This Sort of Thing is Becoming a Habit!
Part 4: The Relative Strengths of Lewis & Tolkien Scholarship, Conclusions & Connections
During the last three posts, I talked about how Brenton Dickieson invited dialogue and discussion about his three-part series on the relative strengths of Lewis and Tolkien scholarship. The invitation included an offer to publish guest posts (an offer I am happy to make for here as well!). Ideally scholarship is supposed to be part of a dialogue, not a self-contained monologue, in that we are supposed to engage with ideas in the relevant scholarship with the shared goal of developing new knowledge.
Blog posts are not peer-reviewed scholarship, of course, but many scholars I know use their blogs or other social media to share ideas that relate to their scholarship, in more informal, immediate, and interactive ways than formal publications. I am old enough to know that nothing in this world always (or ever) meets the standard of the ideal. For whatever reasons, my response to the series was ignored by Dickieson and his commenters.
However, as I was assembling the information and links for my recent posts, I found a follow-up post dated a year later (August 11, 2022) in which Dickieson describes being “eyebrow deep in grant applications and revisions and syllabi creation, and I don’t have anything else to say! [about the Lewis/Tolkien series).1 Been there, swamped to the eyebrows and over, crashed and burned out, so I understand, I think, how he felt.
But setting aside the unresolvable question about why my response was ignored, I can focus on the question of whether my tendency to respond conservative white men who in the last three cases have ignored those responses completely is becoming a habit which I should attempt to break.
The Dickieson series was the third instance. My second newsletter post was about the first which was an attempted dialogue with a conservative Tolkien fan who emailed me to express his concerns about conflicts in online spaces and how radical leftists were attacking conservative fans by calling them alt-right.
Based on nothing more than the title of my presentation, “J.R.R. Tolkien, Cultural Warrior: The Alt-Right Religious Crusade's appropriation of ‘Tolkien,’” and my Call For Proposals (CFP) for the Tolkien Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association’s annual conference, my correspondent was concerned that my position seemed to be that people (like me) think that people (like him) who disagree with me (us) about the Rings of Power are part of the alt-right. He wanted to see if his reading of my position was accurate, and explain to me that people who dislike the adaptation are not alt-right members. He also asked for my “data.” I replied (at some length) as I described in Decorum vs. Diversity
My correspondent’s stated goal was to engage in a dialogue to try to connect across political disagreements. His email was polite and professional in tone. I agreed to try, but after I wrote him back, he disappeared.2 For whatever reason, he did not, or could not, carry through his plan to engage in dialogue, or at least not with me!
In fairness to him, friends have compared my "responses" to tidal waves. Whether verbally or in print, I come across to people as too overwhelming, too intimidating, or too something or other. I will not deny the validity of the comparison although my perspective about that metaphor for my communication style changed when I learned I am an autist the year I turned sixty. Autism monologues are a thing.
As the therapist, who did my official evaluation and who wrote a lovely seventeen-page single spaced small-font Official Assessment, and I discussed, luckily for me, universities tend to create some space for privileged people (mostly white, still largely male, especially in some disciplines) to go on and on and on and on without punishment. Fandom (as I experienced it at cons and in fanzines in the 1970s-1980s and online from 2003-2010) is pretty accepting of lengthy detailed passionate monologues especially if (as is true for me at least), one is willing to listen to other fans’ (or academics’) monologues in return which results in sort of a dialogue if you squint the right way although it probably takes more time to get through than more neurotypical dialogues.
The first of the three events occurred earlier and differs from two later ones in that it took place in an academic journal and involved three different people presenting their ideas about interpreting Tolkien. Luckily the journal is Mythlore, and I can link to all three articles.
The first part is by Verlyn Flieger (IMNSHO the best Tolkien scholar of her generation—that is, the generation of the scholars who founded Tolkien studies—and in the running for the best of the field period) was the GOH at the 2019 Mythcon and, as usual for the organization, her talk was published in their journal. The title is: “The Arch and the Keystone.”
