So, this may be a case of 'too much information'.
This morning I had to look something up in C. S. Lewis's autobiography, SURPRISED BY JOY, which I haven't read all the way through in a while. I was struck, and not in a good way, by the following passage:
". . . in the hive and the anthill we see fully realized the two things that some of us most dread for our own species -- the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective" (CSL, SURPRISED BY JOY: THE SHAPE OF MY EARLY LIFE, pages 8-9; emphasis mine).
That Lewis includes himself ("us") and uses the present tense, I have to conclude that this was still his position in his late fifties, after he'd written TILL WE HAVE FACES and less than a decade before his death --either just before or more likely between his two marriages to Joy Gresham. I know I've seen several attempt to defend Lewis against charges of misogyny, but this particular example seems particularly egregious to me.*
One other passage, a little earlier in the same paragraph, is of interest for another reason. Here's how Lewis describes the nightmares brought on by his childhood fear of ghost and phobia about insects:
"My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about spectres and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse; to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula. And to this day I could almost find it in my heart to rationalize and justify my phobia" (SURPRISED BY JOY, page 8; emphasis mine).
If we were to grant Diana Pavlac-Glyer's argument that (1) Tolkien's having Lewis to read aloud chapters of THE LORD OF THE RINGS to as he wrote them (2) must therefore have influenced what Tolkien wrote to take Lewis's likes and dislikes into account, then (3) it could be argued that scenes such as The Paths of the Dead and especially Shelob's Lair must have had quite an impact on CSL. Interesting.
In any case, the 'dominance of the collective' passage in the first quote above works very well as a gloss on THE DARK TOWER, where it finds vivid expression in the sinister world of the Stingermen seen through the chronoscope, where ordinary folk are subjugated to a sort of group mind when they are turned into the Jerkies. And the 'dominance of the female' might tie in to Hooper's guess that the aggressive, assertive Camilla of our world might turn out to have been a changeling for the passive, submissive Camilla that Scudamour meets in the otherworld, both of whom, in the end, might wind up exchanged to their proper worlds. Again, interesting.
--John R.
*though not as bad as his description of one of his students, to whom he owed his discovery of E. R. Eddison's work, as "som poore seely wench that seeketh a B.Litt or a D.Phill, when God knows shad a better bestowed her tyme makynge sport for some goodman in his bed and bearing children for the stablishment of this reaulme or els to be at her beads in a religyous house" (CSL, writing to ERE in pseudo-middle english, letter of November 16th 1942; COLLECTED LETTERS, Vol. II, page 535).
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
An Unwritten Book
So, we've known for a long time* that Tolkien and Lewis once thought of collaborating on a book about language ("Nature, Origins, Functions"), called at one point LANGUAGE AND HUMAN NATURE. The two men first came up with the idea in late 1944, at the same time that Tolkien was starting up THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS and Lewis began (or at least came up with the idea for) THE DARK TOWER (cf. JRRT's 18 December 1944 letter to Christopher, which discusses all three works; LETTERS p. 105) and abandoned the project around the beginning of 1950 -- or at any rate that is when Lewis gave up on it (see Lewis's letter of January 12th 1950, published in COLLECTED LETTERS Vol. III pages 5-6). Blame for the project's floundering, or rather for its never getting off the ground, has by all commentators been laid entirely at JRRT's door, because Lewis implies in his 1950 letter that it was all Tolkien's fault. I've always had a suspicion, which I now find is widely shared, that Lewis's late book STUDIES IN WORDS, which from what little I've read of it seems thoroughly Barfieldian in approach, was Lewis's attempt to write up the project on his own, just as THE DARK TOWER can be seen as his giving up on Tolkien's writing a time-travel story to match his own space-travel story OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, as per their original bargain back in the spring of 1936. I've also attributed Tolkien's hostility to STUDIES IN WORDS ("ponderous silliness"—cf. JRRT's 12 Sept 1960 letter to CT; LETTERS p. 302) to the same source; nothing aroused his ire so much as something than ran close to something he was interested in writing himself, or actually had written -- witness his distaste for Charles Williams' Arthurian poems, which he did not discover until some time after writing his own Arthurian work (the still-unpublished THE FALL OF ARTHUR).
So, as I said I've always assumed that STUDIES IN WORDS was as close to 'LANGUAGE AND HUMAN NATURE' as we were ever going to get, and not particularly close at that, as Tolkien's criticism of that work shows.
