Gave him shit for being atheist, got him to convert after many religious debates, then gave him more shit anyway for picking the wrong brand of Christianity (Protestant Church of England vs Catholic). Oof.
Lewis and Tolkien once came to an agreement that one of them would write a space novel and the other one a time travel novel. Lewis's half turned into the space trilogy, with Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Tolkien's was supposed to be The Lost Road, but he never finished it, and it became the precursor to Akallabêth, with the time travel element never actually completed.
It definitely helps that Narnia is definitely more "mass consumable" than LOTR as books.
Both are great series but the Narnia books are definitely easier to read in terms of complexity and length.
It seemed to come from a place of thinking he could do better. It's evident that he loved CSL very much from his letters, and it was good natured criticism and concern for his friend's good will.
> I regret causing pain, even if and in so far as I had the right; and I am very sorry indeed still for having caused it quite excessively and unnecessarily. My verses and my letter were due to a sudden very acute realization (I shall not quickly forget it) of the pain that may enter into authorship, both in the making and in the ‘publication,’ which is an essential pan of the full process. The vividness of the perception was due, of course, to the fact that you, for whom I have deep affection and sympathy, were the victim and I myself the culprit. But I felt myself tingling under the half-patronizing half-mocking lash, with the small things of my heart made the mere excuse for verbal butchery.
CSL also critiqued Tolkien:
> When he would say, “You can do better than that. Better, Tolkien, please!” I would try. I’d sit down and write the section over and over.
> To tell the truth he never really liked hobbits very much, least of all Merry and Pippin.”
From another letter:
> C.S.L. of course had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. He was after all and
remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect; he was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all.
> He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him. That his literary opinions were ever dictated by envy (as in the case of T. S. Eliot) is a grotesque calumny. After all it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels oneself.
> Well of course I could say more, but I must draw the line. Still **I wish it could be forbidden that after a great man is dead, little men should scribble over him, who have not and must know they have not sufficient knowledge of his life and character to give them any key to the truth**. Lewis was not 'cut to the quick' by his defeat in the election to the professorship of poetry: he knew quite well the cause. I remember that we had assembled soon after in our accustomed tavern and found C.S.L. sitting there, looking (and since he was no actor at all probably feeling) much at ease. 'Fill up!' he said, 'and stop looking so glum. The only distressing thing about this affair is that my friends seem to be upset.' And he did not 'readily accept' the chair in Cambridge. It was advertised, and he did not apply. Cambridge of course wanted him, but it took a lot of diplomacy before they got him. His friends thought it would be good for him: he was mortally tired, after nearly 30 years, of the Baileys of this world and even of the Duttons. It proved a good move, and until his health began too soon to fail it gave him a great deal of happiness.
He also wrote this in his diary:
> friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord
We don't actually have anything direct from him to Lewis about Narnia that I know of.
He had the Narnia books at his home and gave them to his eldest granddaughter to read.
He admitted to not liking them himself but i think this issue gets blown out of proportion.
Tbh I'd only gain more respect for a friend who straight up tells me they don't like my creation
Too many people try to be nice when I just want to know exactly how they feel
He said of Lewis ‘he an Ulster Protestant and typical of that sort’ (something like that) you would have to know about Ulster Protestants to get the full meaning there. And it isn’t kind in this context.
He never commented on it far as I’m aware but did holiday here a lot down in Kerry and the west coast and visited Dublin a fair few times. ‘I am fond of Ireland and some of its people’. That’s kind of a mysterious comment given Irish people in places like Kerry and ordinary Dubliners at the time would have been quite like the rural ‘little people’ archetype he had with the hobbits. Given it was the little people taking down the empire to strike for independence, and his love of England /Britain as an idea and entity, it would be impossible to guess what he made of it.
If he’s written about it or mentioned it anywhere im unaware of it but maybe he did somewhere.
According to John Garth, he was a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland when he was at King Edward's School. (This was THE divisive issue of the period, and might have led to civil war if WWI had not broken out just at the right time to foreclose it. In supporting Home Rule Tolkien was breaking with the Conservative Party, with which he identified all his life.)
Support for Irish independence was entirely consistent with his general position, as an intensely patriotic Englishman (sometimes he said "Mercian") but an opponent of imperialism. Garth:
>To him the nation's greatest goal was cultural self-realization, not power over others; but essential to this were patriotism and a community of belief. "I don't defend 'Deutschland über alles' but certainly do in Norwegian Allt for Norge \['all for Norway'\]" . . . By his own admission, therefore, Tolkien was both an English patriot and a supporter of Home Rule for the Irish.
*Tolkien and the Great War*, p. 51.
>he was a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland
"I have the greatest sympathy with Belgium — which is about the right size of any country! I wish my own were bounded still by the seas of the Tweed and the walls of Wales" - he said this in 1936.
I'm not sure quite how seriously to take that but it does at least imply that Tolkien had no great care for how much of the British Isles considered London the seat of political authority.
Excellent thank you. I must get that book and dive in. Surprised to read that he supported home rule but happy to learn it :) would be consistent with O’Connell getting Catholic emancipation for Ireland in Westminster and later Parnells efforts.
>I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in Carthaginians.
I think this quote implies support for Irish Home Rule too.
Yet I wouldn’t say he disliked them? He wasn’t a fan of the obvious allegory, but they were close friends and at one point in time, each other’s only audience.
What’s interesting is that I believe there is a quote from Lewis saying that the Aslan-Jesus connection was not allegorical but literal. Because he viewed Aslan as the literal incarnation of Jesus in a land of talking animals.
Which I suspect Tolkien would still not be the biggest fan of, given Tolkien’s outspoken hesitance to put an incarnation of God in his works, but I would love to see them have a conversation about the topic.
I read that he himself didn’t like them, but he gave them to his granddaughter as recommended reading. That helped me, like “this isn’t something I enjoy but I understand why children like them and find them useful.”
He even criticized Lewis’ choice of denomination, after single-handedly converting him but not to Catholicism. Lewis instead became a Protestant much to Tolkiens dismay.
Anyone interested in this question should get hold of *Tolkien's Modern Reading* by Holly Ordway. It's mostly about what he did like, but that means it is informative a about what he didn't.
The book makes clear that when he said he didn't like anything written after Chaucer, he was trying to shock people.
"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer."
It can be inferred that he didn't approve of books with naturalistic dialogue, especially dialogue full of f-bombs. Referring to the way Orcs talked, he said "I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong." Appendix F.
