I was reading an article tonight about the debate on whether author J.R.R. Tolkien ought to be taken seriously, and I came across this quote by literary critic Harold Bloom.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=kicking_the_hobbit

"Elf-besotted fans aside, why shouldn't Tolkien be granted admission to the literary pantheon? Well, for one thing, his detractors argue, his prose is unbearably archaic. "Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon," writes Bloom. Tolkien's verse--which litters the text of The Lord of the Rings--is generally accepted to be even worse."

Wow, Tolkien must be pretty unbearably archaic then if it's worse than the Book of Mormon. Or maybe Bloom is using hyperbole with the Book of Mormon representing a literary standard for bad prose. Or maybe Mormons should be jumping for joy that literary critics are reading the Book of Mormon. :)

He seems very eccentric. I don't know what his hard-on is for Joseph Smith, but Tolkien is immeasurably better than the Book of Mormon.

That may be the author of the article calling it "worse than the Book of Mormon." I have Bloom's book "J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)" (p.2) with the actual quote:


But there is still the burden of Tolkien’s style: stiff, false archaic,
overwrought, and finally a real hindrance in Volume III, The Return of the
King, which I have had trouble rereading. At seventy-seven, I may just be too
old, but here is The Return of the King, opened pretty much at random:

At the doors of the Houses many were already gathered to see
Aragorn, and they followed after him; and when at last he had
supped, men came and prayed that he would heal their kinsmen
or their friends whose lives were in peril through hurt or wound,
or who lay under the Black Shadow. And Aragorn arose and went
out, and he sent for the sons of Elrond, and together they labored
far into the night. And word went through the city: ‘The King is
come again indeed.’ And they named him Elfstone, because of the
green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold
at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own
people.

I am not able to understand how a skilled and mature reader can absorb
about fifteen hundred pages of this quaint stuff. Why “hurt or wound”; are they
not the same? What justifies the heavy King James Bible influence upon this
style? Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon.
Tolkien met a need, particularly in the early days of the counterculture in
the later 1960s. Whether he is an author for the duration of the twenty-first
century seems to me open to some doubt.

Thankfully, the scriptural style of that paragraph is pretty rare in the LOTR trilogy.

Bloom should know better than this--"hurt or wound" serves the cadence of the sentence and emphasizes the depth of Aragon's care. It is a rhetorical device. Sheesh.

As if that's the sum total of Tolkien's legacy. I agree with some of Bloom's criticism. For example, he said in another part of his book that Lord of the Rings is a period piece. He quotes other people who have said that it is escapist or not a modern novel. I think that's apparent. But he tries to confine the importance of the book to points that he can easily strike down. He says that the story isn't a quest like the Hobbit, but a descent into hell and "[w]hether a visionary descent into hell can be rendered persuasively in language that is acutely self-conscious, even arch, seems to me the hard question." Well, no. The book is a lot more complex than that, and if all you're looking at is whether it's persuasive in its unusual language, then you're missing the whole reason Tolkien wrote this book. And clearly it works, because it is a page-turner for a lot of people despite what Bloom thinks.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2010 01:39AM by Makurosu.

...and didn't try to foist his imaginative stories on his readers as scripture.

Tolkien raised the bar for fabulous, rich, fantasy fiction. Joseph Smith lowered the bar for pure bullshit.

Tolkien was an Oxford professor of philology, worked on the Oxford English dictionary and was an expert in a number of medieval European languages. So, if he wrote something that sounded King James Bible-ish, he would be the one to do it. Smith, not so much.

The first time I picked up the LOTR books, I literally couldn't put them down. (It was not a good idea to start reading them during university finals week.)

With the BoM, I never could get past the first few chapters, despite several attempts and sincere effort. I nearly dislocated my jaw, from yawning. NOT what you could describe as an edge-of-your-seat plot line.

I did find the one quote passage of Return of the King..too well, scripturesque, but Tolkien is such a better writer than Smith! Tolkien actually bothered to study and work on his books not just make shtuff up and plagiarize. Tolkien is worth re-re-reading...Smith not so much.
I love the way Tolkien creates scenes with his words. And he never once said "and it came to pass"!
Smith's version of Tolkien "and it came to pass, that the Hobbits were blessed with many furry footed women for their righteousness and not murmuring against Gandalf"
Throw thy CTR rings into the Great Salt Lake!

But his feelings toward Tolkien's work are somewhat consistent with that statement...

>Harold Bloom--the famously Falstaffian Yale English prof who has designated himself the gatekeeper of the Western literary canon--calls Tolkien's romance "inflated, over-written, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme." Bloom concludes: "Whether [Tolkien] is an author for the coming century seems to me open to some doubt."

