography of Tolkien that came out a few years ago, which I assume you are overlooking inadvertently (or I read your post wrong). By Raymond Edwards. I read it the once, found it credible and generally helpful without really advancing anything very much.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Boromir88, your Priya Seth 'Dan Brown Middle-earth code' sounds truly terrible.

On the challenge of naming decent Tolkien scholarship I think you hit a nail on the head. Far better than any such 'scholarship' for getting a 'take' on Tolkien's Middle-earth is Le Guin's Earthsea series. She goes the way of the 'true name,' which halfir found in Tom Bombadil in his 'Peeling the Onion.' I think this idea of Tolkien magic as the magic of the true name is wrong, but lots of people subscribe to it. @Saranna explained to me once that Earth-sea, in Le Guin's language of the Making is *Tolk* and *ein*, a tribute. Last year I read all of GRR Martin's GoT books with the same eye - because however enjoyable those stories are in themselves their is also a strange dialogue going on with Tolkien. I am convinced 'Holdor' is a meditation on The Hobbit.

Also, yes to what you say on maps. There is no Tolkien scholarship without a map.

[Saranna]

To nitpick, as that is what I am here for, 'tolk' means 'earth' and 'inien' means 'sea', thus 'Earthsea' in the language of the Making sounds like 'Tolkienian.'
I read a lot of secondary literature, perhaps because I write a little of it, and other people's work can stimulate one's ideas. I tend to avoid 99% of the overtly religious ones as they are so often about what the author wants Tolkien's work to be. I very much admire Verlyn Flieger and enjoy her books, but that does not mean I agree with every word. Mostly I enjoy this secondary reading and rarely feel I want to throw the book in the fire (as if I would! I'd give it to a charity shop.) Le Guin writes extremely well on Tolkien and on Fantasy in general. On the subject of tribute allusions in other writers' works, I don't think I've read a single Pratchett or a single Stephen King without such an allusion, some so slight you have to be very close reader (which we nitpickers tend to be.) It's nice spotting them. PS what happened to the book-reading smiley? I used to have it in my signature.

[onthetrail]

This is why publishers jumping on the bandwagon, self-publishing and online sites like academia.org are not always a good thing. The bar of excellence has been lowered by such a height now one has to wade through a dozen boos or articles to get to a decent one.

Yes. Well said. That is part of why halfir is worth reading. He makes as many mistakes as many of these second-rate 'Tolkien scholars,' but he had the wisdom to make them within an online community rather than 'publications.'

There is a second, recent biography of Tolkien that came out a few years ago, which I assume you are overlooking inadvertently (or I read your post wrong). By Raymond Edwards. I read it the once, found it credible and generally helpful without really advancing anything very much.

I like Raymond Edward's book, but like you say it is "credible and generally helpful without really advancing anything very much". That boils it down to why I think we need a new biographical text. There are plenty of 'OK' efforts, but they all trudge the same paths offering the same information in a new frame. After reading John M. Bowers excellent but dry Tolkien's Lost Chaucer it becomes clear just how much is still unpublished, especially letters.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

After reading John M. Bowers excellent but dry Tolkien's Lost Chaucer it becomes clear just how much is still unpublished, especially letters.

Ah. I have not looked at that. Will have to make time for it. From what I have been lucky enough to see of the unpublished letters they would form an essential part of any new biographical text. They, so to speak, tell their own story.

@Saranna thank you for the correction. but actually, does not tolk mean stone rather than earth?

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives Ulp! How halfirian of you, I believe that's right. How distressing. I have had to go right back to the first edition of Lin Carter's early book on Tolkien, 'J.R.R. Tolkien: a look behind the Lord of the Rings.' For that is where I found this snippet, I have never claimed to have spotted it myself! I quote from page 173, paragraph 1: ''...Ged starts learning the true names of things, and we discover that the true word for 'rock' is tolk - the stuff of 'the dry land on which men live.' The word for sea, on the other hand, is in the 'true speech' inien. So, if we wanted an equivalent for the name of the world Le Guin has made, a word for Earthsea, it would be tolk-inien; which is nicely appropriate."

[Chrysophylax Dives]

:)

@Saranna I am guessing you never got into the Game of Thrones books? They seem far away from Middle-earth, and in some ways they are, but reading them felt often as if this or that element of the story was a deeply considered response to some element of LOTR.

