10 ms·
W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring
- cafard 3y agoFor a contrary view, Google for Edmund Wilson's essay, "Oh, Those Awful Orcs".
- magicalist 3y ago> "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it. - Ursula Le Guin https://books.google.com/books?id=asYXBgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA266&ots=OX3JHUN8uF&dq=%22Oh%2C%20Those%20Awful%20Orcs%22.&pg=PA266#v=onepage&q=%22Oh,%20Those%20Awful%20Orcs%22.&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=asYXBgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA266&ots...
- frutiger 3y agoAh yes. That fine scholar who authored among several notable works the outstanding “To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History”. A landmark work that every successful actor has read and every aspiring author must read.
- georgeecollins 3y agoTo the Finland Station is about the Russian Revolution.
- tom_ 3y agoWhen I was a teenager, my mum suggested I read Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps it was The Hobbit. Whatever. There were some guys on horses, and maybe a spider. That's all I remember. It was boring as fuck, and I gave up at about page 70,000 - or so it felt like. I was still young enough that I hadn't realised that you could just give up at page 2 if you wanted. Anyway, dear reader, I guess my point is: if you hate this fucking shit too, you are not alone.
- zabzonk 3y agoWell, what kind of novels do you like?
- tremon 3y agoI never could get past the first chapter of The Hobbit. An Unexpected Party just drones on and on. The Lord Of The Rings also had its long slow introduction, but at least it wasn't as tedious as The Hobbit's.
- jamincan 3y agoYou might enjoy the comic version of The Hobbit by David Wenzel more than Tolkien's original. It was how I was introduced to Tolkien, and was, frankly, the high-point of Tolkien for me personally.
- hotnfresh 3y agoI bailed on Fellowship about 50 pages from the end, I think. Gandalf had just fallen a few pages back. Hated it, enjoyed basically zero pages I’d read. And I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of other fantasy, and routinely read long fiction books (mostly “classics”) that’d bore a lot of folks to tears. My favorite book is To the Lighthouse and about a third of it’s about an empty house. I finished every page of Lichteim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature (all three volumes!) and hot damn was a lot of that boring. I like the Telemachus books of The Odyssey. LOTR, though, was too boring for me, just couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t stomach one more elf song or backstory of a tree. Though I acknowledge that’s probably some very-specific pathology of mine, rather than the book’s fault. I do seem to be wrong, in a sense, in this judgement. Oddly enough, I later read The Hobbit, and loved that. I do enjoy the Peter Jackson films (extended, especially for ROTK, which kinda sucks in its theatrical cut)
- musicale 3y agoI imagine Peter Jackson's screenplays for The Hobbit are longer than the original novel by some margin.
- 3y ago
- AlbertCory 3y agoFor a contrary view of Edmund Wilson, get the Kindle sample of To the Finland Station https://www.amazon.com/Finland-Station-Writing-History-Classics/dp/0374533458/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Finland-Station-Writing-History-Class... : I wouldn't give a lot of deference to a book review by someone who'd write that. I'm sure his titanic reputation is well-deserved, but "readability" isn't his strong suit.
- mellosouls 3y agoMuch kinder than the interjection from his fellow literary club member Prof Hugo Dyson to a reading by Tolkien of a draft of LOR: "Oh no. Not another fucking elf."
- ggm 3y agoI thought that was CS Lewis
- zabzonk 3y agoShouldn't think so as Lewis and Tolkein were very close friends. But I suppose close friends can say things like that.
- Turing_Machine 3y agoAlso, Lewis wasn't exactly averse to fairy tales.
- wolverine876 3y agoIIRC, the comment was supposed to have been made at a meeting of the Inklings, who were friends.
- mberning 3y agoI need to re-read it. I probably finished the last book 20 years ago. Then I saw the films. And in the intervening years my opinion and attitude towards it, and the genre as a whole, has shifted toward the negative. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just from getting older.
- stevenwoo 3y agoI’m old and tried re-reading it recently and the low number of female characters and voices is really jarring now. YMMV. There’s so much I haven’t yet read I just moved on.
