Books, Films, Adaptations & Reader Responses (including backlashes!) 3.5/8
These are a few of my favorite things!
First, before I forget, here are links to the earlier parts of the “Adaptations & Backlash” series:
Part 1 of this series links to two great posts on adaptation and Tolkien (one on the Jackson film, one on the Rings of Power series) that I highly recommend reading and which inspired this series!
Part 2 of this series describes my journey (completely unplanned until Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyen kicked me out the door of Bag End) of falling in love with the film, which brought me back to my earlier adoration of Tolkien’s legendarium, all in a fannish mode (seeing it 45 times before it left the theatres definitely counts) and then switching my academic specialization and “research agenda” to ALL Tolkien, Jackson, and related topics (including reception and fan studies).
The link for Part 3 is in the next paragraph!
I admit I wondered how many people who are reading here for Tolkien (and in this series, the issues around adaptations) looked at Part 3 in this series and were “WTF Shakespeare?!??”
Maybe this is a good place to explain that the reason I love “Leaf by Niggle” so much (and have never had any interest in the Catholic/Religious/Afterlife interpretation of it, any more than I have had with regard to Tolkien’s legendarium in general) is because I read it as, wait for it, an allegory of Tolkien’s writing process.1 The older I’ve gotten, and the more I have experienced my own writing process which is fractally chaotic, the more I identify with the process in “Leaf.” So I ignore that “happy (because C/R/Afterlife) in the same way I ignore the canonical marriage of Faramir and Éowyn.
My reading is what fandom calls headcanon (IMNSHO, a brilliant term for what academics call, more boringly, “reader response.”) My headcanon definitely drives my fanfiction, and, at times, has been known to drive my scholarship.
The applicability of “Leaf” is illustrated in this series which keeps putting out roots and branches and leaves (and if you think I am in control of all of this or carefully planned it all out, well, we can pretend, retroactively, that I did, but I know it’s not true).
So with that in mind, of COURSE Shakespeare had to pop up when I started thinking about adaptation, canons, and conflicts over adaptations (and interpretations) of Tolkien’s legendarium for at least two reasons.
First: having been a Shakespeare fangirl as an undergraduate and an English teacher during the past thirty-five years, my weird brain cannot lose the sense that reception of “Shakespeare’s” plays over the centuries (and the historical and ongoing critical wrestling matches over them) maps fairly closely to how the critical, fan, and academic reception of “Tolkien” (both his works and his “authorial self” in the sense of whose “intention” is being claimed as the One True Meaning) has been playing out since The Lord of the Rings was published.
Second: one of my recent and sporadically ongoing projects is tracking the extent to which far-right extremists have been attempting to appropriate their vision of Tolkien’s imagined Middle Ages as an all-white, all-Christian, male-dominated straight utopia and their attempts to shut down any discussion (whether in fandom, academia, or with regard to commercial adaptations) of the possibility of diversity in Tolkien’s work, the adaptations, or the readership.
And in one of the imbroglios (their attacks on the 2021 Summer Seminar, “Tolkien and Diversity,” organized and presented by the Tolkien Society), I found textual evidence of comparisons between Shakespeare and Tolkien.
The three paragraphs below are excerpted from one of my presentations (available at the Journal of Tolkien Research) but also includes original data from my “Backlash Corpus” which I used in that presentation.
You can read the essay (linked in Note 2 below), but the data in this post was not a part of that presentation. It remains to be developed.
My methodology for this presentation draws on corpus linguistics, an approach Franco Moretti describes as "distant reading," as opposed to the traditional close reading done in literary studies. I created an electronic database consisting of the text of the backlash articles and public comments in order to do quantitative analysis to identify shared rhetorical patterns in the texts. One benefit of this method is that the articles are aggregated and anonymized in the corpus; as a result, I can avoid giving individual attention to the racism, misogyny, and homo- and transphobia of the authors while tracking rhetorical patterns across the corpus.
My Backlash Corpus is a small one, approximately 98,500 words, consisting of the text of the nineteen articles [listed in the published paper], plus publicly available comments at the time I collected the data. Some sites did not allow comments; others required an account to read the comments which I chose not to set up.
. . . .
The process of creating a corpus involves first, copying and pasting the text and saving it as a plain text document (.txt). Next, I scrub the document in order to remove punctuation and standardize case, making it easier to generate quantitative data. Scrubbing also removes stop words (in this case, over 170 of them) such as pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions. These function words are always the most numerous in any written text but are not particularly useful in my project. I used Michael Drout's "Lexos" for this step. Removing the stop words allows clear identification of the most frequently used nouns, verbs, and adjectives for analysis of the context of those key words. I uploaded the scrubbed documents into TextSTAT, a free text analysis program that generates Word Frequency lists and Concordances.2
This project uses applied linguistics to analyze key words/concepts (and collocations, or the words closely associated with the key words). I use open-access programs created by linguistics and scholars to generate the data I analyze.
The bolded words in the first list (the 60 words that appear most frequently in the corpus) are ones I discussed in the presentation [Tolkien + variant spellings; Tolkien Society; diverse and diversity). I have another (not yet published presentation) tucked away in the folder that focuses on all the ways “woke” and its variants are used as slurs.