Okay, I think I can lay claim to a "reasonably educated sensibility" (even if I don't exercise it much these days, preferring, as I do, history, a bit of science, and politics, which I naturally indulge in off-board). And I think this analysis of Tolkien's current status is accurate:

>When it comes to the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, it is a truism that critics either love the books or hate them: Concerning Middle Earth, there is no middle ground. Such has been the case ever since Tolkien, an Oxford philologist, first published his epic novel The Lord of the Rings...

This whole blog entry--which is what it looks iike to me--is an example of what passes for literary scholarship and criticism in academia; it is the wordsmith's pastime akin to the medieval joust with allusions to fair ladies and heroic tales brought together in a 13th Century festival hosted by the king or other nobles; the real war is elsewhere or in the past, but they seek nevertheless to portray it in their playtime...

What nobody seems to have come to grips with, in contrasting past writers--note the comparisons offered to Shakespeare--is just how populous and prosperous the world became in the 20th Century... Tolkien sold 50 million copies of his work; the population of Great Britain in 1700 was around five million...

A large percentage of these were illiterate as well... So it's unreasonable not to expect Tolkien to have a huge fan base (so does the Book of Mormon); cue up H.L. Mencken: "Nobody every went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

I concur with the judgment that Tolkien's appeal is largely to juvenile sensibilities; my complaint with it is I indulged my juvenile/fantasy needs with the Wizard of Oz, which has a much more American element to its tone and thus appeals to my biases better...

And Baum preceeded Tolkien by forty years or so, and I'll suggest in elements of plot, that his two heroines (Dorothy and Ozma) were "nicer" than Tolkien's hobbits...

Good is good in Baum; evil is evil (and is defeated consistently), and it is seen through children's eyes, which is how we all generally view it (see Twain, Mark: Huckleberry Finn); for Tolkien to succeed as literature he must create the interplay of good and evil--and power--and offer illumination to the reader...

If he succeeds--as he does with some--fair enough...

But Bloom's assertion is that he does not, hence his charge that it is "moralistic in the extreme."

As I see it, it is the usual--albeit also juvenile because it amounts to "acting out"--tactic of up-and-coming critics to toss their brickbats at those whose success is deemed unwarranted.

Witness Germaine Greer's mortar fire...

>Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies and babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialised.

Ms. Greer, incidentally, is the potty-mouthed Aussie b**ch who made some horribly callous and insensitive remarks about the tragic and premature death of her countryman, naturalist Steve Irwin...

Since Irwin's genius involved using a child's perception to create undertanding and sympathy for the animals he loved (many that were either loathsome or terrifying), it's pretty diagnostic of Ms. Greer's psyche that she had to adopt an "artificial adulthood" to mask her discomfort with "the juvenile."

As I recall though, that one had a happy ending. Ms. Greer's statue in a wax museum was replaced by one of Steve Irwin...

Granted, I absolutely loved watching Steve Irwin doing his stuff. But even if you didn't -- how crass do you have to be to attack the dead?

Sigh, people -- they continue to confound me.

From the point I saw her analysis...

I even felt guilty "steering my processes" (since I know them well enough and should just let them take me where they will) with this one...

I couldn't resist, however...

For those who are capable of perhaps being more objective than I can, here's her original article...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/sep/05/australia

>The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin, but probably not before a whole generation of kids in shorts seven sizes too small has learned to shout in the ears of animals with hearing 10 times more acute than theirs, determined to become millionaire animal-loving zoo-owners in their turn.

Methinks that lady doth protest too much...

Or was she just a little embarassed to be turned on by a man in shorts who was a couple of decades her junior...

What a rotten lemon this woman is.

Other than the LOTR, Tolkein was famous for reinterpreting Beowulf. He was trying to create a similar feel in the LOTR.

I read his books in middle school and found them easy to get through. He's a far better writer than Rowlings or C.S. Lewis. His world is fully fleshed out and easy to immerse yourself in. There is a strong internal logic and a feeling that this world is very, very old.

Meanwhile, I find Jane Austen's prose to be prattlingly tedious. She has great stories but how anyone ever managed to read them is beyond me.

The BofM isn't literature; it was a literary money making stunt that some people fell for. No one other than a TBM would ever cite the BofM as passable writing.

Rowling is a much easier read than Tolkien. By far, and I mean her books are written so that young kids can read them and understand them.

