The Day I Discovered Tolkien

[Overread]

My experience of English literature is that any book studied cannot be read for enjoyment purposes again; in fact (in my opinion) it is better to study a book that you have no liking for, because then you can be quite impartial when taking it apart . In fact whilst taking 'A' level English lit - and for some time after - I found myself dissecting books rather than reading them for a pleasurable experience.

I have to agree and I think in part its because school level literature reading tends to focus on going into the extremes of analysis. Where every item is being pulled apart looking for inner meanings. Red curtains over the windows are not simply aesthetically choices or incidental details; they are glimpses into the tortured past of the author; of the blood to be spilt upon the battlefield; or the loss of chlidhood innocence etc... Basically I think they encourage tearing books apart (often in small bits) so much that you actually lose sight of the story. It's like those who argue that there's only 7 stories in the world and that all tales are simply elaborations of those same story structures.
It's a viewpoint I don't find I enjoy because it tears a story into almost nothing.

 

[Extollager]

Classroom "dissection" will often ruin a work for readers, it seems -- I have seen that view expressed many times over the years.

I prefer the idea of "unpacking" things or even just "noticing" things in a literary work, and doing these things in such a way that one's enjoyment of the work is enhanced. But it might be that what one person experiences thus, could come across to someone else as the dread "dissection."

When I taught English, I tried to avoid "dissection" for one thing by not spending too much time on a given work. I thought it was more important to read plenty -- read plenty of the original creative works, not criticism, that is. So (I wonder if this will shock people here)……. when I taught an intro to Shakespeare course, I had it setup as an evening class, 2 1/2 hours a week. For the first 45 minutes or so, I would have the students take an objective multiple-choice quiz (closed book) and then do a focused short in-class paper (30-40 minutes or so, open book). Then we'd discuss for a bit; then a five-minute break; and then one more hour of discussion. And that might be the full extent of the time we'd spend on The Merchant of Venice. With some plays we'd spend two weeks like that. The only outside of class activity that I required, aside from the reading of the play, was the preparation of a compilation of imagery. For example, Romeo and Juliet is full of imagery of light. That was due at the beginning of the class session. Oh yes, I did have them read Marchette Chute's story version of the play at hand, to get what happened straight, before reading the play.

But in that way we'd read, in a semester, perhaps seven plays. I don't have a syllabus at hand, but that would be about right. I thought it was much more likely that students would take to Shakespeare with this approach rather than by spending several weeks on any individual play (and thus fewer plays). We might read Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale.* A big objective for me was simply that the students would cease to feel afraid of Shakespeare, supposing that's how they felt at first, and enjoy at least some of the plays.

Well, that's a long non-Tolkienian digression. I did teach The Lord of the Rings once, and we spent six weeks on it, I believe, that is, a week per book (each volume is two books). I remember that I asked them to look for "dualities" such as light and dark, possessiveness and magnanimity, etc. I think that helped people to pay attention to details without getting bogged down in "'red curtain' symbolism"!

This blog posting -- on Arthur Machen -- has embedded in it some of my thoughts about English teaching:

Guest Post: Machen’s “The Glitter of the Brook” and Poetic Knowledge by Dale Nelson

Here is a Machen rarity. Click on the link to the late Ned Brooks’s archived first issue of It Goes on the Shelf and scroll down. ...

wormwoodiana.blogspot.com

*Students took an Intro to Lit course (also taught by me) in which we read A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet.

 

[Extollager]

"For the first 45 minutes or so, I would have the students take an objective multiple-choice quiz (closed book) and then do a focused short in-class paper (30-40 minutes or so, open book)."

What I meant was that, in the first 45 minutes or so, the students took a quiz -- about five minutes. Then they wrote the short response paper, open book. It wasn't meant to be hard and it wasn't meant to be "personal." I'm not remembering actual examples. But the paper should be pretty easy if the student had read the play reasonably alertly.

To bring this back to LOTR: If students came to class one Monday evening and had read the first book of The Fellowship of the Ring, I might ask them to write an in-class short paper, open book, with a prompt like this:

"The Lord of the Rings will give us the sense of a wide world to be traveled. Tolkien also seeks to create a sense of depth in time. Set forth and briefly discuss some good examples of passages in which he evokes a sense of the depths of the past."

I hope that sort of thing would warm people up for discussion and not seem like dissection and symbol-hunting!

 

[Vladd67]

I think I was 13, so 1980, I remember various books were popular with some of my friends and that Christmas my parents bought me the box set of Lord of the Rings and a copy of Dune.

 

[Overread]

See when we did our required reading I think we did one Shakespeare and one novel; both of which were read out in class and analysed as we went. Page by page, line by line. Which mostly meant no one was "into" the story at all and tearing it apart like that I think resulted in a lot of micro-analysis.


I've also felt that there are always three core problems with Shakespeare in class:
1) Most of the advanced word play only works if you're very well read and have a wider than average grasp of the specifics of language. Ergo its not just enough that you can muddle through the understanding, but that you've got to get the finer definitions and meanings of words. If you don't have this then appreciation of the wordplay can be totally impossible to grasp.

2) They are plays not books. It's like reading a script to a film rather than watching the film. There is so much "missing" from the story because its supposed to be placed there by the actors playing it out; by the set and lighting etc.... I find it curious how some will hang so much meaning on minor descriptive details in the plays when many features of the characters, both minor and major, are often missing.

3) The language isn't modern. I think sometimes you see people who have a greater appreciation of Shakespeare only come to that when theyhave read/seen a lot of it. When you're exposed to only one or two or bits I think the average person just doesn't get into the swing of the language. So the story gets essentially, lost in a sea translation.
Sure you can understand it, but you can't engage with it until you're comfortable with the language and style of writing. A single shock experience or two in school isn't really enough.

