Rissik Review of Tolkien and Tom Shippey
Jmicha5059
Tolkien, I decided to read them. Here are my impressions of the negative one.
The negative review by Andrew Rissik is simple name-calling and not analysis.
It is apparent that he has not read any parts of the HOME series, On Fairy
Stories, Shippey's earlier books and important books by others. I also did a
search on Google and discovered a few other reviews done by Rissik. He also
produced a 3-part drama for the BBC based on Helen of Troy. His other reviews
included one of James Bond movies and an historical account of whaling on the
high seas. A reference to James Bond and Ancient Greek writers appears in the
review below.
Just as an exercise, I though I would quote the review and emphasize the
insulting names thrown at Shippey, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and their works.
Middle Earth, middlebrow JRR Tolkien the author of the 20th century?
Andrew Rissik defends the canon against assault from hobbits and Tom Shippey
Andrew Rissik
Guardian
Saturday September 2, 2000
JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century
Tom Shippey
JRR Tolkien's chief contribution to the literature of the 20th century was to
ignore it almost completely. He wrote, as his Oxford don colleague and fellow
Inkling C S Lewis also did, to retrieve something that the discordance of the
modern age seemed intrinsically to threaten - the old, secure, prepubertal
moral certainties of late-Edwardian England.
Insult #1: Tolkien and Lewis are prepubertal boys.
Both men were secular mystics who chose to canonise their own tastes. They
found in books and mythology less a reflection of life and lived experience
than some fulfilment of the mind's sovereign capacity to escape into dream.
Insult #2: Tolkien and Lewis could not deal with the real world like adults.
Lewis might have been happier if English poetry had ended with John Masefield;
Tolkien would have preferred it to have finished somewhere between the work of
the anonymous Gawain poet, whom he translated, and Chaucer. "Literature stops
in 1100," he once said. "After that it's only books."
Insult #3 (combined with Insult#1): Tolkien and Lewis are anachronistic old
farts who behave like prepubertal boys .
It was as if, on some primary level, his interests weren't artistic at all.
Insult #4: Tolkien is not a true writer like me.
He abandoned Greek and the Classical world after an indolent first year at
Oxford, switching to English and linguistics because comparative philology was
the only paper in which he'd distinguished himself.
Insult #5: Tolkien was too stupid to study the classics like I did.
One suspects that the undertow of sex and religious doubt and the restless,
argumentative probing of human psychology in Euripides, Aeschylus and Homer
held little appeal for him. What he liked was the colour and vitality of
archaic Northern languages, their hammer-on-anvil gold-and-silver sound, their
plainness and lack of introversion.
Insult #6: Tolkien was a prepubertal boy who will like to write about sex and
normal adult ruminations once he grows up.
The danger in writing about him now is to misread this essential simplicity of
temperament, taking what's fresh and enjoyable in his work and applying to it
wrongheaded standards of traditional literary eminence, so that what he did
achieve is falsified by being mistaken for what he didn't. This is the cardinal
error made by Professor Tom Shippey in his long and densely packed study, JRR
Tolkien: Author of the Century, which - as its title may suggest - is a
belligerently argued piece of fan-magazine polemic.
Insult#7: Tom Shippey is another wrongheaded idiot who obviously did not study
the classics and cannot think big thoughts like me.
Shippey wants to feel that his own enthusiasm, which is for morally serious
fantasy of the kind Tolkien pioneered, is worthy of a place up there at the top
table alongside the totemic great names of the western canon. Accordingly, he
classifies Tolkien as equal with (or ahead of) James Joyce, George Orwell,
William Golding and Kurt Vonnegut, and then castigates the "literary snobs" who
disagree.
Insult#8: Tom Shippey is a second-string academic and has no business
commenting on the Western canon. Only Harold Bloom and I have that authority.
The trouble is, it's not just literary snobs who don't accept Tolkien as one of
the greatest writers of the last century. Almost no one does, except the
hard-core Tolkien addicts who've elevated his books to the status of a cult.
Insult#9: Anyone who has a positive thing to say about Tolkien obviously has a
psychological disorder.