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Abstract: The growing body of writing both by and about Tolkien insures that not only can we no longer read the unknown book I discovered in 1956, we can't even all read the same book in 2019. We have too many opinions based on too much information from too many sources to come to a consensus. In spite of his fame, in spite of his position at the top of the heap, in spite of The Lord of the Ring's established position as Waterstone's Book of the Century, the world has and probably will continue to have trouble agreeing on who/what he is.
At the 2021 Mythcon, Donald Williams presented his response to Verlyn's "Arch and Keystone.” A version of his presentation was published as in Mythlore: “Keystone or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged “Conflicting Sides” of Tolkien’s Singular Self”
Abstract: In “The Arch and the Keystone,” Mythlore 38:1 (Fall/Winter 2019), 5-17, Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger argues that the conflicts and contradictions she sees in Tolkien’s essays and fiction do not call for harmonization but rather should be embraced for what they are: “two opposing and conflicting sides of one person, whose contention makes him who he is as well as what he is, the keystone that creates the "arch” of The Lord of the Rings out of the friction of the two sides. Her argument has the virtue of helping us to take both darkness and light in the legendarium with full seriousness. Unfortunately, the alleged contradictions, e.g. between the despair of the Beowulf essay and the hope for eucatastrophe in the essay “On Fairie Stories,” reflected by light and darkness in The Lord of the Rings, are created by Flieger’s failure fully to understand Tolkien’s biblical worldview, where the impossibility of salvation in this life does not contradict, but is the logical setting for, the hope of a redemption not fully realized until the next. Thus an understanding of Tolkien’s biblical eschatology dissolves the alleged tension and lets us supplement Flieger’s keystone with the cornerstone of Tolkien’s worldview, which shows us that the coherence, rather than the contradiction, of Flieger’s elements can also function as a useful window on the power of Tolkien’s sub-creation.
I attended Williams’ presentation solely because I could not for the life of me figure out how the word “allegation” was in any way appropriate for a scholarly argument, given that the word is defined as “a statement, made without giving proof, that someone has done something wrong or illegal.” I had read Flieger’s published speech when it was first published; I regretted not being at MythCon to hear it in person; I assigned it in a graduate class! I re-read it a number of times and cite it in my own scholarship!! I am, in fact, a fan of that essay (as well as her earlier scholarship). And I could not believe that somebody was saying she is wrong (illegality does not enter into it, though the connotation hangs around like a bad smell) for not applying the same Christian theory to Tolkien as Williams does.3
Since Williams spent the whole time talking, allowing little time for the Q&A after his presentation that is, ideally, a feature of all conferences I attend, I could not ask any of the many questions I had for him. I needed to leave the virtual session because I was scheduled in the next session, but I ranted on the conference Discord about the problems I had with the talk. Janet Brennan Croft, the editor of Mythlore, asked me to think about writing a response to Williams' "Note" which I did, and it was published in the following issue as: “A Queer Atheist Feminist Autist Responds to Donald Williams's "Keystone or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged 'Conflicting Sides' of Tolkien's Singular Self"
Abstract: This response traces what the author sees as significant areas of disagreement between Flieger’s essay “The Arch and the Keystone” and Williams’s rejoinder in Mythlore #139, and touches on the wider contemporary context of pushback against diverse scholarship about and readings of Tolkien’s works.
To sum up what I see as the areas of disagreement:
Flieger argues that the many contradictory interpretations of Tolkien’s work which exist are largely caused by his own contradictory statements expressed in his letters, essays, and fiction. She focuses primarily on his statements about religion. As a result of these contradictions, she argues that there is no single right/correct "meaning" of Tolkien to be found. I agree with her claim!
Williams argues that she "fails" at interpreting Tolkien because she does not understand "Tolkien's Biblical worldview" which Williams claims to be able to understand and which is, presumably the correct/right/singular reading that resolves all contradictions. In parts of his response Williams praises her earlier scholarship, but only so he can cherry-pick parts that seem to support his claim. He ignores completely her peer-reviewed essay,4 published in Tolkien Studies, “But What Did He Really Mean?” in which where she goes into much more detail about his contradictory statements (sometimes within the same paragraph!) about Christianity and Faerie Tolkien Studies is not open access, but you can read some Excerpts at Project MUSE.