I find the same when I read some older fantasy stories. I don't start engaging until I get the writers "voice" and style. Of course they are not quite as far departed from the current as Shakespeare is, but its still there.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Shakespeare has to be watched as a play; it doesn't work as a story which is read. It's a bit like trying to understand what a cake is by reading a cookery book; you can see all the ingredients, but not the end result. Once you have seen a stage production it all starts to make a lot more sense.

 

[Extollager]

Vladd67, I wanted to thank you for posting that photo. I don't remember ever having seen that boxed set or design, or even that photo of the Professor. That's an Allen and Unwin production, I take it -- ?

 

[Boaz]

@Extollager Great subject.

Thanks to all who have shared their memories. It's enjoyable for me to read how Middle-earth became part of your stories.

I have memories of multiple days I discovered Tolkien.

When I was nine, I reluctantly started The Chronicles of Narnia because it was a birthday present from my mother's friend and I was supposed to read a bit so I could send a thank you card... and Narnia blew my mind. Around my tenth birthday (the summer of 1976) I told my sitter how great Narnia was and after I finished, she began to tell me about hobbits with wooly feet who lived in snug warm holes. She spoke of hobbit birthday customs, fruit pies, and gardens. She singled out Bilbo and spoke of spiders, goblins, trolls, elves, dwarves, wolves, Gandalf and Gollum. So my mom bought The Hobbit, but it stayed on the shelf for a year. Then Star Wars came out (I saw it six times that summer), but after it left the theater I longed for an epic story. My mother pointed to The Trumpeter of Krakow, The Hobbit and The Song of Roland. I read Roland and Hobbit, I liked them both, but preferred Roland with the Olifant and his sword, Durandel, to Bilbo with Sting and a ring..

The next year, The Lord of the Rings was in the theatre and I begged to see it. It moved me to read Tolkien's opus and I loved it. I think I've mentioned this elsewhere, but right after reading how Aragorn turned the tide at the Pelennor Fields I found the appendices. It had family trees, a glossary, timelines, histories, calendars, elven and dwarven alphabets, and little extra stories. And I found out something that spoiled the story... In the history, I read how Elessar became King of Gondor and married Arwen. I could not understand how Tolkien could have cut out Aragorn from his destiny... and I wondered if Aragorn died or if this Elessar just stole Aragorn's wife and crown. I began reading again to find out the answer.

I noticed that Aragorn's sword, Anduril, seemed a bit like Roland's sword, Durandel. And Roland's horn, Olifant, sounded like Sam's Oliphaunt... and also Boromir had a horn which he sounded to late to be rescued, just like Roland.

Over the next two years, my mother gave me The New Tolkien Companion by J.E.A. Tyler and The Silmarillion. Mr. Tyler's book was wikipedia, youtube, fan blogs, and The Chronicles Network all wrapped up in one source. And I quickly noticed that on the map in The Silmarillion there were the Ered Luin... which, in TLotR, is range of mountains west of the Shire. I only knew one other classmate who read Tolkien, but here was a man who studied Tolkien. During my high school years I read The Lord of the Rings at least sixteen times. In my twenties, my mother also gave me Unfinished Tales and The Book of Lost Tales...

And now there is The Chronicles Network. Sure I can answer my friends' questions about the movies... Who is Elrond? Are hobbits human? Are orcs made from mud? After Boromir's death, did you worry for Aragorn when he fell off the cliff?... but this is the only place where other people know the difference between Earendil and Elendil, Hurin and Huor, and Eowyn and Arwen.

 

[HareBrain]

I remember my first encounter with the Silmarillion. I must have just read LOTR at the age of ten (I remember puzzling over the word "hitherto", used by Gandalf, but not being arsed to look it up), and Mum took me to a small bookshop where I used to buy laminated cards with the Hobbit illustrations, and maps by Pauline Baynes, that I liked to put on my wall. The young shop owner, realising I was a Tolkien fan, got excited about the prospect of a sale of the Silmarillion, which had just been published. Unfortunately he was onto a loser there. Everything about it unnerved me -- the title, which I couldn't forge any kind of meaning from; the abstract flower designs on the cover (who wanted to read a story about abstract flowers?); and not least the clear insanity of the shopkeeper (because who but a madman would be enthused about a meaninglessly titled story about abstract flowers?). I don't think I read it for another ten years.

I also remember that shop had a particular smell, which I think came from a kind of card or paper stock rather than anything the shopkeeper was smoking when there were no customers. Very occasionally, when I pass a stack of books in a shop these days, I'll catch the same smell, but it's so fugitive that when I try to trace it back to its source, it just disappears. I'd love to find out what it is because I'd scent my home with it. Probably get a cologne made with it too.

 

[Vladd67]

Yes it is, its the set i got back in the 80s

 

[Boaz]

The first publication of The Fellowship of the Rings was sixty-eight years ago today.

 

[paeng]

I started with Bakshi's animated feature when I was young, and finally got to read the trilogy many years later because a student used it for a senior paper (I was more familiar with Tolkien's translation of and commentary on Beowulf, which I used with others for uni lit classes). When I told colleagues that I didn't like it, a friend who had happened to have Shippey as one of her advisers when she took medieval lit grad school laughed, saying that she didn't, either. When I asked why, she explained that Tolkien's intention was to introduce kids to the great epics of the Western world through his stories, which is why it doesn't have much by way of sex and violence. In short, I should have read it when I was younger.

 

[BAYLOR]

In an an elementary school writing assignment , I recall a sentence in an writing exercise which mentioned Bilbo Baggins and the The Ring of Power . A few years later, I saw the Rankin and Bass incarnations of The Hobbit and The Return of the King . Reading the actual books came later still.