- slibhb 3y ago[flagged]
- defrost 3y agoThat's exactly right Bertie, the University of Oxford Literary circles famously consisted of nothing but straight white school chums who gathered together to butter crumpets placed in toast racks while talking at length of fairies and such things. Such well adjusted literary Dons were incapable of writing coded tales of unspoken love.
- astrange 3y agoNot a very close reading there! Frodo lives with his committed bachelor uncle who's famous for collecting outfits, he goes on a journey with his male best friend, they actually kiss 4-5 times (on the hand and forehead), they move in together at the end and Frodo never marries or has children. …And the narration calls Bilbo and Frodo "queer" several times and goes on about them comforting each other in their sleep in Mordor. (Yes that word meant the same thing it does now, and yes he knew what it meant.)
- morelisp 3y agoI agree with the sibling commenter that Bilbo is very gay-coded, to the point I cannot imagine it to be an accident, but even explicitly within the text - https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FE5bMUoIXoAAAo9I.png https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FE5bMUoIXoAAAo9I.png
- hprotagonist 3y agoI’d never read this review and I must confess I am very relieved to find two authors that I greatly admire, and lean on often for strength, to be on each other’s wavelength.
- zabzonk 3y agoI had not read this review before, and I was surprised how positive it was. I can't imagine Auden and Tolkein would have got on well. But they both loved countryside, and so maybe I am wrong.
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago> I can't imagine Auden and Tolkein would have got on well. But they both loved countryside, and so maybe I am wrong They became friends later in life, perhaps because of Auden's championing of his work, although they fell out when Auden wanted to write a book about Tolkien. https://lithub.com/how-j-r-r-tolkien-blocked-w-h-auden-from-writing-a-book-about-him/ https://lithub.com/how-j-r-r-tolkien-blocked-w-h-auden-from-...
- andrewstuart 3y agoIt saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. It was one of the happiest parts of life - to be able to read the books and venture into that world. It's been spoiled for me by the ridiculous movies like The Hobbit (holy god, Peter Jackson turned Dwarves into ridiculous comedy clowns, covered Radagast with birdshit) , the endless licensed garbage and whilst The Lord of The Rings movie was quite good it hacked the story instead of treating it with reverence. The movie should have changed nothing, regardless of what "modern audiences" expect. The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script. Thank goodness there's a single example in this world of a great work not being commercialised - Calvin and Hobbes. UPDATE: A counterpoint to my grumble about the hacking of Tolkien's work: Anyone who would like to listen to the most fabulous audiobook of The Hobbit that was ever made: https://www.discogs.com/release/4205817-JRR-Tolkien-Nicol-Wi https://www.discogs.com/release/4205817-JRR-Tolkien-Nicol-Wi... It was made in 1974 narrated by Nicol Williamson. You can find pirated versions of it popping up on the web from time to time. It's truly beautiful. Email me if you want a copy - I might know a link. andrew.stuart@supercoders.com.au
- marcusverus 3y agoWhile I mostly agree, it’s hard for me to imagine a better adaptation of LOTR than Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Last I checked, 3/3 are in the top ~15 movies of all time on IMDb! It isn’t perfect, but it’s damn close.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- csallen 3y agoIf you don't like the recent commercial depictions of the LotR series… don't watch them? Of course you have the right to criticize and complain about them. But to let their existence "spoil" your enjoyment of the original works seems excessive. The original works were not somehow changed by the creation of new works, and so neither should your ability to enjoy them change.
- resolutebat 3y ago"The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps." For anybody else wondering what The Thirty-Nine Steps is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Nine_Steps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Nine_Steps
- gumby 3y agoI took that as sarcasm when I saw that but by the end I felt he was earnest.
- msla 3y agoIn more context: > on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps. That is, it's an engaging narrative up there with a book that's been adapted into four films, a stage play, and enough radio dramas it would be tiresome to count them all. So, yes, high praise for Tolkien's ability to tell a story people want to continue reading.
- adrian_b 3y agoI certainly agree that it is an engaging narrative. When I was a teenager long ago and I have seen for the first time this book when I have borrowed it from a library, during a couple of days I did almost nothing else until I have finished reading the entire trilogy. For me this has happened very seldom with other books, and with none of this size.
