The Tolkien Coming of Age Club 2

[Samwise]

But next (from Howard Shore & Billy Boyd) came this:
Home is behind
The world is ahead.
And there are many paths to tread
Thru shadow to the edge of night
Until the stars are all alight
Mist and shadows, cloud and shade.
All shall fade.
All shall fade.


My hair stood on end.
12-23-2004 03:31 PM

Oh, I don't doubt it. I was so upset that on the ROTK disk Billy's song seemed so short. It was so awesome.

[Child of the 7th Age]

It seems a bit disrespectful to do this right after the haunting lyrics that Helen has posted. But I've found that's the way life is....one minute you're crying and the next keeling over with laughter.

This is a brief trip down memory land. Did anyone go to college in the sixties? And does this sound vaguely familiar? These are quotations from an article about Tolkien, apparently based on a personal interview, that appeared in the New York Times, January 1967. I've pulled out the quotes that deal with topical things.

As well as hobbits-benevolent, furry-footed people, fond of bright colors-Tolkien has put into books a grizzly man who can change into a bear, a thieving, English-speaking dragon, dark horsemen in the sky who cast freezing shadows, and a dreadful war in which thousands of goblins perish. He has spilled them into a separate world called Middle-earth and dressed them with names, lineages and languages which he explains in a 104-page appendix. The explanation is sending Americans, especially students, half-mad with delight. One student's mother said: "To go to college without Tolkien is like going without sneakers."

I love that last sentence. In fact, I am stealing it for a new sig. Sounds like this reporter saw me packing my Ballentines into my luggage, being very careful they didn't get left behind.

There is a Tolkien Society of America and a Tolkien Journal. At meetings of the society it is usual to lie around eating fresh mushrooms, a favorite hobbit food, drinking cider and talking about family trees, which no hobbit can resist. One must remember to call wolves wargs, goblins orcs, treelike people ents and the sun She. A popular greeting is, "May the hair on your toes never grow less." Everyone wears a badge with a slogan naming a Tolkien character: Frodo the hobbit or Gandalf the wizard; and louder enthusiasts chalk them on walls, sometimes in three-foot-high letters, preferably at the 116th Street-Columbia University subway stop. Tolkien books sell in student cafeterias next to the cigarettes; they have been translated into nine languages including Japanese and Hebrew and are part of the degree course at Liege University. Their world sales are almost 3-million copies, but it is the Americans who are wildest about them. An unauthorized paperback edition sold well over a quarter of a million copies. In the fifties, World Science Fiction called Tolkien the best fantasy-writer of the year and gave him a model rocket. "It's upstairs somewhere," Tolkien thinks. "It has fins. Quite different from what was required, as it turns out."

Oh, my! This all sounds familiar. He must have attended the small liberal arts college that I went to, which prided itself on being "counter-culture". We actually had meetings in our dorm rooms that resembled this. Blushes and slinks off.

Students produce lots of allegories. They suggest that the Dark Lord's ring represents the Bomb, and the goblins, the Russians. Or, more cheekily, that Treebeard, the tall treelike being, "his eyes filled with age and long, slow, steady thinking," is Tolkien himself. In a rather portly note to his publishers, he replied: "It is not about anything but itself. (Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or political.") But he will agree that the Shire, the agreeable hobbit country, is like the West Midlands he remembers: "It provides a fairly goof living with moderately good husbandry and is tucked away from all the centers of disturbance; it comes to be regarded as divinely protected, though people there didn't realize it at the time. That's rather how England used to be, isn't it?

I am innocent of this. I never made any such outrageous comparisons to the bombs and the "Russians" or Tolkien as Treebeard! Thank goodness for all of us, that no one today would suggest that the Orcs are Russians (or vice versa) with a straight face. Would that all such useless stereotypes would float away on the wind!

If it had been left to him, he would have written all his books in Elvish. "The invention of language is the foundation," he says. "The stories were made rather to provide a world for the language rather than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows. But, of course, such a work as 'The Lord of the Rings' has been edited and only as much language has been left in as I thought would be stomached by the readers. I now find that many would have liked much more." In America, especially, Tolkien words are creeping into everyday usage; for example, mathom, meaning an article one saves but doesn't use. A senior girl at the Bronx High School of Science says: "I wrote my notes in Elvish. Even now, I doodle in Elvish. It's my means of expression."

Oh, boy! I'm dying to know who wrote those notes. We have a lot of friends who went to Bronx Science just about this time....

