A most enjoyable discussion, my fellow BD Deadies.
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Originally Posted by SPM
Does it matter what the sixpence is? It's lost anyway.
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Well, not entirely. I think Tolkien did us the service of partially recovering it and presenting it to us in LotR. More on that later. The
literati seem not to understand what it is that he found.
SPM, I'll quote from this section by Shippey more later so as to clear up some of the issues you raise. Suffice it to say for now that Shippey had spent eleven pages discussing the vituperative nature of most of the critique regarding Tolkien, trying to arrive at just what it was behind all of the antipathy; the allegory comes at the end, and my sense is that Shippey is "throwing up his hands", after a fashion, after not being able to quite come to the answer he was hoping to find. That said, the questions you raise still deserve answering. Soon.
Squatter, what you say rings true in that what we seem to have here are two
paradigms, to ways of thinking about literature, and they seem to be (almost) mutually exclusive. Consider: the
literati that openly scorn Tolkien as childish to autistic
are by him scorned as not worth reading. He considered anything written after 1600 (I think that's the rough date) to be not worth the effort.
davem & Lalwendė, thanks much for your input; I'm learning from you much that I didn't know by way of background regarding what Shippey was saying.
I'm also grateful for the even-handed points that have been made on how Tolkien's religion (as compared to others such as Pullman) may have a piece in the derision directed toward Tolkien. Nevertheless, I don't think religion is more than a small piece of the puzzle; if it were larger,
davem and I would surely be at odds.
I think it has to do with language. Shippey is a philologist, and a self-professed non-Christian (which I read in JRRT:AofC). Anyone who has read Carpenter's biography of Tolkien has learned of the "Lang vs. Lit" battle in Oxford that raged from the late 19th century in to the 1970s, when Lit finally won upon the apparent natural death of Lang, more's the pity. As some of us know, all of Tolkien's fiction is based in Language first. He knew words and their histories and functions far better than anybody else who wrote fiction in the 20th century.
As I've suggested elsewhere on this board, western culture has three fundamental "strains", as it were: Hebrew, Greek, and Germanic. Every single aspect of western culture (until the rise of Eastern influences in the last century) is an admixture of these three ingredients. The critical thing is that the German piece has always been considered inferior and in need of the balances to be had from the Greek and Hebrew, whether that meant sciences or religion. The
literati own the Greek science as
received cultural doctrine.
So here comes Tolkien, avowedly influenced by Hebrew more than they (a practicing Catholic) and also someone who knows the Greek Classics but has rejected them and 'Lit' in favor of Germanics and 'Lang' (thus professionally incorrect); and he revives the Germanic piece of our heritage by taking its words from the ash heap and cleaning them off and making them shine. So he's committed cultural heresy, as it were, and to the shock and dismay of the cultural orthodox, he has committed disciples numbering in the millions.
He has revealed (not made) that which is supposed to be accepted as inferior, as in fact something beautiful in its own right. And of course westerns who are not too stuck in the "received doctrine" have found what he has revealed as food for our souls, because we are at root Germanic (include Celtic within this).
So there is a religious feel to all of this, but it's not about religion, it's about culture. And the self appointed arbiters of culture are, like the Pharisees and Saducees of the first century, finding their flock leaving the pen. Of
course they don't like it.