[Lush]

As usual, thanks for the great post, Beth.

You are absolutely right that the work of Tolkien has not been "championed," (yet) and that this prevents many others to follow suit and take the man seriously.

From what this lady told me, attempts to champion Tolkien are akin to courting "professional suicide." There are medivalists that I know of within the department (some of them better than others) who are sympathetic to "the cause," but will not involve themselves directly. A number of erudite academics refuse to take the first crucial step.

We talked about how Tolkien's creation is "the straw-man" to a generation of academics who are in the habit of using medievalism as something to project their work against, and in this rush to draw the line, these people tend to forget of the literary merit of his language, for example (your criticism of some aspects of his work is valid, of course, though I would like to read more). Academics, mind you, not just young students. The current generation of general English-majors is more sympathetic to Tolkien than most of the people who are teaching them. How this is going to play out ten years from now is not up to me to predict, at this point.

As an interesting sidenote, it is amazing with what C.S. Lewis gets away with, when compared to Tolkien, in terms of his treatment of female characters. Tolkien is labelled as "mysogynist" and "outdated," whereas Lewis remains the darling of a great number of academics, and nevermind the fact that one of his female characters is basically denied salvation due to her interest in make-up.