Tolkien seems over laborious to what he's trying to get the reader to envision. I further the opinion that the third installment in the trilogy is the worst. Probably the only reason I didn't quit that book is because I was on a 10 hour flight from London to Dallas when I was reading the last of it and I didn't have anything else to do. The books are by far better than the BOM, but then again, what isnt'?

You want overly complicated reading - Try some Robert Ludlum...

Rowling is terrible at action scenes. Every time she would break from simple narrative into describing action, I would have to read her prose 3-4 times to figure out what happened. This was true of quidditch matches and battle scenes. Her narratives, especially the last few books, just drone on and on with little happening for hundreds of pages at a time.

I never said she was a difficult writer, just not a very good one.

I'm with you, axel. LOTR has far more in common with Beowulf and the Norse Sagas than the BoM. That is the reason the prose feels "archaic". It was designed to feel that way.

Whether LOTR can or should be considered canonical, I don't know. For me, I love the series and will go back to it time and again.

Books don't have to be part of the canon to be excellent. I enjoy reading Harold Bloom, but I think as he's gotten older, he's become overly critical of non-canonical literature. He hated the Harry Potter books. But what he failed to notice was kids lined up around the block, all over the world, to get the latest HP book. When has that ever happened?

A love of literature begins with a love of reading. However a child comes to that love is okay by me.

And just to keep it on topic: the BoM sucks. I couldn't stay involved enough with the turgid text to ever give a damn about any of the characters. Consequently, I have never finished it. I would say the BoM is a very poor example of mythopoeia. The difference is Tolkien was honest about his tale-telling. JS tried to pawn it off as truth.

If LDS Inc were smart, they'd find a great author and have them totally revamp the BoM. Make it better and more readable. :)

It took several attempts for me to get through The Return of the King. I love the story, but it does get difficult at parts. I think I read Fellowship and Two Towers each two times before I managed to finish King. I would set King aside for a couple months, forget what was going on, and just decide to read the other two again. :) This was in junior high.

The first time I read it was in junior high. I went right through The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, and I was so anxious and concerned about Frodo and Sam that I skipped the entire first half of Return of the King and went right for their story in the second half. I didn't care about all that Gondor business.

I've read Lord of the Rings every other year since then (15 times, I think), and now the first half of Return of the King is my favorite part of the books. It's the suspense I find unbearable not the archaic language, and I get chills every time when I read the Siege of Gondor with Grond and the King of the Nazgul. I used to like the characters of Gandalf and Samwise Gamgee the best when I was a kid. Now I'm interested in Boromir and Aragorn, and I love the descriptions of the great halls, ancient bloodlines and traditions.

I think different parts of the book appeals to different people perhaps at different times in their lives, and it's kind of a struggle to get through the parts that I'm not presently interested in. I also find that I pay attention to different parts of the story in Fellowship, because there are foundations laid down that lead to different aspects of Return of the King.

Is there any of this richness in the Book of Mormon? No, of course not, and with the Mormon church now ten years in my hindsight, I can't believe they haven't buried this book and redefined their religion into something more interesting.

My former BYU professor and still friend Steve Walker wrote his dissertation on Tolkien and recent authored a book on his prose style. He occasionally sends me drafts of his work or essays he has written. Steve has been personally supportive of me the 20+ years I have known him. He gave me a lot of leeway in the professional seminar I took from him and listened to my diverging points of view. When I was at BYU, he had a stack of Mad Magazines on a shelf next to his scriptures.

http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/905-Power_of_Tolkien_Prose.php

I kept comparing Rowling to Tolkien all the way through Harry Potter's books, and always found her to be clearly inferior. I think HP has lots of plot inconsistencies and loose ends, while in Tolkien everything has very solid internal logic.

Two things that always bugged me about Harry Potter: how does one "discover" new spells? I don't care that it's a fantasy world, but that is never addressed properly. And another thing: the Hogwart's express leaves from a magical train station invisible to normal people, but it apparently travels through our ordinary world. That's apparent when the kids miss the train and go to school in a flying car, that is seen by normal people on its way. It doesn't make sense.

What I don't understand, now IRL, is why on earth Rowling said in an interview that Dumbledore was gay. Just to draw attention, I guess... because that was completely unnecessary.

LOTR is a breeze to read. The prose seems appropriate to the story even if 'archaic'.

The Silmarillion on the other hand - arggggh. The first 1/3 of the book is just as mind-numbing tedious as the Book of Mormon, and just as absurd.

I've made several attempts......just can't do it.

...more than they ever did enjoy our family reading of the BoM. I wouldn't give you a penny for a copy of the BoM but I have purchased several sets of the LOTR over my lifetime cause I keep wearing them out from rereading or abuse in travelling in my backpack.

