Teacher's Bad Rowling Advice

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by davem

So all we have to do is wait a few decades & LotR will be acceptable?

Possibly. It happened with Dickens

Now this business about fantasy not being suitable for grown-ups (with a kind of reverse X certificate attached) is odd as some fantasy is acceptable for grown-ups, indeed one Sir Rushdie has just been honoured for his magic realism. And Pan's Labyrinth was lauded to the hilt. You'll also find Angela Carter lurking on most University reading lists. So clearly, some fantasy works are more equal than others.

Why not Tolkien's brand? Is it the fault of Tolkien or is it the fault of those who aped him and gave a bad impression? Is it our fault? That's likely - when at Uni I sought out Tolkien fans and nobody on my degree would admit to liking him apart from a couple of my delightfully mad tutors - quietly though, they had jobs to think about; amongst the students I found it was the unfashionable (at the time), ungainly students of science and engineering who liked their Elves and Dragons. It was the Goths, and the new-Hippies. Scallies too liked their Tolkien - young, working class, unemployed Scousers (there's a lot to be written about how Liverpool is Britain's lost city of dreamers and visionaries...) - I've had many mad all-night conversations with assorted Scousers about how Gandalf is Shamanic and the like. But notably NOT the young students of Literature and The Arts. In summary, Tolkien has had a serious Image Problem.

Yet there's a curveball to throw into this whole topic...

What about Tolkien himself? What would he have said, in his professional opinion?

The public image of Tolkien doesn't exactly make a big deal out of the fact that he loved a lot of popular fiction himself (Asimov and H Rider Haggard, for example); instead it focuses on the more 'high-brow' stuff he liked. So his public image is that he spent his hours in reading sagas and the Eddas and Beowulf and the like... Why? We can't blame the literati for that image. Why has his love of the distinctly mass market, the bestseller, been buried? Are even Tolkien's biographers and critics, and fans, a little embarrassed by his own liking for popular fiction?

It's like discovering Kurt Cobain was heavily into Tiffany...

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

The public image of Tolkien doesn't exactly make a big deal out of the fact that he loved a lot of popular fiction himself (Asimov and H Rider Haggard, for example); instead it focuses on the more 'high-brow' stuff he liked. So his public image is that he spent his hours in reading sagas and the Eddas and Beowulf and the like...

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein loved the cinema, especially Hollywood action-films (in thirties and fourties)! And he was the most grim and gritty one indeed, more serious than an apocalyptic.

Hitler loved the popular movies as well, but that's going to require another explanation... or does it?

The popular image of these two are also kind if edited...