[Androthelm]

@Chrysophylax Dives a week late and slightly off topic, but I think you're on the money when it comes to the dialogue with Tolkien in Game of Thrones. GRRM is open about it, too -- I'll have to dig up the quote, but he gave an interview once where he talked about how it isn't enough to say that somebody is "a good king" -- you have to show how their kingship is good and just, and how that filters down into other things: what is their tax plan, do they keep a standing army etc. That always reminded me of the Professor's own struggles to write The New Shadow in the aftermath of the story as we know it.

It's certainly a different approach to worldbuilding -- but, on the other hand, he's said that he rereads LoTR about once annually, so he's certainly inspired.

On-topic, do you happen to have any recommendations on Secondary Tolkien stuff? I still haven't read much besides a few excerpts from the Carpenter bio. It seems like the pickings might be slim -- are there pickings at all?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Androthelm:

On-topic, do you happen to have any recommendations on Secondary Tolkien stuff? I still haven't read much besides a few excerpts from the Carpenter bio. It seems like the pickings might be slim -- are there pickings at all?

The only book ever published on Tolkien really worth reading is Tom Shippey's Road to Middle-earth. This was published (I think) in 1982. What Shippey does is show how Tolkien's creative writing was often the other side of the coin to his professional philological studies.

To give a 'worm' example (which Shippey does not mention). In the Anglo-Saxon story of Beowulf the good, old king Beowulf dies in a fight with a dragon whose wrath has been awakened by a nameless thief who crept into his treasure-filled barrow and stole a cup. With the story of Bilbo Baggins, who awakens the rage of Smaug by stealing a cup, we see Tolkien (among other things) playing with this story (which he surely took to be much older than Beowulf), giving a name to the nameless thief and telling his story so that, despite the destruction of Lake Town, he has our sympathy.

The basic problem with the secondary literature on Tolkien is that while everyone hails Shippey's Road almost nobody has explored further the obviously intimate connection between Tolkien's professional interests and his creative writing.

A further problem, I think, is that most 'Tolkien scholars' are found in English Lit. departments and the presuppositions they have learned in their discipline are diametrically opposed to those held by Tolkien - but this is not acknowledged and so the modern scholarship often seems to miss what Tolkien was actually saying.

Still, there is by now a lot of secondary literature, and while I certainly have not read all of it I have read too much of it. So if you can give me indications of your particular interests I'd be happy to offer some further suggestions if I can.

[Androthelm]

@Chrysophylax Dives I will check out Road to Middle-earth, then. I'll admit that (despite our conversation on "On Fairy-Stories"!) I am tremendously interested in examining the bones before they went into the soup (or perhaps even a step further -- seeing the animal walk). I'm more interested in the texts / perspectives / context which surrounded Tolkien (and which it sounds like Shippey addresses with his professional interests) than I am in straight biography.

I'd love to know what you mean by the English lit comment -- I'm not in disagreement (once upon a time I was an English person, but that was long ago) but interested. What sort of presuppositions?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Androthelm, the two parts of your post are related. OFS has the line about being interested in the soup and not the bones, and this together with the famous allegory of the tower in Tolkien's 1936 lecture on Beowulf are routinely trotted out in the literature to justify an ahistorical approach to Tolkien's Middle-earth as purely a creative fantasy. Given the context of this discussion I'll focus only on the latter.

Tolkien introduced his 1936 lecture on Beowulf with a story of a man who found some old stones (ancient English stories) and built a tower from which he could see the sea; but his friends did not climb the stairs but rather knocked over the tower to search for hidden inscriptions among the invidivual stones.

The standard reading of this allegory is that Tolkien is saying that to appreciate a work of art - in this case Beowulf - we must enjoy it on its own terms and that scholarly inquiry into the sources of the story (the bones, to switch metaphor) spoils literary appreciation. Jane Chance, who first voiced this reading, goes so far as to equate the scholarly friends with 'monsters' who seek to kill art.

But this reading does not square with the lecture itself, which reveals that Tolkien posits a specific relationship between historical and literary readings: to read Beowulf properly we must first establish the historical facts of its composition: Tolkien's starting point is the then recent conclusion that the poem was composed by an Anglo-Saxon already living in England. Once we have the history fixed we can then see what the author was trying to do, which turns out to be: drawing on the ancient stories brought over the sea in the migration to the British Isles to make a story that was true to the spirit of the ancient pagan English imagination (which, the poet wishes to show, was compatible with the teachings of the gospels) - and in achieving this aim, says Tolkien, the poet was (in effect) looking back over the sea (i.e. glimpsing a lost world of ancient English story). And with this literary reading established we can now return to historical scholarship, because while the old stones of Beowulf are indeed windows onto these ancient stories, to read them properly as historians we have first to understand how the poet was using and reshaping them for his own ends (the scholarly friends who sought insight into the ancient world needed first to climb the stairs before they could evaluate the stones of this 'modern' poem). So rather than an anti-scholarly manifesto that decries scholarship as a crime against art, what we have here is a sophisticated vision of how literary and historical readings must work together.