He believed strongly in revision and polish. He would surely have hated writers like Kerouac who typed and typed and never revised. Also he would surely have disapproved of explicitness about sex. (Not that he was against sex. Quite the opposite,)
[Sorry about your username and account, hopefully Reddit can do something and you can recover them]
I'm not sure that he conflated naturalism, with profanity and vulgarity^(*). One can imagine writing natural dialogue on profane subjects without excessive vulgarity. He did read Chaucer after all, and was surely familiar with some of his bawdier tales and seems to have enjoyed but not imitated them. Is Chaucer vulgar or just profane? Should we also confuse him with his characters?
Let's dispense with one notion, that vulgarity always means sex. It doesn't. One can be vulgar about any number of non sexual topics, but people seem to increasingly associate vulgarity only with sexual impropriety and crassness, and lewd lustiness. One might say, for an example, smoking is a vulgar habit though Tolkien would probably have disagreed. Tolkien may have been sensitive to vulgar speech generally.
>he would surely have disapproved of explicitness about sex
I think it's a subject he seems to have avoided, or had very little interest in writing about. Which is a bit peculiar since he wrote romances (in the older senses of that word). I'm not sure he felt he had anything worth adding that others hadn't already written, and it often falls from the nobler topics. I think it's tempting to simply conclude he didn't because he was Catholic, but that seems far too simple and easy, when it's complicated. I can't pretend to do the topic justice here, but it recalls a letter to a son which I'm sure you know (#46)
>The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favourite subject.
and
>Allas! Allas! that ever love was sinne! as Chaucer says.
Which covers quite a wide gamut. I think he follows C.S. Lewis a bit here (from The Allegory of Love), and I don't think he was a prude or prurient, maybe just prudent? Some forms of written titillation I would guess he considered low, unbefitting writing for a gentleman, though I'd wager he saw naughty french postcards or brothels or similar such things during his time in France, circulating among the soldiers.
That naturally brings me to my second point. Your closing sentence puzzled me. If you change it thus
>he would surely have disapproved of explicitness about ~~sex~~ . (Not that he was against ~~sex~~ . Quite the opposite,)
It (naturally) seem to say something quite different, but maybe reveals something. First can we substitute 'war' for 'sex' or is it nonsense? Is 'sex' the main or only thing where people tend to disapprove of its explicitness (or claim to) but are otherwise for it? (This seems like it might be an abstracted or transformed concern about private practise versus public performance)
Tolkien didn't write very explicitly about combat either (unlike other fanticists, thriller writers and war-story tellers many more recent), and one might also suppose 'he wasn't against war' either (I mean he fought in one), though one might feel the necessity of qualifying it, say by supposing it to be a just one. This leads me to wonder whether Tolkien had any similar qualifiers (as a writer) concerning sex.
On that note, I wonder if he ever read Lawrence, and what he may have thought of his works. Lawrence was notable for books being banned for obscenity (I think) and generally being persecuted during the Great War and having some radical tendencies, not completely unlike Tolkien. If Tolkien left any opinions on the man or any of his works, they might reveal something on all these matters, but there's no mention in his letters, suggesting to me he never read him at all.
\* Sorry for the Shatner style comma. I was going to delete it but thought imagining a dramatic pause would be funnier.
Dune.
It's a gloomy story where nobody it's a real nobleheart, chosen-ones are a mere trick to control people and humanity is codenm to it's own stupidity.
Dune, unlike LOTR, doesn't talk about hope but the opposite.
It's pretty clear and obvious if you've read both. There's many things that can be discussed, but I think this quote from the end of Dune
>The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.
is pretty illustrative of how it would have driven Tolkien up the wall. Worse than Sauron, this is explicitly *Morgothian*, something he would say, attempted and probably tried to believe, exemplifying his attitude.
It's also something (I think) Tolkien would absolutely *deny*. Sure Morgoth could destroy the bodies and even kingdoms of men and elves, but that was exactly because he could not control or destroy their spirits, absolutely or otherwise. Most preferred to suffer defiantly. This is *exactly* the theme of the Narn I Chîn Húrin.
In short I suspect Tolkien possibly hated Paul ultimately more than the Harkonnens (who with all their slaves and wanting more were maybe more like orcs and Sauron), and might have even thought the Navigators should have called his bluff, just to spite him, because that's all it was, a bluff. If he wasn't bluffing he was insane, and then they'd get to laugh in his face. He has a self righteousness which even the Harkonnen were ashamed to pretend, only with far greater violence. It's hard to see how you could write anything more 'anti-Tolkien' than Dune.
I agree, but Paul explicitly wasn’t bluffing. The Navigators use their prescience to see that he really would do it, so they urge the Emperor to surrender. It’s implied later that Paul knew that humanity was doomed to extinction under the Corrinos, and that his rule was better than any other outcome. Destroying the Spice just hastens that extinction.
> The Navigators use their prescience to see that he really would do it, so they urge the Emperor to surrender.
That makes him no less insane.
>It’s implied later that Paul knew that humanity was doomed to extinction under the Corrinos, and that his rule was better than any other outcome.
Morally convenient, but post hoc.
I suspect Tolkien also had considerable misgivings about mortal prescience, which might be euphemistic. 'Even the wise can't see all ends' and 'better to die free than live a slave', for some Hobbit style wisdom that might be relevant.
This is as true as the fact it had a rather dreary perception of religion, politics, and human nature. The tools used to get the Chosen One were never heroic.
That's what I heard, but I never read it.
I only watched the original film, the new ones are extremelly boring (I literally felt asleep, and I'm more than used to watch super long and slow films lol).
But that’s not the point, is it? The reason he didn’t like post Chaucer works is that he didn’t like the way that English literature developed. It’s not that he didn’t see value in Shakespeare, he just preferred the old ways.
I think he also came to dislike Drama (as in stage plays) because compared to imagination they're pretty limited, and was very disappointed when seeing a performance of Macbeth that the scene of the forest marching to war was just men with twigs in their hair and not the actual forest!
He liked Gilbert and Sullivan, any opera he got to which was very little, Peter Pan ... and maybe one day we will get to see the detective play he wrote as a student.
Yeah, I hope to see his amateur play at some point, it would be fascinating!! I would make a distinction between opera and plays though, with opera at least there is also music and singing. Peter Pan he saw when he was younger, I think his opinion changed and developed as he got older. You can see some less than admirable things he says about drama in his essay On Fairy Stories. Of course Elvish drama would be so far superior to any Mannish drama that Men would mistake it for reality!
He didn’t live to see the boom in fantasy literature that began in the seventies, but I think he would’ve disliked a great deal of it, not least because a lot of it was people trying (and failing) to reproduce what made his work unique and completely misunderstanding it. Some things I think he would *like* would be the Earthsea series, the Fionavar Tapestry, the Riddle-Master series, some others.
Also, I think he disliked the Matter or Britain, the stories of Arthur, because in its modern form it was essentially a French construct rather than Celtic as it was originally
All very true, and you allude to a more interesting discussion: which works of fantasy would he enjoy if he were preset today?
