The Geek Menace to The Lord of the Rings
It’s a little hard to believe, having watched them when they came out, but Peter Jackson’s rendition of The Lord of the Rings turns old enough to drink in just another year. Considered by fans to have been a labor of love, these films were the culmination of almost a decade of planning, pre-production, shooting and editing. It was a massive undertaking seldom seen in contemporary movie making, featuring extensive sets, exhaustive costuming and prop forging, thousands of extras, and innovative special effects. With conceptual artwork provided by famed Tolkien illustrator Alan Lee and inspiration from both his work and Ted Nasmith’s, the movies were widely anticipated as worthy presentations of the books to an even wider audience.
The films were so liked—and remain so liked—that for many, they are the only rendition of The Lord of the Rings that they’re even familiar with. This is hardly unexpected considering the accessibility of film versus that of writing. In order to get anything out of Tolkien’s books, one must first know how to read, and this, it turns out, is a diminishing prospect as the years dawdle on and attention spans dwindle down. As it stands presently, with a population of ‘fandom’ geeks overstimulated by contemporary spectacle and Marvel Cinematic Universe-styled writing, just sitting through one of Jackson’s three-and-a-half hour films can be a tall order.
With this in mind, it’s not hard to see why Christopher Tolkien condemned the film project and lamented its popularity. His father’s legacy, which Christopher had spent the better part of his life helping to collate and bring into the light of the public eye was being reduced to some tiny, flattened and commodified element of a broader fandom culture. A coherent and sprawling story set in an expansive and written-out world got dismantled piece by piece and reduced to encyclopedia entries for nerds, all so it could be sold more effectively.
True, to some extent, it had always sort of existed there in the fandom sphere, sandwiched between Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs on one side and the proliferation of contemporary science fiction on the other. Berkeley types had hijacked the Tolkien brand to their own limited degree as early as the late fifties, organizing Tolkien reading groups and fan clubs. Many were ostensibly drawn in by his use of old Scandinavian and Saxon imagery or languages, themselves attracted to alternative (Druidic and New Age) lifestyles that they then intentionally misread and projected upon Tolkien’s work. If one wants to know about the present-day Tolkien Society, and why it’s so backwards in its supposed grasp of its own namesake, then look no further.
The success of Star Wars and the wider spread of fandom culture across the eighties also propelled Tolkien’s work deeper into the mire of so-called ‘high fantasy’ subset of fiction media. By association, despite its content, The Lord of the Rings was wedded to a general public consciousness of a specific genre. It soon became difficult to consider it according to its own merits; animated adaptations and the coincident explosion of fandom culture only made this worse. In particular, we can witness Ralph Bakshi’s attempt to bring it to the big screen as a serious work of animation for serious adults—no singing elves to be found in that film!
But something greater damaged Tolkien’s legacy, as the very essence of fandom culture exists downstream from some other modern notion: the relationship between the audience and the work was already strained due to the advent of capital media. To understand the schism in how Tolkien’s work is viewed, we must understand the difference between his work viewed as fiction and his work viewed as media.
Media versus Fiction
In theory, fiction should be considered a subset of media. After all, media today would best be defined as the term that refers to the broad strokes of consumer culture, specifically as it relates to intellectual property and entertainment. Not all media is entertainment per se, at least speaking in its broadest sense, but all media does exist to be consumed. It is a product of some kind, not unlike a car or a loaf of bread, except that these are tangible commodities that have a given duration. Media, if we’re to believe what our social and financial betters tell us, is different only in that media can’t really be touched with our hands.
It can be seen, of course, and it can be listened to or read. It can be experienced. And it has its tangible referents as well: toys and action figures, ‘physical media’ such as books or DVDs, posters. Memorabilia. But where these things are physical commodities like cars or bread, their meaning and value are determined primarily by the media from which they are derived. And that media has no material. So while merchandise is made in the same sorts of factories as other products are, media itself is made—if we’re to still use this analogy—in the factory of the mind. Usually a corporate one, by which it is meant, the author of any particular media title, if there even is just one, can be considered dispensable once the title has reached the status of an intellectual property.