In terms of modern literary criticism, the key word is 'intention.' Tolkien seeks the intention of the Beowulf-poet, which can only be grasped by first situating him in history. He concludes that this Anglo-Saxon poet intended to rework the ancient stories to make a new story that captured the spirit of the lost ancient (pre-migration) world. But modern literary criticism has abandoned the idea of 'intention' and seeks readings of the text divorced from the author ('the author is dead'). Given that the secondary literature on Tolkien is mainly composed by those trained to eschew intentions the result is an absolute failure to grasp what Tolkien was saying about Beowulf - and, I would add, what Tolkien was himself trying to do, which was - following the model of the Beowulf poet - to build his own tower out of his own reading of the ancient stones.

In my opinion, the above arguments are demonstrated simply by a careful reading of the 1936 lecture. But if there was ever any doubt about the matter they have been resolved by the posthumous translation and commentary on Beowulf, where we find Tolkien's careful historical inspection of the stones of Beowulf (an activity that brands him a monster, according to Jane Chance!)

All of the above is merely to point to the key to Middle-earth that the secondary literature has passed over. Once we have this key we can start to unlock many doors, which is to say that we can get to the bones that you are after. But this is a massive endeavour, of which in this post I can only provide some pointers.

Briefly, in Beowulf Tolkien found two 'stones,' one ancient and one very old, which provided him with a vision of the mythical beginning and legendary end of the lost ancient era of English history (i.e. the period prior to migration to the British Isles). The mythical beginning, the exordium to Beowulf, is the story of a king who came to his people as a babe in a boat sent by mysterious others from over the sea. The legendary end is the likely historical story of the doomed love of Ingeld and Freawaru, which is alluded to in Beowulf, and which Tolkien describes as a personalized story of the end of the ancient order in the North. In the 'Fall of Númenor,' composed in 1936 - a few months before delivering his famous lecture on Beowulf, we see Tolkien combining elements of these two stories to imagine the 'original' mythical story of beginning, which results in the arrival on the shores of Middle-earth, not of a babe who will be king, but of Elendil. But, as I said, this is hardly to explain and merely to point to the 'bones.'

But as a final note, the original tower that looks over the sea is found, not on the Tower Hills to the West of the Shire, nor even in the allegory that introduces the Beowulf lecture, but in the 'Fall of Númenor,' where it is told how the exiles in Middle-earth could still 'half-see' the vanished West and built high towers to look back over the sea. Here is the key to the allegory of Beowulf, and also to Tolkien's own intentions: both were engaged in an art of remembrance, which sought to glimpse the stories - and so the magic (or enchantment) - of an age that was now lost.

[Androthelm]

@Chrysophylax Dives you've convinced me, although I'll admit that I dropped my English Lit. studies for the weird world of Religious Studies, where a lot of what you're saying (particularly the foolishness of hardcore author-death) is widely accepted. So maybe I'm better primed for what you're saying.

The issue of the Tower -- looking west, looking into memory -- interests me as well, although I do have one question: Reading it as you do, who was Tolkien talking about? It seems like he himself knocked down plenty of towers in his time (to stretch the metaphor a bit).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I think Tolkien shared the Beowulf poet's vision of a lost tradition of ancient English storytelling and, like the Anglo-Saxon poet before him, saw himself as rescuing from oblivion this lost ancient art.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Back to topic... I'm going to name two more who I think merit the title of Tolkien scholars - first rate writers worth devoting time to reading. So, in addition to Garth (for early biography) and Shippey (the fit between the scholarship and the fiction), what about (our own, silent) Troelsfo (whose name i don't @ to spare his blushes) and Dawn Walls-Thumma?

Troelsfo was one of the old plaza loremasters, which (as has been pointed out by @Elenhir) is not the same thing at all as being a 'Tolkien scholar.' But Troelsfo's contributions to the old plaza lore forum were of a piece with his wider reviewing work of all things Tolkien, and in both he revealed (and on occasion still reveals) not only a knowledge wide and deep but also (that most unusual thing) an open mind. Unlike Tolkien scholars, as they are found in journals and books, he really has read all the literature, and yet refrains from making his own generalizations. Possibly, this is the only respectable point of view?

