/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4080883]

40 years ago today, the greatest author of English literature passed away. Let's take this moment to pay our respects to J. R. R. Tolkien.

[Anonymous No.4080912]

Thank you for giving us such incredible movies JRR.

[Anonymous No.4080941]

>>4080883
Let's also not mystify a man who was a mediocre teacher and, though undoubtedly clever, just an adequate academic. We'd think him the worst kind of ivory-tower squatter with nothing to offer society but he wrote a few pretty-good books that were successfully marketed. He would have stopped the cultural phenomenon surround the books if he could have, and he would have resisted its success now.

I say cheers to a man who wrote because he wanted to and then mostly kept to himself. Now on to something else.

[Anonymous No.4080950]

>>4080941
This is why I hate this board and every pompous literary snob that crawls in here thinking their point of view has any sort of merit.

[Anonymous No.4080982]

>>4080950
This is why I hate this board and every plebby illiterate boor that crawls in here thinking their point of view has any sort of merit.

[Anonymous No.4080992]

>>4080982
Check and mate, egotistical twat.

[Anonymous No.4080996]

>>4080950
I'm not sure why you're so cracky about my post... his books are good enough and enjoyable, not, as OP said to bait, "the greatest author of English literature." He's just not worth a terrible lot of attention. Adequate academic, doting father, good storyteller. We should all be such things. But let's not make too much of him.

[Anonymous No.4081002]

>>4080996
I dunno. It's hard to put my finger on it. Every word just saturated with smug and pretension.
But I stay here too long and stop picking up on it as much.
fuck, i need to shower.

[Anonymous No.4081031]

>>4080941
I'd consider Tolkien's essay, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" the work of more than just a mediocre academic. He was a top class philologist and literary critic.

[Anonymous No.4081037]

>>4080996
>as OP said to bait, "the greatest author of English literature."

I doubt OP was baiting. There are a lot of people that share that opinion. I dare say that if it was put to a popular vote, Tolkien would finish higher in the polls than probably everyone but Shakespeare.

[Anonymous No.4081065]

>>4080941

You couldn't be more wrong.

You're talking about a man who personally taught W.H. Auden and was regarded by the poet as a guiding influence on his literary career.

You're talking about a scholar who revolutionised Beowulf scholarship entirely.

You're speaking of a man who gave more than twice the amount of average lectures that his fellow professors gave, not for additional financial compensation but purely out of a desire to teach.

You are a stupid asshole. The kind who wants to tear down established literary figures to make yourself seem insightful. In this case you even added some backhanded praise to try and make it seem like you aren't a sniping bastard.

But you are. You know it, I know it and, even if we never meet, I hope you go to your grave knowing that someone out there is laughing at you, you miserable piece of shit.

[Anonymous No.4081069]

>>4081065
bazinga

[Anonymous No.4081072]

>>4080883
That one time when I realized that Tolkien ripped everything off the Greek and Roman mythology (down to the fucking giant beacons) and made a poor job out of it.

[Anonymous No.4081078]

>>4081031
Agreed, that was a seminal work and it is the reason that Beowulf is studied and read today as anything other than an exemplar text in A-S. But what else did he do? He had a plush position that didn't demand much. Lord, I wish I could get such an appointment, but they don't exist like that anymore.

I suppose I was meaning that, given the way elements of this board like to deride academia, Tolkien would have been a sterling example of the otherwise useless intellectual who broods over his tenure and does little with it. But he wrote two enjoyable novels and created a vehicle for his interests in language.

I mean, I've read the hobbit, LOTR, the silmilfdsafion, the unfinished tales,his work of beowulf, his essay on faerie tales, his collection of faerie tales, and his edition of sigurd. He's very enjoyable and insightful, but I think that much of the perception of his greatness is the result of a billion dollar marketing campaign in the past 15 years. So drink to the brevity of his purgatorial interstice and let him be, I'd say.

[Anonymous No.4081080]

>>4081065
>I hope you go to your grave knowing that someone out there is laughing at you, you miserable piece of shit.
What are you really angry about?

Go to bed, Christopher.

[Anonymous No.4081091]

>>4081072
Not the first time somebody from the British Isles has made great use of Greek and Roman mythology then

[Anonymous No.4081095]

I've got a feeling that the tremendous amount of butthurt whenever English authors are mentioned comes from jealous Americans who come from a country that has produced about 10 authors of any merit in its 350 year existence.

[Anonymous No.4081104]

>>4081095
What about us Canadians?

[Anonymous No.4081106]

>>4081078
His mainstream popularity flourished organically in the '60s. The billion dollar marketing campaigns only came many years later to exploit the Tolkien-mania that already existed. I believe that according to Waterstones, LotR was the best selling British book of the 20th Century, before the films were even conceived.

I don't regard him as the greatest author ever (or even close), but give the man his dues.

[Anonymous No.4081108]

>>4081104
mountain brits

[Anonymous No.4081110]

>>4081095

I agree with you but whom would you consider to be among the ten? I can only think of Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Whitman, Melville, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, DFW, Pynchon, Gore Vidal, Raymond Carver, Thoreau, Bukowski, Mailer, Saul Bellow and T.C. Boyle.

[Anonymous No.4081115]

>>4081078

Tolkien is also responsible for the way that the majority of English and Classics curriculum are structured in modern university.

[Anonymous No.4081126]

>>4081110
Melville is the only American who can hold a candle to the classic European writers tbh.

[Anonymous No.4081129]

>>4081065
I have always considered Tolkien to be the most entry-level of writers. His books can be appreciated by a 6 year old, provided he or she is not stupid. The experiences of Proper Literature do not come so easily. Once does not simply understand a man as cryptic as Ahab or Raskolnikov. Yet, anyone can play a little LOTR extended edition in the background as they eat their Spaghettios. Tolkien hardly requires attention. He demands virtually nothing of one's cognitive abilities. Such cannot be said for the rewards offered by Finnegans Wake or Borges' Ficciones.

In today's world of intellectual decadence and sitcoms, the epaulettes of intellectualism are handed out like blue participation ribbons at a public elementary school. I am above all else, humble. And so I confess, I only appear as an intellectual relative to the mediocrity of the mass populace.

[Anonymous No.4081136]

>>4081126
Henry James?

[Anonymous No.4081138]

>>4081126

Really, you're not considering Poe, a man whose literary influence resounds across oceans and ages?

[Anonymous No.4081142]

>>4081129

>the more cryptic it is, the better it is
>"I'll hide this little gem in here for the scholars"

[Anonymous No.4081147]

>>4081129

*tips fedora*

[Anonymous No.4081148]

>>4081142

[Anonymous No.4081150]

>>4081148

Well.

Egg on my face, then.

[Anonymous No.4081156]

>>4081148
I almost got convulsions from that.

[Anonymous No.4081160]

>>4081148
And this thread is now irretrievably derailed.

Curse you bloom face!
>*shakes fist, fedora falls to the ground*

[Anonymous No.4081245]

>>4081129
Its stale pasta.