Praise for the Hobbit from an odd direction

[solicitr]

By Daniel Hannan, better known as a Euroskeptic Tory MEP.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danie ... or-adults/

[Aravar]

Why an odd direction, soli?

[solicitr]

Well, I guess one doesn't expect politicians to come out as literary critics.

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

That was an interesting blog and the comments were good and thoughtful too; they would not out of place here or on TORC. I liked Hannan's appreciation of the rhythm of Tolkien's prose, a very neglected quality.

I read the Spengler article though from the Asia Times and found it the most outrageous twaddle.

[N.E. Brigand]

Funny that a picture of Elijah Wood as Frodo has the caption, "J.R.R. Tolkien was a well-regarded Beowulf scholar", implying that the picture is of Tolkien himself.

I disagree with Hannan about the verse he quotes ("The dwarves of yore"): it is not in alliterative meter.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

Funny that a picture of Elijah Wood as Frodo has the caption, "J.R.R. Tolkien was a well-regarded Beowulf scholar", implying that the picture is of Tolkien himself.

I disagree with Hannan about the verse he quotes ("The dwarves of yore"): it is not in alliterative meter.

The verse as a whole is not in alliterative, but it is metrical.

The third line is a "simple" alliterative form (xD||Dx, and the last is 2/3rds of a "full" alliterative form (HH||xx, no head stave, but the first two alliterations are there on the appropriate stresses).

But you would not expect alliterative meter with rhyme generally, though examples, such as "Pearl" exist. However, the suggestion of the alliterative form through incomplete forms as noted above, does make for something "whose force cannot be properly felt unless the lines are vocalised".

Some Icelandic forms (e.g. Dróttkvætt and Hrynhenda) mix alliteration and rhyme (including internal rhyme as in 3rd line from the Dwarves song), but the rules are very complex, though the results can be quite beautiful.

The example given on the blog is more similar to some Danish forms without alliteration, but still part of the larger tradition:

Examples can be seen at the bottom of the page in the following link:

http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/jonas ... dy-II.html

Though it appears that Tolkien regularized the form in English to use iambic tetrameter, with internal rhyme in the 3rd line replacing the alliteration and assonance of the example.

I still think that it is fair to say that echoes of the alliterative form exist, and, of course, elsewhere Tolkien did a lot of actual verse in the alliterative forms.

BrianIs AtYou

[solicitr]

Tosh, do you have a link to the Spengler piece?

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

Here you go soli:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FA05Aa01.html

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I read the Spengler article though from the Asia Times and found it the most outrageous twaddle.

Now that you have posted it, I have to say, I definitely do not agree.

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

Well he made lots of observations and I concede not all are twaddle.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And I would certainly say that I don't agree with all of the observations that he makes. But I definitely think he makes some interesting and even worthwhile observations.

[MithLuin]

The concept of the death of a culture (not just the nation or the language or religion alone, but everything together all at once) is an interesting thing to consider, whether historically, in Tolkien's work, or in current events. Certainly it has been of great concern to native peoples who were subjected to imperialism, in which their culture was often wrested from them forcefully. I was surprised he made no reference to 'the Long Defeat' from Tolkien's Letters, and also that there was not more discussion of the Vikings. After all, they were almost happy to shed their culture as they were absorbed by the people they conquered, whether as the Rus or the Normans or the Sicilians - and yet still retained something vaguely Viking to them, even after changing nation and language and religion. Culture can be very difficult to put a finger on.

Also, America is only about 200 years old. It's tough to develop a significant culture in such a short time! So, give us a chance, and we'll have one with possibly the gravity of Greece or Rome.... Maybe We are, after all, exporting whatever culture we do have (including the English language) all over the globe at the moment. And I've never understood why British people were such snobs about Mark Twain. Did he make fun of them or something? (I have in mind particularly George Bernard Shaw's comments.)

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

I never read Shaw's comments on Mark Twain but Shaw could have an acid tongue. Twain is someone I have always respected enormously so it's not a culture wide thing.

Edit, and Brits revel in being made fun of by foreigners. Twain wouldn't offend us by doing that.

[MithLuin]

Hmmm.....

The only quote by Shaw I can find at the moment is "Mark Twain and I are in the same position. We have put things in such a way as to make people, who would otherwise hang us, believe that we are joking."

But that wasn't it. It had something to do with Joan of Arc. They both wrote about her, oddly enough. Shaw's play "Saint Joan" and Mark Twain's novel "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" have little in common except that they both obviously had some respect for the historical character, though they viewed her in very different ways.

But now that I can't find the quote, I am afraid I'm misremembering the entire thing. Someone said something rather disparaging, along the lines that the person who wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court clearly understood nothing about the history of Europe and so his work on Joan of Arc could be dismissed out of hand. I thought it was Shaw, but it may have been someone else writing about Shaw's play. While I agree that 'A Connecticut Yankee' is intentionally mocking of a caricature of that time period in history, Twain's 'Joan of Arc' is a very different project and is written in a completely different vein. So the comment came off as snobbery rather than fair criticism, though I suppose there are other famous English authors who have complained about the stereotypical American view of feudalism... (*cough*Tolkien*cough*)

So to run into this again here: what culture does America have? Mark Twain? The Simpsons? I was just like, not again.... Glad to hear it's incidental, not symptomatic.

Edit: Found my quote! From the Preface to Shaw's play:

They had, however, one disability in common. To understand Joan's history it is not enough to understand her character: you must understand her environment as well. Joan in a nineteenth-twentieth century environment is as incongruous a figure as she would appear were she to walk down Piccadilly today in her fifteenth century armor. To see her in her proper perspective you must understand Christendom and the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire and the Feudal System, as they existed and were understood in the Middle Ages. If you confuse the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages, and are in the habit of ridiculing your aunt for wearing 'medieval clothes', meaning those in vogue in the eighteen-nineties, and are quite convinced that the world has progressed enormously, both morally and mechanically, since Joan's time, then you will never understand why Joan was burnt, much less feel that you might have voted for burning her yourself if you had been a member of the court that tried her; and until you feel that you know nothing essential about her.

That the Mississippi pilot should have broken down on this misunderstanding is natural enough. Mark Twain, the Innocent Abroad, who saw the lovely churches of the Middle Ages without a throb of emotion, author of A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, in which the heroes and heroines of medieval chivalry are guys seen through the eyes of a street arab, was clearly out of court from the beginning. link

The reason this seems so unfair is that Twain actually spent 12 years doing the research and preparation for his novel, and while his view of Joan of Arc is certainly romanticized, his portrayal is far more historically accurate than that of Shaw's, who seems much more 'modern' than medieval. I've read the transcript of Joan's trial, so I see where each of them got their ideas...but Shaw is being grossly unfair, and, well...a snob.

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

Agreed.

[solicitr]

Well, I partly agree and partly disagree with Spengler's piece. He seems to have a very 'hard-edge' view, as if 'civilizations' don't morph and synthesize. "Western Civilization" itself is a hybrid of (hybrid) Greco-Roman + Judaic + Germanic + some other stuff.

But I was very impressed by another linked essay, by A. N. Wilson:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 14070.html