- raffraffraff 3y agoThat's not really a fair quote. Having first read your quote, then read the actual piece, I feel duty bound to put your quote in it's full context, which changes it's meaning considerably: > The first thing that one asks is that the adventure should be various and exciting; in this respect Mr. Tolkien’s invention is unflagging, and, on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps He's clearly suggesting that in one very particular respect, he values the 39 Steps so very highly that it can be used as a kind of measuring stick. It may not seem like such a big deal, but partial quotations of this nature are the source of so much internet misunderstanding and drama these days.
- jdshaffer 3y agoTom Shippey, a very well known and respected Tolkien scholar gave a talk about the book vs the Peter Jackson movies. It also ended up in an edited version in one of his books (I cannot remember if it was "Tolkien: Author of the Century" or "The Road to Middle Earth".) In short, he argues that Jackson actually did the best he could to present the book in a format that movie studios would accept, and even then was able to press through on some typically non-Hollywood elements (such as having at least nine main characters split across two to three major story arcs). Here is an online transcript of his talk, "Tolkien Book to Jackson Script: The Medium and the Message": https://www.swarthmore.edu/news-events/tolkien-book-to-jackson-script-medium-and-message https://www.swarthmore.edu/news-events/tolkien-book-to-jacks...
- bombcar 3y agoJackson's LotR is probably about as good as you could get mass-market movies made at the time; the Hobbit, of course, was about as bad as you could get at the time (likely if it had been compressed back down to one or at most two movies, it might be salvageable: so much so that various competing "cuts" now exist, search "hobbit cut"). More and more I come to realize that the things we argued about so much at the time are actually pretty good; especially removing Bombadil - because there's no way that would have worked correctly. The elves barely worked some of the time; Bombadil would have failed utterly.
- wolverine876 3y agoJackson was the anti-Tolkien. The book and movie stories had the same character names, many of the same events, but otherwise were completely opposite. A few things off the top of my head, great and small: Tolkien's books were primarily about the corruption of power, and showed that the Good and Wise avoided it. There's the Ring, of course, but also Gandalf traveled around motivating people, rarely showing any magical ability at all. Aragorn's sword was broken until the great test required it. Jackson glorified power. Tolkien's magic and world were places of beauty, darkness, and art beyond human experience; Tolkien never visualized Sauron, who was left to our imaginations. Jackson's world was of commonplace, manipulative horror film techniques and action hero tropes. Heck, Tolkien's Gandalf had supreme confidence (for good reason); Jackson's was an anxious old person. Tolkien's Aragorn was the epitome of duty and commitment, always putting life and limb on the line for it; Jackson's didn't want the job!
- maxFlow 3y agoCurrently listening to the LOTR audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. Highly recommended. His characters are heavily influenced by Peter Jackson's movies; it put me off a bit at first, but I've really come to like it now.
- TillE 3y agoThe Serkis ones are good, but I really love the old Rob Inglis versions. Someone described them as the closest thing to Tolkien himself reading the books. Surprisingly I think some of his voices (eg, Gandalf) do match the vibe of the films better; even his Gollum isn't too far off.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- themadturk 3y agoI haven't heard Serkis's narration, but it's hard to beat Inglis. I certainly wouldn't object to narration influenced by Jackson's films -- though I have my share of problems with Jackson's adaptation, I think he did a fine job of casting and directing.
- AlbertCory 3y ago"Arcadian rustics": I love it.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoWow. So this is what an actual book review by someone that knows how to actually write looks like. Yes, Tolkien is a literary mastermind, but set that aside for a minute: I feel lucky to have read the review itself. If modern book reviews in mainstream media were still written this well, I think more people would read books!
- wolverine876 3y agoModern book reviews are often written by authors. Try the NY Times Book Review, NY Review of Books, or London Review of Books, to start.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThe vast majority of authors cannot be great writers by definition, since 'great' usually means a tiny subset of the best.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoIs the “NY Times Book Review” a separate publication or just the books section of NYT? Because NYT and WaPo book reviews are hugely disappointing to me.