Turns out I was wrong. Because, as I learned this week from reading Jason Fisher's blog, a researcher from Texas is claiming that he's found a draft of a fragment of this work in the Bodleian, in a notebook containing various odds and ends by Lewis. According to the following piece, which I found by following the link on Jason's site (http://www.txstate.edu/news/news_releases/news_archive/2009/07/CSLewis070809.html), Professor Beebe, the Chairman of the Dept. of Communication Studies at Texas State, has an article describing the discovery in the next volume of VII, and negotiations are now underway with the Lewis Estate to publish the fragment itself -- no doubt with added editorial material recounting what little is known about the project, the story of the fragment's re-discovery, and a placing of what Lewis says in it in context with his other works. This is something I very much look forward to, both Beebe's essay and the eventual publication of the original piece.
In any case, here's Jason's original post announcing the discovery:
http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2009/07/tolkien-studies-6-has-arrived.html
and here's his thoughtful follow-up discussion of its possible ramifications:
http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2009/07/lewistolkien-collaboration-that-might.html
--if you follow this link, be sure to read the comments as well, in the first of which Beebe himself elaborates a bit about his forthcoming article in VII. Well done, Jason, for discovering and spreading the news.
--JDR
current audiobook: THE LOST CITY OF Z by David Grann
*I first learned about it in LETTERS OF JRRT in 1981, though apparently first public mention of it had come in Chad Walsh's book on Lewis in 1949.
So, as I said I've always assumed that STUDIES IN WORDS was as close to 'LANGUAGE AND HUMAN NATURE' as we were ever going to get, and not particularly close at that, as Tolkien's criticism of that work shows.
Turns out I was wrong. Because, as I learned this week from reading Jason Fisher's blog, a researcher from Texas is claiming that he's found a draft of a fragment of this work in the Bodleian, in a notebook containing various odds and ends by Lewis. According to the following piece, which I found by following the link on Jason's site (http://www.txstate.edu/news/news_releases/news_archive/2009/07/CSLewis070809.html), Professor Beebe, the Chairman of the Dept. of Communication Studies at Texas State, has an article describing the discovery in the next volume of VII, and negotiations are now underway with the Lewis Estate to publish the fragment itself -- no doubt with added editorial material recounting what little is known about the project, the story of the fragment's re-discovery, and a placing of what Lewis says in it in context with his other works. This is something I very much look forward to, both Beebe's essay and the eventual publication of the original piece.
In any case, here's Jason's original post announcing the discovery:
http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2009/07/tolkien-studies-6-has-arrived.html
and here's his thoughtful follow-up discussion of its possible ramifications:
http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2009/07/lewistolkien-collaboration-that-might.html
--if you follow this link, be sure to read the comments as well, in the first of which Beebe himself elaborates a bit about his forthcoming article in VII. Well done, Jason, for discovering and spreading the news.
--JDR
current audiobook: THE LOST CITY OF Z by David Grann
*I first learned about it in LETTERS OF JRRT in 1981, though apparently first public mention of it had come in Chad Walsh's book on Lewis in 1949.
Monday, July 13, 2009
The New Arrival: WINTER'S TALES FOR CHILDREN
So, a few years back I decided that it'd be a good thing to have a copy of Caroline Hillier's WINTER'S TALES FOR CHILDREN* [1965]. And now, at length, I've been successful, via various indirect means -- i.e., I found it as a used book listed through amazon.co.uk. Unfortunately, it seems that third-party sellers there are reluctant to send books overseas, so I asked a friend in England with whom I do a book trade if he could get it for me. He wasn't able to, but put me in touch with someone else who could make the trade. He did, and the book itself arrived today.
The reason for wanting this book, of course, is for the two Tolkien poems contained therein: "Once Upon a Time" and "The Dragon's Visit". Both were reprinted a few years later in Lin Carter's THE YOUNG MAGICIANS [1969], but that book's hard to find itself (not unnaturally for a forty-year-old paperback). Since then "The Dragon's Visit" -- which had originally appeared in THE OXFORD MAGAZINE back in 1937, and was thus available to folks with a university connection through indirect means like InterLibrary Loan -- has been reprinted twice: in Doug Anderson's THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT [in the revised & expanded edition of 2002] and in his recent collection TALES BEFORE NARNIA [2008]. In both cases, Doug reprints the original (superior) version of the poem, rather than the revised version with a different ending that appears here.
