Bored of the Rings

[Otto]

Lon interesting essay by Richard Jenkyns in TNR on the book:
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey, Houghton Mifflin, 348
pp.

"One can admire Tolkien a great deal and still regret that so many people
believe there to be nothing better. Shippey's "take no prisoners"
policy--you are either with Middle-earth or you are with the poncey
eggheads--polarizes the debate too much. That is why I have been so hard on
Tolkien here: in resisting the claim that he is a literary titan, it is
necessary to point to his large deficiencies."

So what sounds first as a harsh critique of Tolkien is in fact a critique of
the Shippey-book and of Tolkien-admirers who believe that there is nothing
beside him.

"(...) what is left out of The Lord of the Rings that makes one wonder if
this is really a book for adults. Tolkien invented his own mythological
world, but it lacks the dignity and the sinew of a real mythology, for it is
without religion and essentially without sex. Hobbits may have fur at the
bottom of their legs, but they have seem to have no balls at the top; and
that pretty much goes for the rest of Middle-earth, too. The women in The
Lord of the Rings are few and pallid, while The Hobbit has no female
characters at all: even the giant spiders are regarded by Bilbo as male (the
narrative voice uses the unsexed pronoun "it"). The film of The Lord of the
Rings seems to have tried to beef up the female quotient; but it was surely
an uphill struggle. If one is to regard The Lord of the Rings as a book for
adults, what disturbs is not so much the absence of women, perhaps
explicable in an adventure story of this kind, as the absence of desire. In
this work that presents itself as the representation of a whole world, there
is hardly any awareness that we are sexual beings.
(...)
Author of the century? One of Shippey's declared reasons for making so
grandiose a claim for Tolkien is that "the dominant literary mode of the
twentieth century has been the fantastic," and Tolkien is the dominant
figure in fantasy fiction. (...) No, the only genre of which Tolkien stands
as representative is the sword-and-sorcery novel. Shippey is no doubt right
to claim that Tolkien is far superior to other sword-and-sorcery writers;
but this is not, to put it mildly, a genre that has been central to the
literature of the last century. And hasn't Shippey chosen exactly the wrong
tack? Surely Tolkien's remarkable achievement was not to have ridden the
zeitgeist but to have bucked it: to have been so unrepresentative and yet so
popular.
(...)
Shippey cites, as books that come to seem most representative and
distinctive of the twentieth century, The Lord of the Rings, 1984 and Animal
Farm, Lord of the Flies, Slaughterhouse-Five, Gravity's Rainbow, and several
more. It would be easy enough to draw up an alternative list--Proust,
Faulkner, Mann, Solzhenitsyn, Greene, whatever (...)."

The end of Jenkyns' essay is maybe remarkable in respect to Pynchon:
"And there are some wonderful passages, such as the visit to the talking
trees, the ents, perhaps the most magical and evocative thing that he wrote.
In his way he was unique, and that cannot be claimed for many writers."
http://www.tnr.com/012802/jenkyns012802_print.html