Shippey makes a legitimate case for the enduring commercial popularity of The
Lord of the Rings, but if we're talking of "lasting value" I doubt whether
popularity has any significance.
Insult#10: If the common people like something, it must really suck.
People read the tales of Middle Earth the way they've always read cunningly
wrought fantasies - the way they read Sherlock Holmes or James Bond or Dracula
- drinking in the excitement of the atmosphere, revelling in the hypnotic
detail. They don't read them the way the 19th-century public read Nicholas
Nickleby or War and Peace, feeling that these books were somehow inseparable
from the life and thought of their age.
Insult#11: People who read Tolkien are a lot like mindless Opium addicts.
It's this absence of common literary horse sense that makes me feel that a
critic who tries to raise the creation of Hobbits and Middle Earth above what
was achieved by Yeats, Eliot, Conrad, Joyce, D H Lawrence or Auden is either
artistically tone deaf or harmlessly dotty.
Insult#12: Tom Shippey is either artistically tone deaf or harmlessly dotty.
(It is hard to beat a simple repetition of that one.)
After the annihilating traumas of the last century, it's merely perverse to
ascribe greatness to this airy but strangely simplified mock-Teutonic
never-never land, where races and species intermingle at will and great battles
are fought but there is never any remotely convincing treatment of those
fundamental human concerns through which all societies ultimately define
themselves - religion, philosophy, politics and the conduct of sexual
relationships.
Insult#13: Tolkien is a prepubertal boy who did not learn irony like the the
adult writers of the 20th Century.
So much of what Shippey says in Tolkien's favour cuts the opposite way.
Insult#14: Tom Shippey is so stupid he doesn't even know it.
He discourses on the profundity of Tolkien's treatment of evil without
appearing to see that Sauron, the Ring Lord, is no more than a compelling
melodrama villain. Personified evil, though effective in its intended
fantasy-adventure context, can't and doesn't implicate its readers emotionally,
as do William Golding's Lord of the Flies or The Inheritors, which use exotic
and far-removed settings to throw back at us a prophetically twisted image of
our own corruptibility. Nor is it something insidious and institutional,
working through structures and organisations in a recognisably sophisticated
way, as in Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World.
Insult#15: Tolkien is a prepubertal boy who did not learn irony like the the
adult writers of the 20th Century.
To praise Tolkien for his archaic authenticity with languages is to miss the
point.It's not his Old Norse or High German that's the problem, it's his
English - the twee doggerel of Tom Bombadil, the high-falutin' Hollywood-epic
inversions of the speeches at Rivendell, and that meandering prose style that
is half Old Testament pastiche, half 1920s ripping yarn. The mix of high
severity and low bluntness we find in a writer such as Sir Thomas Malory is
entirely beyond Tolkien's reach; so too is the great poet's awareness of the
inadequacy of language itself, that shrinks the thousand-year gap between us
and those Anglo-Saxon masterpieces The Wanderer and The Seafarer.
Insult#16: Tolkien was so screwed up by studying philology (instead of the
classics) that he cannot write in English.
Tolkien lacked the qualities that might have made The Lord Of The Rings a
masterpiece: the language of a poet and the perception of a philosopher. When,
at the end of the Morte d'Arthur, Sir Ector enters Joyous Guard to find his
comrade Sir Lancelot lying dead, we hear, in the spontaneity and simple
stoicism of his grief, some of the finest dramatic speech written in English
before Shakespeare. When, in the last pages of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo
leaves the Shire and departs for the Grey Havens, all we hear in the suavely
allegorical and too sweetly cadenced prose are plagiaristic echoes of other
books, other voices - Malory, Tennyson, Andrew Lang, William Morris, the King
James Bible.
Insult#17: Tolkien plagarized the Bible.
Yet the moment itself, and its high-aspiring style - "And it seemed to him that
as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to
silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a
far green country under a swift sunrise" - lie at the heart of what Tolkien and
Lewis were striving to achieve. Their vision, for all its limits, was not
ignoble. Some faith that had been lost amid the slaughter of 1914-18 is
respected in their fiction. Both were devoutly religious, and for both life was
largely an intensification of what they'd read and talked about and imagined.