I disagreed strongly with Williams' presentation when I heard it, so strongly that it took me over 11,000 words to express that disagreement!5 I do not disagree that Tolkien's religious beliefs are an important element of Tolkien's work. My disagreement is with Williams' "cornerstone" analogy which is used to support his claim that there is one right meaning, in Tolkien's work, compared to all the *wrong* meanings (especially presumably by people who are not Christians/not the same type of Christian Williams is). I call this type of argument an allegorical reading, one which denies any role to readers' varied experiences in creating interpretations (you know, applicability!). If Williams had been content to argue that his interpretation was his, and was in fact shaped by his own religious beliefs, rather the appeal to "Tolkien" as an authority, and rather than claiming that Flieger was wrong/ignorant of the Biblical eschatology and thus failed to see the "correct meaning," my 11,000 words would not have been written.
Revisiting the Flieger/Williams/Reid series, which was the first of my three examples of failed dialogue, I have realized that Williams is also second example, and probably an even better one, of the fact that the “resistance to theory” that Dickieson describes amongst Lewis scholars also exists in Tolkien studies!
In my response to Williams, I tried to leave open the possibility of additional dialogue: it is not uncommon for academic journals to published several “responses” to on an item of scholarly debate. As I said earlier, I do not expect a “successful” dialogue to result in one participant’s conversion/agreement to the other’s stance. Instead, I hope that such dialogues might lead to a better understanding of why the other makes the argument they do!
I noted that Williams’ analogy of the cornerstone could work well if the “cornerstone” was changed from a claim about what Tolkien’s “cornerstone” was to an exploration of what a reader’s cornerstone is, that is, what they build their interpretation of “Tolkien’s” work on, a method that would lead to more reader response essays about Tolkien (something I think would be a great addition to the scholarship). I gave two examples of such successful reader response essays: Michael Drout’s “Reflections on Thirty Years of Reading The Silmarillion" and Martin Barker’s “On Being a 1960s Tolkien Reader." I think they are both fantastic, and I plan to write my own “cornerstone” reader response about how Joanna Russ and J. R. R. Tolkien’s work are both cornerstones in my life. And while I was also a “1960s” Tolkien reader, I was a very different type of reader than Barker which is the point of reader response scholarship. I do not know if Williams read my response, but he chose not to respond to it which he could have done privately, or in a response to my response to his response to Flieger which I am fairly sure Janet would have published.
Thinking about this habit, and whether I should break it or not, I can see reasons for doing so, and reasons for not doing so. One of the reasons for doing so is that I could spend more time on the work I love — such as the next project I will be posting about! The new series draws from the work on a project I started back in 2018 that I do not think I will try to bring up to speed five years later: “Cruising The Archive of Our Own: Mapping Perversions in Tolkien Tagging.”
On the other hand, I dislike giving up on the possibility that readers with different perspectives on Tolkien’s work cannot communicate with each other given how much animus exists in online fan and some academic spaces.
I am going to end this section with the quote from Flieger’s essay that so brilliantly expresses the contradictions and conflicts in Tolkien’s work, in Tolkien’s self. Among other things, I think her writing style is so beautifully done that her work is a joy to read!
Then I will conclude this series by describing some of the journey I made to this point as current “Robin” I am as a reader and scholar.
Tolkien is the keystone in the great arch of his work, the element that divides and at the same time bridges the divide. He is the center held in place by the two sides of his own nature. That nature hopes for the Happy Ending but expects the dragon. It can see his work as Catholic yet describe it as not Christian. It can walk toward Heaven with Niggle’s joy and walk away from Faery with Smith’s regret. That nature can with ruthless compassion engineer the separate destinies of both Frodo and Sam. These oppositions are the sources of Tolkien’s power and the tension between them is the energy that unites it. They are what after sixty-five years still sets him apart from the others and makes him the icon, the image, the towering figure that he is. . . .