This is a crucial difference that must be expanded on. Media, as it exists under any modern system, results in the hollowing out of stories and their replacement with narrative widgets. It’s mass marketed, industrialized storytelling: the creation of things that resemble artwork but ultimately fail to have any substance. One gets the experience of a story without actually getting anything beyond some plot points strung together by characters. Nothing, in other words, is being said. Although this occurs because of the presence of an industry behind the creation of narratives, this is more than a mere matter of attributing a profit motive to writers seeking to use their pens to make a living. It’s about how the industry comes to define taste according to how it understands its own market, and the relationship between its market, its writers, and itself.
In his book Otaku: Database Animals from 2001, Hiroki Azuma commented at length on a sort of database theory of media consumption (on the part of the audience, or consumers) and media generation (on the part of the industry). Stories that were once written organically are grouped together for the convenience of reader surveys and commercial sales. After some time, the manner in which they are grouped together comes to define how authors write them: the birth of a specific notion of genre fiction. This in itself isn’t altogether bad, as genre fiction—pulps—has its place in a commercial market, though it should not be confused, as some often do, to be the entirety of the literary market.
The database part of this comes a little later. As a result of genre fiction, readers come to certain expectations regarding the literature that they read. Presumptions about a work’s content, such as its characters or props, or even its plot, as well as its structure and style, all mount within the reader in order to judge the story according to its genre. The genre comes to define the work even before the work has been read. In the case of writers setting out to write genre fiction, there’s little more that can be asked. But in the case of writers who are not writing in this form, or those whose method predates this form, the reader is left either confused or unsatisfied with the result. Their disorientation is due to not believing themselves equipped with a framework with which to interpret the work. Something outside of a genre, rather than being what they consider a story, is an opaque mystery that should probably be ignored; it seems to offer them nothing, since what they’re looking for is the genre rather than whatever story the writer has actually prepared for them.
Your typical modern fantasy reader attempting to engage with The Death of Arthur, for instance, may stumble and crawl through Malory’s archaic prose and even come to appreciate some of it, but if he’s been raised on a steady diet of Mercedes Lackey or Marion Zimmer Bradley, he’ll probably just thirst for more familiar territory. In the case of truly exemplary authors, particularly more modern ones such as Tolkien, this form of media consumption will leave much of what they had to present with their stories on the table.
In this way, the tales of Middle-Earth are consumed for the qualities in which they most resemble a form of modern high fantasy, despite the stories themselves bearing little resemblance to the typical genre fiction outing. In addition, it has resulted in The Lord of the Rings being largely neglected as a serious work of literature, far more deserving of academic attention and study than the likes of, say, Hemingway or Salinger. While it is possible to see it listed in literature curriculae in several colleges, there remains the tendency to discount it as ‘literary fiction’–itself a genre that has come to be consumed, if by a different audience, in the manner of a database.
It is in this sense, this consuming impulse on the part of the reader, that we can distinguish media from fiction. Fiction is what the author writes, and it can be read according to its own merits at least to the degree that it is possible. Media is created according to a series of rules, often unwritten ones, and with the intent specifically to be sold or consumed. The author of a work of media is mostly irrelevant. Consider the Young Adult industry, or the Star Wars knock-offs and tie-ins. Authors in these fields desperately try to stand out and remain relevant in an industry that completely disregards them. They are little more than entertainers, and both they and their products are treated accordingly: disposable. Their stories are meant to stock the shelves of large chain bookstores with cafes built into them, and then eventually to end up in a landfill.
If one considers creativity a thing that must be fed, then media consumption is like a drug addiction, or at best, a sugar craving. There’s little of value to be found in the consumption of media, and the act of consuming it trains a person wrongly in how to actually read. It trains them to consume fiction not unlike how they would consume pornography: impulsively, with pure self-interest and escapism as the their driving motivators. They read stories to get specific aspects of an escapist fantasy out of them, and if the story fails to deliver these things, it is considered bad.
