Re: A Novel You Love
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 9 June, 2021 08:03PM
Thank you for such kind words, Knygatin. By the way, apropos of your comments about Tolkien, the History of Middle-earth, etc. -- just today I read something that puts our current hyper-exposure to rubbish and lies in perspective; over against that foetid part of reality there is the fact that an abundance of good things to read is available to us, and abundance not so readily available in former times.
Specifically, I got hold a the letters section of Johyn o' London's Weekly for 3 March 1960. J. Burn of Sheffield writes about her passion for buying books and reading, but also the experience of disappointment when she has taken too seriously some reviewer's excessive praise. Yet, she says, one cannot simply disregard reviews, else how would one find out about what's there? But anyway, she mentions how she has ignored some books that would have been good to read, and gives Tolkien's The Lords of the Ring [sic] as an example. Reviews gave her the impression that it was "some sort of fairy-tale with humanised animals as heroes," and so she wasn't interested till a friend loaned the first two volumes to her. Then she "became an addict" who still looks "for the advertisement of The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien."
I rather hope she lived to read The Silmarillion when it was published 17 years later.
But for us, the wealth of Tolkien's writing that's available, including the History that you mention, would've been inconceivable in 1960.
And reading him we are put in touch with parts of reality that are not foetid, not corrupt, but the opposite of corruption, as you say. How fortunate we are!