Dawn Walls-Thumma is a different kettle of fish. You can find her work through the Silmarillion Writers Guild and her website, The Heretic Loremaster. She comes to 'Tolkien scholarship' as a writer of fan-fiction, and her stories about Silmarillion-characters perform work in relation to her scholarship (and vice versa) that (I think) mirrors the relationship between Tolkien's stories and his own scholarly reflections. Dawn's 'Tolkien scholarship' is in the spirit of Tolkien in a manner that is, to the best of my knowledge, unique.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

The 'fifth mortal' on my Tolkien scholar dream team will have to be someone who understands about Tolkien's languages; some people do seem to, but i do not know who they are.

[onthetrail]

The 'fifth mortal' on my Tolkien scholar dream team will have to be someone who understands about Tolkien's languages; some people do seem to, but i do not know who they are.

I think that would have to be Carl Hosttetter of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship.

My go to writers on the subject of Tolkien would have to be Garth, Fleiger, and Hammond/Scull. I really enjoyed Rateliff's History of the Hobbit but obviously his work on Tolkien is restricted mostly to that with some articles and blog posts.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

The 'fifth mortal' on my Tolkien scholar dream team will have to be someone who understands about Tolkien's languages; some people do seem to, but i do not know who they are.

I think that would have to be Carl Hosttetter of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship.

My go to writers on the subject of Tolkien would have to be Garth, Fleiger, and Hammond/Scull. I really enjoyed Rateliff's History of the Hobbit but obviously his work on Tolkien is restricted mostly to that with some articles and blog posts.

Phil, thanks for that. Now we can get into fine-tuned discussion. On Carl H., what i have read of his work was really good. ideally, my 'Tolkien linguist' would have as good Old English (and Old Norse) as Sindarin and Quenya (which Carl H. may have, i don't know). My underlying concern here is related to that expressed above regarding English Lit. Those who study Tolkien's invented languages tend to be linguistics, and i have a sense (but with less understanding) that linguists are trained different to comparative philologists like Tolkien - so there may be obvious aspects of Tolkien's language work that they miss because they wear different disciplinary blinkers. But i just don't know...

@Saranna also mentioned Verlyn Flieger, and indeed she is the name i am most aware that i have not entered into the list. I find her a very curious case. On the one hand, I believe she has more basic insight than any other commentator, that she alone of the 'English Lit.' people genuinely sees the historical context of Tolkien's writings (witness, e.g. her highlighting of the Folklore Society, or even her honing in on the notion of 'time'), and that she has a deep honesty and integrity such that, in contrast to many other first-wave commentators (e.g. Shippey, but also Patrick Curry and Chance) I always feel that she is honestly striving to understand Tolkien rather than using Tolkien to advance her own agenda. The drawback with Flieger is that her execution is usually flawed, or at least limited.

To take but the obvious case, 'Splintered Light,' for a long time you could not open a work of secondary literature without reading of Shippey's 'Road' and her 'Splintered Light' as the two classics of 'Tolkien studies.' Now, Flieger's argument that Owen Barfield stands shoulder to shoulder with the Beowulf poet as influences on Tolkien did not survive the dating that emerged from the Home volumes (as John Rateliff notes in the 'History of the Hobbit,' Tolkien's Silmarillion stories predate the publication of Barfield's 'Poetic Diction' and show no obvious change in the wake of its appearance, and given that Tolkien was in Leeds they can hardly have talked much before this). Her response to this was the second edition of 'Splintered Light,' which becomes a glorious mangling of her original insight (a consistent misidentification of linguistic genealogical relationship with the much more mysterious unity of opposite meanings posited by Barfield). The arguments of this second edition do not work, and it is in fact hardly surprising that, despite all the talk of 'Road' and 'Splintered Light' Tolkien studies has failed to reconcile these two books. (An illustration is found in halfir's discussion of Owen Barfield on 'Peeling the Onion,' which is hopelessly confused). But let me highlight that, while her execution is flawed i have no doubt (on an instinctive level) that her insight is correct: Barfield's 'Poetic Diction' is truly a key to Tolkien's thought (only we do not quite understand how, yet).

John Rateliff I would bracket with Hammond/Scull and also Troels Forchhammer. Rateliff is the most scholarly of the group, and indeed the research behind the 'History of the Hobbit' is rock solid and a magnificent contribution. But Rateliff follows Hammond/Scull (and i admit, even our Troelsfo) of throwing in everything and the kitchen sink. The commentary in the 'History of the Hobbit' too often reads like an encyclopedia entry on everything to do with, say, trolls (after 'Roast Mutton'). Hammond/Scull take this too extremes. I think one could argue that they are editors and archivists more than scholars - they provide the scholar with material but don't employ their own discernment sufficiently. I confess that, plaza pride aside, there is no good reason for including Troelsfo in the 'dream team' but not Rateliff or Hammond/Scull.