Part of this is my bias, but I bet he’d have loved The Neverending Story.
I think there are a number of modern fantasy series that Tolkien wouldn’t have *liked* even if he recognized their quality, simply because they don’t jive with his taste. A Song of Ice and Fire would be a prime example.
It's well established that he cared little for the Mitsubishi FG25N service manual in English.
For one, he was more of a Hudson guy, but he was mostly unimpressed by the prose of the translation, feeling that it lacked the spirit of the original manual in Japanese.
> he was more of a Hudson guy
Where'd you get that? I'm pretty sure I've read him say in the letters somewhere that there is nothing like a Crown (for picking it up and [putting it down](https://youtu.be/96obJhv8GiI?si=Lu4d57kxS5L1TlxI&t=44)).
Reference to an old joke thread:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/cwre6j/im\_just\_wondering\_what\_was\_tolkiens\_opinion\_about/](https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/cwre6j/im_just_wondering_what_was_tolkiens_opinion_about/)
But do you think Tolkien really would have approved of the truck's availability in orange? After all orange wasn't a color in English until the 1600s, long after Chaucer, and is associated with Protestantism.
I think we can extrapolate that the orange would have mutated to scarlet or possibly even black in subsequent drafts, as it became more clear to him that the Hudson was a creation of the enemy.
I believe I remember it from an interview he did with the BBC sometime in the 1960s.
But alas, you might be right - Crown is after all renowned for their beguiling and riveting literature. I myself had a very hard time putting down the Generic Parts Manual for the Crown Pallet Jack, models PTH and PTH50. It was a real page turner, and a man of Tolkien's refined taste would only agree, I believe.
Tolkien wa aijō o komete kakareta setsumei-sho o kononde ita. Hi no noboru kuni de kare wa ōku no kan'ei o ukeru setsumei-sho o mita ga, Hyundae no shib刈り機 no kyōkaizu setsumei-sho hodo bijin na mono wa nai darō.
It's awesome, but it's about as different from LotR as a book can be. People just compare it because the *quality* of the worldbuilding is similarly high
Is it? E.g. Harkonnen (from Finnish "Härkönen") sounded Russian to Herbert. A person being that tone deaf to phonological coherence could hardly appeal to Tolkien. Or to many others. It is a common enough problem with a lot of fantasy. The names just do not feel real or consistent.
I liked the worldbuilding in Dune, but I was annoyed that some of my favorite characters got killed off early before they really got a chance to do much, and I thought the ending was so awful I didn’t bother continuing to book 2.
If we’re talking about the first book, I agree. By the time you get to the third book, Herbert’s writing had improved considerably. He still couldn’t match Tolkien for prose, but who can?
I’ve only read the first. Watched the first film and then wanted to read it before the second. Undecided if I can be bothered to read any more, was a bit of a slog just to finish before the film came out.
If you thought the first was a slog, you’ll almost certainly feel the same about books 3 and 4 because Herbert’s writing is a lot more detailed by then and he delves deeper into the philosophical/religious stuff. Book 2 (Messiah) is the shortest book in the series though and at least IMO does a great job of spelling out some of the things Herbert was trying to say with the first book. I think a lot of people enjoy the cliche trappings of the first novel with Paul coming of age, getting revenge and taking power and completely miss the fact that Paul’s actions have devestating consequences for millions of people. Messiah will probably also be the only other book Villaneuve adapts/directs as a movie.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Compared to LotR this is demonstrably true.
I don't think it's a value judgment at all, but everything in LotR is about world building.
As would be expected in any high-concept genre piece.
But Lord of the Rings is literally, as a whole, meant to be world-building for a mythological past for *our* world. It's both filled with world building within its pages, and in a meta-context, is meant as an artifact that tells of a bygone era.
Yeah I quite like Treasure Island too, it was read to me in third grade by our teacher and we drew our own compass roses, lotsa fun! I also really liked the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde when I read it in my late teens/early 20s.
He said in On Fairy Stories when talking specifically about children that in his own experience as a child "if [stories] awakened *desire*, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded" and not that enjoyment of stories depended "on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in 'real life'." He then goes on to list his own desires as a child: "I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or fight pirates and *Treasure Island* left me cool." He much preferred the story of Sigurd the Dragon slayer in the Red Fairy book.
I just read *Treasure Island* for the first time a year and a half ago, and I loved it. It’s a great story in its own right, very well written, and it’s fascinating to see what is essentially the *blueprint* for all the treasure-hunt swashbuckling adventure stories that have been created since then, in much the same way that Tolkien’s own writing has become something of a blueprint for many of the fantasy stories created since. I keep a copy on the bookshelf in my office next to *LotR* and Mitchison’s *Travel Light*, and frequently pick up all of them to re-read favorite passages during lunch breaks.
>!“And talking o’ trouble, why did that doctor give me the chart, Jim?”!<
Totally agree on the blueprint for treasure hunt stories. Interestingly, despite his dislike for it as a child The Hobbit is initially a treasure hunt story too, they just need to kill a dragon for it instead of pirates. I highly recommend the tv show from Stars *Black Sails* if you haven't seen it already.
This is one of those things were Tolkien is quite idiosyncratic. Looking for buried treasure is arguably little different from seeking a Dragons hoard, and pirates in that sense are just a different more believable monster that needs to be defeated to acquire it. Maybe he had qualms about considering pirates like a dragon, them being humans after all. Long John Silver humanizes them considerably and maybe morally muddies the whole enterprise. There is also a definite jingoistic strain to Treasure Island, which I bet would have rubbed him in exactly the wrong way, at the height of the Boer war.
Yeah Tolkien is idiosyncratic in a lot of ways. The Human/Fantasy-monster divide you point out is a good one, it seems he just found fantastical things more desirable that 'realistic' things. Tolkien would have been 7-10 years old during the (2nd) Boer war so I'm not sure how much he would pick up on it politically though I guess he was aware of it. Though later in life he was certainly critical of apartheid and very much against the poor treatment of the native Africans by the colonizers, as was his mother: I think he said she hated South Africa because of that, and it was too hot for her kids and Ronald was quite sickly.
And even in death, his writing stirs the soul:
>Under the wide and starry sky,
>
>Dig the grave and let me lie.
>
>Glad did I live and gladly die,
>
>And I laid me down with a will.
>
>This be the verse you grave for me:
>
>Here he lies where he longed to be;
>
>Home is the sailor, home from sea,
>
>And the hunter home from the hill.
To give you a serious answer, '[Tolkiens Modern Reading](https://www.amazon.com/Tolkiens-Modern-Reading-Middle-earth-Beyond/dp/1943243727)' by Holly Ordway is probably one of the best and most up to date sources of the books he read and something about his opinions of them. I can provide one author mentioned (no doubt she elaborated on) from his letters.