So, "The Dragon's Visit", one of my favorite Tolkien poems, while not as well known as I would like is more available than it used to be, largely thanks to Doug's efforts.
The same is not true of "Once Upon A Time", unfortunately, which is little-known for a late Tolkien work -- particularly one this good. The revised version of "The Dragon's Visit" probably dates from 1961-62, when he was putting together THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL, collecting and revising old poems from the twenties and thirties and writing a (very) few new poems to accompany them. By contrast, I think "Once Upon A Time" is slightly later, because otherwise I don't know why it wouldn't have been included in the book. For one thing, it's a Bombadil poem in the literal sense that it's about Tom and Goldberry, making it the third in the sequence, after the original "Adventures of Bombadil", which is rather fun, and "Bombadil Goes Boating", which I've always thought rather an effort at forced jollity. For another, it's considerably better than some poems which did make the cut, both of which points make me think that if it'd existed by the time Tolkien was finished putting the book together he would have included it.
We know relatively little about how Tolkien's poems came to be in Hillier's book, but a brief physical description of the book appears in Wayne Hammond's DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY (page 311) and some brief entries in Wayne & Christina's COMPANION & GUIDE [2007], the main one of which (READER'S GUIDE page 689) quotes eight and a half lines from this forty-two line poem but cannot really convey the utter charm of the original. Here Tolkien finally manages to write a "Goblin Feet"/"Princess Mee" type of poem which is neither precious nor cloying.
He's also in fairly good company here -- while I haven't read the collection yet, Hillier seems to have had an eye for assembling some unusual talent. In addition to JRRT, the contributors include Elizabeth Jennings (who as a child had received one of his original author's copies of THE HOBBIT) with two poems, Ted Hughes (at that time not yet the Poet Laureate), who contributes a poem on The Loch Ness Monster, Rosemary Sutcliff with one of her Roman Britain stories, Philippa Pearce, and some others. I suspect the entries that would have interested Tolkien most (aside from his own) are the contributions by Kevin Crossley-Holland: a retelling of the story of Caedmon (based on the account in The Venerable Bede) and a translation of three Old English Riddles (I assume from The Exeter Book, though I have not yet checked).
So, a nice enough collection, which did well enough that it established a series that followed with a new volume every year for a number of years to come. But its main interest remains the Tolkien, and it is indeed really good to have these two poems readily accessible on my shelves rather than filed photocopies.
Perhaps someday we'll get an expanded edition of THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL which will include "Once Upon a Time" plus those poems Tolkien considered including in the book which did not make the final cut.
--John R.
current reading: THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER by Philip MacDonald [1959]
current audiobook: THE LOST CITY OF Z by David Grann [2009]
*I assume the title is a homage to the famous line in Shakespeare's A WINTER'S TALE [1611], one of his last plays:
QUEEN HERMIONE: Come, sir, now . . . Pray you, sit by us
And tell us a tale.
LITTLE PRINCE MAMILLIUS: Merry or sad shall't be?
HERMIONE: As merry as you will.
MAMILLIUS: A sad tale's best for winter. I have one
Of sprites and goblins.
HERMIONE: Let's have that, good sir.
Come on, sit down. Come on, and do your best
To fright me with your sprites, you're powerful at it.
MAMILLIUS: There was a man . . . Dwelt by a churchyard . . .
(Act II, Scene 1, lines 22-30)
--M. R. James, a little more than three centuries later, re-created the tale young Mamillius started and never had a chance to finish: "There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard" [circa 1924, first published in COLLECTED GHOST STORIES [1931].
The reason for wanting this book, of course, is for the two Tolkien poems contained therein: "Once Upon a Time" and "The Dragon's Visit". Both were reprinted a few years later in Lin Carter's THE YOUNG MAGICIANS [1969], but that book's hard to find itself (not unnaturally for a forty-year-old paperback). Since then "The Dragon's Visit" -- which had originally appeared in THE OXFORD MAGAZINE back in 1937, and was thus available to folks with a university connection through indirect means like InterLibrary Loan -- has been reprinted twice: in Doug Anderson's THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT [in the revised & expanded edition of 2002] and in his recent collection TALES BEFORE NARNIA [2008]. In both cases, Doug reprints the original (superior) version of the poem, rather than the revised version with a different ending that appears here.
