The Desolation

[jallanite]

Personally I tend to pick up on posts where I think the poster has said something incorrect, and point it out. Not a good trait, perhaps. Yet I honestly feel gratitude when someone has convinced me that I am wrong. I’ve learned something, and owe that person.

What many posters don’t realize is that often, when an argument is serious, the winner may only emerge months later when the quarrel has been forgotten and the apparent winner may have had more time to think about the matter and then change his or her mind. Also, if I am totally right in my argument, then I may be convincing many others who are not taking part in it openly.

Again, as I have mentioned, I don’t see a great deal of difference between academia and fandom. Academics also include a large percentage of people who most consider to be nuts. And that includes some that I mostly respect. Often they may, like many non-academics, be perfectly sane in most matters but have particular areas where they are irrational.

The critic Harold Bloom some years back created a list of 1,524 books which he believed everyone should read and this list is now often known as Bloom’s Canon. It contains a lot of books which have Stories or Poems or Plays in their titles so this covers many more works than its numbers show. For example, Shakespeare is represented by one book only: Plays and Poems.

For the complete Bloom Canon list see http://home.comcast.net/~dwtaylor1/theocraticcanon.html .

J. R. R. Tolkien is not included because Harold Bloom hates Tolkien, as did such a significant number of other academics that he didn’t feel compelled to include him. He, nevertheless, was pressed into producing a book of Tolkien criticism which most think laughable. See the reviews at http://www.amazon.com/J-R-R-Tolkien-...owViewpoints=1 .

Bloom also wrote a fantasy novel, A Flight to Lucifier: A Gnostic Fantasy which was a sequel to David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus which Bloom puts in his canon. Fair enough. Tolkien (and C. S. Lewis) also thought highly of A Voyage to Arcturus though they very much disliked the writer’s philosophy, in which Pain is the sole ultimate truth, and so the ultimate good. But though A Flight to Lucifier: A Gnostic Fantasy got mostly good first reviews, Bloom decided to disown it as garbage and it seems to have also sold poorly. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_to_Lucifer . Possibly those reviews were by the kinds of fans you mention who are over-identifying with what they think is their side.

For a freewheeling and mostly polite discussion of Bloom and Tolkien see http://sacnoths.blogspot.ca/2011/03/...ien-again.html .

But is an academic like Michael D. C. Drout any better? Drout is an English professor who specializes in Old English, loves Tolkien, is co-editor of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review and is editor of the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. Yet a recent talk which was recommended to me by another Downer I think also to be utter nonsense.

Supposedly Drout is attempting to explain why some readers can’t enjoy Tolkien. But he doesn’t. He shows quite well one feature of Tolkien’s writing and says, without any presented evidence, that this is the reason. I don’t think it is, though I don’t know what is, or if any one thing is.

Drout says a few other things about Tolkien and about stories related to Beowulf and gets his facts wrong, more than I showed in my answer to Drout which I posted at http://wormtalk.blogspot.com.au/2013...ture-from.html and at http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showpos...6&postcount=52 because the answer box limited the number of words I could use.

That no-one here has commented on my post suggests that you may be right, that no-one feels they are allowed to join in to criticize a famous Tolkien scholar like Drout or perhaps they don’t want to criticize me.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by jallanite

That no-one here has commented on my post suggests that you may be right, that no-one feels they are allowed to join in to criticize a famous Tolkien scholar like Drout or perhaps they don’t want to criticize me.

Well I know for my part that I didn't comment simply because I don't have anything to contribute. I wouldn't feel any reluctance to criticise Drout simply because he's famous.
Regarding Bloom, I'm aware that he's voiced similar objections regarding the Harry Potter books. Now regardless of whether or not one likes Harry Potter, what baffles me is why on earth serious academics waste their time writing and publishing on why books are "good" or "bad" or "should" or "should not" be read. These are pointless subjective criteria which can't be proved. It's the same case with Drout trying to explain why some readers don't "like" Tolkien. Who cares? Or if people do, surely it's a matter for psychology and cultural studies, not English scholars. I feel like academics (myself included) should be exploring new ways of thinking about texts, ways of reading them and so on, a myriad of scholarly activities other than going on about subjective appreciation.
But I suppose that's the kind of sensationalism that gets articles written about it (and irritated forum posts like this) and sells books.
On my blog I review TV shows, books, films and so on, but in an informal way, because I don't think matters of taste are a really a very scholarly issue. I didn't really enjoy Ulysses when I read it and I find the works of Henry James rather tedious. It doesn't mean I'm going to write a thesis on "why What Maisie Knew" is boring or how "people who like Ulysses are wrong." It'd be absurd.