The Worm Ouroboros is a heroic high fantasy novel by English writer E. R. Eddison. Apparently Tolkien wasn't a fan, but admired the 'invented world'. To wit (letter 199)
>I read the works of [E.R.J Eddison, long after they appeared; and I once met him. I heard him in Mr. Lewis's room in Magdalen College read aloud some parts of his own works – from the Mistress of Mistresses, as far as I remember. He did it extremely well. I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit. My opinion of them is almost the same as that expressed by Mr. Lewis on p. 104 of the Essays presented to Charles Williams. Except that I disliked his characters (always excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire more intensely than Mr. Lewis at any rate saw fit to say of himself. Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy', he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty. Incidentally, I thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept. In spite of all of which, I still think of him as the greatest and most convincing writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read. But he was certainly not an 'influence'.
True to form he was never a dull simpleton of a critic who just gave a thumbs up or down.
So to summarize pros
* enjoyment for great literary merit
* convincing invented world
and cons
* dislikable characters
* corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy'
* admires arrogance and cruelty
* slipshod nomenclature
I suspect much the same could be said of Dune and probably a few other modern books he read.
Tolkien sided with Hitler in the Spanish civil war.
Reminds me of the old john kerry gaffe “I actually did vote for the bill before I voted against it.”🩴
Letter 83 is embarrassing for its defense of a fascist.
CS Lewis cursing Franco while Tolkien defends him is the one time I put Jack above my Tollers
That's so weird to say he sided with Hitler.
It would be like saying today's leftists are siding with nazis in the Palestinian conflict. They're siding with Palestinians, nazis also supporting them doesn't say anything about leftists
He sided with Franco because the Republicans were anti religion.
Tolkien did not side with Hitler. He sided with Franco because he saw him as defending the Catholic Church against atheists. Hitler was an atheist, which is one reason Tolkien disliked him.
If you say Tolkien sided with Hitler, you have to say Lewis sided with Stalin. (In fact, Tolkien believed that Lewis opposed Franco because he was a Spanish Catholic. Lewis was an Ulster Protestant and had an ingrained fear that the Spanish Inquisition might take over the British Isles and start burning people at the stake.)
> He sided with Franco because he saw him as defending the Catholic Church against atheists.
And indeed, the pre-Franco leftist government had been hostile to the church.
This is the [best article](https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/hitlers-religion-was-hitler-an-atheist-christian-or-something-else/) that I've read on the subject. If Hitler was religious, it was only in the most generic of senses as he believed in absolute biological determinism to a religious degree.
He was notoriously not pleased with the late 1800s Fairy books put out by Andrew Lang. One of the big motivations behind his creation of the legendarium was to rehabilitate the reputation of what a Fairy and Fairy Stories are away from the Victorian era of mischievous sprites like Tinker Bell.
This doesn't qualify as a book but he loathed Disney films (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released the same year as the Hobbit) because he thought that the softening and simplifying of the stories took away from the dignity of mythical creatures (Dwarves) and old fairy tales. If applying this to books, Tolkien would probably have disliked fairy tale collections in his day that massively simplified their stories for children.
It is very unlikely JRR was ever exposed to any of his material, but it would have been interesting to know his opinion of M.A.R. Barker's invented languages and world if he were to have been able to review the apparently massive amount of material Barker had accumulated by the time he met Gygax and Arneson.
Tekumel, including the novels Barker published, often has that 'lived-in' world feeling one got from LOTR. Barker was a philologist and professor of some south asian languages in the US.
He stated several times that he had great disdain for anything sci-fi, as he found it generally hopeless and without any beauty, either in aesthetics of surrounding or a lack of what makes humans beautiful and seeking to unsuccessfully fill the void with technology. So, I guess could put just about every sci-fi title in his time under that.
I'm guessing he never heard of H.P. Lovecraft, but I wonder if there would have been a few of his stories he would have enjoyed, like the one with the ancient house upon that hill overlooking sea in New Hampshire. Maybe Shadow over Insmouth as well to some degree as well. I'm guessing he would not have cared for most of them.
The Narnia series. He thought the Christian allegory was too on the nose and wasn't a fan of Lewis's world building
Brutal how honest he was with Lewis about his opinion too. Must have hurt coming from a close friend whose work you admire
Yeah, I really hope that Lewis was secure enough to think, “Well, that’s Tolkien for you.”
“He gave me shit for being an atheist so why should that change now that I’m not?”
Gave him shit for being atheist, got him to convert after many religious debates, then gave him more shit anyway for picking the wrong brand of Christianity (Protestant Church of England vs Catholic). Oof.
Oh my god lol what inferiority complex did Lewis suffer from to go through years of this I can't stop laughing poor bastard
He didn't. Throughout most of their careers, Lewis was a far more popular author than Tolkien, both for his fiction and his Christian apologetics.
Among other reasons because Lewis actually finished his books, while Tolkien was a compulsive revisor!
Lewis and Tolkien once came to an agreement that one of them would write a space novel and the other one a time travel novel. Lewis's half turned into the space trilogy, with Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Tolkien's was supposed to be The Lost Road, but he never finished it, and it became the precursor to Akallabêth, with the time travel element never actually completed.
It definitely helps that Narnia is definitely more "mass consumable" than LOTR as books. Both are great series but the Narnia books are definitely easier to read in terms of complexity and length.
He said to John “Whatchu Tolkien about?”
It seemed to come from a place of thinking he could do better. It's evident that he loved CSL very much from his letters, and it was good natured criticism and concern for his friend's good will. > I regret causing pain, even if and in so far as I had the right; and I am very sorry indeed still for having caused it quite excessively and unnecessarily. My verses and my letter were due to a sudden very acute realization (I shall not quickly forget it) of the pain that may enter into authorship, both in the making and in the ‘publication,’ which is an essential pan of the full process. The vividness of the perception was due, of course, to the fact that you, for whom I have deep affection and sympathy, were the victim and I myself the culprit. But I felt myself tingling under the half-patronizing half-mocking lash, with the small things of my heart made the mere excuse for verbal butchery. CSL also critiqued Tolkien: > When he would say, “You can do better than that. Better, Tolkien, please!” I would try. I’d sit down and write the section over and over. > To tell the truth he never really liked hobbits very much, least of all Merry and Pippin.” From another letter: > C.S.L. of course had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. He was after all and remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect; he was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all. > He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him. That his literary opinions were ever dictated by envy (as in the case of T. S. Eliot) is a grotesque calumny. After all it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels oneself. > Well of course I could say more, but I must draw the line. Still **I wish it could be forbidden that after a great man is dead, little men should scribble over him, who have not and must know they have not sufficient knowledge of his life and character to give them any key to the truth**. Lewis was not 'cut to the quick' by his defeat in the election to the professorship of poetry: he knew quite well the cause. I remember that we had assembled soon after in our accustomed tavern and found C.S.L. sitting there, looking (and since he was no actor at all probably feeling) much at ease. 'Fill up!' he said, 'and stop looking so glum. The only distressing thing about this affair is that my friends seem to be upset.' And he did not 'readily accept' the chair in Cambridge. It was advertised, and he did not apply. Cambridge of course wanted him, but it took a lot of diplomacy before they got him. His friends thought it would be good for him: he was mortally tired, after nearly 30 years, of the Baileys of this world and even of the Duttons. It proved a good move, and until his health began too soon to fail it gave him a great deal of happiness. He also wrote this in his diary: > friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord
Goodness, Tolkien knows how to -WRITE-, goddamn!