For this post, I pulled out the data on “Shakespeare (+ variants)”3, and added two words that are not in the top sixty but are important because I know they are concepts often used in this context to defend Shakespeare (“canons/canonized” and “Western” and its antonym “non-Western”).
1. KEY WORD FREQUENCY
1. tolkien/tolkiens/tolkein/tolkeins 1024
2. months 672
3. like 386
4. people 293
5. society 214
6. lord 207
7. rings 200
8. work/works 365
9. book/books 196
10.read 179
11.think 172
12.woke 159
13.WOKE Spelling variants 40
14.good 144
15.open 143
16.options 128
17.world 125
18.time 124
19.diverse/diversity 118
20.man/men 115
21.orcs 108
22.evil 99
23.new 97
24.lotr 96
25.want 90
26.great 86
27.seminar 85
28.never 84
29.right 81
30.edited 80
31.queer 80
32.movies 78
33.white 78
34.first 73
35.story 73
36.hobbit 70
37.fantasy 69
38.might 67
39.gay 63
40.life 62
41.love 59
42.elves 58
43.old 56
44.saruman 56
45.middle 55
46.christian 54
47.earth 54
48.sex 54
49.characters 52
50.culture 52
51.different 51
52.literature 51
53.reading 51
54.author 50
55.better 50
56.history 50
57.human 50
58.identity 50
59.shakespeare 50
60.TRUE 50
2 CONTEXT/COLLOCATIONS
The following list includes the text immediately surrounding each use of the term in the corpus (meaning there’s no way to identify which of the multiple authors attacking the Seminar wrote it). Remember the corpus method clears out function words, also known as “stop words” (and I also removed all pseudonyms).4
I’m not taking the next step here which is to organize the words which tend to be associated strongly with the terms (you can see a collocations analysis in the publication if you wish): but that may come in the future. This rough data just gives a sense of the method but may explain why after working with this corpus quite intensely for a while, “Tolkien” and “Shakespeare” (and the whole debate over the so-called “Western” canon—or as I call it, the Dead White Guys reading list) popped up like another leaf when I started thinking about adaptations and conflicting interpretations!
Raw Data
2.1 SHAKESPEARE 51; SHAKESPEARES 10
SHAKESPEARE actually touched themes im worse
edited age yes indeed age discover interpret SHAKESPEARE anew example laurence oliviers film henry intend
lots annotated volumes SHAKESPEARE available purchase library checkout im literature
taking college course SHAKESPEARE basically cares literature poetry study william
oh okay besides common law rights SHAKESPEARE british monty python oh besides
thats normal son SHAKESPEARE class college homosexuality bisexuality shakespeare
wrangling allies sweeping military strategies SHAKESPEARE class shakespeare ploy advance agendas people
read scholar opines SHAKESPEARE closet catholic conservative day age note scene
plenty sexual jokes SHAKESPEARE comprehensible vowel shift affected smallish prop
SHAKESPEARE confuses lot modern readers dont share underlying
mentioning sexual themes course SHAKESPEARE course focusing sexual themes shakespeare course
course shakespeare course focusing sexual themes SHAKESPEARE course
instructor hisher specific expertise regarding SHAKESPEARE didnt offerings term easily waited term instructor
sexnegative neopuritan wokescolds ran college SHAKESPEARE doing rape
SHAKESPEARE england pretty pervy alive hed prudish lot
vengeful moneygrubbing loan shark easy cast SHAKESPEARE enlightened modern liberal dont clue heroes
themes sex nice son liked course simply title SHAKESPEARE fair amount time themes fulfilling eliminating to
bowdler beginning century moved create version SHAKESPEARE family fireside reading extremely popular maybe
course focusing sexual themes shakespeare course SHAKESPEARE focuses sexual themes people shakespeare actually
observation portia disguises merchant venice told SHAKESPEARE greatly concerned critical narratives gender
shakespeare class college homosexuality bisexuality SHAKESPEARE heavy emphasis sexuality gay sex bisexuality
shakespeare todays scholars teachers queer SHAKESPEARE im fine ps the true literary stood test time
actually SHAKESPEARE isnt sex child sexual revolution look sunset
purchase library checkout im literature huge SHAKESPEARE learned left college
session shakespeares plays exactly talks actually SHAKESPEARE meditation hamlets soliloquy rest fit following
basically cares literature poetry study william SHAKESPEARE obsess genitals libidos suggest little value
millions lives lost ruined suggests maybe reading SHAKESPEARE perspective wiser approach yes undergrad grad
women twenty minutes mentioning merchant venice SHAKESPEARE play matter
sharks jumped dont misses sex sexuality SHAKESPEARE plays understand light particular history course
suggests serious deficiency approach obsession topic SHAKESPEARE plethora study
sweeping military strategies shakespeare class SHAKESPEARE ploy advance agendas people century care
course focusing exclusively sex shakespeare titled SHAKESPEARE sense ought focus particular topic unless label
particular topic unless label course accordingly SHAKESPEARE sex basic course courses narrowed subject plenty
yes SHAKESPEARE sex homo bisexuality
malignant power shakespeares mind class implying SHAKESPEARE sex money gotta groundlings throw
unless course focus topic isnt difficult course SHAKESPEARE shakespeare study sex course focused below waistline
