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No I don’t think that, altogether.
I fell in love with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings long before I got into studying real ancient manuscripts. But there are many lovers of The Lord of the Rings who don’t have my later experience with old documents or any real interest in them.
Drout never really gets into why some reputable scholars quite hate Tolkien, including some I suspect hate Tolkien in part as a dumbing-down of what they really like about ancient literature. Victorian hobbits with umbrellas just annoy them.
His discussion of Beowulf ignores entirely the Icelandic tales of Böðvar Bjarki whom some suspect is a cognate of Beowulf, but if so the tale is much changed in the way that Drout claims that only the other tales referenced by Beowulf were changed.
That Glofindel’s horse sometimes has a bridle and reins and sometimes does not is explained when Tolkien admitted to correspondent Rhona Beare in letter 211 that he had not properly understood Elvish ways with horses when he wrote the passage for the first edition. When Tolkien revised the passage for the second edition to give the horse a headstall only, he missed revision of the later passage where the bridle is unfortunately still mentioned once.
If this was at all connected with hatred for The Lord of the Rings, then one should find the hater equally hating Melville’s Moby Dick which also contains fragments of earlier writings in the published text. Possibly there is a likeness between hatred of Moby Dick and hatred for The Lord of the Rings.
Drout’s talk explains some problems that some readers have with Tolkien’s writing, that it is archaic. Myself, I have always enjoyed archaic writing. But I have encountered this complaint with other writings, mostly with translations, and just don’t feel it. Edmund Spenser seems to be the one writer that literary pundits must express respect for, though his archaism in fact is rather phony. I suspect that the haters of archaism just know that Spenser is one of the literary giants whom one is not allowed to criticize, and so shut up about their real feelings. Besides Spenser was inventing his archaic poems in the the time of Elizabeth I, so I suppose his bad archaism was too early to matter.
Drout gives a very good talk but he doesn’t provide any more of a genuine answer than does Tolkien as to why his prose rubs some people the wrong way.
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