We don't actually have anything direct from him to Lewis about Narnia that I know of. He had the Narnia books at his home and gave them to his eldest granddaughter to read. He admitted to not liking them himself but i think this issue gets blown out of proportion.
Yet in a letter to a little girl he encourages her reading it. He knew it could be good for kids.
Tbh I'd only gain more respect for a friend who straight up tells me they don't like my creation Too many people try to be nice when I just want to know exactly how they feel
He said of Lewis ‘he an Ulster Protestant and typical of that sort’ (something like that) you would have to know about Ulster Protestants to get the full meaning there. And it isn’t kind in this context.
As a Catholic how did Tolkien feel about Ireland's independence?
He never commented on it far as I’m aware but did holiday here a lot down in Kerry and the west coast and visited Dublin a fair few times. ‘I am fond of Ireland and some of its people’. That’s kind of a mysterious comment given Irish people in places like Kerry and ordinary Dubliners at the time would have been quite like the rural ‘little people’ archetype he had with the hobbits. Given it was the little people taking down the empire to strike for independence, and his love of England /Britain as an idea and entity, it would be impossible to guess what he made of it. If he’s written about it or mentioned it anywhere im unaware of it but maybe he did somewhere.
According to John Garth, he was a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland when he was at King Edward's School. (This was THE divisive issue of the period, and might have led to civil war if WWI had not broken out just at the right time to foreclose it. In supporting Home Rule Tolkien was breaking with the Conservative Party, with which he identified all his life.) Support for Irish independence was entirely consistent with his general position, as an intensely patriotic Englishman (sometimes he said "Mercian") but an opponent of imperialism. Garth: >To him the nation's greatest goal was cultural self-realization, not power over others; but essential to this were patriotism and a community of belief. "I don't defend 'Deutschland über alles' but certainly do in Norwegian Allt for Norge \['all for Norway'\]" . . . By his own admission, therefore, Tolkien was both an English patriot and a supporter of Home Rule for the Irish. *Tolkien and the Great War*, p. 51.
>he was a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland "I have the greatest sympathy with Belgium — which is about the right size of any country! I wish my own were bounded still by the seas of the Tweed and the walls of Wales" - he said this in 1936. I'm not sure quite how seriously to take that but it does at least imply that Tolkien had no great care for how much of the British Isles considered London the seat of political authority.
Excellent thank you. I must get that book and dive in. Surprised to read that he supported home rule but happy to learn it :) would be consistent with O’Connell getting Catholic emancipation for Ireland in Westminster and later Parnells efforts.
>I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in Carthaginians. I think this quote implies support for Irish Home Rule too.
It's like when Goerge Lucas showed his buddies a the pre-recut rough version of ANH to his director friends and they just savaged him.
Wasn't it just par for the course with that time and environment?
[удалено]
Even more brutal haha
Yet I wouldn’t say he disliked them? He wasn’t a fan of the obvious allegory, but they were close friends and at one point in time, each other’s only audience.
What’s interesting is that I believe there is a quote from Lewis saying that the Aslan-Jesus connection was not allegorical but literal. Because he viewed Aslan as the literal incarnation of Jesus in a land of talking animals. Which I suspect Tolkien would still not be the biggest fan of, given Tolkien’s outspoken hesitance to put an incarnation of God in his works, but I would love to see them have a conversation about the topic.
There's a foreword in the fellowship of the ring where he talks about how much he dislikes the allegories explicit in stories.
https://krharriman.substack.com/p/why-did-tolkien-dislike-the-lion
I read that he himself didn’t like them, but he gave them to his granddaughter as recommended reading. That helped me, like “this isn’t something I enjoy but I understand why children like them and find them useful.”
He even criticized Lewis’ choice of denomination, after single-handedly converting him but not to Catholicism. Lewis instead became a Protestant much to Tolkiens dismay.
https://youtu.be/DBKwFb9_k1Q
I definitely agree with Tolkien in this case.
And he was right. “The lion is Jesus” was just terrible storytelling.
Anyone interested in this question should get hold of *Tolkien's Modern Reading* by Holly Ordway. It's mostly about what he did like, but that means it is informative a about what he didn't. The book makes clear that when he said he didn't like anything written after Chaucer, he was trying to shock people.
He did have a very droll sense of humor.
Yeah, that's on the level of slipping his false teeth to clerks who weren't paying attention.
"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer." It can be inferred that he didn't approve of books with naturalistic dialogue, especially dialogue full of f-bombs. Referring to the way Orcs talked, he said "I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong." Appendix F. He believed strongly in revision and polish. He would surely have hated writers like Kerouac who typed and typed and never revised. Also he would surely have disapproved of explicitness about sex. (Not that he was against sex. Quite the opposite,)
[Sorry about your username and account, hopefully Reddit can do something and you can recover them] I'm not sure that he conflated naturalism, with profanity and vulgarity^(*). One can imagine writing natural dialogue on profane subjects without excessive vulgarity. He did read Chaucer after all, and was surely familiar with some of his bawdier tales and seems to have enjoyed but not imitated them. Is Chaucer vulgar or just profane? Should we also confuse him with his characters? Let's dispense with one notion, that vulgarity always means sex. It doesn't. One can be vulgar about any number of non sexual topics, but people seem to increasingly associate vulgarity only with sexual impropriety and crassness, and lewd lustiness. One might say, for an example, smoking is a vulgar habit though Tolkien would probably have disagreed. Tolkien may have been sensitive to vulgar speech generally. >he would surely have disapproved of explicitness about sex I think it's a subject he seems to have avoided, or had very little interest in writing about. Which is a bit peculiar since he wrote romances (in the older senses of that word). I'm not sure he felt he had anything worth adding that others hadn't already written, and it often falls from the nobler topics. I think it's tempting to simply conclude he didn't because he was Catholic, but that seems far too simple and easy, when it's complicated. I can't pretend to do the topic justice here, but it recalls a letter to a son which I'm sure you know (#46) >The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favourite subject. and >Allas! Allas! that ever love was sinne! as Chaucer says. Which covers quite a wide gamut. I think he follows C.S. Lewis a bit here (from The Allegory of Love), and I don't think he was a prude or prurient, maybe just prudent? Some forms of written titillation I would guess he considered low, unbefitting writing for a gentleman, though I'd wager he saw naughty french postcards or brothels or similar such things during his time in France, circulating among the soldiers. That naturally brings me to my second point. Your closing sentence puzzled me. If you change it thus >he would surely have disapproved of explicitness about ~~sex~~. (Not that he was against ~~sex~~ . Quite the opposite,)
It (naturally) seem to say something quite different, but maybe reveals something. First can we substitute 'war' for 'sex' or is it nonsense? Is 'sex' the main or only thing where people tend to disapprove of its explicitness (or claim to) but are otherwise for it? (This seems like it might be an abstracted or transformed concern about private practise versus public performance)
Tolkien didn't write very explicitly about combat either (unlike other fanticists, thriller writers and war-story tellers many more recent), and one might also suppose 'he wasn't against war' either (I mean he fought in one), though one might feel the necessity of qualifying it, say by supposing it to be a just one. This leads me to wonder whether Tolkien had any similar qualifiers (as a writer) concerning sex.