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives In fact I have read every word of A Song of Ice and Fire, and have joined the ranks of those longing for the last instalment. (But not of those abusing GRRM online.) As for A Game of Thrones on the TV, I understand it to be off on a line of its own and don't feel able to get into that. I take your points about Flieger, in terms of limitations, but we all have those. Integrity is a valuable thing, and she has that in abundance. Her edition, with Douglas A Anderson, of 'On Fairy-stories' is so meticulous and addresses the original with a kind of reverence, but not OTT. Also she's a really nice lady and remembers one's name from conference to conference. Personally I wish she had been Galadriel - I'm not convinced that long-living among the Eldar need imply sustained youthfulness of appearance. Blanchett looked too young, no gravitas. Seems I'm a serious Flieger fan! But this is a fascinating thread, very valuable. Has geordie re-joined the plaza? Never underestimate what geordie knows about Tolkien

[Winddancer]

@Saranna @geordie he has indeed joined us ;)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Aside from @Saranna, who possesses some secret hobbit vitality, all the old lore team have become treeish. This is usually the way with Entmoots.

[Saranna]

@Winddancer @Chrysophylax Dives @geordie I have a secret store of Miruvor, but don't tell!

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Saranna, @Androthelm

https://www.academia.edu/19105667/Reviv ... card=title

- an essay i randomly came upon on academia.edu. that pertains to both Verlyn Flieger and the mess that passes today as 'Tolkien scholarship.' The author is Joanna Podhorodecka, the title: 'Reviving dead metaphors - images of evil in JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings'. I am not suggesting that you read the paper, but if you look at it you will see (I believe) what I mean.

Flieger in Splintered Light argued that Tolkien learned from Owen Barfield a curious ancient history according to which, when the original mythical age passed, language changed and the original words came to mean disenchanted things and no longer fully intelligible metaphor. Barfield's vision is amazing, and as Flieger points out beautifully, generates an understanding of language today as haunted by metaphors misunderstood because we have forgotten that they were once fragments of a living mythology - and some such awareness of language we certainly find in Tolkien.

Now, as John Rateliff points out, the Silmarillion stories predate any possible acquaintance with Barfield. So Flieger's position is now reduced to an idea of Barfield expressing ideas already in Oxford in the air and so at most similar to (rather than the source of) Tolkien's root ideas. But this is very exciting, and invites an attempt to articulate Tolkien's understanding of metaphor - a term of art (just think of Tolkien's various Stones and Towers). Here would indeed be a key to Middle-earth!

Rather than attempt to outline Tolkien's idea of metaphor - the natural, illuminating, step that should follow Flieger - the author of this paper takes a different route, which could be described as hollowing out the better part of Flieger's insights.

Joanna Podhorodecka begins with wonderful quotations from Flieger concerning Tolkien on dead myth and living metaphors but steps carefully clear of any mention of (the known to be troublesome) Owen Barfield and decides to investigate Tolkien's 'ruling metaphor of light and dark' by means of the tools of the modern, semi-scientific or 'cognitive' school of metaphor associated with the names Lakoff and Johnson. Why?

This is called throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Noticing where Flieger came unstuck her genuine insight into the relevance of Owen Barfield's account of metaphor is dismissed from view and, in place of Barfield's contemporary theory - which is hardly going to be identical with Tolkien's but is going to provide many hints about it - we have a post-WWII theory of metaphor that draws on various traditions of which Tolkien had nothing to do.

Why use Lakoff and Johnson to investigate Tolkien's metaphors? What is the point? Why not ask what Tolkien thought about metaphors? But nobody does.

[Saranna]

Well that's an admirable summary of how wrong one can go, please don't apply your piercing eye for unintentional error to anything I write! I confess I'd never noticed Rateliff's spotting of the dates that undercut the Barfield theory, it's good to have that clarified. Whenever I have tried to read Barfield I have become confused, it's nice to know that as a Tolkienist I need not bother too much - though as you say, it was 'in the air' so not completely negligible even though not a 'source' in any way. Maybe a main pitfall for people trying to be scholarly about Tolkien today is this huge proliferation of secondary stuff, so that, to misquote Byron, one has 'read too long and deeply.'
What we need to do perhaps, is start a thread on 'Tolkien and Metaphor' - a nice new Lore thread would be stimulating. Say in January, there's too much going on for me in RL this month. Many thanks @Chrysophylax Dives

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Whenever I have tried to read Barfield I have become confused, it's nice to know that as a Tolkienist I need not bother too much - though as you say, it was 'in the air' so not completely negligible even though not a 'source' in any way.

