University Bookman, Winter 1975 (Full Issue)
A seminal issue of the Bookman. Every article deals with a book Kirk considered to be one of the most important of the 1970s: William T. Couch’s THE HUMAN POTENTIAL.
Lester del Rey, “A Report About J.R.R. Tolkien,” Worlds of Fantasy (1968).
Source: Lester del Ray, “A Report on J.R.R. Tolkien,” Worlds of Fantasy 1 (1968): 84-85.
Nothing could seem less revolutionary than being a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, with a chief interest in such works as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the original. Yet Professor J. R.R. Tolkien is well on the way toward creating the major literary revolution of our generation.
The man not only writes about magic, but he seems capable of working spells in real life. No dictum of publishing or tradition of literature can withstand his quiet assault, as a simple listing of his achievements demonstrates.
The modern tradition is against fairy stories, even for children. But The Hobbit by Professor Tolkien had become a classic, and the publishers wanted a sequel. They got one — one based on the same characters, background and magic as the original, but for adults! Not only that, but it was to be in three volumes, with no false endings to make each volume stand as a complete book. The reader would have to get it like a serial. And where long novels were selling for a few dollars, this one would come to fifteen dollars! No sane publisher should have risked such a venture, but George Allen & Unwin couldn’t resist the book.
Nobody expected it to do well, and the American copyright on The Lord of the Rings was not protected, with the result that the work became public domain. It did quite well, however, with little but word-of-mouth advertising; my 1963 copy of the first book lists thirteen hardcover printings. The work refused to die.
Everyone knows that a copyright is the author’s only protection. But when the soft-cover volumes were issued, Tolkien was able to exercise control, even without legal protection. His simple request that only the authorized Ballantine edition be purchased was enough to make readers pay the extra twenty cents per volume and to force the other publisher to come to terms with him. This created a major furor in publishing circles and established a tradition for which every writer must give perpetual and incredulous thanks.
Soft-cover books don’t get serious reviews, normally. The Lord of the Rings received unusually full reviews. And for over a year, the books led the soft-cover bestseller list. They are still selling excellently, though there isn’t a hint of “daring” words or events in them.
The new editions were published during the great youth revolt, when the young were supposed to be cynical about all values and turning to the literature of protest. Yet millions turned at once to these books, filled with such things as the love of beauty, the dignity of ordinary people, and the conflict of good and evil. They bore no resemblance to anything being read before — but they outsold everything else.
The Tale of Wonder passed from 1 the literary scene about three hundred years ago. Its demise was ‘noted by many and seemingly mourned by few. Yet today, as the result of one man’s work, it is back with us. And it is causing excitement in the most serious academic circles, under the new name of mythopoetic literature.
This year Belknap College, in ‘Center Harbor, N. H., will hold a serious conference on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien over the weekend of October 18-20, with joint sponsorship by the Tolkien Society of America. Many of the papers, to be published later, will deal with scholarly aspects of mythopoetic literature. It took science fiction forty years to accomplish what Tolkien has achieved in three.
The revolution has had a major impact on all fantasy publishing. Five years ago, there was little market for fantasy; today, a great many publishers are actively seeking such fiction. Fantasy has suddenly become a “hot” item in soft-cover publishing.
Meantime, Professor Tolkien is working on another project that violates all normal publishing sense. Despite the fact that even serious books shouldn’t have too many pages of notes and references, Tolkien finished his work of fiction with over a hundred pages of appendices and the world developed there has been so fascinating that readers have insisted he give them still more.
He is now doing so — as he probably intended all along. He is working on what may be another three-volume novel about the age before that of the first novel — to be called The Silmarillion. After that, there is still an earlier age to provide a work now known as The Akallabeth.
Sometimes his publishers despair of ever having the final manuscripts, already long delayed by Professor Tolkien’s tendency toward perfectionism. He is now 76, and the work of correlating all his notes and making countless revisions is seemingly endless.
But when a man consistently works miracles, nothing should be considered impossible.
— Lester del Rey
Harvey Breit interviews J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955 (Short!)