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 the 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. What they see is there, even when they’re seeing contradictory things. So instead of wrestling with Tolkien’s contradictions, instead of trying to reconcile them or harmonize them, I propose that we take them as they are for what they are, two opposing and conflicting sides of one person whose contention makes him who he is as well as what he is, the keystone that creates the arch. Without it there’s just a pile of bricks (pp. 17-18)
I would add to Flieger’s argument that these contradictions/conflicts in Tolkien’s legendarium are very likely one of the reasons that the scholarship on Tolkien is stronger than the scholarship on Lewis, and is beginning, in the past twenty years or so, to be more diverse in terms of participants, perspectives, theories, and methods.
I am not the only one seeing this change: in her 2009 monograph, Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, Dimitra Fimi argues that the growth of cultural studies and related literary-critical approaches during the second half of the twentieth century changed Tolkien scholarship, offering opportunities to increase the scope and depth of work being done as the field increasingly grew to include theories relating to alterity and intersectionality, including constructions of race.
Another reason for the differences between Tolkien and Lewis scholarship is the extent to which many established Tolkien scholars are more welcoming than resistant to all the Bugbears I bring to Tolkien studies! That value is, as I note in my response to Williams, one that Verlyn Flieger has embodied over the years. She expresses it in the excerpt I quoted above: her voice is that of a guide, rather than a gatekeeper. Williams’ insistence on one true right correct Biblical way of interpreting Tolkien is one I cannot help seeing as that of a gatekeeper: failed and wrong approaches are not welcome.
*Waves my Bugbear Cane around*
“I was there, Gandalf . . . I was there fifty-seven years ago . . . ”
I first read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in 1965, when I was ten, on summer vacation, when a friend of my mother loaned me her copy of the trilogy. I had read The Hobbit at age eight when a librarian gave it to me saying she thought I would like it because it was like the Oz books (which I was a fan of and had been since age five). I imagine that some critical sources compared the two “fantasy” works, but, even at age eight, I knew that Bilbo Baggins’ story was nothing like the Oz stories. Middle-earth was nothing like Oz! I disliked the intrusive narrator (I did not know the term at the time!) who talked down to me. I sort of disliked Bilbo (probably because of the contemptuous dismissal of him by the narrative/dwarves). I really disliked the dwarves’ treatment of Bilbo (except for Balin!).
However, I trusted my mother’s friend (she was one of those adults who talked to children like we were adults which was really cool). She just said she thought I would like it, and she was right. I fell head over heels in love with the story, dragged my mother to every wire bookrack in the drugstores in town when we got home to get my own paperback copies (no bookstore in that town then, other than the university book store which had mostly textbooks), I read it over 100 times between then and graduating from high school. After that, I read it religiously once a year (always in the summer, as close to the original time I read it as I could—August—as many fans did). And in a sort of fannish retconning, I became fonder of The Hobbit as a sort of prequel to LotR, and as I got older, and could appreciate how the intrusive narrator more or less disappeared after Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, and how the story changed from the rather silly, I thought, “children’s” story to something different.6
By the time I was given LotR, I had been reading sf and fantasy, as well as every other type of book I could get my hands on, since I was five or so. My father was a geologist and a major sff fan, so I had access to his magazines and books.7 The books in the children's section of public library that were sff had little rocket ships on the covers, so I could easily find them; they did in the adult section too, but I was not allowed up there at the time.
I was a bookworm all my life, and in the small town in northern Idaho where I lived, I was considered weird. Although it was a university town, it was a land-grant university with little concern for humanities programs as opposed to agriculture, forestry, and mining. Even worse than reading a lot, I read “science fiction” (which was a catch-all term for fantasy as well), and girls were not supposed to read that stuff. Luckily, my father did not subscribe to that attitude; I think he enjoyed having someone he could talk with about his favorite books just as I did. I also think he was hoping my love for sf would lead to me going into one of the sciences in college, but that never happened. I was an English major from the start, and I became an English teacher (but not a high school English teacher; I disliked my peers from junior high school on and would never consider working in that environment).