sex course titled sex obsession sexual themes SHAKESPEARE shakespeare
reading SHAKESPEARE century eyes means aim laser genitals libidos
topic isnt difficult course shakespeare SHAKESPEARE study sex course focused below waistline shakespe
written SHAKESPEARE thats course shakespeare willing look unless
shakespeare study sex course focused below waistline SHAKESPEARE thats desperately avoid
plays poems changed time care people read SHAKESPEARE sexual revolution happened bound affect
amazingly SHAKESPEARE time muse variety subjects themes sex nice
SHAKESPEARE time muse variety subjects themes sex yep thats
thats course focusing exclusively sex SHAKESPEARE titled shakespeare sense ought focus particular
agecenturygeneration discover SHAKESPEARE todays scholars teachers queer shakespeare im fin
SHAKESPEARE tolkien common writers catholics
yea written shakespeare thats course SHAKESPEARE willing look unless course focus topic isnt
titled sex obsession sexual themes shakespeare SHAKESPEARE
ah okay besides common law rights british theres SHAKESPEARE oh okay besides common law rights shakespeare
world war ii enjoy SHAKESPEARE read eyes possible by reading critical comment
wasnt tolkien white isnt influential SHAKESPEARES lessons ingrained society appreciated mainstream
johnson disapproved saying punning malignant power SHAKESPEARES mind class implying shakespeare sex money gotta
sorry burst bubble nine tenths SHAKESPEARES oeuvre involves sex jokes using awful awful puns
heavy emphasis sexuality ummmmactually sexuality SHAKESPEARES plays poems yea quoth dost thou fall thy
misfortune attending conference session SHAKESPEARES plays exactly talks actually shakespeare
soliloquy rest fit following format quickly talk SHAKESPEARES plays exhibits influence woke topic rant woke top
tell actually understand moral ideas time period SHAKESPEARES political social beliefs appear extremely conservervative
SHAKESPEARES priority read plays dont notice theyre sex gender
themes topics worthy discussion entire library SHAKESPEARES sex gender individual common shakespeares writing
library shakespeares sex gender individual common SHAKESPEARES writings
2.2 CANON/S/CANONIZED (6)
gatekeeper son pj film tremendous achievement CANON act material expanded middle earth world prequel
maligning dwg dead white guy and doing remove texts CANON serving multiculturalism
wholesome times seen unless professor tolkien CANONIZED despite universal ferocious sentiment hale sound
literature proliferation silliness lotr entered CANON ruined
english literary styles english literary reverences CANONS english ethics believe bad mothers
literary styles english literary reverences CANONS english ethics english superiorities cultural
2.3 NONWESTERN 2 & WESTERN 12
conference movies saving grace modern productions NONWESTERN audience priorities
read soviet chinese indian eyes pretty precisely NONWESTERN cultures dont share cultural obsessions wokeness
justification intellectual infantilism suffuses WESTERN academia percipiently displayed disney gay
add trying tear lotr rest WESTERN cannon simply jealous neither write nor create
honor continuing understanding basic worldview WESTERN civilization sadly wrong photo
cultural marxists destroy WESTERN civilization
please author word allegorical basically WESTERN cultures root christianity tolkien desired tell
die service beaurocratic war machine remember WESTERN front east england
set strictures applicable gentilesa set laws thst WESTERN governments signatories look particularly christian
walker percys remark WESTERN journalists wish alexander solzhenitsyn
weight lifting competition woke official religion WESTERN late stage civilisation serves reader consider
leftist corruption WESTERN literature
omg writing epic legend WESTERN world insert christianity whiteness african asian
diversity biggest scam pulled WESTERN world obligated accept destruction own culture
Click here to read Part 4 of this series!
Yes, I know, “cordially dislikes allegory” and “prefers applicability” [emphasis on agency of the reader!)] I know — I love that passage, and quote it all the time and credit Tolkien for introducing me to the concept of allegory at age 10 which, after I looked it up, made me feel retrospectively angry at the Narnia series which I adored when I thought it was Talking Animals WOW! But there’s a huge difference between a short story and a novel, and I’m willing to call it symbolism or even analogy when it comes to the Tower by the Sea in in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” but I do think “Leaf” leans pretty hard on The Underlying Meaning. I’m just very good at rejecting underlying meanings if need be.
Reid, Robin Anne "J.R.R. Tolkien, Culture Warrior: The Alt-Right's Crusade against the Tolkien Society's 2021 Summer Seminar on ‘Tolkien and Diversity,’” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 16, iss. 2, article 4, 2023. Link to JTR Publication.
“Variants” include spelling errors: I do not correct/edit the material I collect for the corpus. I do think it’s ironic when a major defender of “Tolkein” fails to spell his name correctly, I admit.
Stop words are pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions. These function words are always the most numerous in any written text but are not particularly useful in my project.