Middle-earth Journeys

Interesting thoughts Iolanthe. Shippey speaks to Tolkien's views on mythology in his first book The Road to Middle-earth, How J.R.R.Tolkien Created a New Mythology. A couple of fascinating points...

Shippet wrote:Tolkien himself did not approve of the academic search for 'sources'. He thought it tended to distract attention from the work of art itself, and to undervalue the artist by the suggestion that he had 'got it all' from somewhere else....

He was also very quick to detect the bogus and the anachronistic...Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit...

Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Anderson. All he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

It seems that Shippey agrees that Tolkien wrote for the artisitc fun of writing a good story. Allegories and social inferences be damned.

Yeah, but Tolkien DID use many of those old sources. Is it fair to use them and then say we shouldn't look for them?

Mmmm. True. Yes he did use them . But he still created a totally original world and a new epic story as much as any story can be new, so looking at the sources wouldn't be like digging up all the old Arthurian Legends and then looking at how they reappear in Mallory . In Tolkien's case it really would 'distract attention from the work of art itself'. But sometimes we like to be distracted in that way, to learn the background. It certianly wouldn't make Tolkien any less unique. But I can see it could reduce the imagination to the dry and dusty.

Interesting to hear what Tolkien thought about attempts to re-interpret old material and lumping Shakespeare in with the company of those missing something .

I've realised I'm reading Shippey the wrong way round and have temporarily abandoned JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century for his earlier book.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why we want to read Tolkien over and over: the first (and second and third?) time is/are just for the sheer wonder of the story. And then we begin to dig.

I just spent a very happy two week period with A Reader's Companion by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull - excellent ideas and commentary. I found it to be a much easier read than any of the HoME books. Thorough and thoroughly enjoyable and most highly recommended!

Starmast

Good recommendation, Starmast--thanks! I'm not really fond of the HoME books myself, so maybe there is hope for me.

Thanks, Merry. Come to think of it, it would be particularly useful during Middle Earth Journeys' chapter-by-chapter reads...

This is really a very arcane little observation, but I think Tolkien would approve. Does anyone here get A Word a Day? It's an e-mail service that sends, well, a word a day, complete with definition, etymology and use in a sentence. (It also has a great quote every day, unrelated to the word.) Well, the theme for last week's words was words that were created over time by eliding the n from the indefinite article 'an' before it. That took me back to Shippey's talk--how many years ago was Marquette, Riv Res?--about the word 'ninnyhammer', which Sam calls himself one of the times when he did something silly. Shippey told us that 'ninny' was formed from 'an inane (person)' and the n just kind of travelled over time from 'an' to 'inane'. I guess that travelling happened in other words, too!

Okay, I know, I am officially a geek! But I console myself in that it mattered to Tolkien.

I love the word ninnyhammer Merry, and it seems like eons ago that we were at Marquette.

I've always loved the word ninnyhammer too, ever since I read it for the first time in a Georgette Heyer novel.

Which Word of the Day service do you receive, Merry? I hadn't realised they were available by email and I've found various sites. Would you recommend one to be better than the others?

(Since I wrote my essay I've become a bit of a geek, too. )

I've never heard of Word of the Day services either. What a great idea to learn more words!

I like the explanation of ninnyhammer - how wonderful that words have a life of their own, getting married with other words (an and inane) and producing chidren (ninny) .

Oh! I LOVE the word "ninnyhammer"! I first read it in LOTR, and it is evocative of so many things that I associate with Sam -- his wonderful colloquial speech, his tendency to self-deprecation, his straightforwardness . . .

It also reminds me of my father's use of the word "fiddlesticks" (another wonderful word) whenever he felt the need to curse and refused to do so (he's a minister). "Persnickety" ranks up there too.

If anyone is interested, this link should tell you how to subscribe to A Word A Day:

http://wordsmith.org/awad/subscriber.html

The word for the day today is 'grog', by the way, which has a great history and which is related etymologically to 'grosgrain', the ribbon!

thanks for this, Merry - have signed up straight away!

I have too .