No! You must at least understand Barfield. He may not be a source but his book is vital context. Tolkien's idea of metaphor is not the same, and is certainly not the source, but there is a family resemblance and that is more than can be said for just about any other book I know.

On reading Poetic Diction. Flieger could have helped her exposition by turning to Otto Jespersen's great revisionist work of comparative philology, Progress in Language (1894), from which Barfield explicitly draws his historical vision.

Overturning 19th-century ideas about linguistic change over the centuries (which saw modern English and European languages as degenerating from an archaic inflexional form), Jespersen introduced the (novel) idea that the business of language is to communicate and that, over time, all languages reveal progress in that less verbal effort comes to communicate more. Jespersen's real concern is with the ways in which the modern European languages have become increasingly 'analytic,' which he defines in terms of many short words for different things and a nimble apparatus of combination. An almost incidental (for him) byproduct of his vision of modern linguistic progress is that a strange origin of it all is posited, a primordial day when language consisted only of very long words hard to combine, monstrous conglomerations of sound-syllables that, in their great Entish length, each alone conveyed myriad abstract and the concrete dimensions of any thing talked about.

Barfield says in Poetic Diction that he is adopting wholesale Jespersen's revised historical model of linguistic change. What he insists upon, his starting-point, is that the Danish philologist's model is absent an account of meaning. His argument is that when we add meaning the posited primordial origin takes on a new significance as a key to modern metaphor (and therefore poetry).

In the beginning, once upon a time, at the origin of language, meanings of words must have been more like what we consider today meanings of whole stories. Abstract and concrete meanings must have attached in single (very long) words, in which - say, the name of a hill told the sorrows and joys played out upon it as well as its geological fashioning.

Metaphor does not seem to play a significant role in the language of the Ents, but Barfield's idea - some elements of which are certainly also found in Tolkien - is that a poetic metaphor composed today may be a discovery of a lost fusion of meanings once found in a forgotten story (the conglomeration of sound-signs that we call a story but was once a single name).

At the very least, Tolkien surely has a very close idea of the relationship between his 'discovery' of lost connections as a scholar and his fashioning of poetic metaphors as an artist (again: Stones: the stones of Beowulf and the Seeing Stones).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This discussion prompts me to revise my four + names above as good Tolkien scholars. On reflection it feels wrong to include Shippey but not Flieger; rather than warrant Verlyn Flieger, however, I think I'd rather cast Tom Shippey from the fold. That said, the productive step is probably to encircle 'Road' and 'Splintered Light' as two classics that, the enormous Home+ publications since the 1980s have still failed to reconcile. One might say that the problem today with the literature of 'Tolkien studies' is that there is more and more of it and yet the fundamentals have yet to be pinned down because we don't know how to read 'Road' and 'Splintered Light' together.

Because Shippey makes a single, cogent, massively illuminating point - viz. Tolkien's stories were the imaginative constructions of a philologist - and because he makes it with such style and panache, 'Road' will remain the first point of reference. But 'Road' is by the same token a one-pony-wagon, and what 'Splintered Light' illuminates is the edges of the road to Middle-earth that Shippey is frightened of and runs away from.

I know no comment by Shippey on Flieger's 'Splintered Light', and his silence is indicative of a self-declared student of Language who will have no truc with a literary theory. Shippey is of course correct that Tolkien was a champion of Language over Literature in his day at Oxford and Leeds, but he makes far too much of his own sense of this battle and cannot - or will not - see that Tolkien has an ideal of communication (founded on the idea of *reading an intention*) and a concrete metaphor (the stone, and its derivatives) by which he works to express this ideal (and its imperfect copies). Tolkien, in other words, has a (perculiar, idiosyncratic, mind-blowing) literary theory, and though Flieger gives a muddled presentation (simplifying it into Barfield's 'Poetic Diction) she - acutely - saw that such a literary theory was at the heart of Tolkien's stories and, vitally, that it turned on an idea of metaphor.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

The issue of the Tower -- looking west, looking into memory -- interests me as well, although I do have one question: Reading it as you do, who was Tolkien talking about? It seems like he himself knocked down plenty of towers in his time (to stretch the metaphor a bit).

