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Be part of a community of people who share your interests (or at least some of them!). Now that I’m feeling a bit more at ease working with Substack, I’ll start posting some invitations for introductions and discussions.
Additionally, if you are interested in writing about “Tolkien” (however you define that topic), I’m interested in publishing Guest Posts from others. Let’s talk!
What I’m talking about . . .
I perceive “Tolkien” as a very large and complicated subject: it is not simply the writer and his legendarium (which is complex and contradictory to start with), but “Tolkien” the global phenomenon, the ways in which his work and the contradictory images of him as an author, have grown and changed throughout the decades since I first read The Lord of the Rings, in 1965, when I was ten.
At that time, “Tolkien” was a slightly battered paperback trilogy, supplemented by a few more paperback publications, all of which I badgered asked my parents to buy for me (the first thing I bought with my first paycheck—from waiting tables!—was the Big Red Hardcover anniversary edition which I still own).
We can start with how many languages this so-called “Myth for Modern Englishmen” (which Tolkien never actually said in those words about his fiction) has been translated into; how many adaptations in other media of his work exist; then, one of my favorite categories, how many Fan Archives hosting fanfiction (and in some cases vids, art, and meta) exist although this category is a neverending and everchanging one! Tolkien fanzines abound (and did for decades before the internet). Musicians and artists have been inspired by Tolkien’s fiction (so. many. links I’m not even going to try!), and so have fascists.
As Verlyn Flieger so eloquently argues in "The Arch and the Keystone" :
when we look at Tolkien we are likely to see ourselves, and thus to find in his work what we want to see. This is as true of his most devoted fan as of his nastiest critic. It is as true of me as it is of Edmund Wilson or Germaine Greer. Or, I dare say, of Peter Jackson. But the result is that the more I read about Tolkien the less homogenous a figure I find. What I find instead is increasing fragmentation and polarization. Everybody has their own private Tolkien—more Tolkiens than you can shake a stick at” (Mythlore 38.1, Fall/Winter 2019 p. 9).
While “fragmentation and polarization” are negative, by the end of the speech, Flieger shows how the extent to which different people find such contradictory/conflicting elements in Tolkien’s work reflect not only themselves but the contradictions and conflicting statement made in the total body of his work by the human being that she describes in a brilliant structuring metaphor as being the keystone that holds the arch together:
What holds a keystone in place is not cement but friction, the grinding of the two sides against each other that only the middle prevents from destruction. It is the pressure of competing forces not against each other but against what keeps them separate—the keystone that holds the arch. It is these same forces that generate the curious power of Tolkien’s work. And it is these same forces creating this same friction that invite the disagreeing and debating Tolkien scholars and critics to find in Tolkien’s work what they are looking for. I am not saying they’re wrong. I’m saying they’re right” (p. 18)