So, "The Dragon's Visit", one of my favorite Tolkien poems, while not as well known as I would like is more available than it used to be, largely thanks to Doug's efforts.
The same is not true of "Once Upon A Time", unfortunately, which is little-known for a late Tolkien work -- particularly one this good. The revised version of "The Dragon's Visit" probably dates from 1961-62, when he was putting together THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL, collecting and revising old poems from the twenties and thirties and writing a (very) few new poems to accompany them. By contrast, I think "Once Upon A Time" is slightly later, because otherwise I don't know why it wouldn't have been included in the book. For one thing, it's a Bombadil poem in the literal sense that it's about Tom and Goldberry, making it the third in the sequence, after the original "Adventures of Bombadil", which is rather fun, and "Bombadil Goes Boating", which I've always thought rather an effort at forced jollity. For another, it's considerably better than some poems which did make the cut, both of which points make me think that if it'd existed by the time Tolkien was finished putting the book together he would have included it.
We know relatively little about how Tolkien's poems came to be in Hillier's book, but a brief physical description of the book appears in Wayne Hammond's DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY (page 311) and some brief entries in Wayne & Christina's COMPANION & GUIDE [2007], the main one of which (READER'S GUIDE page 689) quotes eight and a half lines from this forty-two line poem but cannot really convey the utter charm of the original. Here Tolkien finally manages to write a "Goblin Feet"/"Princess Mee" type of poem which is neither precious nor cloying.
He's also in fairly good company here -- while I haven't read the collection yet, Hillier seems to have had an eye for assembling some unusual talent. In addition to JRRT, the contributors include Elizabeth Jennings (who as a child had received one of his original author's copies of THE HOBBIT) with two poems, Ted Hughes (at that time not yet the Poet Laureate), who contributes a poem on The Loch Ness Monster, Rosemary Sutcliff with one of her Roman Britain stories, Philippa Pearce, and some others. I suspect the entries that would have interested Tolkien most (aside from his own) are the contributions by Kevin Crossley-Holland: a retelling of the story of Caedmon (based on the account in The Venerable Bede) and a translation of three Old English Riddles (I assume from The Exeter Book, though I have not yet checked).
So, a nice enough collection, which did well enough that it established a series that followed with a new volume every year for a number of years to come. But its main interest remains the Tolkien, and it is indeed really good to have these two poems readily accessible on my shelves rather than filed photocopies.
Perhaps someday we'll get an expanded edition of THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL which will include "Once Upon a Time" plus those poems Tolkien considered including in the book which did not make the final cut.
--John R.
current reading: THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER by Philip MacDonald [1959]
current audiobook: THE LOST CITY OF Z by David Grann [2009]
*I assume the title is a homage to the famous line in Shakespeare's A WINTER'S TALE [1611], one of his last plays:
QUEEN HERMIONE: Come, sir, now . . . Pray you, sit by us
And tell us a tale.
LITTLE PRINCE MAMILLIUS: Merry or sad shall't be?
HERMIONE: As merry as you will.
MAMILLIUS: A sad tale's best for winter. I have one
Of sprites and goblins.
HERMIONE: Let's have that, good sir.
Come on, sit down. Come on, and do your best
To fright me with your sprites, you're powerful at it.
MAMILLIUS: There was a man . . . Dwelt by a churchyard . . .
(Act II, Scene 1, lines 22-30)
--M. R. James, a little more than three centuries later, re-created the tale young Mamillius started and never had a chance to finish: "There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard" [circa 1924, first published in COLLECTED GHOST STORIES [1931].
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Christopher is Distinguished
So, a while back I was in a Borders and thumbed through a new(ish) biography of John Mortimer,* the English writer best known as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey. As is my wont in such cases, I turned to the index and looked to see if there were any references to J. R. R. Tolkien.