But, at the Berkeley campus bookstore Fred Cody, the manager, said: "This is more than a campus craze; it's like a drug dream." In the U.S. hobbits have quite replaced Salinger and Golding as "in" reading. Tolkien seems to promote a mild kind of intellectual hooliganism. But his supporters argue (overwhelmingly) that, on the contrary, it does everyone good to stay in the Tolkien world, where things are still green; there is hope for people and pleasantness. At Ballantine Books, the paperback company which publishes Tolkien at $1.50 per copy, an editor thought that "young people today are interested in power and they are interesting in working out the conflict of good and evil. Here it is worked out for them."

If that sounds overly simple and sententious, consider the point C. S. Lewis once made, asking why Tolkien should have chosen to point morals in such extravagant fantasy:

"Because, I take it... the real life of men is of that mystical and heroic quality... The imagined beings have their inside on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the Universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?"

That is one quality with a powerful appeal to students. There is another. Tolkien's writings allow thousands into the finest and most select kind of college tutorial; they demand that attention be paid. J. I. M. Stewart, another Oxford don storyteller-he writes detective stories as Michael Innes-puts the thing perfectly in his memory of Tolkien as an orator. "He could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting listening guests."

That quote from Lewis is quite striking. So striking that I wonder if it deserves a thread and discussion? I had not seen that before.

Do any of these memories ring a bell?

[mark12_30]

That quote from Lewis is quite striking.

Quite!! Consider it stolen!!

[Ealasaide]

I agree that the quote from Lewis is quite striking and that it would make an excellent topic for a thread of its own. Do you plan to open one? If so, please let me know, I would like to drop in there.


I went to college in the early eighties, so I missed out on the other memories you mention. My initial reading of Tolkien was very solitary - locked in my bedroom every day after school. I remember thinking that I was the only one who responded so strongly to Tolkien's work, as my friends and family at the time seemed rather uninterested at best. How wrong I was!

[Raefindel]

I wish I could have termed my family's reaction as "disinterest".

I was 14 when first I read Tolkien and was met with down-right horror! My family treated me like I was reading material printed by a witches coven or a satanic cult.
They still frown upon it, even now.

[Hilde Bracegirdle]

Yes, Tolkien’s works had until reaching the Barrow Downs been a rather private thing for me. The only person I knew who had read it was my brother, and over the next maybe 10 years I met about three others. Still we didn’t really talk about it, and it didn’t really enter conversation until Dungeons & Dragons started up. Then the debates began at our house. D & D seemed to cheapen Tokien’s world in my view, precisely because that mystical and heroic quality was totally obscured.

And while I did not have a Frodo lives button, and only very occasionally saw graffiti bearing the names of Frodo or Gandalf, I did have two prized t-shirts in the 70’s, one with a drawing of Gandalf and one of Smaug.

If the stories had been more popular with my peers, I wonder if I ever would have read them. Probably. I confess that it surprises me to see how large numbers of college students in sixties embraced them. I simply cannot picture 'my batch' doing the same.

Also news to me was the comment that they seemed most loved in the US. Is that true? Is it still the case?

Rae, I know what you mean about some people thinking that LoTR is somehow evil. If they only knew how wrong they are!

[Lalwendë]

I love these stories of what it meant to be a Tolkien reader in the 60's/70's. In the early 80's I used to daydream about that world where everyone seemed to be a Tolkien fan, although I know my daydreams were probably far removed from reality. I always used to think it would have been wonderful to experience university life at that time. I'd actually love to see a book written about what it was like to be a Tolkien fan in those years; it might well be nostalgic, but it would be interesting to see where some of these fans went to from Tolkien. Maybe some of the 'Downers might be in it?

Growing up as a Tolkien fan in the 80's was a welcome relief; it was quite a bleak world, with the ever-present spectre of unemployment, the 'greed is good' mentality and the horrors of a cruel world on the news every day. I sometimes wonder if my love for Tolkien's world partly grew as a response to that cruel time in history. There was quite a love for Tolkien and counter-cultural literature, music and art which grew up in the Liverpool area at that time; I remember seeing Pink Floyd grafitti on this one wall in Bootle every time I went into the city. I think there was a strong need amongst young people then for what Tolkien had to offer; it was seemingly a place full of dreamers. It was always quite easy in the 80's to find fellow Tolkien fans - his work was one of the many things shared by those who 'reacted' against the cultural commercialisation of the decade.

Then I was dropped into the academic world in 1989 and endured the wasteland of the 90's, when Tolkien was seemingly deemed unworthy and uncool, and it was nigh on impossible to find any fellow fans! Or at least, any who would admit to it. With the films, somewhow fans came crawling out of the woodwork - and that is one thing I will always be thankful to the films for! Are these years something of a Renaissance for Tolkien fans? If so, I hope it carries on!