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by Thomas Monteath

As a film, even as one that sits in the middle of a trilogy, it is just a bad film, with a lazily conceived focus and structure, poor editing, dialogue and an injudicious use of effects.

Sadly, this sums it up for me. Peter Jackson made a wonderful trilogy of films that weren't quite Tolkien's LotR, but captured the spirit and were nevertheless great films. These films largely fail to capture the spirit of The Hobbit and TDoS is, unforgiveably, just a plain bad film.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man

Sadly, this sums it up for me. Peter Jackson made a wonderful trilogy of films that weren't quite Tolkien's LotR, but captured the spirit and were nevertheless great films. These films largely fail to capture the spirit of The Hobbit and TDoS is, unforgiveably, just a plain bad film.

Saucy's back! Folks have been wondering when you might return to comment on the Hobbit movies.

How's life and the young ones?

I still have not seen DoS yet. It's still showing at one cinema here, so I suppose there's still a chance.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

I still have not seen DoS yet. It's still showing at one cinema here, so I suppose there's still a chance.

There is a high probability that you haven't seen two warthogs mating. There is still a chance to see such an event, I suppose, but why the hell would you want to?

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

There is a high probability that you haven't seen two warthogs mating. There is still a chance to see such an event, I suppose, but why the hell would you want to?

Ha! Yes indeed. I have yet to become aware of any compelling reason I should subject myself to any further PJ "visions".

[Guinevere]

I forgot to mention here that I have seen the movie some time in January. But I have nothing to tell really , all the numerous flaws that irritated me, have been discussed here at large. I really did try to suspend my disbelief, but failed miserably! (Whereas I had been able to enjoy at least some parts of "an unexpected party") What is the use of all the visually stunning imagery when the changed plot is just ridiculous?

[jallanite]

Still, the fact remains that academics often do try to show that a particular work is better or worse objectively than another work. Whether they should do this is another matter. Fans, who are not very academic, often do the same.

Tolkien seems to try to avoid it, but at least comes close. In the introduction to his translations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo Tolkien says on page 13: �“But he was a major poet of his day; ...”, this of a poem known only from a single manuscript. He appears to agree with the general opinion that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the best surviving Middle English poem, or at least one of the best. On page 21 Tolkien writes of the poem “Pearl”: “The reality of the bereavement will not save the poetry if it is bad, save to those who are in fact interested, not in poetry, but in documents, whose hunger is for history or biography or even for mere names.”

In short, a critic who does not care whether a work of literary art is good or bad is very rare, or is looking at the work in some nonliterary way. If it were not so, should not one just as well teach one of Terry Brooks�’ novels or one of E. R. Eddison’s books? The situation is that those who loathe Tolkien mostly dislike these others far more.

People, whether fans or academics or those who claim to be both do have differences of opinion about what they read. They do disagree in public. They sometimes do this politely, and sometime do this with great anger. And they have always done so as far as I can see.

And they sometimes misunderstand the work that they claim to explain. Bloom obviously thinks he understands Tolkien, and Tolkien is not worth bothering about. Drout thinks he understands Tolkien but his talk to me shows someone ignorant both about Tolkien and about Beowulf because he makes gross factual errors. Or maybe I don’t understand Drout and am being the fool, but no-one shows me where my understanding that Drout is the fool is wrong.

I see no difference between a fan who follows a particular line and an academic who follows some particular line, save, as you point out, literary academia is an area where one can’t prove anything, unlike pure mathematics. But I see an academic named Drout who it seems to me doesn’t know the basic facts of his own discipline, like discovering a modern physician is completely unaware of penicillin.