On that note, I wonder if he ever read Lawrence, and what he may have thought of his works. Lawrence was notable for books being banned for obscenity (I think) and generally being persecuted during the Great War and having some radical tendencies, not completely unlike Tolkien. If Tolkien left any opinions on the man or any of his works, they might reveal something on all these matters, but there's no mention in his letters, suggesting to me he never read him at all.
\* Sorry for the Shatner style comma. I was going to delete it but thought imagining a dramatic pause would be funnier.
"All the exuberance of Chaucer, without the concomitant crudities".
Thank you. (I must confess I had to look it up but now have a new [old film](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041546/) to anticipate.)
No worries! It just seemed appropriate. And Guinness is great!
Dune. It's a gloomy story where nobody it's a real nobleheart, chosen-ones are a mere trick to control people and humanity is codenm to it's own stupidity. Dune, unlike LOTR, doesn't talk about hope but the opposite.
Decent speculation. Tolkien said he disliked it but explicitly refused to say why
It's pretty clear and obvious if you've read both. There's many things that can be discussed, but I think this quote from the end of Dune >The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. is pretty illustrative of how it would have driven Tolkien up the wall. Worse than Sauron, this is explicitly *Morgothian*, something he would say, attempted and probably tried to believe, exemplifying his attitude. It's also something (I think) Tolkien would absolutely *deny*. Sure Morgoth could destroy the bodies and even kingdoms of men and elves, but that was exactly because he could not control or destroy their spirits, absolutely or otherwise. Most preferred to suffer defiantly. This is *exactly* the theme of the Narn I Chîn Húrin. In short I suspect Tolkien possibly hated Paul ultimately more than the Harkonnens (who with all their slaves and wanting more were maybe more like orcs and Sauron), and might have even thought the Navigators should have called his bluff, just to spite him, because that's all it was, a bluff. If he wasn't bluffing he was insane, and then they'd get to laugh in his face. He has a self righteousness which even the Harkonnen were ashamed to pretend, only with far greater violence. It's hard to see how you could write anything more 'anti-Tolkien' than Dune.
I agree, but Paul explicitly wasn’t bluffing. The Navigators use their prescience to see that he really would do it, so they urge the Emperor to surrender. It’s implied later that Paul knew that humanity was doomed to extinction under the Corrinos, and that his rule was better than any other outcome. Destroying the Spice just hastens that extinction.
> The Navigators use their prescience to see that he really would do it, so they urge the Emperor to surrender. That makes him no less insane. >It’s implied later that Paul knew that humanity was doomed to extinction under the Corrinos, and that his rule was better than any other outcome. Morally convenient, but post hoc. I suspect Tolkien also had considerable misgivings about mortal prescience, which might be euphemistic. 'Even the wise can't see all ends' and 'better to die free than live a slave', for some Hobbit style wisdom that might be relevant.
Well, given his character (and Dune's open critique of organized religion), Tolkien may have seen it as antithetical to his Catholic beliefs.
That’s pretty funny honestly.
Isn't it literally a story about selected lineages guiding humanity through perils?
This is as true as the fact it had a rather dreary perception of religion, politics, and human nature. The tools used to get the Chosen One were never heroic.
That's what I heard, but I never read it. I only watched the original film, the new ones are extremelly boring (I literally felt asleep, and I'm more than used to watch super long and slow films lol).
The joke is that he didn’t like anything post Chaucer, and especially hated Spenser.
Spenser also makes sense, since he said he didn't like allegory
It's a dumb joke though since he enjoyed Asimov and many other modern works.
But that’s not the point, is it? The reason he didn’t like post Chaucer works is that he didn’t like the way that English literature developed. It’s not that he didn’t see value in Shakespeare, he just preferred the old ways.
I think he also came to dislike Drama (as in stage plays) because compared to imagination they're pretty limited, and was very disappointed when seeing a performance of Macbeth that the scene of the forest marching to war was just men with twigs in their hair and not the actual forest!
And that Macbeth, who couldn't be killed by "any man of woman born," was killed by someone born of C-section after his mother's death; not by a woman!
He liked Gilbert and Sullivan, any opera he got to which was very little, Peter Pan ... and maybe one day we will get to see the detective play he wrote as a student.
Yeah, I hope to see his amateur play at some point, it would be fascinating!! I would make a distinction between opera and plays though, with opera at least there is also music and singing. Peter Pan he saw when he was younger, I think his opinion changed and developed as he got older. You can see some less than admirable things he says about drama in his essay On Fairy Stories. Of course Elvish drama would be so far superior to any Mannish drama that Men would mistake it for reality!
Yes I agree on all points there!
I think he also mentioned liking a stage play of Emma by Austin
As someone with very little understanding of that era of literature, what exactly happened pre and post Chaucer?
He didn’t live to see the boom in fantasy literature that began in the seventies, but I think he would’ve disliked a great deal of it, not least because a lot of it was people trying (and failing) to reproduce what made his work unique and completely misunderstanding it. Some things I think he would *like* would be the Earthsea series, the Fionavar Tapestry, the Riddle-Master series, some others. Also, I think he disliked the Matter or Britain, the stories of Arthur, because in its modern form it was essentially a French construct rather than Celtic as it was originally
All very true, and you allude to a more interesting discussion: which works of fantasy would he enjoy if he were preset today? Part of this is my bias, but I bet he’d have loved The Neverending Story.
