Thread: The Desolation
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Old 02-13-2014, 09:10 PM   #151
jallanite
Shade of Carn Dûm
 
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Toronto
Posts: 479
jallanite is a guest of Tom Bombadil.
Personally I tend to pick up on posts where I think the poster has said something incorrect, and point it out. Not a good trait, perhaps. Yet I honestly feel gratitude when someone has convinced me that I am wrong. I’ve learned something, and owe that person.

What many posters don’t realize is that often, when an argument is serious, the winner may only emerge months later when the quarrel has been forgotten and the apparent winner may have had more time to think about the matter and then change his or her mind. Also, if I am totally right in my argument, then I may be convincing many others who are not taking part in it openly.

Again, as I have mentioned, I don’t see a great deal of difference between academia and fandom. Academics also include a large percentage of people who most consider to be nuts. And that includes some that I mostly respect. Often they may, like many non-academics, be perfectly sane in most matters but have particular areas where they are irrational.

The critic Harold Bloom some years back created a list of 1,524 books which he believed everyone should read and this list is now often known as Bloom’s Canon. It contains a lot of books which have Stories or Poems or Plays in their titles so this covers many more works than its numbers show. For example, Shakespeare is represented by one book only: Plays and Poems.

For the complete Bloom Canon list see http://home.comcast.net/~dwtaylor1/theocraticcanon.html .

J. R. R. Tolkien is not included because Harold Bloom hates Tolkien, as did such a significant number of other academics that he didn’t feel compelled to include him. He, nevertheless, was pressed into producing a book of Tolkien criticism which most think laughable. See the reviews at http://www.amazon.com/J-R-R-Tolkien-...owViewpoints=1 .

Bloom also wrote a fantasy novel, A Flight to Lucifier: A Gnostic Fantasy which was a sequel to David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus which Bloom puts in his canon. Fair enough. Tolkien (and C. S. Lewis) also thought highly of A Voyage to Arcturus though they very much disliked the writer’s philosophy, in which Pain is the sole ultimate truth, and so the ultimate good. But though A Flight to Lucifier: A Gnostic Fantasy got mostly good first reviews, Bloom decided to disown it as garbage and it seems to have also sold poorly. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_to_Lucifer . Possibly those reviews were by the kinds of fans you mention who are over-identifying with what they think is their side.

For a freewheeling and mostly polite discussion of Bloom and Tolkien see http://sacnoths.blogspot.ca/2011/03/...ien-again.html .

But is an academic like Michael D. C. Drout any better? Drout is an English professor who specializes in Old English, loves Tolkien, is co-editor of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review and is editor of the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. Yet a recent talk which was recommended to me by another Downer I think also to be utter nonsense.

Supposedly Drout is attempting to explain why some readers can’t enjoy Tolkien. But he doesn’t. He shows quite well one feature of Tolkien’s writing and says, without any presented evidence, that this is the reason. I don’t think it is, though I don’t know what is, or if any one thing is.

Drout says a few other things about Tolkien and about stories related to Beowulf and gets his facts wrong, more than I showed in my answer to Drout which I posted at http://wormtalk.blogspot.com.au/2013...ture-from.html and at http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showpos...6&postcount=52 because the answer box limited the number of words I could use.

That no-one here has commented on my post suggests that you may be right, that no-one feels they are allowed to join in to criticize a famous Tolkien scholar like Drout or perhaps they don’t want to criticize me.
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