Tolkien's Nobel Prize Nomination rejected due to 'poor prose'

[Gormenghast]

In the end it's the same old debate: is literature so highly specialized that it's meant to only be understood by an handful of experts or it is meant to reach out the public?

Literature IS essentially the practice of cultivating narrow borders. The specialization is objective. What's subjective is its merit (whether or not specialization is a good thing, or always a good thing).

[Sci-2]

I dunno I don't like criticizing the author for things implied or just evident in the text but I don't like absolving the text of everything present becuase the author wsa a good person

Oh, the text has problems, but there are works (not to mention artists) that are far more egregious. I mean look at Naipul. Admittedly I have yet to read the one book I have - I refuse to buy others - but many people believe him to be downright incredible.

He is also most certainly a racist, abusive shit-bag.

[Arthmail]

I'm a Tolkien nut, but I think argument ad popularum is a mistake: the works can be defended on a literary level without needing to appealing to sales. Taking the issue of prose, Tolkien was one of the finest philologists of his time: the fellow knew style, and he knew language. The diverse array of styles to be found within LOTR is entirely deliberate, and is largely geared to telling something about a character or a society. Taking Theoden, for instance, Tolkien mentions in a letter that he could have written Theoden's gratitude to Gandalf in a more modern tone of voice (giving an example), but he argues that to do so would have created an incongruity between style and thought. Someone expressing Theoden's sentiments is expressing sentiments that simply don't exist in the modern age, so it would be wrong to translate them as such.

The fundamental problem that people like the Nobel Committee encounter in dealing with Tolkien is that he simply doesn't conform to the rules: LOTR is not a novel. It is a recreation of the epic, and a throwback to the era before the novel. Complaining about it not meeting, say, the standard of characterisation expected from nineteenth or twentieth century literature makes about as much sense as complaining that Tolkien lacks robots.

Appropriately enough, Tolkien ran into the same problem with Beowulf scholarship prior to 1936. Before Tolkien, Beowulf was picked apart for information about Germanic tribal warfare, and word-origins. The monsters were ignored because the critics considered Grendel and company random pieces of distracting silliness. Tolkien had to turn that around, and point out that the monsters serve a cosmological and metaphysical purpose.

An heir who has known for sixty years that he is one, and has spent those sixty years out in the wilderness thanklessly protecting the likes of Bree and the Shire. Aragorn is not a random farmboy.

None of whom are all-powerful, and the most powerful of which turned to evil.

And arrogant, self-satisfied hobbits. And lazy hobbits. And small-minded hobbits.

The less said about what happens when the Elves screw up, the better. But they do envy mortals one major thing: we die and they don't. LOTR is very death-obsessed.

Saruman's white, powerful, and evil. Ghan-buri-Ghan is non-white and good. And repelling those evil hordes is doomed to failure, and they know it: victory over Sauron cannot be achieved by force of arms. It is instead achieved through rejection of power (the entire purpose of the Ring Quest), self-sacrifice, and mercy. If Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam hadn't shown mercy to Gollum, the Quest would have failed.

See Sam's thoughts on this.

BAM! Thats what i like to see. I just wasn't going to post it all. To be honest, Tolkien approached his story on an entirely different level than really anyone else of the last...fuck....100 years. It does not fit an easy mold, it is beyond the comprehension of some, and has become too populist for others. But for me, when i lay my head down to sleep, i think of someone saying that Tolkien had shit prose, and i think of Gandalf shining a light in the mines of Moria. Some bitches just want to stay buried in the dark with the Balrog.

[Liffguard]

You are disrespecting the memory of a man whose work is loved by millions, nay, billions and are getting your social agenda into MY FANTASY how dare you! It's just escapism! [iNSERT THREE PAGE RANT HERE]

It's less that you're getting your social agenda involved and more that that little screed was about half a superficial interpretation and half completely untrue.

[Verboten]

I like lord of the rings. I loved the Silmarrilion. The Silmarillion is gorgeous. But LOTR does have an unfortunate amount of subtext that while unintentional is still problematic. Saying they don't exist is not the way to get yourself across. Also thank you for calling me a bitch Arthmail, I really appreciate it.