To my surprise, there weren't any entries for JRRT, but there were two for Christopher. Looking them up, I found that the first, in a passage regarding Mortimer's grudge against his parents for sending him off to The Dragon School in Oxford, gave a brief description of the school's history and noted that
"John [Mortimer]'s generation, like every other, produced alumni of distinction: the historian E. P. Thompson, the writer and publisher Richard Ollard, The Times's music critic William Mann, and J. R. R. Tolkien's son Christopher" [p.19]**
The second reference comes much later in the book, when discussing how Mortimer's son Jeremy applied to Oxford:
"He was interviewed for New College by Christopher Tolkien and John Bayley, who were eager to hear all about his co-ed schooling, and awarded him an exhibition to read English" [p. 274]
--Here we see Christopher very much the Oxford don, evaluating applicants for his college; the sort of administrative work we knew he must have done but which rarely surfaces in the public record. It's easy to forget that he was well on his way to establishing himself as a distinguished Middle English and Old Norse scholar in his own right between the late fifties and mid-seventies, when he left Oxford to devote himself to editing his father's manuscripts full-time.***
So, it's nice to see Christopher getting some of the credit he deserves independently of JRRT.
--John R.
*A VOYAGE ROUND JOHN MORTIMER, by Valerie Grove [2007]
**other, more recent, alumni include Humphrey Carpenter (whose father was after all the Bishop of Oxford) and Hugh Laurie; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_School
***His translation/edition of THE SAGA OF KING HEIDREKS THE WISE is my favorite saga. He also co-edited three Canterbury Tales in school editions with Nevill Coghill, and wrote an introduction to another edition of the same saga (this latter being one of the items I picked up in May at Kalamazoo). He also wrote a wonderful essay about the Goths and Huns for the Viking Society's SAGA-BOOK, which he was able to draw on just this year for his commentary in THE LEGEND OF SIGURD & GUDRUN.
To my surprise, there weren't any entries for JRRT, but there were two for Christopher. Looking them up, I found that the first, in a passage regarding Mortimer's grudge against his parents for sending him off to The Dragon School in Oxford, gave a brief description of the school's history and noted that
"John [Mortimer]'s generation, like every other, produced alumni of distinction: the historian E. P. Thompson, the writer and publisher Richard Ollard, The Times's music critic William Mann, and J. R. R. Tolkien's son Christopher" [p.19]**
The second reference comes much later in the book, when discussing how Mortimer's son Jeremy applied to Oxford:
"He was interviewed for New College by Christopher Tolkien and John Bayley, who were eager to hear all about his co-ed schooling, and awarded him an exhibition to read English" [p. 274]
--Here we see Christopher very much the Oxford don, evaluating applicants for his college; the sort of administrative work we knew he must have done but which rarely surfaces in the public record. It's easy to forget that he was well on his way to establishing himself as a distinguished Middle English and Old Norse scholar in his own right between the late fifties and mid-seventies, when he left Oxford to devote himself to editing his father's manuscripts full-time.***
So, it's nice to see Christopher getting some of the credit he deserves independently of JRRT.
--John R.
*A VOYAGE ROUND JOHN MORTIMER, by Valerie Grove [2007]
**other, more recent, alumni include Humphrey Carpenter (whose father was after all the Bishop of Oxford) and Hugh Laurie; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_School
***His translation/edition of THE SAGA OF KING HEIDREKS THE WISE is my favorite saga. He also co-edited three Canterbury Tales in school editions with Nevill Coghill, and wrote an introduction to another edition of the same saga (this latter being one of the items I picked up in May at Kalamazoo). He also wrote a wonderful essay about the Goths and Huns for the Viking Society's SAGA-BOOK, which he was able to draw on just this year for his commentary in THE LEGEND OF SIGURD & GUDRUN.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
And Then There Were Nuns (Poke-Em-With-A-Stick-Wednesday)
So, last week I saw a piece about the Nun Crisis:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/02nuns.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper
This is something I'd been vaguely aware about for a while, but not seen any numbers on before. Basically, people are asking 'where have all the nuns gone?' As this piece points out, at the end of Second Vatican, when the population of the U.S. was about two hundred million people, there were something like 180,000 nuns in this country. Today, when there are more than three hundred million in the US (with many of the new immigrants having come from mostly-Catholic countries), there are less than 60,000 nuns left.
