Tolkien is Not Yeats

[Bill Ferny]

Poet,

When I work at the computer I keep BD open in the background. When I popped up BD the first thing I saw was that paragraph; it didn’t make much sense to me, so I changed it. I noted the change because it transformed the meaning of the paragraph significantly. I doubt if the distinction is original… after all I’m a researcher by trade, and my kind isn’t known for originality [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img] .

The significance of the distinction is open to much debate. In comparison to any other work of literature, I can’t think of anything else that approaches the scale of Tolkien’s corpus in regards to depth (linguistic, historical, philosophical, and perhaps theological), or in regards to narrative story telling. In many ways its more comparable to Saint Thomas’ Summa or Copleston’s History of Western Philosophy than to works of fiction. What does that say about the author, though? Does the fecundity of the corpus make Tolkien a better artist than other writers, even though other writers may be able to (objectively speaking) pen better poetry or prose, or come up with comparable narrative (i.e. Lewis)?

What I am sure of, though, is that saying “Newman wrote better prose than Tolkien” is merely a distinction that is not by any stretch of the imagination a slight against Tolkien. Likewise, the opinion that Yeats, Robert Browning, Hopkins and Tennyson wrote better poetry than Tolkien isn’t making the claim that Tolkien wrote horrible poetry. Just because I think Squatter, Poet, Lush, Doug, Sharon, and, of course PanMan [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] write the best posts on this forum isn’t saying that they are the only people on the forum who have valid opinions or insights or that I don’t read anyone else’s posts and glean insight or enjoyment from them.

We Tolkien fans need to accept the fact that the professor isn’t going to hit the top of the charts, so to speak, in every category. In fact, we have to admit that he reaches the top of the chart in one category only, because he invented the category in the first place, and is the only writer who can claim to belong to that category. That, in and of itself, is an extremely lofty achievement.