OK, I went back and read it again. OK, I see his point and agree with most of it (the D&D stuff is outside my experience). But I came to that conclusion only after I forced myself to remove the coloration imposed by the title and the Ace covers and the Leonard Nimoy photo. It was as mis-directing as the infamous "Other than that Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
PS, if the author's intent was to stir the pot then he succeeded quite well, to the point were it was impossible to be sure what was in the pot.
No it doesn’t. Read the post from Zaklog the Great: “Ok, besides the title…Leave the title out of it, though.” He says you are wrong regarding the title.
a - Zaklog said no such thing. he was STIPULATING to one of your assertions in order to demonstrate that, even assuming certain of your assumptions to be true, you were STILL WRONG
b - which is the reason i made my post in the first place, that there was no reason to cede even that much justification too you
c - the irony of a man who can't be arsed to read the article before violently reacting to something it never said complaining about others not reading his entire corpus is peak comedy
It’s been decades since I seen ‘stipulate’ actually used outside of legal language so I looked it up. It means to specify, which is what I suspected it meant. So Zaklog stipulated or specified exactly what when he told me to “leave the title out of it”? And what specifically about the title would cause him to do that?
Please explain EXACTLY why my assertion about the title (forget the article, I have conceded the point) being misleading is contradicted by Zaklog’s statement. Up to now you haven’t.
nother great article. The stewardship has now been left to ..Amazon and wackjobs who neither care about the story or are giddy at the opportunity to right what ever intellectual wrongs they feel Mr Tolkien made. I can’t believe someone is giving Colbert a chance to tell stories in that world.
I pulled The Hobbit off my elementary school library shelf in 4th grade (1980). It was recommended by the librarian because I was running through my weekly checkout limit in 2 or 3 days. I found the Lord of the Rings on my grandparents bookshelf in middle school. It was left there by my weed-addled uncle who read it in the 70s. Good times.
Very similar story here. Only I discovered it myself in my small Danish elementary school library in a remote rural area. No fancy cover, just a generic dark blue leather binding. This sort of thing only happens once in a lifetime.
Those two have the advantage of being public domain, so there's not really a canon anymore. The girlfriend started playing Tainted Grail and was asking about Arthurian mythology, I asked, "The Celtic one, the British one, the Welsh one, the Catholic one, the pagan one, the modern one..."
“Canon” is a modern concern, and an ethereal one. Great stories evolve through centuries, as they are adapted for each new era - yet retaining their core mythic messages.
I would say it still holds for shared works and collections (such as Cthulhu Myhthos, Wild Cards, comic books in general, and the like). I meant it in this case as more of a shorthand of there's no collection of either character that is "complete".
I don’t know about Myhthos or Wild Cards. But my description fits well with the older Comics. Compare modern Batman and Superman (eg of an extreme case, the “Absolute” versions) with their 1930s originals. Quite different. Especially Batman - who used guns (in the first year’s comics), wasn’t a detective, etc.
It's true that GenX wasn't reading Tolkien in the '80s. Tolkien, at that time, had a rep of being a much heavier lift than Moorcock and Brooks. But, we also weren't reading it because it has been read to us in the '70s by our parents. And for those whose parents hadn't read it, there was the Hobbit movie and the Bakshi incomplete LotR.
It's true that authors only stay relevant if institutions preserve and push them. The Iliad would be forgotten without there being academic work associated with them. Memory of Dumas is nearly entirely from the Three Muskeers movies that get made for every generation. Robert E. Howard would have been forgotten without De Camp and Carter and Lovecraft forgotten without Derleth. Fiction does need people who preach it.
But where does the fervor for preaching come from? Because there is something about it that is sublime. Good fiction compells people to tell others about it. One can call it hype. But all hype takes work and people are lazy. The dollars are secondary. Yes, hype can sell pet rocks. But not for long.
Yes, some of us were reading Tolkien in the 80s. True, we mostly started with the Hobbit, which was good for kids and youths. Lord of the Rings was a bit tough for most of the kids, but I read it, as did several of my friends.
I’m Gen X and we were very much reading Tolkien in the ’80s. We were the generation that knew about Tolkien from Led Zeppelin. But Gygax and Rank and Bass also had a lot to do with it.
Most Gen X were in elementary school or not even born. Gen X is people born between 1964-1980. My Gen X brother was born in 1972. He and his friends all read the LoTR in highschool and that was a rural public school in NH. It was a very popular book in the 1980s.
It was popular but going into old hat by 1980. Yes, some people read it. Most did not. 1970s was Tolkien peak coinciding with the movies. And, how many read it rather than said they read it. Who knows.