[Sci-2]

Yeah, Verboten is right about LOTR having issues. I think the work has incredible merits, but we shouldn't pretend this or any other work magically makes up for long pages of dark brown skinned evil people because of one comment by Faramir and a token PoC.

We can praise Lovecraft, for example, without ignoring his prejudice against...well, all living things.

[Horselover Fat]

Tolkien's prose can be judged on its own merits. I don't think its all that great in particular but I am not one to demand perfection from my pleasure reading. Tolkien had other strengths. Graham Greene, E. M. Forster and Robert For-fuck's-sake Frost (that's his actual middle name, true story) are not by any stretch obscure. Let's not allow Tolkien love to let us make statements like that.

And yes, thier prose is well better than Tolkien's. There is no shame in this, thier prose is better than most, Nabokov is better still, Better than all of them put together and he never won a Nobel prize.

[Gormenghast]

I'll explain what the deal really is (the pretense is deliberate ;) )

Do you think a guy who barely has a grasp of grammar could tell a good book from a bad one? One'd say probably not.

Do you think that someone who read 5 books all his life could tell a good book from a bad one better than a guy who read 500 books? Probably not.

This is the "axis" of specialization. It is objective. After all in order to READ you NEED to be educated at a certain level or it's just gibberish. If you follow this axis you go all the way up to a literary major and the guys who hand out the Nobel Prize, and who obviously know what they are doing, the same way an engineer knows what he's doing after a whole life spent learning very complicate (specialized) stuff.

Now.

The problem isn't so much that popular works pretend to be "literature". BUT that literature pretends to be meaningful and relevant (in the same way an engineer building a bridge is). Because that's the point. The specialization of literature is kind of objective in the way it works, and it exists and is not subjective. One can't argue the Nobel Prize for literature.

But you CAN argue whether it's just specialized masturbation or actually meaningful. And more often than not serious literature is absolutely irrelevant, narcissistic and solipsistic. Intellectual wankery for those who have that kind of kink.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Yeah, Verboten is right about LOTR having issues. I think the work has incredible merits, but we shouldn't pretend this or any other work magically makes up for long pages of dark brown skinned evil people because of one comment by Faramir and a token PoC.

We can praise Lovecraft, for example, without ignoring his prejudice against...well, all living things.

Lovecraft was racist, plain and simple, and nobody is ever going to deny it (fortunately his later stories started to move away from that). Tolkien on the other hand is more eurocentric, rather than racist. We're talking about a guy who castigated Hitler's unscientific race doctrine at a time Hitler was actually quite popular among western conservatives, who loathed apartheid (Tolkien was born in South Africa), and who condemned both US and British Imperialism.

The most awkward thing about Tolkien isn't racial issues, it's that he was sympathetic to General Franco (conservative Catholic and all that).

[Sci-2]

Oh, I wasn't trying to accuse Tolkien of being anything, just stating that there are issues in the books themselves.

Apologies for the confusion, I do see my post conflated the author and the works.

[Grack21]

Sometimes I think people get the movie versions mixed up with the books.

There was this whole Scouring of the Shire bit that pretty much invalidates all this humble hobbit bullshit people liek to throw around.

[Shryke]

Movies made in the past decade or so of Forster and Greene's works, Frost's "The Road Less Traveled" being a mainstay in not just high school cirricula but also quoted on several programs over the years, Andrić apparently selling millions worldwide and having respectable Amazon sales numbers today 51 years after his selection. That's the basis for my comment. All of them sell well and have received new editions over the years, so to argue that because they are not fantasy works that they are not popular was what baffled me about the quoted comment I responded to earlier.

Why are you attempting to connect "popularity" with "high school curricula"? These things, they have nothing in common.

[Arthmail]

I like lord of the rings. I loved the Silmarrilion. The Silmarillion is gorgeous. But LOTR does have an unfortunate amount of subtext that while unintentional is still problematic. Saying they don't exist is not the way to get yourself across. Also thank you for calling me a bitch Arthmail, I really appreciate it.

Wow, read into it much? My last post was a barely coherent post trying to have a little fun. Sorry if you took it the wrong way.