Nor is the crisis limited to the U.S.: according to a BBC article from a few years ago, the worldwide nun population declined by a quarter during just John Paul II's reign -- again, at a time when the number of Catholics overall went up. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7227629.stm]
And things are made still worse by the aging nun population: most of the remaining American Catholic nuns are elderly. One piece I checked said there were more nuns past the age of ninety than there were under the age of thirty; another that the average age was over seventy and less than six thousand were under fifty. Recruitment has almost ceased for many communities, and the remaining nuns are struggling economically, with many of them now government-supported.*
Now Pope Benedict has dispatched an Apostolic Visitation -- the equivalent of a Papal Legate -- to investigate the crisis and report back. And meanwhile the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith** seems to have launched its own investigation. Initial signs suggest that the goal is to reign in those who embraced Second Vatican's call to go out into the world and help change it*** rather than remain cloistered but doctrinally pure.
What I think we're seeing here is the beginning of an attempt at renewal. When an organization, whether the Republican Party or Catholic nuns, start to lose members at an unsustainable rate, there are two schools of thought about how to solve the problem. One is to broaden the group's appeal by modernizing its ideas to attract those who had been put off by some aspect of the group's earlier incarnation. The other is to pull back to a faithful core of true believers in hopes their fervor will re-ignite the group so it can grow and thrive again. This will be a story I'm hoping to keep my eye on. Although only a bystander -- my denomination hasn't had nuns or monks in four and a half centuries, and I've only known two nuns**** -- I'd be sorry to see a tradition that goes back to the early Dark Ages fade away.
I guess we'll see.
--John R.
*[convents typically aren't supported by Church funds but by the wages earned by sisters from their jobs, usually as nurses or teachers. Janice has taken many a SSI claim from nuns.]
**[nobody expects the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith!]
***[the inspiration for a v. bad Mary Tyler Moore/Elvis Presley movie, 'Change of Habit']
****[one a fellow grad student at Marquette, the other a downstairs neighbor during the one period when I lived in The Core.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/02nuns.html?_r=2&ref=todayspaper
This is something I'd been vaguely aware about for a while, but not seen any numbers on before. Basically, people are asking 'where have all the nuns gone?' As this piece points out, at the end of Second Vatican, when the population of the U.S. was about two hundred million people, there were something like 180,000 nuns in this country. Today, when there are more than three hundred million in the US (with many of the new immigrants having come from mostly-Catholic countries), there are less than 60,000 nuns left.
Nor is the crisis limited to the U.S.: according to a BBC article from a few years ago, the worldwide nun population declined by a quarter during just John Paul II's reign -- again, at a time when the number of Catholics overall went up. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7227629.stm]
And things are made still worse by the aging nun population: most of the remaining American Catholic nuns are elderly. One piece I checked said there were more nuns past the age of ninety than there were under the age of thirty; another that the average age was over seventy and less than six thousand were under fifty. Recruitment has almost ceased for many communities, and the remaining nuns are struggling economically, with many of them now government-supported.*
Now Pope Benedict has dispatched an Apostolic Visitation -- the equivalent of a Papal Legate -- to investigate the crisis and report back. And meanwhile the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith** seems to have launched its own investigation. Initial signs suggest that the goal is to reign in those who embraced Second Vatican's call to go out into the world and help change it*** rather than remain cloistered but doctrinally pure.
What I think we're seeing here is the beginning of an attempt at renewal. When an organization, whether the Republican Party or Catholic nuns, start to lose members at an unsustainable rate, there are two schools of thought about how to solve the problem. One is to broaden the group's appeal by modernizing its ideas to attract those who had been put off by some aspect of the group's earlier incarnation. The other is to pull back to a faithful core of true believers in hopes their fervor will re-ignite the group so it can grow and thrive again. This will be a story I'm hoping to keep my eye on. Although only a bystander -- my denomination hasn't had nuns or monks in four and a half centuries, and I've only known two nuns**** -- I'd be sorry to see a tradition that goes back to the early Dark Ages fade away.
I guess we'll see.
--John R.
*[convents typically aren't supported by Church funds but by the wages earned by sisters from their jobs, usually as nurses or teachers. Janice has taken many a SSI claim from nuns.]
**[nobody expects the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith!]
***[the inspiration for a v. bad Mary Tyler Moore/Elvis Presley movie, 'Change of Habit']
****[one a fellow grad student at Marquette, the other a downstairs neighbor during the one period when I lived in The Core.]