I was born in 1970 and read The Hobbit in 1977 - took me another six or seven years to get through LOTR. It was, yes, quite popular among my peers around then, early to mid-80s. Late 80s, at college, only us geeks liked it. But we liked it a lot.
Tolkien would totally understand. His JOB was maintenance: handing on the tradition. In other news, you might enjoy reading my students' blogposts about our discussions of Tolkien: https://tolkienmedievalandmodern.blogspot.com
“If being a great writer meant anything at all, John C. Wright would be at the top of the NY Times bestseller list for months every time he published.”
Who the hell cares what the NYT, that stupid failed CIA-front of a crappy newspaper says about anything at all?
And furthermore, who cares what the “average American” reads in between watching Lizzo dance videos?
Great literature has always been an elite niche. There will always be only a few people on earth who appreciate the brilliance of Awake in the Night Land and Iron Chamber of Memory. The same will probably be true of Lord of the Rings in the distant future as well.
Does not mean that “omg Tolkien has died” any more than Homer has died.
Take another look at the composition of the ruined husk: Chistianity.
Moorcock? Kept hints of the forms, dicarded the rest. Brooks? Truth, prettty things, sappy sentiment.
Grimdark - just keep that awful Light thing away dudes, making an empty statement here.
Martin decided to desecrate ideas, beginning with incest for its owns sake, then endless rape.
Maintenance and re-enchantment are necessary, in a culture poisoned by the Dark Lord's (OTHER ONE, the evil one, if you please!) minions and by Orc Life.
Why should I be upset because Tolkien would have faded if not for failed theft? His son did cement his literary legacy and he's still in the zeitgeist. Shakespeare has some ridiculous adaptations with fast cars and machine guns, and teenage kids with a foul temper and a sense of entitlement. Does that diminish anything 'Shakespeare' has done?
Perhaps it's worse to have a black Numenorean or the yass queen daughter of Helm Hammerhand than to be forgotten. Tolkien could have been forgotten, but he wasn't and probably won't be. Right now no one is watching the Rangz of Power. Probably no one will watch the new movies full of a redeemed villain and girlbosses.
Or perhaps this is a phase that Tolkien's legendarium is going through.
Oh and better watch out or Jeffro will hunt you down and beat you with a signed Daw edition. Don't you know he _proved_ Tolkien has nothing to do with D&D?
Jeffro's whole point has been the distinction between D&D as Gygax Intended and D&D as Popularly Received. The Tolkien elements were shoved into the published work by popular demand/other authors, and emphasized by the audience. D&DAGI would have little to no Tolkien--so much the worse for D&D, IMO, but I'm Unworthy of the True Game. :)
I’m a boomer, who first encountered The Hobbit in my freshman year at high school, where dogeared copies of the book were being passed around, and marveled at. I went on to read the other books, and continued rereading them every couple of years until the late 90’s, when I began reading them to my children.
This is why Jeffro Johnson's _Appendix N_ (available from Castalia!) is so important as well. He did the work to preserve that critical part of the Fantasy corpus which would have otherwise stayed buried under Token.
I have read some truly excellent books because of Jeffro Johnson. Have you read any of the adventures of Jules De Grandin? If you're not too picky about copyright, you can find audiobooks on YouTube. They're great.
"...if you're not too picky about copyright..." then you endorse stealing from those who work extremely hard on their craft and are due their just wages.
Did you actually read this? It is not an anti-Tolkien screed at all.
Could've fooled me. Perhaps there is a pro-Tolkien nugget buried in there somewhere, but the overall tone makes it hard to find.
Ok, besides the title, show me what he said that is running down Tolkien. Give me a direct quote. Leave the title out of it, though.
OK, I went back and read it again. OK, I see his point and agree with most of it (the D&D stuff is outside my experience). But I came to that conclusion only after I forced myself to remove the coloration imposed by the title and the Ace covers and the Leonard Nimoy photo. It was as mis-directing as the infamous "Other than that Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
PS, if the author's intent was to stir the pot then he succeeded quite well, to the point were it was impossible to be sure what was in the pot.
the title of the article has the logically required implication that Tolkien <b>IS NOT</b> forgotten.
Thanks for ignoring my next post.
thanks for not being competent at reading the article or the title.
No it doesn’t. Read the post from Zaklog the Great: “Ok, besides the title…Leave the title out of it, though.” He says you are wrong regarding the title.
a - Zaklog said no such thing. he was STIPULATING to one of your assertions in order to demonstrate that, even assuming certain of your assumptions to be true, you were STILL WRONG
b - which is the reason i made my post in the first place, that there was no reason to cede even that much justification too you
c - the irony of a man who can't be arsed to read the article before violently reacting to something it never said complaining about others not reading his entire corpus is peak comedy
please continue.
God, you ARE a pretentious jerk.