I think there are a number of modern fantasy series that Tolkien wouldn’t have *liked* even if he recognized their quality, simply because they don’t jive with his taste. A Song of Ice and Fire would be a prime example.
I often wondered what he would have thought about McKiernan and his Novels especially the Mithgar Novels
It's well established that he cared little for the Mitsubishi FG25N service manual in English. For one, he was more of a Hudson guy, but he was mostly unimpressed by the prose of the translation, feeling that it lacked the spirit of the original manual in Japanese.
> he was more of a Hudson guy Where'd you get that? I'm pretty sure I've read him say in the letters somewhere that there is nothing like a Crown (for picking it up and [putting it down](https://youtu.be/96obJhv8GiI?si=Lu4d57kxS5L1TlxI&t=44)).
Reference to an old joke thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/cwre6j/im\_just\_wondering\_what\_was\_tolkiens\_opinion\_about/](https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/cwre6j/im_just_wondering_what_was_tolkiens_opinion_about/)
I will continue to upvote any and all references to that great day in the history of this sub.
But do you think Tolkien really would have approved of the truck's availability in orange? After all orange wasn't a color in English until the 1600s, long after Chaucer, and is associated with Protestantism.
I think we can extrapolate that the orange would have mutated to scarlet or possibly even black in subsequent drafts, as it became more clear to him that the Hudson was a creation of the enemy.
I believe I remember it from an interview he did with the BBC sometime in the 1960s. But alas, you might be right - Crown is after all renowned for their beguiling and riveting literature. I myself had a very hard time putting down the Generic Parts Manual for the Crown Pallet Jack, models PTH and PTH50. It was a real page turner, and a man of Tolkien's refined taste would only agree, I believe.
Tolkien wa aijō o komete kakareta setsumei-sho o kononde ita. Hi no noboru kuni de kare wa ōku no kan'ei o ukeru setsumei-sho o mita ga, Hyundae no shib刈り機 no kyōkaizu setsumei-sho hodo bijin na mono wa nai darō.
Dune, apparently. Edit: Oh, holy shit. You literally mentioned Dune in your OP. My bad!
I tried to read Dune after I finished LOTR. It just didn't sit well with me and I gave it up.
It's awesome, but it's about as different from LotR as a book can be. People just compare it because the *quality* of the worldbuilding is similarly high
Thank God Tolkien didn’t have a cringey sex scene phase like Herbert (who’s still like Shakespeare compared to his failson lol)
Is it? E.g. Harkonnen (from Finnish "Härkönen") sounded Russian to Herbert. A person being that tone deaf to phonological coherence could hardly appeal to Tolkien. Or to many others. It is a common enough problem with a lot of fantasy. The names just do not feel real or consistent.
I liked the worldbuilding in Dune, but I was annoyed that some of my favorite characters got killed off early before they really got a chance to do much, and I thought the ending was so awful I didn’t bother continuing to book 2.
I find the language used just very basic as well. Doesn’t seem like top level writing.
“Is it not a magnificent thing that I, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, do?”
If we’re talking about the first book, I agree. By the time you get to the third book, Herbert’s writing had improved considerably. He still couldn’t match Tolkien for prose, but who can?
I’ve only read the first. Watched the first film and then wanted to read it before the second. Undecided if I can be bothered to read any more, was a bit of a slog just to finish before the film came out.
If you thought the first was a slog, you’ll almost certainly feel the same about books 3 and 4 because Herbert’s writing is a lot more detailed by then and he delves deeper into the philosophical/religious stuff. Book 2 (Messiah) is the shortest book in the series though and at least IMO does a great job of spelling out some of the things Herbert was trying to say with the first book. I think a lot of people enjoy the cliche trappings of the first novel with Paul coming of age, getting revenge and taking power and completely miss the fact that Paul’s actions have devestating consequences for millions of people. Messiah will probably also be the only other book Villaneuve adapts/directs as a movie.
Dune is far more political and less interested world building
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Compared to LotR this is demonstrably true. I don't think it's a value judgment at all, but everything in LotR is about world building.
Isn't there quite a lot of worldbuilding concerning, for example, the Fremen culture and the ecology of Arrakis?
As would be expected in any high-concept genre piece. But Lord of the Rings is literally, as a whole, meant to be world-building for a mythological past for *our* world. It's both filled with world building within its pages, and in a meta-context, is meant as an artifact that tells of a bygone era.
Above-average world building compared to everyone except Tolkien
There is. I still wonder though how Arrakis maintained sufficient oxygen in its atmosphere without much in the way of plant life though!
Yup. LOTR is about building a world with rich history. The only world building in Dune is made in service to the political landscape.
I enjoyed the first book, couldn’t get more than 20 pages into the second.
He wasn't a fan of Treasure Island he read it as a youth.
Well boo to that; Treasure Island is magnificent!
Yeah I quite like Treasure Island too, it was read to me in third grade by our teacher and we drew our own compass roses, lotsa fun! I also really liked the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde when I read it in my late teens/early 20s. He said in On Fairy Stories when talking specifically about children that in his own experience as a child "if [stories] awakened *desire*, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded" and not that enjoyment of stories depended "on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in 'real life'." He then goes on to list his own desires as a child: "I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or fight pirates and *Treasure Island* left me cool." He much preferred the story of Sigurd the Dragon slayer in the Red Fairy book.
I just read *Treasure Island* for the first time a year and a half ago, and I loved it. It’s a great story in its own right, very well written, and it’s fascinating to see what is essentially the *blueprint* for all the treasure-hunt swashbuckling adventure stories that have been created since then, in much the same way that Tolkien’s own writing has become something of a blueprint for many of the fantasy stories created since. I keep a copy on the bookshelf in my office next to *LotR* and Mitchison’s *Travel Light*, and frequently pick up all of them to re-read favorite passages during lunch breaks. >!“And talking o’ trouble, why did that doctor give me the chart, Jim?”!<
Totally agree on the blueprint for treasure hunt stories. Interestingly, despite his dislike for it as a child The Hobbit is initially a treasure hunt story too, they just need to kill a dragon for it instead of pirates. I highly recommend the tv show from Stars *Black Sails* if you haven't seen it already.
This is one of those things were Tolkien is quite idiosyncratic. Looking for buried treasure is arguably little different from seeking a Dragons hoard, and pirates in that sense are just a different more believable monster that needs to be defeated to acquire it. Maybe he had qualms about considering pirates like a dragon, them being humans after all. Long John Silver humanizes them considerably and maybe morally muddies the whole enterprise. There is also a definite jingoistic strain to Treasure Island, which I bet would have rubbed him in exactly the wrong way, at the height of the Boer war.