As an English major in the 1970s, I remember when Tolkien’s work along with all science fiction, fantasy, and other genre literature, was deemed categorically Popular/Trashy/Genre/Not Worthy of Literary Analysis by Literature Professors. The denigration of Tolkien began immediately upon the publication of The Lord of the Rings (The Hobbit, as a “children’s book,” was presumably not important enough for Modernist Intellectuals, such as Edmund Wilson, to acknowledge). Wilson’s critical essay is notorious among Tolkien scholars. Of course, from the same time, Tolkien had his defenders (including, most notably, W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis).
The dismissal of science fiction and fantasy, including Tolkien, continued into the 1970s when I was an undergraduate. My literature classes were taught by New Critical scholars who, with one notable exception, emphasized that they only taught Great Literature (which just happened by sheer coincidence to be authored by Dead White Men (DWM)). There was one notable exception, one of the two tenured women in the department, who was a Shakespeare scholar and my mentor. Her son loved science fiction. She let me babble about it to her in her office, and I still remember when she said thought SF was the modern day form of the pastoral, where the characters leave their city and go into the country outside it and learn about themselves and their culture. That moment was at least forty-five years ago, but I cannot imagine ever forgetting it.
I witnessed first-hand, the changes from the late 1970s and early 1980s, in my undergraduate program and my two Masters’ in English programs (one was creative writing, the other a summer program over five years), and into the 1990s in my doctoral program (1987-1992), the changes in curriculum and teaching based on changes in theory & methods that made it not only possible but increasingly popular (in academic terms!) to write about Tolkien (and science fiction and fantasy generally).
I took my first “theory” class at a summer graduate program in the 1980s, in a class taught by a woman, and it was like whole new worlds opened up for me. When I started my doctorate, I could take theory classes (primarily choosing feminist, gender, and what was then called “multicultural” as well as applied linguistics/stylistics) which included how to apply theory to texts (could be literature but could as easily be film, television, or advertisements). If anything, by the time I was finishing my doctorate, I was considered rather old-school by my (usually younger) peers because I was interested in applying theory to analyze print literature (granted, science fiction and fantasy) rather than studying theory to write theory, or doing all the sexy new work with film or other visual texts.
I was a non-traditional aged doctoral student, not starting the Ph.D. until I was in my thirties. I had left academia in the early 1980s because of the sexism and only returned in the late 1980s because I knew that there were changes in what was taught and who was teaching it (plus, I found doing clerical jobs during those years that there was lots and lots of sexism there as well).8 I celebrated my 40th birthday in my second year of a tenure-track job, somewhat older than most 'new hires.'
I spent the first ten years of my tenure-track focusing my scholarly agenda on feminist speculative fiction, culminating in being invited to edit the Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy encyclopedia. The theories I worked with raised some questions from the senior male professors in my department, but luckily for me (not all my friends were as lucky), those men took the concept of academic freedom seriously, and the department had one feminist professor (who retired soon after I was hired, but whose classes I inherited).
I often told my students that I got a Ph.D. in English so I could teach the sff I loved at the college level. I was introduced to Foucault by my dissertation advisor; his genealogical theory (major Bugbear) made it easy to sneak lots and lots of feminist sf into my dissertation: A Genealogy of North American Feminism, 1963-1991: Competing Narratives of ‘Gender,’ ‘Race,’ and ‘Ethnicity,' University of Washington, December, 1992.9 The dissertation brought together a lot of feminist publications (fiction and non-fiction) from those decades, not just sf. My dissertation committee bravely went through it with me although none of them read sf! Afterwards, one of them took me aside and told me I should just write on sf because I could do that these days, and it was clear from the dissertation that is what I loved because when I talked about sf, those sections were the strongest. So I did.
I finished my doctorate in 1993, and can say that thirty years later, with the mainstream explosion of sff in multiple media, writing about “the fantastic” by academics is growing. And both my individual experience, and the institutional-cultural changes support the proposition that “theory” the Bugbear of all Bugbears is one of the reasons for the change.