I love a lot of the classics and a lot of modern sci-fi/fantasy stuff. I'm an avid reader, and long works don't intimidate me. I'm also a genius, a law student (known for reading endless pages of court opinion drivel), and a pretty patient person. In movies, the action scenes bore me, while the psychological aspects hold my interest.

With all these attributes seemingly on my side, I was still unable to enjoy Tolkien's LOTR. I can't get into the movies either. There's just something so overly verbose about it all. It's anything but concise or direct, and the indirectness lacks anything approaching beauty. Simply put, it was not fun, it was not absorbing, and it was not good literature (to me). Of course, taste in literature is rather like taste in music or anything else: one man's trash is another's treasure.

I do, however, feel that there is absolutely nothing, including Tolkien's works, that can be fairly characterized as more vapid than the Book of Mormon. Note that I'm a nevermo. My impression of the Book of Mormon is undoubtedly colored by never having considered it a sacred text. I have found it more dependable than Benadryl or Ambien, but if I had ever viewed it with the reverence of, say, the Bible, I acknowledge that I might feel different.

I don't know if this was serious or not because I don't know the post to which you're referring. If you're intimating that my writing is not concise or direct, you're right...but then again, I'm not trying to pass off verbosity as literature. Although I've won several awards for writing (some in law school and some in legal writing contests), I'm making no claim to being one of "the greats."

I don't deny that some people enjoy Tolkien's works, though I'm not among them, but I do question his status as one of the great authors. He's no Dickens, Shakespeare, or even C.S. Lewis...but he's no Joseph Smith either.

The sedative qualities of the Book of Mormon are simply beyond comparison. Behold, a passage randomly chosen: "And I, Nephi, did build a temple; and I did construct it after the manner of the temple of Solomon save it were not built of so many precious things; for they were not to be found upon the land, wherefore, it could not be built like unto Solomon’s temple. But the manner of the construction was like unto the temple of Solomon; and the workmanship thereof was exceedingly fine." -2 Nephi 5:16

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

My first thought was, if you really were a genius, then you wouldn't be a law student. But that's harsh. Sort of.

With that "Benadryl or Ambien" line...

Of course I've always thought Ol' Clem got his idea for "chloroform in print" from the "Book of Ether" in the BOM...

No? It's possible that he amused himself making a particularly clever connection...

Speaking as a refugee from an MA in English program (and there are lots of "high I.Q." sorts who come here, but that's a broad designation, and there's also the element of creative ability, which operates independently of intelligence above a certain level. And nobody is ever "twice as smart" as another, but someone can easily be five or ten times more creative), the important element of "the educated sensibility" I spoke of is identifying one's subjective tastes and being able to support one's views. They can also "undergo evolution"; I remember being smitten by Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" in high school, but when I read it a dozen years later in a Sci-Fi class, I found it fairly mediocre...

These days I can generally see why something is popular--whether among the cognoscenti or the masses-- but there are still powerful works of literature out there that still make me want to reach for a razor blade because they're so depressing...

Anyway, the little I've seen of Bloom leads me to conclude he is a bit of a gasbag, but then people have said that of me...

for those of us who've been made to feel defective for not being into LOTR. I could never get past the first few pages.

As a genius lawyer with a literature degree, I hereby confess my love for LOTR and The Hobbit.

I can't get through The Silmarillion, though. After much struglle, I also decided that I prefer the movies to the books. Now that is blasphemy of the highest order.

I adore the LOTR and reread the trilogy about every other year.
Also the movies - the language Tolkien uses does not get in the way of loving the characters and enjoying the story.

So nice that no one has tried to spoil it by turning it into a BOM for brand new corporation.

fewer people read BoM. Just because he denied any ulterior agenda, doesn't mean he didn't have one. He wanted to write something that would make the BoM look like the trash it is.

Have you thought of Gollum as JS,the wring-wraiths as LDS missionaries, Saruman as the first presidency of LDS, Sauron as Hitler, and Gandalf as the Pope? (Remember, Tolkien was Catholic-- and furiously anti-Nazi.)

Harold who?

How very DARE he? But as far as critics go they are basically all the same: they can only put down and not create anything of their own

Tolkien was a major influence on me in my teen years. Skip forward to last year and I can definately say that upon entering college and choosing what to study at university, I chose English language and literature BECAUSE of Tolkien.

What this critic is forgetting is the type of fiction Tolkien's canon falls into, which is fabulation/fantasy (more emphasis on fantasy) and he sounds to me like he likes the more down to earth fiction of realism.

I hope to high heaven nobody introduces him to metafiction - his head would explode!lol!