Excellent essay — well written and well thought out! I hope you will read LOTR again — you will notice a lot of things the second time, especially after reading Shippey. Lydia Fish October 16, 2008, at 08:50 AM
Shippey’s foreword to J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, provides a lot of insight into Tolkien’s life, his text The Lord of the Rings, and the cultural results of his work. I wish I had read this foreword before reading The Lord of the Rings because Shippey raises and succinctly explains a lot of important points. I feel that I would have been better prepared to dive into the sometimes confusing world of Middle Earth.
Shippey opens the foreword by writing about the impact the fantasy genre has had on texts of the twentieth century. Not all critics are pleased with this fascination with fantasy. Shippey wrote that some people view it as “a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy-should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste.” This idea angers me because it alleges that some sorts of texts are “right”, and others are “wrong”, and that what a person likes to read can either be “good” or “bad”. I don’t agree with this thought. Writing is a form of art, and there isn’t just one way to execute it. If every author wrote in the same style, about the same topics, there would be hardly any difference between one book and another.
I knew from the different films and documentaries we’ve watched in class that Tolkien was fascinated by languages. I also assumed this while reading the text when I encountered foreign languages that he had invented. I felt that the languages Tolkien created were a very important part of The Lord of the Rings, but I didn’t know until reading the foreword that Tolkien regarded the languages as his main inspiration. Shippey quoted a letter that Tolkien wrote to his publishers that explained, “the ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.” If I were to reread The Lord of the Rings I would pay greater attention to the languages as well as to the words Tolkien uses. A man who loves words as much as he did probably would have put a lot of thought into his diction and it may hold keys to reading and understanding his work.
Annika Lauglin? October 08, 2008, at 11:52 PM
