Quote:
Originally Posted by Estelyn Telcontar
I'd like to bring this deserving but neglected thread up out of the shadows in which it dwelt - perhaps more members have something to add to it?!
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For shame,
Esty! Bumping up a thread without posting to it!
What I find interesting about this thread is
Mith's title:
The Evolution of a Reader, for it suggests that Tolkien has created a new kind of reader. What do I mean?
Well, in the early years of the novel (read, centuries
), writers weren't expected to produce serial novels. It's true that Henry Fielding wrote
Shamela and
Joseph Andrews as parodies of Richardson's
Pamela, but he never wrote a sequel to
Tom Jones. Surely there would have been amble opportunity to develope ideas of the nature of Tom's and the lovely Sophia's marriage! After all, we know Tom's eye for lovely things and those don't stop at the church door. But Fielding didn't.
Readers expected and were expected to reread existing novels or turn to completely new ones.
Close to a serialisation was probably Dickens' method of serial publication of chapters (or books?) in magazines. Yet still Dickens never gave us sequels to actual novels. Lots and lots of Victorian situations and cultural bric a brac, but not more of Pip or Davey. We don't have a volume two to titilate readers about Jane's and Rochester's marriage: Jane's 'autobiography' ends with a paen to the rejected suitor and that's it. George Eliot's novels are entirely self-consistent, with no leakage into each other (well, not that I can think of, simply in terms of
Middlemarch,
Mill on the Floss and
Daniel Deronda).
Trollope comes close I think to producing the kind of serialisation that Tolkien readers seem to want, especially with his series
The Chronicles of Barsetshire and then the
Palliser series. So I suppose the ground was already worked for Tolkien to come along and produce an immensely interesting world and characters and history of eons which whetted readers' appetites not necessarily to reread but to read more.
I'm not saying Tolkien fans don't reread. Obviously there's a strong tradition of rereading LotR as a ritual event which is amply reported here on the Downs. But this desire which
Mithadan so lucidly describes and which
Azaelia and
Lindale and
Ibrin attest to is something which possibly Tolkien himself created: an unsatiated desire for more and more of Middle-earth. This readerly desire is what Rowlings expanded upon with
Harry Potter. Except that Rowlings seems to have given her readers the last little experience of readerly
petit mort whereas Tolkien didn't do that. No act of reading ever actually consumes Tolkien fans, but sends them out to search for more of the same.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by some ancient poet
If ever any beauty I did see and desire and got,
'twas but a dream of thee
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Is this a new kind of reader which
Mithadan implies with his title?