[Child of the 7th Age]

Squatter,

I will address myself to just one small point --- the charge of the book being filled with schoolboys.

First, you have a great deal more patience with critics like Muir than I do.

Muir's contention that the LotR is filled with schoolboys masquerading as adult heroes was, as you mentioned, a common theme in the criticism of this early period. Indeed, I would go further and state that this charge of immaturity was the single most common criticism originally levelled against the book and its author.

A little over four months after Muir's review, Edmund Wilson writing in The Nation dismissed LotR as "juvenile trash" along lines similar to Muir. Wilson described LotR as "a children's book which has somehow got out of hand....an overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity." (Perhaps significantly, another critic once said of Wilson that he was "pompously obsessed with being the Adult in the room.")

Maurice Richardson, the first critic to review The Two Towers, used similar words. He said that TTT had begun as a "charming children's book" but "proliferated into an endless worm." Richardson maintained it "would do quite nicely as an allegorical adventure story for leisured boys" but no audience wider than that.

Even in the sixties and seventies, the critics continued to charge that the book was suitable only for children or contained childlike characters. Among the descriptions of the book were the following: "Winnie the Pooh posing as an epic" and "Faërieland's answer to Conan the Barbarian ". In 1961, Phillip Toynbee rejoiced that Tolkien's 'childish' books 'have passed into a merciful oblivion'. (Oh, how wrong he was!) In 1978, Toynbee went on to argue that Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams were all "childish" in their devotion to "make-believe" with additional comments on the "immaturity" of The Lord of the Rings.

It is certainly a legitimate thing to examine male/female relationships in LotR, or any other relationships for that matter. And I would be very interested to see what posters in the Downs have to say about such a topic. But I honestly think that Muir's insistence on "adult heroes and heroines who were sometimes unfaithful to their vows" is little more than a smokescreen.

Why must all relationships depicted in books be cut out of the same cloth? For that matter, why must every book deal with 'Relationships' (with a capital 'R')? Surely there can be some books that deviate from these arbitrary standards and still have something to say. Mr. Muir may have a preference for books of a certain type, but that is a lot different than saying that all books must be of that particular type if they are to be worthwhile. And that's what I feel he's doing.

So what is really going on here? Noted fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin has noted that many critics, champions of modernism, "have a deep puritanical distrust of fantasy" and they "confuse fantasy, which in the psychological sense is a universal and essential faculty of the human mind, with infantilism and pathological regression". Hence, they see tales of myth or faerie only in chldlike terms.

Tolkien himself anticipated the argument of some of these critics with his earlier essay "On Fäerie Stories" (finished sometime in 1946). But it's interesting to note that on 18 November 1956, C.S. Lewis came out with a piece "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said" in the New York Time Book Review , which seems to answer back to some of these critics who'd been taking their pot shots at LotR over the last year. Lewis bemoaned that fairy tales were now out of favor with adults, since myth should be accessible to both younger and older folk. He went on to point out that fairy stories can give us experiences we've never had and denied the critics' claims that, in literary terms, they were suitable only for children:

'Juveniles', indeed! Am I to patronise sleep because children sleep sound? Or honey because children like it?

Squatter, please forgive my rant. I hope others will respond to your query about relationships. But I am suspicious of charges like these regarding schoolboy characters on the part of Muir and other critics. Hopefully, now that we are in the age of "postmodernity" we will get beyond these biases.

BTW, I have shamelessly borrowed from Patrick Curry. His Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity has a great deal more to say on this theme.

Child

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 2:41 AM December 19, 2003: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]