- atombender 3y agoI recommend giving The New York Review of Books a try. Their stable of guest writers is legendary, from J. M. Coetzee to Zadie Smith. They established a kind of genre of review where the review isn't so much reviewing the book as it is retelling it in magazine form. In many cases I've had no desire to read the book itself, because the review was so in-depth and comprehensive, not to mention well-written.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoI spent a couple of hours reading through reviews there on your suggestion - thank you! But I feel like I would only read those reviews after finishing the book myself as part of a post-read “imaginary book club session” because, as you say, it seems the reviews really do stand in for reading the books!
- wolverine876 3y agoTolkien wrote the essential story - for our time: An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people of the world allow themselves to be influenced by it; they embrace despair and abandon goodness and all resistance; or they are corrupted and even help the enemy. The primary actor is a wise old man who travels around, not using great powers, but waking them up, reminding them of who they are and their strength rousing them to action (the scene with Theoden is a great example). How could Tolkien, in the 1940s and 1950s, write a book for the post-2016 era? Remember what he saw as he wrote it: An evil force that heavily used propaganda to spread their horrible ideas, and masses of people not only in Germany or Italy, but the rest of Europe and the US, refusing to acknowledge or oppose the reality of the evil, the grim future; and many even supporting it. Tolkien arguably turned it into a myth for future generations, like the real-life Trojan War was turned (eventually) into the Iliad and Odyssey.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago"The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. Moreover, though Gandalf rarely displayed his power, everyone outside the Shire suspected that he did possess power and belonged to an elite, and today there is great distrust of elites. I think a lot of idealistic people today concerned with justice, would prefer a myth by which organizing in pursuit of said justice is bottom-up, starting from the most disadvantaged and intersectional, instead of the Maiars’ top-down.
- smfugit 3y agoThere are no essential stories for "everyone". Cause everyone is different. What the cactus needs and what the redwood needs are not the same thing. The stories they need will always be different.
- wolverine876 3y agoThere are no common needs and desires, and no common stories? That doesn't seem to match the data, at all. LOTR, as one example, is among the best-selling fiction of the 20th century.
- wolverine876 3y agoThe other books reviewed in the NY Times: * The Two Towers, by Donald Barr (I don't know of an Auden review): http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/specials/tolkien-two.html http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/specials/tolkien-t... * The Return of the King by Auden: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/specials/tolkien-return.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/11/s... Also, this website claims to have a CS Lewis review of Fellowship of the Ring, but doesn't say where it was published: https://www.theonering.com/the-gods-return-to-earth-c-s-lewis-review-of-the-fellowship-of-the-ring/ https://www.theonering.com/the-gods-return-to-earth-c-s-lewi...
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoISTM a lot of book reviews by official reviewers, meaning those employed to write reviews, are often horribly gushing. Books have now unfortunately become just a product to be sold and the reviewers are part of the marketing. If I want an honest review I go and read a bunch of reviews off Amazon, accounting for the shills that are there as far as I can. What really bothers me is I know there are some very good books out there that are well worth reading but aren't well known just because the authors aren't, and again, books now are being sold as a brand, just as much as soft drinks. In the UK we have a radio 4 programme where people read and critique each other's recommendations. I can't bear it because they're so pretentious, but I also because the books they go for are almost always (AFAICT) from mainstream authors – these people want a nice, safe, conventional environment. They're just boring people.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoFor a slightly less positive take, see essay "Epic Pooh" by sci-fi/fantasy author Michael Moorcock: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/en361fantastika/bibliography/2.7moorcock_m.1978epic_pooh.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/under...
- gf830562 3y ago[dead]
- elmersidney53 3y ago[dead]
- susandavid2315 3y ago[dead]
- Elizabeth22 3y agoI am Elizabeth K. spahn If you are considering doing an online financial investment, BTC, WLD, ETH, and such, consider doing a full background check on the brokers you will work with. Better safe than sorry. When I sorted out mystroushack666@cyber-wizard.com I was giving up. I had lost my savings to fraudsters. In comparison, other hackers were asking for huge money to offer me help. But MYSTERIOUS HACKER came through for me. Try them out and get their service, you can also reach out on telegram at +15625539611 And again, be safe than sorry
- Stevenedward 3y ago[flagged]