Now, one may rebut something stated above with a simple ‘so what?’ There might be nothing being said in our stories, he might admit, but stories aren’t supposed to be platforms for messages, anyway. Let people have their schlock, let them enjoy things, et cetera. And to this, there is some merit. Stories into which direct messaging is inserted frequently come across as immature works of midwittery. But just because there is not an overt and direct message or ideology being proselytized does not mean that the narrative lacks any message at all.
To take Lord of the Rings as an example, there is a great deal being said about Tolkien’s views on providence and predestination, moral fortitude in unlikely characters, free will in the face of great evil, corruption of mind and soul, and the scope of an agent’s actions in history. The substance of the novel is exactly the fact that there is something to reflect on, some connection being forged between author and reader across the narrative. He has written something that he intends to be communicated and it carries signification greater than, say, pretty colors or some paint-by-numbers formulae of storytelling.
Jackson’s Films and Fairy Tales
And so we run into one of the first problems with Jackson’s film trilogy. In order to convert a book into a film, it is necessary—unless one is willing to attempt going an arthouse route, which is plagued with its own narrative difficulties—to truncate, cut, and force a book’s narrative into a plot reflective of a film’s timing. Screenwriter’s classes exist to teach the method of filmic pacing. Such-and-such act must begin around page so-and-so; a narrative twist or change should be made at this page or that. Films follow structured formulae for two reasons: to make them easier to produce, firstly, and because these formulae work in keeping a general audience attentive and engaged with the action.
This is not to say that all general audience films are bad. Those that implement these formulae well can be, and in fact, should be expected to be enjoyable movies. Were it not that they were adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, Jackson’s film trilogy that bears the name mostly fits this bill. They’re exciting and enjoyable films that showcase Jackson’s competence as an action-horror director. They had great sets, great costumes, great props, and for the most part, great casting. The problem with the films, unlike The Hobbit follow ups a decade later, really had nothing to do with his competency as a director and that of the production staff. It had to do with how they completely misrepresented, contorted, and eviscerated the story that Tolkien told in an effort to bring it to the big screen.
It is must be made clear that it is more than simply a matter of cutting out material that changes a story from a novel into a film. Truncating scenes and removing pieces is only part of the job of a screenwriter. He also has to change the structure of a story in order to best fit the structure and pace of a blockbuster. Sometimes this means moving developments and conversations to different places in the narrative, sometimes it means removing entire characters or exchanging the places of characters for his convenience. But structural alterations to the story, which do in fact change the story being told, are part and parcel for adaptations to the silver screen. It’s unavoidable, and that’s part of the problem.
The extent of the films’ bastardization of the source material isn’t within the scope of this piece, and even if it were, others have written about it for at least two decades. Rather, of interest here is whether this bastardization was a result of Jackson and his team of writers simply not understanding the most basic elements of Tolkien’s books, or whether it was a natural consequence of trying to adapt the material at all. Some changes, such as editing out nearly all of Fellowship’s first half, seem like the latter; the prolonged discourse of geography, journeying, and landscapes that dominate the travels from the Shire to Rivendell would be impossible to appropriately depict in a blockbuster that was already three hours in length.
Adapting Blood Meridian, the notorious western by Cormac McCarthy, or alternatively, his book The Crossing, suffers from the same problems: great swaths of their narratives are consumed with traveling long distances and the descriptions of landscapes therein. While it can make for riveting prose when done effectively, as McCarthy and Tolkien do, it makes for difficult filming and throws off the pace of the movie. A movie, remember, is something to be consumed all at once, viewed in one sitting with perhaps an intermission. A novel has no such constraints.
But, those who choose to adapt novels to the big screen overcome this hurdle somehow, and audiences implicitly accept that a movie and their favorite novel will not be the same. Beyond this, Jackson’s films juggle narrative elements around to such a degree that it confuses, and in fact, radically changes the core elements of Tolkien’s narrative. Being generous, we can assume this was not out of maliciousness but out of a preoccupation with drawing together more difficult things in the book in order to make it easier to present on screen, but the manner in which this was done draws forth another conclusion: that the writers didn’t understand The Lord of the Rings, or alternatively, didn’t care about adapting it in the first place.