Source: Harvey Breit, “Oxford Calling,” New York Times Book Review (June 5, 1955), pg. 8.
“How does it happen that a writer of children’s books (who began that way, if we may believe his critics) can end by producing a somber and brilliantly bizarre trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings’—part two of which (‘The Two Towers’) was reviewed here recently and labeled definitely for adults? The author of that Gothic masterpiece, J.R.R. Tolkien, was asked how it all came about. What, we asked Dr. Tolkien makes you tick? Dr. T., who teaches at Oxford when he isn’t writing novels, has this brisk reply: “I don’t tick. I am not a machine. (If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder.)
“My work did not ‘evolve’ into a serious work. It started like that. The so-called ‘children’s story’ was a fragment, torn out of an already existing mythology. In so far as it was dressed up ‘for children, in style or manner,’ I regret it. So do the children.
“I am a philologist, and all my work is philological. I avoid hobbies because I am a very serious person and cannot distinguish between private amusement and duty. I am affable, but unsociable. I only work for private amusement, since I find my duties privately amusing.”
Hobbits in Kentucky?
Excerpts from Davenport, Guy. “Hobbits in Kentucky.” New York Times (February 23 1979), A27.
“The first professor [Tolkien] to harrow me with the syntax and morphology of Old English had a speech impediment, wandered in his remarks, and seemed to think that we, his baffled scholars, were well up in Gothic, Erse and Welsh, the grammar of which he freely alluded to.”
“Even when I came to read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ I had trouble, as I still do, realizing it was written by the mumbling and pedantic Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien”
“Nor have I had much luck in blending the professor and the author in my mind. I’ve spent a delicious afternoon in Tolkien’s rose garden talking with his son, and from this conversation there kept emerging a fond father who never quite noticed that his children had grown up, and who, as I gathered, came and went between the real world and a world of his own invention. I remembered that Sir Walter Scott’s son grew up in ignorance that his father was a novelist, and remarked as a lad in his teens when he was among men discussing Scott’s genius, ‘Aye, it’s commonly him is first to see the hare.’”
“Nor, talking with his bosom friend, H.V.G. (“Hugo”) Dyson, could I get any sense of the Tolkien who invented Hobbits and the most wonderful adventures since Ariosto and [ ]. ‘Dear Ronald,’ Dyson said, ‘writing all those silly books with three introductions and 10 appendixes. His was not a true imagination, you know: He made it all up.’”
Allen Barnett, an American Oxford classmate of Tolkien’s: “‘Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that.’”
The New York Times Update on Tolkien, 1977
Excerpts from Mitgang, Herbert. “Behind the Best Sellers: J.R.R. Tolkien.” New York Times (October 2 1977), 48.
“After Professor Tolkien’s death at 81, international readers hoped that Middle-earth would somehow continue to live. The author’s son, Christopher, a World War II R.A.F. pilot, resigned his fellowship in Old English at Oxford and devoted himself to his father’s works. From a vast amount of writing, Christopher Tolkien relates, ‘I set myself to work out a single text, by selection and arrangement. Here and there I had to develop the narrative out of notes and rough drafts. I had to make many choices between competing versions. Essentially, it was a job of organization, not of completion, and the result was ‘The Silmarillion.’”
“‘If you imagine the archetype of the Oxford don, you have him,’ said Rayner Unwin. ‘He was a little offputting and at a distance, until you go to know him, and then he became immensely warm. Fame puzzled him. He was not pretentious. He lived in a very simple way, wrapped up in his family and own internal world. He laughed a lot and smoked his pipe a lot.’”
Unwin: “‘He took criticism in one of two ways–ignore it completely or go back to Square One and do it all over again.’”
Unwin: “‘He was a great philologist, and he knew precisely the way he wanted to say things. In a sense, I was more his correspondent than his editor during ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ His spellings could be eccentric–his plural of dwarf was dwarves, for example. Once a printer corrected all his so-called misspellings. Tolkien was furious. The printer then quoted as his authority the Oxford English Dictionary. And Tolkien responded, ‘Why, I wrote the O.E.D.!’ As a matter of fact, he had worked on it early in his career.’”
Stormfields 