What does the sixpence = ?

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by davem

I'm tired of critics who dismiss fantasy & SF as something childish & meaningless & who seem to take pride in not liking it, as if that's the 'grown-up' position, & who dismiss those genres as being only fit for children or inadequates. They can only handle fiction which depicts the world they know. They only want their limited worldview confirmed & will accept nothing else. They have no desire to learn anything, only to be told that they already know everything important, everything worth knowing.

The BBC just broadcast a program, 'Balderdash & Piffle' presented by Victoria Coren, in which this 'right-on' lady dismissed Lord of the Rings in pretty contemptuous terms.

The example of dismissiveness displayed by Victoria Coren simply displayed a lack of any knowledge and a 'knowing-wink' to those in the 'chattering classes' (of which I am probably a member), making a joke out of the 'oh so cliched Lord of the Rings'. Little do such TV presenters/journalists know but many of the members of the chattering classes may be secretly reading a copy of LotR disguised beneath the covers of Finnegan's Wake; the Harry Potter books have all been issued with alternate 'grown-up covers'.

But that is what gets our backs up in essence. Much of the criticism offered about Tolkien is not in fact about the books, but about us, the fans! I happen to like Germaine Greer as she always can be guaranteed to say something that gets you talking, even if you don't agree with her (and sometimes I do), but to take her quote as an example:

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 been realized

Just why do we find what she says so objectionable? It is because she equates us all with infantile, childlike people, and not child-like in a good way. She excludes us from the 'cool gang' which we must presume she was in (she was not, as it happens, as she was well known for ruffling the feathers of her tutors). And are Tolkien fans like this in reality?

OK, so many of us do in fact do silly things in the name of Tolkien, like dressing up, playing with swords, collecting action figures, trying to win trivia quizzes, getting One Ring tattoos and so on. Do authors such as Jane Austen and Salman Rushdie attract such behaviour? Not really, although the idea of Mr Darcy action figures is something I cannot now get out of my head (being a collector of action figures...).

So we have a tendency to do silly things, or to put it in a better way, to have fun. But I do have to ask whether it is worth us dropping all of this fun in order to have Tolkien taken more seriously, as that seems to be what it would take.

I think I actually prefer to keep the fun, and to have Tolkien remain partially (as he is not totally shunned) outside the establishment literary canon. I take some pleasure in the fact that I like something that I, as an English graduate, am not supposed to like. I also take pleasure in the fact that Tolkien's work is something I discovered for myself. It was not a prescribed text at school or University, and it is still rare to find his work on reading lists, yet so many people still pick up those books and love them. Nor is Tolkien in the realms of 'supermarket fiction', those books which are ubiquitous and can be picked up anywhere for pennies in special deals; his books are always stuffed somewhere at the back of Waterstones (in the nerd section ) and are at full price. Yet still we keep on reading them!

maybe that's what Shippey is talking about. We are all outsiders in a way, kept out of the light at the front of the bookshop, relegated to the back, but we still find the sixpence.