Tolkien Estate blocks new Tolkien book

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by davem

Its probably nothing more than something with a minor embarrassment factor at worst. I'm not even necessarily arguing that whatever it is should be published - just that using copyright in these circumstances is a bit off. After all the Estate have never implied that whatever it is that being referred to isn't true.

You are up to your old tricks again, in simply regurgitating innuendo and supposition and for that reason I'm becoming very bored with this.

I've already pointed out that nothing I heard or saw in any way was the least bit dodgy.

It is possible that the Family simply does not want any kind of reference to the children's and grandchildren's lives as they believe that has no merit in any literary questions about Tolkien's writing.

What I see is a very sad situation in which one member of the family invited the authors to undertake a particular kind of study using the material they owned. And that study has been repeatedly, despite significant changes and edits, rejected by the Family Estate, which owns copyright but not the material itself.

So I see two authors who have spent considerable time now with no likelihood of renumeration. I see scholars and fans of Tolkien losing access to information about his life, no matter how banal or trivial or personal. And I see a Family Estate that lacks unanimity. That must be very hurtful.

I had always wondered about the sibling relationship, how the elder was able to attend university and achieve a university career while the younger did not. In a class-ridden society, those occupational differences were substantial. (Yet in spite of that difference, the two families maintained close contact.) It is a sociological question to me, not a family question. Tolkien getting into Oxford strikes me as a story very similar to that of Patrick Bronte getting into Cambridge a hundred years earlier.

I'm trained as a scholar and I know countless stories of situations like this.

And having heard from the authors, the publisher and the Estate, that's all I'm going to say about this very unfortunate event.