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
The New Arrivals: TOLKIEN STUDIES VI
So, today Hastur was sitting peacefully in my lap -- a rare occurrance -- when she suddenly sat up and growled. I looked out and, sure enough, a Post Office van had just pulled up outside in our driveway (there's no visitor-detecter as good as a nervous cat). By the time I'd gotten disentangled and all the way downstairs and out to the porch, the mail-carrier was gone, but she'd left behind two promising book-shaped parcels.
One, which came all the way from Belgium (first time I've ever ordered a book from Belgium, I think) is Andrew Warn's CONSTRUCTING NATIONS, RECONSTUCTING MYTHS -- the T. A. Shippey festschrift and the last of the books I ordered at Kalamazoo. This is a non-Tolkien-themed volume which focuses instead on 19th century philology, with what look to be interesting essays on MacPherson's OSSIAN and The Four Branches of THE MABINOGI and of course Grimm, and titles like "How Elvish Were the Alfar?" and "What is 'Middle-Earth'?: Origin, Evolution, and Mythic Function". The latter, by Paul Battles, looks to be one of the two in the collection devoted in whole or part to Tolkienian themes, the other being the always interesting Jonathan Evans' "Worter, Sachen, und Wahrheit: Philology and the Tree of Language in Tolkien".
It's the other new arrival, however, that's captured my attention, since I have the lead article in this year's TOLKIEN STUDIES: "A Kind of Elvish Craft: J. R. R. Tolkien as Literary Craftsman". It's a great honor to appear in Tolkien Studies at last, and as the lead piece, complete with a John Rateliff Checklist of my scholarly works. This is the written version of the speech I gave at Marquette back in October 2007 as that year's Blackwelder Lecture, and I'm glad to see it in print** to see what folks make of my argument (that Tolkien deliberately crafted his style to evoke participation in the subcreation on his readers' part). I also make a case for Tolkien's prose being so interwoven and carefully constructed that it's difficult to change any detail without unintended consequences somewhere down the line -- something I've more recently been looking at in another piece (just finished) on the various films and radio adaptations. And of course I love seeing a page from the HOBBIT manuscript on the front cover of this year's volume, thanks to Marquette and the Estate.
Actually, I'm in this issue of TOLKIEN STUDIES twice, since I wrote a review (of the Walking Tree Press collection TOLKIEN'S SHORTER WORKS, this topic having been a longstanding interest of mine*) as well. Looking over both pieces now, there are passages I like, places where I'd tinker with the wording a bit, a comment there I'd moderate, a point here I'd emphasize -- but on the whole I'm relieved to find I'd essentially say the same thing if I were writing it today.
So, if you come across and read this, let me know what you think.
---JDR
*cf. my contribution years ago to the Tolkien Society's little volume LEAVES FROM THE TREE
**I understand it's been available online through Project Muse for about two weeks, but I don't have access to that -- and, besides, there's great satisfaction in getting an actual copy of something you wrote in print and making a new place for it on your shelves.
One, which came all the way from Belgium (first time I've ever ordered a book from Belgium, I think) is Andrew Warn's CONSTRUCTING NATIONS, RECONSTUCTING MYTHS -- the T. A. Shippey festschrift and the last of the books I ordered at Kalamazoo. This is a non-Tolkien-themed volume which focuses instead on 19th century philology, with what look to be interesting essays on MacPherson's OSSIAN and The Four Branches of THE MABINOGI and of course Grimm, and titles like "How Elvish Were the Alfar?" and "What is 'Middle-Earth'?: Origin, Evolution, and Mythic Function". The latter, by Paul Battles, looks to be one of the two in the collection devoted in whole or part to Tolkienian themes, the other being the always interesting Jonathan Evans' "Worter, Sachen, und Wahrheit: Philology and the Tree of Language in Tolkien".
It's the other new arrival, however, that's captured my attention, since I have the lead article in this year's TOLKIEN STUDIES: "A Kind of Elvish Craft: J. R. R. Tolkien as Literary Craftsman". It's a great honor to appear in Tolkien Studies at last, and as the lead piece, complete with a John Rateliff Checklist of my scholarly works. This is the written version of the speech I gave at Marquette back in October 2007 as that year's Blackwelder Lecture, and I'm glad to see it in print** to see what folks make of my argument (that Tolkien deliberately crafted his style to evoke participation in the subcreation on his readers' part). I also make a case for Tolkien's prose being so interwoven and carefully constructed that it's difficult to change any detail without unintended consequences somewhere down the line -- something I've more recently been looking at in another piece (just finished) on the various films and radio adaptations. And of course I love seeing a page from the HOBBIT manuscript on the front cover of this year's volume, thanks to Marquette and the Estate.