Both locate their image of God in the same emotional places: in the sensuous,
pre-industrial beauty of an invented natural world and the childlike stillness
of the accepting human mind. The tone is lyrical, the meaning apocalyptic.
Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lewis's Narnia were what these men thought and hoped
that heaven might be like.
Insult#18: Although Tolkien and Lewis are still prepubertal boys, I have to
say something positive, so readers don't think I'm a literary snob.
Mike Williams
http://www.tolkiencollector.com
Paris
jmich...@aol.com (Jmicha5059) wrote:
> Inspired by Carl Edlund's comments on the reviews of Tom Shippey's
new book on
> Tolkien, I decided to read them. Here are my impressions of the
negative one.
>
> The negative review by Andrew Rissik is simple name-calling and not
analysis.
> It is apparent that he has not read any parts of the HOME series, On
Fairy
> Stories, Shippey's earlier books and important books by others. I
also did a
> search on Google and discovered a few other reviews done by Rissik.
He also
> produced a 3-part drama for the BBC based on Helen of Troy. His
other reviews
> included one of James Bond movies and an historical account of
whaling on the
> high seas. A reference to James Bond and Ancient Greek writers
appears in the
> review below.
[snip cutting analysis]
Yeah well you always know what you get in the Guardian: bad taste,
ignorance and PC drivel.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Flame of the West
Paris wrote:
> Yeah well you always know what you get in the Guardian: bad taste,
> ignorance and PC drivel.
Darned right. It's The Times of London for me!
--
-- FotW
"For the uninitiated, Galadriel is the good sister of the evil
but beautiful Queen Beruthiel, who imprisons the Fellowship
of the Ring in the forest of Lothlorien."
The Times of London
smokyb...@my-deja.com
Paris <par...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah well you always know what you get in the Guardian: bad taste,
> ignorance and PC drivel.
>
I used to be quite fond of The Grauniad, I respected it's left wing
credentials going back to the old Manchester Guardian, I enjoyed the
literary, artistic and social commentary - let's face it, for most of
the 70's and 80's its only serious competitors in broadsheet terms were
The Thunderer and The Torygraph both of which were pillars of the
establishment. However it cannot truthfully describe itself as
socialist any more, nor even liberal - it has now descended to the
level of a lifestyle guide. What type of salad should we be eating this
week? Which couturier has the best autumn collection? What kind of
literature or music should I appreciate if I want to impress my shallow
friends? Where should I take my holidays? Plenty of "style", zero
substance.
The Rissik review typifies this attitude, Tolkien must be the easiest
of targets for mainstream literary critics, though I don't doubt that
their attitudes will change when the movies come out and prove Tolkien
to be as popular as ever (after all newspapers have to sell). Rissik
refuses to acknowledge (or possibly is not even aware of) modern
Tolkien criticism, the guy is stuck in the literary establishment of
the fifties along with most of his British peers. It is Rissik, not
Tolkien that is the anachronistic old fart.
If I read an english paper at all these days it would be The
Independent or (occasionally) the FT.
Smoky
CarlEdlund
>Insult#18: Although Tolkien and Lewis are still prepubertal boys, I have to
>say something positive, so readers don't think I'm a literary snob.
Too late, Mr. Rissik! :)
Cheers,
Carl
CarlEdlund
>Tolkien must be the easiest
>of targets for mainstream literary critics, though I don't doubt that
>their attitudes will change when the movies come out and prove Tolkien
>to be as popular as ever (after all newspapers have to sell).
Well, getting slightly off-topic, LOTR books may get a temporary boost in sales
from the movies, but I don't think there will be a long-term positive or
negative impact from the movie.
The popularity of Tolkien's fiction will endure a) because it's a good story,
and b) because much as Mr. Rissik implies it is *not* tied to the 20th century
-- its appeal is timeless.
Cheers,
Carl
Raven
news:20000919230443...@ng-fi1.aol.com...