The follow-up post linked to The Idiosopher’s Razor: The Missing Element in Metacritical Analysis of Tolkien and Lewis Scholarship . This post summarizes the background to his project and his work on Lewis and links to an additional “more theoretical” response to the question asked in the “digital cage match,” “The Secret of a Strong Field of Research which Dickieson introduces in this paragraph:
Back when I did the Tolkien studies vs. Lewis studies digital cage match, I invited others to join in. Most of that discussion happened in the comments section of A Pilgrim in Narnia, on Facebook groups, and in guest blog posts, like Connor Salter’s essay, “Lewis and Tolkien among American Evangelicals.” It took awhile, but someone else has offered a response on a more theoretical level.
I think it's supposed to be a satire -- “the low end of a scholarly debate” — perhaps as much about his own big data work as about "Tolkien studies," because there are clearly in-jokes.
Calling it “more theoretical” (Dickieson’s characterization) is probably also a joke. The ‘joke’ is that the name “Tolkien” is unique enough as a lexical item to make it easy to find only relevant results (easier than Joe’s work on “Poul Anderson” (an sf and fantasy writer) because so many people are named “Anderson.”
My only response to that is to note that at least in the subscription databases, using “Tolkien” without identifying it as a “SU” (Subject category” will get the aspiring scholar a lot of false hits because “Tolkien” is also used in journal titles. Tolkien Studies focuses on Tolkien (although they do not limit themselves to peer-reviewed essays), but the full title of Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, which publishes scholarship on the Inklings *and* “mythopoeic literature,” shows up all over a plain “Tolkien” search if the “SU” limitation is not set.
I gather the newest term for such behavior is “ghosting” which is a metaphor I like!
My choice of theory here is definitely intended; as an atheist, I do not consider any Christian ideas to be any sort of revealed truth or have a higher authority based on the label of “religion.”
The Mythlore publication is of an oral presentation, just as Williams’ response is based on his presentation. This sort of publication is not expected to meet all the standards for a peer-reviewed piece of scholarship which is what “But What Did He Really Mean” is. However scholarly journals do not limit themselves only to the peer-reviewed scholarship: there are editor-reviewed materials (“Notes,” “Responses,” and reviews of monographs being most common).
The original draft I submitted was longer and had to be cut following editorial review although the cut parts fit neatly into an essay about how Joanna Russ and J. R. R. Tolkien are the two writers whose work had the most impact on my life, something I hope to get back to soon since I've been working on it, on and off, for mumblemumble years!
My first response to Bilbo’s story and how it was told is probably why I like some parts of Jackson’s film adaptation more than many fans (other parts, bleh!). The second film (one film, three parts) is not as strong as the first, but there are some brilliant sequences (including Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum).
My parents claimed I learned/taught myself how to read at about age three which I do not remember. I cannot remember a time when I was not reading. I do remember getting into trouble in first grade because I already read at what the education experts identified as the fourth-grade level, but I didn’t understand/like phonics. And I did not want to read those stupid “Dick and Jane” books. There were a number of parent-teacher conferences, and somehow I got the idea I was reading “wrong,” and stopped reading (luckily my best friend introduced me to my first Oz book, so I had to start reading again). I have recently learned that this was probably a case of hyperlexia which, of course, nobody in that town knew about in 1960).
Those years away from academia gave me more time to read what I wanted to read, and write what I wanted to write, and lousy clerical jobs aside, that was pretty amazing. What I mostly read was work by Anglophone women writers (mostly white, as I realized during my doctoral classes). I started reading all the authors that Joanna Russ covers in How to Suppress Women's Writing (and not just the one or two books she might mention, but all the books they published) as well as adding all the women publishing in sff (during the 1980s, there was a backlash against women who began winning the Hugo and other sff prizes).
I learned only much later of the allegations that Foucault was a pedophile. He is only one of a number of famous men whose work is being questioned because of their abusive behaviors.