The absurd flattening of the characters, as well as the treatment of the settings in the story, both point toward this conclusion. Gandalf is depicted more like a superhero, Aragorn like a recalcitrant and distraught antihero vagabond, and the hobbits each like young children. Gimli is reduced to comic relief, and absent entirely from Legolas is any truly elvish sprightliness, replaced instead with flat childish naivete. The Shire is treated as if it was a dream that Frodo wakes up from in order to perform the quest to Orodruin, and which he then returns to after it’s over. This reduces the Shire to a land outside of the narrative in a way that Tolkien expressly considered the Elven regions of Rivendell and Lorien, rather than a reality clearly modeled after an English town. Worst of all is the reduction of the elves to that of tall, slow-talking men, who each talk vaguely about diminishing, rather than the truly otherworldly, abstractly dangerous, fae-like creatures that Tolkien depicted in his books.
One might consider this a harsh reading of the films, but when compared to what they were supposed to be adapting, one wonders why the writers bothered at all. Granted, it could always have been worse. The work put into The Hobbit trilogy ten years later makes that clear.
What Jackson and his production team seem to have been interested instead was this: making an exciting film using the dressings and props of Tolkien’s vision. They wanted the fandom version of Lord of the Rings and, in so doing, brought that version to the big screen—at once solidifying a common sense of fandom’s understanding of Tolkien, and vastly expanding the accessibility of and entryway into that fandom in the process. But lost or forgotten was what The Lord of the Rings actually is; one can infer Tolkien’s story from the films, but it is not ultimately presented by them due to all of the changes that were made. Even if one were charitable in presuming the intentions behind the changes, the point remains that changes of some sort have to be made in order to follow movie-making formulae. Some books, it seems, are better off never being brought to the big screen. As critical as we can be of Jackson for his failure to represent Tolkien’s work effectively, we must admit that Bakshi fared no better—and despite the charms of the Rankin-Bass effort in 1980, it took falls well short.
It would be better if audiences could accept this, but the ubiquity of video and the consumer qualities of the West make this, again, a tall order.
Tolkien in Contemporary Culture
It is understandable that Tolkien’s work with Middle-Earth is considered, in general, only according to his depiction of it in The Lord of the Rings. Despite the popularity of The Silmarillion, it comes across as the unfinished addendum to some greater mystery that Tolkien never made sense of. As a result, although every nuance and element of the world dropped as passing references in The Lord of the Rings is substantiated in some detail elsewhere in Tolkien’s writings, the vast majority of readers will never find out.
Part of this speaks to Tolkien’s complexity as a storyteller. His tales of the First Age were woven together and supported by four or five main pillars of distinct narrative. Of these, only the broad tale of the Noldori seemed completed, and even it comes across as a slightly more developed framing device in order to tell the other stories. The Children of Hurin was the closest to completion, as Christopher Tolkien notes, while Beren and Luthien never had its verse written out to its end. The Fall of Gondolin, likewise, deserved a fuller novel-length treatment that Tolkien had begun work on around the period he finished The Lord of the Rings, but he barely even got to about a third of the way through. Meanwhile, the full tales of Earendil and of Dior were never started, save for a narrative poem that happened to find inclusion in The Fellowship of the Ring.
This has left the complete vision of Arda as Tolkien understood it in something of a mess, thus inviting the term ‘legendarium’ to be applied to his work, rather than the more common ‘canon’. Canon is a word that indicates consistency within the system of the work itself. Legendarium, on the other hand, does not; it’s the term applied to all versions of all the tales concerning Middle-Earth in Tolkien’s oeuvre. The most completed version of Beren and Luthien, for instance, in which Beren hides beneath Morgoth’s throne, is considered alongside the very early rendition of the same tale in which the figure of Sauron is known instead as Tevildo, a giant talking cat.