> Shippey wants to feel that his own enthusiasm, which is for morally
> serious fantasy of the kind Tolkien pioneered, is worthy of a place
> up there at the top table alongside the totemic great names of the
> western canon. Accordingly, he classifies Tolkien as equal with
> (or ahead of) James Joyce, George Orwell, William Golding and
> Kurt Vonnegut, and then castigates the "literary snobs" who
> disagree.
[...]
> It's this absence of common literary horse sense that makes me feel
> that a critic who tries to raise the creation of Hobbits and Middle
> Earth above what was achieved by Yeats, Eliot, Conrad, Joyce,
> D H Lawrence or Auden is either artistically tone deaf or
> harmlessly dotty.
[...]
> He discourses on the profundity of Tolkien's treatment of evil
> without appearing to see that Sauron, the Ring Lord, is no more
> than a compelling melodrama villain. Personified evil, though
> effective in its intended fantasy-adventure context, can't and
> doesn't implicate its readers emotionally, as do William
> Golding's Lord of the Flies or The Inheritors, which use exotic
> and far-removed settings to throw back at us a prophetically twisted
> image of our own corruptibility. Nor is it something insidious and
> institutional, working through structures and organisations in a
> recognisably sophisticated way, as in Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's
> Brave New World.
Rissik must not have read the foreword to the LotR. In it, Tolkien
explains that his purpose with writing and publishing the book is to
tell a good story, for his own pleasure and hopefully for that of some
of his readers. My mother did as much for me when I was a toddler,
sitting by my bedside telling stories that she invented out of her
head as she went along. Yet Rissik treats the LotR as if it purposed
to bear a Message from the author to the readers.
A book like "1984" has a purpose, namely to convey a message from
the author to the readers: "There is a risk that our democracies turn
into totalitarian, pervasive dictatorships; these are the tools which
I suspect that such a dictatorship may employ to maintain control".
"Lord of the Flies" has the same purpose: to convey a message, namely
the author's idea of what human beings can turn into in the wrong
circumstances; what lies within us. Tolkien has no such intention,
and does not pretend to - unless he baldly lies in his own
foreword ---
So Rissik is comparing apples and oranges, denouncing the latter
because he has tasted apple pie, and you cannot make a pie of
precisely that taste with oranges. And either for this reason or for
another he claims that oranges are good for nothing at all, in their
attempt to make an ingredient for good apple pies.
As for his assessment of Tolkien's writing style and ability to
implicate readers emotionally, well, that is a matter of personal
taste. If Rissik doesn't like Tolkien's style, that is his privilege;
but trying to justify this according to logic or laid-out literary
rules is drooling folly imhoe. Reminds me of the worst aspects of
essay-writing in Norwegian and Danish "gymnasium", which corresponds
roughly to High School: Dissecting Literature, like a frog on a slab
in biology class...
> Yet the moment itself, and its high-aspiring style - "And it seemed
> to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey
> rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and
> he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country
> under a swift sunrise" - lie at the heart of what Tolkien and
> Lewis were striving to achieve. Their vision, for all its limits,
> was not ignoble. Some faith that had been lost amid the
> slaughter of 1914-18 is respected in their fiction. Both were
> devoutly religious, and for both life was largely an
> intensification of what they'd read and talked about and
> imagined.
> Both locate their image of God in the same emotional places: in the
> sensuous, pre-industrial beauty of an invented natural world and
> the childlike stillness of the accepting human mind. The tone is
> lyrical, the meaning apocalyptic. Tolkien's Middle Earth and
> Lewis's Narnia were what these men thought and hoped that
> heaven might be like.
And yet he praises Malory highly. A world of nobles and serfs, the
latter scorned, and existing for their usefulness to the former. Such
as when Merlin declares that King Pellinore raping (and impregnating
and deflowering) a serf-girl between her betrothal and her wedding is
perfectly acceptable, because King Pellinore is an important
king...or when Sir Beaumains is scolded by the lady he is accompanying
because she mistakes him for a low-born man: she considers his company
demeaning to her, and only when she discovers that he must be
high-born does she accept him.
And Malory put a lot more religion into "le Morte d'Arthur" than
Tolkien ever did in the LotR...
Corvo.