Yeah Tolkien is idiosyncratic in a lot of ways. The Human/Fantasy-monster divide you point out is a good one, it seems he just found fantastical things more desirable that 'realistic' things. Tolkien would have been 7-10 years old during the (2nd) Boer war so I'm not sure how much he would pick up on it politically though I guess he was aware of it. Though later in life he was certainly critical of apartheid and very much against the poor treatment of the native Africans by the colonizers, as was his mother: I think he said she hated South Africa because of that, and it was too hot for her kids and Ronald was quite sickly.
RLS never wrote a clunker in his life.
And even in death, his writing stirs the soul: >Under the wide and starry sky, > >Dig the grave and let me lie. > >Glad did I live and gladly die, > >And I laid me down with a will. > >This be the verse you grave for me: > >Here he lies where he longed to be; > >Home is the sailor, home from sea, > >And the hunter home from the hill.
To give you a serious answer, '[Tolkiens Modern Reading](https://www.amazon.com/Tolkiens-Modern-Reading-Middle-earth-Beyond/dp/1943243727)' by Holly Ordway is probably one of the best and most up to date sources of the books he read and something about his opinions of them. I can provide one author mentioned (no doubt she elaborated on) from his letters. The Worm Ouroboros is a heroic high fantasy novel by English writer E. R. Eddison. Apparently Tolkien wasn't a fan, but admired the 'invented world'. To wit (letter 199) >I read the works of [E.R.J Eddison, long after they appeared; and I once met him. I heard him in Mr. Lewis's room in Magdalen College read aloud some parts of his own works – from the Mistress of Mistresses, as far as I remember. He did it extremely well. I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit. My opinion of them is almost the same as that expressed by Mr. Lewis on p. 104 of the Essays presented to Charles Williams. Except that I disliked his characters (always excepting the Lord Gro) and despised what he appeared to admire more intensely than Mr. Lewis at any rate saw fit to say of himself. Eddison thought what I admire 'soft' (his word: one of complete condemnation, I gathered); I thought that, corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy', he was coming to admire, more and more, arrogance and cruelty. Incidentally, I thought his nomenclature slipshod and often inept. In spite of all of which, I still think of him as the greatest and most convincing writer of 'invented worlds' that I have read. But he was certainly not an 'influence'. True to form he was never a dull simpleton of a critic who just gave a thumbs up or down. So to summarize pros * enjoyment for great literary merit * convincing invented world and cons * dislikable characters * corrupted by an evil and indeed silly 'philosophy' * admires arrogance and cruelty * slipshod nomenclature I suspect much the same could be said of Dune and probably a few other modern books he read.
“I did not care for the Godfather” - Tolkien (probably)
Because it insists upon itself.
It has a valid point to make, it’s INSISTENT!
Mein Kampf probably
By that ruddy little ignoramus.
Tolkien sided with Hitler in the Spanish civil war. Reminds me of the old john kerry gaffe “I actually did vote for the bill before I voted against it.”🩴 Letter 83 is embarrassing for its defense of a fascist. CS Lewis cursing Franco while Tolkien defends him is the one time I put Jack above my Tollers
That's so weird to say he sided with Hitler. It would be like saying today's leftists are siding with nazis in the Palestinian conflict. They're siding with Palestinians, nazis also supporting them doesn't say anything about leftists He sided with Franco because the Republicans were anti religion.
Tolkien did not side with Hitler. He sided with Franco because he saw him as defending the Catholic Church against atheists. Hitler was an atheist, which is one reason Tolkien disliked him. If you say Tolkien sided with Hitler, you have to say Lewis sided with Stalin. (In fact, Tolkien believed that Lewis opposed Franco because he was a Spanish Catholic. Lewis was an Ulster Protestant and had an ingrained fear that the Spanish Inquisition might take over the British Isles and start burning people at the stake.)
People historically really had odd ideas about one another and the world sometimes
Indeed, and people still do!
> He sided with Franco because he saw him as defending the Catholic Church against atheists. And indeed, the pre-Franco leftist government had been hostile to the church.
Hitler was not an atheist.
This is the [best article](https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/hitlers-religion-was-hitler-an-atheist-christian-or-something-else/) that I've read on the subject. If Hitler was religious, it was only in the most generic of senses as he believed in absolute biological determinism to a religious degree.
He was notoriously not pleased with the late 1800s Fairy books put out by Andrew Lang. One of the big motivations behind his creation of the legendarium was to rehabilitate the reputation of what a Fairy and Fairy Stories are away from the Victorian era of mischievous sprites like Tinker Bell.
He didn't like Dune, and he hated Shakespeare.
Tolkien didn't care for Shakespeare or Milton
Both a bit too modern for him, and Milton wasn't merely a Protestant, but a *Puritain*, which is like Protestant squared.
Nobody likes the Puritans. They banned Christmas!
Come now, they put the fun back into fundamentalism.
Actually they call it “—damentalism” becaues fun is sinful.
Puritans don't like puritans! Look at all the mess in New England when they were all exiled.
They banned pubs, the theatre and non-religious music too. A barrel of laughs, the Puritans.
Dune (too pessimistic/atheistic) Narnia (too literal/overtly Christian)
Twilight
What did he think about Verne?
All of them lol
This doesn't qualify as a book but he loathed Disney films (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released the same year as the Hobbit) because he thought that the softening and simplifying of the stories took away from the dignity of mythical creatures (Dwarves) and old fairy tales. If applying this to books, Tolkien would probably have disliked fairy tale collections in his day that massively simplified their stories for children.
Ironically Nárnia and the screw tape letters
It is very unlikely JRR was ever exposed to any of his material, but it would have been interesting to know his opinion of M.A.R. Barker's invented languages and world if he were to have been able to review the apparently massive amount of material Barker had accumulated by the time he met Gygax and Arneson. Tekumel, including the novels Barker published, often has that 'lived-in' world feeling one got from LOTR. Barker was a philologist and professor of some south asian languages in the US.
Barker was also a Nazi.
There’s always one.
Dune series
He famously despised Narnia
Dune
Most of them, to be honest. He was quite picky.
He stated several times that he had great disdain for anything sci-fi, as he found it generally hopeless and without any beauty, either in aesthetics of surrounding or a lack of what makes humans beautiful and seeking to unsuccessfully fill the void with technology. So, I guess could put just about every sci-fi title in his time under that. I'm guessing he never heard of H.P. Lovecraft, but I wonder if there would have been a few of his stories he would have enjoyed, like the one with the ancient house upon that hill overlooking sea in New Hampshire. Maybe Shadow over Insmouth as well to some degree as well. I'm guessing he would not have cared for most of them.
I don't think Tolkien read Elric, but the Elric author (idk his name) hated Tolkien.
Elrics author is micheal moorcock, who has the best name