Because of the uncompleted state of his vision, it’s difficult to tell exactly how Tolkien would have wanted the work in its entirety to be interpreted. Christopher’s work in bringing the unfinished tales into the light has done much in illuminating his father’s vision, although perhaps by inviting metatextual analyses that were beyond the bounds of what had almost certainly been envisioned. As noted above, there was intrinsic to Tolkien’s views an element of metatextuality; The Lord of the Rings considered as the Red Book of Westmarch, for instance, or the tales of The Silmarillion translated out of the Elvish by Bilbo Baggins. But due to so much of the Eldar Days’ material being left unfinished, there remains an added level of intertextuality between versions of the same stories. Unlike The Lord of the Rings, which despite its revisions in subsequent publications, actually became a finished product, nothing of the First Age reached such a conclusion. Even The Silmarillion, as published, was but Christopher’s attempt to bring as close to a final work as was possible by working with his father’s wishes.
And yet, if one struggles to find the greater narrative within which to make sense of his First Age stories, one does find it. The metatextual approaches offered by Christopher’s commentary suffice to present the stories his father sought to tell in such fashion as complements both their ‘most finished’ appearances and as brings us closest to what Tolkien was going for in their writings. The Fall of Gondolin and Beren and Luthien both make such arcs clear: he was looking to perfect these stories as he matured as both a man, a writer, and a storyteller. But in observing the evolution of these stories to their unfinished but latest stage, one witnesses another story taking place: that of Tolkien slowly figuring out what his preoccupation with the world of Arda was ultimately about. And much of this fascination finds itself developed in The Lord of the Rings. His treatment of providence, in particular, should be noted.
However, there is another element of metatextuality that must be addressed. We have just here considered Tolkien as he was writing, the Middle-Earth legendarium understood as a system, or meta-system, which can be read and interpreted without too much injection from without. In other words, this is to approach Middle-Earth without the presumptions of the genre it has been grouped into: fantasy. Now we move into the territory of the fandom, and this is where the database rears its ugly head.
With the popularization of his work across the internet, easily perusable reference guides and online fandom encyclopedias have made the First Age ‘lore’ readily accessible for legions of people who have never touched The Silmarillion, much less Christopher Tolkien’s exhaustive History of Middle-Earth volumes. Tolkien’s mythological framework, then, has gradually become divorced from the stories he was seeking to tell, ripping setting from narrative in a way that pleases a media-hungry fandom who are searching for some easily-digestible tokens of IP commodity. They want the trivia and the video games, the world, and to some lesser degree, even the characters, but they want them as trinkets with which they can play their own imaginative games of pretend. Asking them to read the books is itself too tall an order, much less to do a deep reading of what the books were even about.
This is characteristic of database-styled consumption. It’s the divorce of narrative elements from narrative. The consumers have their own narrative, they don’t need one supplied by Tolkien; but they like what Tolkien used to craft that narrative. And so, as video games are an indication, they shamelessly rip from the narrative what they find most appealing and apply it to their own interior fantasies. No longer is Tolkien’s work being engaged with. The Lord of the Rings is no longer getting read when it is being consumed. It is just being consumed. What audiences such as these want from The Lord of the Rings is not Tolkien’s writing, but rather the high fantasy genre.
Jackson’s film trilogy did much to encourage this. Without it, Tolkien’s work would still have been consumed in this manner, although on a smaller scale, and it would have remained slightly more isolated from mainstream commodification. On the other hand, one might say that Jackson mitigated what could have happened; if it was time for the books to be trivialized into a set of movies, was it not better that it be done by Peter Jackson than by, say, Michael Bay? Who knows? If the movies were an inevitable occurrence, then maybe there is merit to believing that it was better to have good movies run the story through the mud rather than bad ones. But good movies doing so has only entrenched this popular misreading of Tolkien’s legacy across the broader culture, while a bad trilogy would have probably been forgotten.
Fantasy, ‘Fandom’, and the Culture Database
Because of the subject matter, Tolkien’s work has been relegated in the popular mind to that of fantasy—high fantasy, perhaps, but fantasy nonetheless. And although there were excellent authors to choose from at one time that wrote in this genre, one cannot try to argue that Tolkien’s literature is of the same make and model as that once found occupying the dime store pulp racks. This is not a denigration of the pulps, either, but an effort in finding consistency in what we’re talking about.