[Myshkin]

Really this is (once again) starting to sound like fanboy rage. Is literature meaningful? It certainly is. To say lit is not meaningful is to say art is not meaningful. But omg my totally fav author is not considered lit, so lit is completely meaningless and no one likes it and it's only read 'cause some literary cabal of professors keeps pushing it down our throats for reasons unclear! Yeah! And fuck Doestovesky, he's a hack who wrote unintelligible wankery, but Terry Goodkind has sold millions of copies so he's waaaay better than Dostoevsky obviously.

[Larry.]

Why are you attempting to connect "popularity" with "high school curricula"? These things, they have nothing in common.

Read what I said again. I'm noting that Frost's poetry is known for more than just being required reading. Miles to go before I sleep, the road less traveled, and all that jazz.

Well, a constructive thing is emerging from this thread for me: I began re-reading Greene's The Power and the Glory for the first time in several years and I may write reviews of that and a few others from this 1961 list.

[Arthmail]

Really this is (once again) starting to sound like fanboy rage. Is literature meaningful? It certainly is. To say lit is not meaningful is to say art is not meaningful. But omg my totally fav author is not considered lit, so lit is completely meaningless and no one likes it and it's only read 'cause some literary cabal of professors keeps pushing it down our throats for reasons unclear! Yeah! And fuck Doestovesky, he's a hack who wrote unintelligible wankery, but Terry Goodkind has sold millions of copies so he's waaaay better than Dostoevsky obviously.

You should get over yourself. If you don't think academic circles tend to produce a sense of intellectual establishment, if not outright elitism, then you are profoundly naive. This is true far beyond literature, and ranges out into all of the sciences, history, and anywhere else where people have a bunch of letters behind their name.

[Sci-2]

Is literature meaningful? It certainly is.

How is literature being defined, and what criteria are you using to decide it is meaningful? There have been statements made that reading more POVs increases one's understanding of the world, as well one's compassion.

But does art that possesses higher marks in defined criteria (prose, characterization, etc) necessarily impact the world?

ETA: quote

[Myshkin]

You should get over yourself. If you don't think academic circles tend to produce a sense of intellectual establishment, if not outright elitism, then you are profoundly naive. This is true far beyond literature, and ranges out into all of the sciences, history, and anywhere else where people have a bunch of letters behind their name.

And you should get over yourself. If you don't think people, a lot of people, enjoy Dostoevsky, Hugo, Hesse, Mann, Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, Kundera, or any other "literary" author based on the merits of the writing rather than the say so of some elitist cabal you are incredibly ignorant. I'm sick of being told by fanboys that I'm not capable of making up my own mind just because I think The Brothers Karamazov is a far greater literary achievement than LotR, and I'm sick of the elitism (yes that's the word for it) inherent in the hipster contrarianism of rejecting everything viewed as "establishment".

[Shryke]

Read what I said again. I'm noting that Frost's poetry is known for more than just being required reading. Miles to go before I sleep, the road less traveled, and all that jazz.

Frost is famous to be sure. I was just pointing out that a school curricula is no place to be measuring popularity. Quality? Maybe. I'd say it often enforces a very narrow definition of acceptable (and imo turns alot of kids off reading but that's a different topic)

I can't seem to actually find a list of the nominees for that year, but the majority of ones you've mentioned are not what I would call well known.

[Lightsnake]

I like lord of the rings. I loved the Silmarrilion. The Silmarillion is gorgeous. But LOTR does have an unfortunate amount of subtext that while unintentional is still problematic. Saying they don't exist is not the way to get yourself across. Also thank you for calling me a bitch Arthmail, I really appreciate it.

I think one can say that LOTR did have unfortunate subtext within (and some that Tolkien himself ended up regretting), but I think, respectfully, you simplified it a little. It's not as simple as 'pure white skinned people good' when we know the Numenoreans became real, real bad guys and had to be smacked down by God. Likewise, the heroic, shining elves? In the Hobbit, they're hardly that reasonable (The wood elves anyways) and the Noldor, the most shiny and brightest of them all, are responsible for a lot of at best questionable, at worst downright evil actions throughout history, while men like the Easterlings displayed great heroism.

So, IMO, definitely not that black and white. The Orcs I think can be debated because they're an artificial race created to be monstrous.