Quote:
Originally Posted by Bêthberry
I have often wondered if Tolkien was, in part, inspired by this observation of a quality in his favourite stories to attempt to capture it in his stories. Whether that is the case or not is not for this thread to discuss, but another comment from his essay I think can be used to describe the broad use of Middle-earth in so many other genres.
How many versions exist of "Little Red Riding Hood"? "Cinderella"? "Goldilocks and Three Bears"? "Sleeping Beauty"? "Hansel and Gretel"? "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves"? "Beauty and the Beast"?
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That some tales occur in oral tradition in many variants indicates unusual popularity of those particular tales. But even those tales can often be traced to a particular variant created at a particular time, before which the recognized tale does not exist.
Tales that have reached Tolkien’s level of popularity are few. Some are semi-religious epics:
The Iliad,
The Odyssey,
The Aeneid,
The Mahābhārata, and
The Ramayana. Some are fantasy compilations that are mostly inventions of a single author, for example the
Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto.
But Ariosto never found a great English translator and his work is almost unknown in the English-language world today. Tolkien said he had never read it and would have hated it if he had. The most popular English-language work in the 19th century was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s virulently anti-slavery
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book almost unread today.
Stories become extraordinarily popular and then disappear almost entirely. Most medieval tales are not very popular today, read only in translation by people who are particularly interested in the matter of the works or their influence on other works. Literary critics really can’t explain this.
Ballantine Books attempted to cash in on Tolkien by publishing a library of fantasy classics. They sold only reasonably well at the time and are now again mostly long out-of-print in popular editions. One comes again and again upon the belief that Tolkien was the unique founder of the fantasy genre, an indication of the degree to which the many, many earlier fantasy works are unknown to many.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, despite its popularity, was better known to the masses from numerous dramatic adaptations. The story of
Hamlet and
King Lear are almost only known from Shakespeare’s adaptations, not from the earlier non-tragic medieval accounts. In the earlier years of the 20th century Ariosto was better known in Italy in puppet-theater adaptations.