Tolkien was an academic, and moreover, a highly intelligent one. This may seem strange today, as liberal arts professors, for whom linguistics is but a sad or terrified neighbor of their department, often come across as unhinged, depressed, uninterested in truth, or otherwise hopelessly polluted with mind-numbing ideology. But this wasn’t always the case, particularly during the first quarter or so of the last century. The English language not only used to mean something, it used to be taught like it meant something, too. A respect for the command of language is one reason why the pulps of the time were so eminently readable in the first place, and the continued denigration of English is likewise why our ‘low-brow’ reading material has also become so much the worse.
Today, as popular culture has strayed more into embracing ‘geekdom’, fantasy and sci-fi exist as default modes of reading—for those, at least, who read at all. Literary fiction has sequestered itself within the incestuous pages of New York Times book review columns and the occasional bored sneer of an effete Brooklyn barista. Geekdom, on the other hand, is the casual context of the broader media culture. It’s comic books, action movies, and what passes for dime store reading. And more importantly, it’s simple, colorful, and at its best, evoking imagery of adventure that should tie audiences into the grander narratives of imagination.
Defenders of geek culture will downplay its commercial and commodified elements in order to emphasize how our superheros are our knights and cowboys, and how our works of over-produced and over-published fantasy writers are our society’s analogue to the yarns immortalized by Homer and Vergil. But these are too simple (and too stupid) comparisons. The stories told by firelight were not mass-produced by corporate machines. The stage performances put on by traveling troops of actors—historically considered no better than prostitutes, in contrast to today—were reenactments of deeply-entrenched mythological narratives that generations of people had intuitive connections to. And this is to say nothing of how informed by Biblical imagery and narrative so much of this was for more than a thousand years. Much like the death of a truly popular sense of music, the rise of an industry made to mass-produce culture at the whims of a technical and managerial elite has contorted storytelling.
One might ask what the difference is, whether a work is penned by a writer or created in some LA boardroom. One might even point out that scripts are still written by people, and comic book story arcs remain, for the most part, brainchildren of specific men or women. One could then also try to explain creative control over intellectual property, and how this doesn’t inhibit the creation of real art, real stories, real music. But even engaging with this discourse is just running cover for that insidious thing that has papered over reality with its false modern veneer. “Intellectual property” is only conceivable in a world that treats corporate entities as real people. The same is true for “creative control”.
But corporate entities aren’t real people. They’re organizations that we pretend exist separately from those that run and govern them. Legal and economic circumstances have encouraged a divorce from what we know to be true: that men make things and that those things are real. Now, those things are only real if assigned ownership to some legal entity, and men don’t have to be known to have made them. They spring forth out of committees and group efforts, even if authored primarily by only one person, so responsibility for its commercial failure or the pride of its success is obfuscated across some ambiguously-involved board of directors.
Worse still, they are constructed according to a content database and consumed in like manner. ‘Fandom’, nerd culture, has been trained to consume content according to this database, and the success of Disney’s Marvel films has revealed that the general population, too, has been successfully subsumed into this broader nerd bracket. They are database animals. They are not interested in narrative or storytelling or plot or even character. They are interested only in the surface imagery of these things, the consideration of their appearances, but only insofar as they can use these images to play in to a different, largely unrelated meta-narrative. Diversity, feminism, gay rights, et. al. are such meta-narratives, just as the overall fantasy genre is. Those are not the only meta-narratives, but they are the best examples. They will consume a piece of media, register only those things that apply to whatever meta-narrative they feel compelled to entertain at that moment, and then simply ignore the rest of what the story has to offer.
This will be made obvious, as it relates to Tolkien’s legendarium, when Amazon’s Rings of Power comes out. In the case of Jackson’s film trilogy, the product was a result of ‘adapting’ The Lord of the Rings into—or creating partly from scratch—a story whose pieces were pillaged from Tolkien’s books and recast in the genres of high fantasy and action-blockbuster. But it was not overly politicized, despite the climate in which they were released. Rings of Power, on the other hand, has already tipped its hand in its jumbled production; not only are they not adapting any specific story of Tolkien’s, they’re inserting into their characterizations of Galadriel modern expectations of bland female empowerment. It’s the same phenomenon as before, except done by significantly worse writers and made up almost entirely from scratch. The term for this is fanfiction. It’s been made entirely according to the database.