Actually, I'm in this issue of TOLKIEN STUDIES twice, since I wrote a review (of the Walking Tree Press collection TOLKIEN'S SHORTER WORKS, this topic having been a longstanding interest of mine*) as well. Looking over both pieces now, there are passages I like, places where I'd tinker with the wording a bit, a comment there I'd moderate, a point here I'd emphasize -- but on the whole I'm relieved to find I'd essentially say the same thing if I were writing it today.
So, if you come across and read this, let me know what you think.
---JDR
*cf. my contribution years ago to the Tolkien Society's little volume LEAVES FROM THE TREE
**I understand it's been available online through Project Muse for about two weeks, but I don't have access to that -- and, besides, there's great satisfaction in getting an actual copy of something you wrote in print and making a new place for it on your shelves.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Private Eye piece on Tolkien
So, for the last few days I've been hearing about an article on Tolkien that appeared in the rather snarky British magazine PRIVATE EYE. Now a friend in England has sent me a scan of the relevant page (thanks D.) and I've had a chance to read it myself. It's a relatively short piece --only a little over two columns-- that starts out as a review of SIGURD & GUDRUN but at mid-point abruptly pivots, so that its second half is a call for a new biography of JRRT.
The anonymous reviewer then briefly what he considers "the two contenders": Carpenter, whom he finds worthy but too constrained by its need to get family approval, and Michael White's much later effort, which he dismisses outright as too obviously derivative from Carpenter to have any standing as an independent work (a judgment which quite overlooks White's biographical fictions and sheer inventions, such as the infamous hole-in-the-carpet story). For some reason, he ignores Grotta-Kurska entirely (odd in that while filled with inaccuracies Grotta-Kurska's is much better known that White's) and, even more surprisingly, John Garth's account of Tolkien during the War years, which has been highly praised on pretty much all sides since it first appeared.
Where it really gets interesting, from my point of view, is in the basis of its call for a new biography: that "it's time for one of the great literary figures of the English-speaking 20th century to get a decent memorial". Indeed, he finds it "extraordinary" that "in a literary landscape where even minor figures get twice or thrice appraised" a major figure like Tolkien hasn't gotten more attention, "a decent memorial".*
Twenty years ago, anyone trying to make such a claim would have been pilloried. Sometimes the world changes in a good way.
--John R.
*one thing the many years of essentially having only one standard biography, the Carpenter, has done is that it's established a consensus view of Tolkien's life that is both fair and largely favorable -- as opposed, say, to the trash 'em biographical style of a Goldman or a Kelley. Imagine if the only bio. of JRRT had been something along the lines of the Dorothy Sayers biography SUCH A STRANGE WOMAN? Brr.
The anonymous reviewer then briefly what he considers "the two contenders": Carpenter, whom he finds worthy but too constrained by its need to get family approval, and Michael White's much later effort, which he dismisses outright as too obviously derivative from Carpenter to have any standing as an independent work (a judgment which quite overlooks White's biographical fictions and sheer inventions, such as the infamous hole-in-the-carpet story). For some reason, he ignores Grotta-Kurska entirely (odd in that while filled with inaccuracies Grotta-Kurska's is much better known that White's) and, even more surprisingly, John Garth's account of Tolkien during the War years, which has been highly praised on pretty much all sides since it first appeared.
Where it really gets interesting, from my point of view, is in the basis of its call for a new biography: that "it's time for one of the great literary figures of the English-speaking 20th century to get a decent memorial". Indeed, he finds it "extraordinary" that "in a literary landscape where even minor figures get twice or thrice appraised" a major figure like Tolkien hasn't gotten more attention, "a decent memorial".*
Twenty years ago, anyone trying to make such a claim would have been pilloried. Sometimes the world changes in a good way.
--John R.
*one thing the many years of essentially having only one standard biography, the Carpenter, has done is that it's established a consensus view of Tolkien's life that is both fair and largely favorable -- as opposed, say, to the trash 'em biographical style of a Goldman or a Kelley. Imagine if the only bio. of JRRT had been something along the lines of the Dorothy Sayers biography SUCH A STRANGE WOMAN? Brr.
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