It’s been decades since I seen ‘stipulate’ actually used outside of legal language so I looked it up. It means to specify, which is what I suspected it meant. So Zaklog stipulated or specified exactly what when he told me to “leave the title out of it”? And what specifically about the title would cause him to do that?
Please explain EXACTLY why my assertion about the title (forget the article, I have conceded the point) being misleading is contradicted by Zaklog’s statement. Up to now you haven’t.
Wait. Tolkien didn't put the manuscript in a lead box, climb to the highest mast on the starship to Yesod and cast it into a black hole?
Tolkien could never do what Wolfe did, but Wolfe could probably have written good Tolkien fanfic if he wanted to.
nother great article. The stewardship has now been left to ..Amazon and wackjobs who neither care about the story or are giddy at the opportunity to right what ever intellectual wrongs they feel Mr Tolkien made. I can’t believe someone is giving Colbert a chance to tell stories in that world.
Agreed 99%
Yeah but that's inevitable. I mean I saw an article that was all glowing praise about a Shakespeare play without words. Yes, you read that right.
"The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all." Ecclesiastes 9:11
Yet another excuse to let things go to dung.
It can be read that way. It doesn't have to be. It's just saying that no matter how brilliant you are, there are things you cannot control.
I pulled The Hobbit off my elementary school library shelf in 4th grade (1980). It was recommended by the librarian because I was running through my weekly checkout limit in 2 or 3 days. I found the Lord of the Rings on my grandparents bookshelf in middle school. It was left there by my weed-addled uncle who read it in the 70s. Good times.
Very similar story here. Only I discovered it myself in my small Danish elementary school library in a remote rural area. No fancy cover, just a generic dark blue leather binding. This sort of thing only happens once in a lifetime.
Sounds like me. I got my 1st copies of LotR from the "put-n-take" rack at my library around 4th grade in 1980 as well.
The Rankin/Bass Hobbit was extremely important. Nearly 50 years later and I can still remember some of the songs.
Where there’s a whip, there’s a way.
Where there’s a whip, there’s a way! Someone took the song and dubbed it into the Jackson scene.
Lemmiwinks has entered the chat
The Ralph Bakshi version was pretty interesting.
Now do Robin Hood and King Arthur.
Those two have the advantage of being public domain, so there's not really a canon anymore. The girlfriend started playing Tainted Grail and was asking about Arthurian mythology, I asked, "The Celtic one, the British one, the Welsh one, the Catholic one, the pagan one, the modern one..."
“Canon” is a modern concern, and an ethereal one. Great stories evolve through centuries, as they are adapted for each new era - yet retaining their core mythic messages.
I would say it still holds for shared works and collections (such as Cthulhu Myhthos, Wild Cards, comic books in general, and the like). I meant it in this case as more of a shorthand of there's no collection of either character that is "complete".
I don’t know about Myhthos or Wild Cards. But my description fits well with the older Comics. Compare modern Batman and Superman (eg of an extreme case, the “Absolute” versions) with their 1930s originals. Quite different. Especially Batman - who used guns (in the first year’s comics), wasn’t a detective, etc.
It's true that GenX wasn't reading Tolkien in the '80s. Tolkien, at that time, had a rep of being a much heavier lift than Moorcock and Brooks. But, we also weren't reading it because it has been read to us in the '70s by our parents. And for those whose parents hadn't read it, there was the Hobbit movie and the Bakshi incomplete LotR.
It's true that authors only stay relevant if institutions preserve and push them. The Iliad would be forgotten without there being academic work associated with them. Memory of Dumas is nearly entirely from the Three Muskeers movies that get made for every generation. Robert E. Howard would have been forgotten without De Camp and Carter and Lovecraft forgotten without Derleth. Fiction does need people who preach it.
But where does the fervor for preaching come from? Because there is something about it that is sublime. Good fiction compells people to tell others about it. One can call it hype. But all hype takes work and people are lazy. The dollars are secondary. Yes, hype can sell pet rocks. But not for long.
REH fans also owe an enormous debt to John D. Clark, who was a true fan when REH was being forgotten.
https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-Propellants-University-Classics/dp/0813595835
True. Clark deserves a mention for sure.
Yes, some of us were reading Tolkien in the 80s. True, we mostly started with the Hobbit, which was good for kids and youths. Lord of the Rings was a bit tough for most of the kids, but I read it, as did several of my friends.
I’m Gen X and we were very much reading Tolkien in the ’80s. We were the generation that knew about Tolkien from Led Zeppelin. But Gygax and Rank and Bass also had a lot to do with it.
Most GenX, who read it at all, read it in the '70s.
The oldest Gen Xers were 15 in 1979. I read it in the early 1980s when I was 13 as did a lot of my peers.