Conclusion – Art in Postmodernity
With all of this taken into consideration, we can deduce that Tolkien’s exclusion from so-called literary fiction has as much to do with the common view’s slavish adherence to genre as it does with the increasingly incestuous academic life that literary fiction owes its existence to. Serious literature requires a sense of being ashamed of being recognized. It carries with it an irony that reflects back upon itself its own pretensions. The later work of James Joyce carries the seeds of this turning-inward, as many of the English Modernists did when they experimented with streams of consciousness and experimental fiction, but the poster child of this mentality would undoubtedly be David Foster Wallace.
Literary fiction has to be ironic if it is to remain literary; in some sense, the name of its loosely-defined genre is exactly what defines its entire genre. It is writing on the topic of writing. Style is everything, and literary fiction that has no clearly defined style is simply judged as bad literary fiction. Literary fiction that is able to transcend the irony imposed upon it by its genre, although few in titles and far between, does exist, but only by writing in a way that can only be described as ‘weird’. The story must be written in such manner that there’s no easy place for the reader to stand in order to interpret it ironically. It’s not just that it has to be crazy and quirky, because that’s not enough to be truly weird. It has to be unconventional in its approach to communicating true things. Again, McCarthy’s a good example, here.
Tolkien, it seems, fits this bill as well. There are many words with which to describe Tolkien’s writing, both in terms of his style and the content of his stories. Ironic, however, is not among them. There is no hint of irony to be found in the stories of the Eldar Days, none trapped in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings, and, despite its status as a children’s story—or, perhaps, because of it, given the time in which he composed it—none present in The Hobbit, either. Tolkien’s work was not about the author in any direct sense. He was not writing commentary and was not indulging in fantastical escapism, either, despite the commonly peddled quote of his.
Instead, Tolkien wrote without the self-restraint necessary to fall into the genre of literary fiction, despite possessing both the credentials and the talent to be listed among literary peers. He was writing in the sincerity of a mythopoeic style, which has no room for irony, and yet situated his works within a world that flirted with real life by its metatextuality. And although writing in a mode that was pointedly self-aware, due to its metatextuality, this self-awareness undergirded the mythopoeic elements rather than, as many contemporary literary works have trouble with, falling into self-indulgent author glorifications.
Roger Scruton remarked often on the fall of art during the second half of the last century. No longer could art be considered art, neither by the artist nor by his audience, because of a terminally ill sense of self-awareness that pervaded its creation. In place of art, there was instead kitsch or, to put it bluntly, cringe. A divide between the elite and the popular square existed in Christian civilization, but its distance was never so extreme and the awareness of this divide never so obvious as it is in modernity; the academy produces creative art that is irrelevant, suicidal, bleak, if it is at all taken seriously, because these pieces only serve to fulfill an empty ideology while large sums of money change hands between well-connected neophytes. The public sphere, on the other hand, churns out mass-produced and unserious trinkets, upon which the minds of pop culture-attuned people are nourished so that they, too, may create their own unserious trinkets. Anyone attempting to participate in ‘real artistry’ has a self-reflexive modern irony that they must simply ignore, like a crazy person, in order to function.
Tolkien’s work presents to us a clear-eyed take on how to break free of this bifurcated modernist impulse, but only if one is willing to engage with Tolkien’s work past the stunted presentations that fandom and media have packaged up to present to us. Tolkien wrote sincerely, and he wrote tuned into the academic thoroughness of the high-brow, but he wrote without the trappings of what many consider to be the indulgence of the literary genre. But this can only be perceived when he is read according to his own merit. Distancing Tolkien from his own work only deprives the work of the meaning that it has, and efforts to do so are undertaken only by the database animals too numbed by media consumption to know the difference.
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