Androthelm, I was reading back up this thread and confess that I did not when I first read it, and still do not now, understand your question (though I replied to it above!) Do you mean: who are the guests that knock over the tower? (The emphasis then should be on 'who' not 'was', no?) Also, it is always worth stretching - or otherwise playing with - Tolkien's metaphors, but i do not see him as especially iconoclastic. What towers that he knocked over might you mean?

[Saranna]

@Chrysophylax Dives Well, maybe I overstated my lack of understanding, I will note that I need to re-re-read Barfield and extend my reading of Jespersen, which stands currently at 'Growth and structure of the English language.' (Both these have been aims of mine for some time but life gets in the way.) Meanwhile thanks for these posts, 'an education in themselves' as people don't seem to say so much these days - it's good to be rewoken.
Do you know the Star Trek NG episode 'Darmok', which features a race whose language IS their mythology. Some of what you say above makes me feel the creators of that might have been reading Barfield/Jespersen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
I need another bookcase.......

[Androthelm]

Androthelm, I was reading back up this thread and confess that I did not when I first read it, and still do not now, understand your question (though I replied to it above!) Do you mean: who are the guests that knock over the tower? (The emphasis then should be on 'who' not 'was', no?) Also, it is always worth stretching - or otherwise playing with - Tolkien's metaphors, but i do not see him as especially iconoclastic. What towers that he knocked over might you mean?

Just asking, accepting your criticism of the "Tolkien said not to knock down the tower :(" people, what your perspective on what he did mean was? Just to be gentle, when we're rooting around examining the lives of author? Something else?

[Troelsfo]

I read a lot of secondary literature, perhaps because I write a little of it, and other people's work can stimulate one's ideas. I tend to avoid 99% of the overtly religious ones as they are so often about what the author wants Tolkien's work to be. I very much admire Verlyn Flieger and enjoy her books, but that does not mean I agree with every word. Mostly I enjoy this secondary reading and rarely feel I want to throw the book in the fire (as if I would! I'd give it to a charity shop.) Le Guin writes extremely well on Tolkien and on Fantasy in general.

I am very much in line with @Saranna here. I have probably not read quite as much as Saranna, but I do quite enjoy it, and would also emphasise Verlyn Flieger's work along with the works of Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond as well as Tom Shippey.

One thing that does, in my view, mar a lot of the critical works, is that the scholars seem unaware of the strength of the evidence, they produce, and therefore often try to stretch their ideas far beyond what they can actually bear. Even if the initial idea does have some merit, by the time it has been presented as the core idea behind large swaths of Tolkien's work, it loses all credibility – even for that initial core idea, that might actually have some merit.

This was one of the points of critique, I raised in my review of Tolkien and his Sources – the book on source criticism edited by Jason Fisher. A few of the authors obviously did have a valid point when identifying one or the other literary source, but generally they would try to claim that this source had also inspired a lot more in Tolkien's works than just the initial couple of passages or concepts, which were actually convincing.

Similar to this – possibly even correlated – there is a tendency towards single-mindedness; towards a narrowness of perspective that I find detrimental to the quality of the work. Scholars often find themselves pursuing a single perspective, a single (and often very narrow) way of viewing Tolkien's work. This is, of course, not restricted to Tolkien scholars, but with an author such as Tolkien, this is possibly worse because he constantly was inspired by a multitude of things. Tolkien was an extremely knowledgeable man (in a way that I think we can hardly understand today), and he was continuously in an environment where he had access to scholars of every field imaginable. Tolkien also constantly worked with his own way of working: he tested out new narrative aesthetics as well as testing out numerous poetic and lyrical aesthetics, various metaphysical position, etc. etc. With such an author, the usual single-perspective way of working is, I believe, quite likely to go astray.

Speaking as a physicist, one of the things that I have had to learn (at some stretches, very much the hard way ) has been that literary criticism is rarely about being right, but about presenting ideas, about getting the reader to try to think in a new way and to see (& think about) the author and/or the work in a new way, a new perspective. What they occasionally forget is that, to achieve this, you still need to have a good enough case to persuade your reader to go along with you for the ride – not to be convinced, but to gain new perspectives and to learn at least a little. Therefore, while being right is not really the point, being too much wrong can put the reader off.

Therefore, and regardless of these tendencies among literary scholars, I do find that there are a number of Tolkien scholars whose work is generally enlightening also for people well versed in Tolkien's life and works, and when pushed back to a core idea, they are quite convincing (even despite their taking their ideas too far). People such as John Garth, Dimitra Fimi, Gergely Nagy, Nelson Goering, Carl Phelpstead, Carl Hostetter, David Bratman, Douglas Anderson, Michael Drout and, I am sure, others whose names escape me at the moment (I build my views here both on monographs and, papers contributed to various academic collections, and in a few cases on attending their lectures/readings).