Yes, and most like you read it around 13. So, mostly in the '70s. If they read it at all.
Most Gen X were in elementary school or not even born. Gen X is people born between 1964-1980. My Gen X brother was born in 1972. He and his friends all read the LoTR in highschool and that was a rural public school in NH. It was a very popular book in the 1980s.
It was popular but going into old hat by 1980. Yes, some people read it. Most did not. 1970s was Tolkien peak coinciding with the movies. And, how many read it rather than said they read it. Who knows.
I was born in 1970 and read The Hobbit in 1977 - took me another six or seven years to get through LOTR. It was, yes, quite popular among my peers around then, early to mid-80s. Late 80s, at college, only us geeks liked it. But we liked it a lot.
Tolkien would totally understand. His JOB was maintenance: handing on the tradition. In other news, you might enjoy reading my students' blogposts about our discussions of Tolkien: https://tolkienmedievalandmodern.blogspot.com
TL'DR Why do the people Whot Be Educated, i.e. those who read, understand the Slough of Despond? Why will Narnia always have legs?
Parents teaching their children.
Let J.R.R. be forgotten: The Hobbit remains. It is designed to be read aloud and does so beautifully.
Longer Letter Later: The institutions that serve these parents and social justice convergence.
“If being a great writer meant anything at all, John C. Wright would be at the top of the NY Times bestseller list for months every time he published.”
Who the hell cares what the NYT, that stupid failed CIA-front of a crappy newspaper says about anything at all?
And furthermore, who cares what the “average American” reads in between watching Lizzo dance videos?
Great literature has always been an elite niche. There will always be only a few people on earth who appreciate the brilliance of Awake in the Night Land and Iron Chamber of Memory. The same will probably be true of Lord of the Rings in the distant future as well.
Does not mean that “omg Tolkien has died” any more than Homer has died.
"And furthermore, who cares what the “average American” reads in between watching Lizzo dance videos?"
You should care a lot about this one. The average American behavior is the culture of America.
Giving that away to Satanists to control is moral failure.
Take another look at the composition of the ruined husk: Chistianity.
Moorcock? Kept hints of the forms, dicarded the rest. Brooks? Truth, prettty things, sappy sentiment.
Grimdark - just keep that awful Light thing away dudes, making an empty statement here.
Martin decided to desecrate ideas, beginning with incest for its owns sake, then endless rape.
Maintenance and re-enchantment are necessary, in a culture poisoned by the Dark Lord's (OTHER ONE, the evil one, if you please!) minions and by Orc Life.
Why should I be upset because Tolkien would have faded if not for failed theft? His son did cement his literary legacy and he's still in the zeitgeist. Shakespeare has some ridiculous adaptations with fast cars and machine guns, and teenage kids with a foul temper and a sense of entitlement. Does that diminish anything 'Shakespeare' has done?
Perhaps it's worse to have a black Numenorean or the yass queen daughter of Helm Hammerhand than to be forgotten. Tolkien could have been forgotten, but he wasn't and probably won't be. Right now no one is watching the Rangz of Power. Probably no one will watch the new movies full of a redeemed villain and girlbosses.
Or perhaps this is a phase that Tolkien's legendarium is going through.
Oh and better watch out or Jeffro will hunt you down and beat you with a signed Daw edition. Don't you know he _proved_ Tolkien has nothing to do with D&D?
Jeffro's whole point has been the distinction between D&D as Gygax Intended and D&D as Popularly Received. The Tolkien elements were shoved into the published work by popular demand/other authors, and emphasized by the audience. D&DAGI would have little to no Tolkien--so much the worse for D&D, IMO, but I'm Unworthy of the True Game. :)
Interesting back story on the books. Thanks!
I’m a boomer, who first encountered The Hobbit in my freshman year at high school, where dogeared copies of the book were being passed around, and marveled at. I went on to read the other books, and continued rereading them every couple of years until the late 90’s, when I began reading them to my children.
This is why Jeffro Johnson's _Appendix N_ (available from Castalia!) is so important as well. He did the work to preserve that critical part of the Fantasy corpus which would have otherwise stayed buried under Token.
I have read some truly excellent books because of Jeffro Johnson. Have you read any of the adventures of Jules De Grandin? If you're not too picky about copyright, you can find audiobooks on YouTube. They're great.
"Of the making of many books there is no end"
Seabury Quinn is on my radar, but I don't know whether I'll ever have enough time to get there.
How about Manley Wade Wellman? Silver John is fantastic.
"...if you're not too picky about copyright..." then you endorse stealing from those who work extremely hard on their craft and are due their just wages.
It will be wild to see how Middle Earth mutates when the books become public domain. That will be the point where we see how it survives.