I have to say that I am less impressed with the Tolkien-criticism from John Rateliff's hand. This is not a criticism of his work in editing the manuscripts for The Hobbit in his excellent The History of the Hobbit, but when he goes to personal analysis, he is, in my opinion, not as convincing as I'd like (meaning that I doubt that his analysis is correct more often than for the scholars listed above).

Of the religious stuff (where, again, I tend to agree with Saranna), I would highlight Jonathan McIntosh' The Flame Imperishable. There is a tendency among those making these overtly religious attempts at literary analysis or criticism of Tolkien to over-analyse in a rather depressing manner. McIntosh understands that Tolkien's personal faith influenced the metaphysics of his work (and, especially in The Lord of the Rings the symbolism), but doesn't try to make everything in the book be based on Catholic ideas. I think that McIntosh' reading of Tolkien's theory of Evil (his ponerology – the underlying concepts of the nature of evil, of its emergence, both in the world and in the individual, etc.) is a wonderful counter-argument to Shippey's description of Manichaean vs. Boëthian views.

On the subject of tribute allusions in other writers' works, I don't think I've read a single Pratchett or a single Stephen King without such an allusion, some so slight you have to be very close reader (which we nitpickers tend to be.) It's nice spotting them.

Oh yes, Pratchett alludes to Tolkien in various (often rather subtle) ways

As for A Song of Ice and Fire, I did once try to read the first book, A Game of Thrones, but I had to give up after a few chapters – it failed completely to enchant me. I haven't since felt compelled to give it a new try. I have read some of the things Martin has said about Tolkien, and have occasionally wondered if Martin has bothered to actually read Tolkien's work rather than just skimming through it ...



P.S. I really don't know what to say to @Chrysophylax Dives' praise of my work. I am, obviously, very grateful, but also I blush because I know it is so deeply undeserved. Still ... thank you very much, Simon!

[Saranna]

@Troelsfo What a lot to respond to, and all very on the mark. One point about narrow vision; when one is (once in a blue moon) invited to produce a paper or chapter by the editors of a new collection, it is very often themed. It's at once exciting and constraining to work to a theme, but it can easily lead to that tendency Troelsfo has mentioned to go seeking for more evidence than is actually there in an attempt to ensure you 'get it right.'
I haven't time to say more now, Troelsfo, as I'm checking references for just such a chapter/paper! So must be off to Lore to see if anyone can help with one I cannot pin down. I hope this discussion continues, it's of the essence of the Plaza as I know and love it.

[Androthelm]

I think @Troelsfo is right on the tendency for scholarship to be rather narrow-lensed. It's sort of the impact of having a lens, imo -- although I'm not as up on English / Literary scholarship as I might be, I know in my own field (Religious studies) there is a tendency toward building your career around teasing out one theme / topic / thread again and again and again -- looking at everything through your very precise interest, and then, of course, presenting it as core to all reading since it's become core to yours.

[Boromir88]

Returning to this thread because a friend has alerted me to a new Tolkien book that's out; Tolkien's Modern Reading by Holly Ordway.

I wanted to see if anyone here has heard about it, or read it? @Saranna @Troelsfo if you have what do you think? From how it's been described is Ordway is making the case that Tolkien was also inspired by modern literature and authors. I do think there is so little scholarship focusing on Tolkien's modern lit influences that it has piqued my interest. However, I also get turned off by scholars who get tunnel-vision and from the description and video on the website, it seems like the author might be antagonistic towards Carpenter; implying that he was dishonest about Tolkien's influences.

[Saranna]

Sorry @Boromir88 I haven't read it yet, though it's on my long long list of things I'd like to read.

[Troelsfo]

Like @Saranna, I haven't read Ordway's book myself, but I have read about it from people who did read it, and I have to say that it doesn't look promising. The preliminary reports have proven sufficient to make respected friends declare that they'd stay away from Tolkien's Modern Reading. One commenter reading the books says “Not that it's likely I 'll do anything with this, but so often with her book I read her statements and think, that's not quite right.”

This sense of “not quite right” sense, coupled with a perception of a narrowness of perspective seems to be the general impression by the few readers, I've seen commenting.

My own copy of Tolkien's Modern Reading only arrived recently, but between the less than warm reviews and lots of other books on my list, I am in no hurry to get to it.