Steve, As is often the case, the depth and breadth of your responses and insights in these postings (defying those who maintain that e-mail is shallow and composed entirely of 'text bites') also "beggars parallel." -- as was said of Tolkien's imagination. I like Joyce too, much preferring ULYSSES to FINNEGAN. One great (and, I believe, insurmountable) difference between these two "epic" authors -- and I'll agree they are both addressing the Big Issues/Themes -- is the intended readership, the "target market," so to speak. Tolkien's stuff (the proofs in the numbers) hits home with "people" and Joyce's with (and I'm using the term in its best sense) "sophisticated people." Tolkien was influenced by the enormous tradition of the oral storytelling of myth and heroic legend and pure folklore subtypes (the riddle, the ballad-like song, etc.), and he tried (and succeeded IMHO) at telling a tale in those old modes. Joyce was influenced much more by the literary tradition, by the modernist notion that stories are read and written and not told and heard. Add to that Joyce's nod to modernism in his experiments with viewpoint and narrative technique in general, and we have a fundamental difference in approach. Also, Joyce's stuff is much more direct and didactic (overt) it seems to me. At least for me, Tolkien works more subtle magic and is far less "showy." I think you're on target seeing Bob Howard as yearning for that kind of "Escape" that Tolkien calls "The Escape of the Prisoner" and not the "Flight of the Deserter") ON FAIRY-STORIES [a must-read essay btw and imho for any of you rehfanians who have not encountered this treatise on the creative imagination -- which leaves Coleridge in the dust, while clearly derived at least in part from Geo. MacDonals'd "The Fantastic Imagination" -- another "must read"]. We can only mourn the fact that REH chose not to live long enough so that possible awarenesses and cross-influences might have occurred. Frank Who thinks his own local "Shire" needs a good "scouring" too. >On 8/24/00 1:55:39 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > ><< I concur with the consensus of at > least a couple literary surveys done in Academe last year "Most > important work of the 20th century [LotR]." It's damned sure a book > that's proven more popular than Finnegan's Wake (who could understand > that besides Joyce?) or others of the various contenders. >> > >Frank, this is from Verlyn Flieger's A QUESTION OF TIME: J.R.R. TOLKIEN"S >ROAD TO FAERIE (with which you might be familiar): > >In that same year [1936] James Joyce was at work on FINNEGAN'S WAKE, his >great, circular narrative of myth and human experience that would be >published in 1939. This work-whose opening line, "riverrun, past eve and >Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus >of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs," is the continuation and >recircling of its last line, "A way a lone a last a loved a long the"-is a >story in the same vein as THE LOST ROAD. Both deal with the interpenetration >of historical and mythic time. The point here is not influence but >confluence, suggesting strongly that Tolkien is not the simple "escapist" >fantasy author he seems. Two very different authors working in widely >different narrative modes responded to the same climate of thought, >approaching time in the same mythic mode and arriving by different means at >similar mythic ends. > >(Here endeth Flieger and resumeth Tompkins) Tolkien stages much better battle >scenes but Joyce is much funnier. Whenever I sift through the various HISTORY >OF MIDDLE-EARTH volumes, another classic modernist line comes to mind (how >strange a phrase like "classic modernist" still seems here in 2000): "These >fragments have I shored against my ruin." And to Flieger's "two very >different authors" I would add a third; as the opening of "The Thunder-Rider" >stunningly attests, Howard too was trying to tunnel his way out of prison, >using the unique set of tools he'd managed to smuggle into his particular >cell. > >John Clute gets into a similar discussion in his recent THE BOOK OF END >TIMES: GRAPPLING WITH THE MILLENNIUM: > >[Tolkien's] masterwork is a conscious countermyth to the twentieth century. >Despite advances in medicine and other spin-offs of science, the twentieth >century was a place that Tolkien, fully consistent with the subversive >subtext of all serious fantasy since the form took shape around the end of >the eighteenth century, thought no sane person could ever choose to inhabit. >The twentieth century, he thought, was simply wrong. THE LORD OF THE RINGS is >an attempt to present not a vision in "realistic" terms of the precise kind >of social world that we could imagine living in, but a countervision of >humane life...A real life, Tolkien implies, cannot be led in the real >twentieth century. Story makes meaning, and LOTR claims that all true >significance is story-shaped... > >I think Howard would have signed on to some of this, and does so here and >there in the SELECTED LETTERS; also, concepts like barbarism and transience >are Howardian manifestations of Clute's "subversive subtext of all serious >fantasy." > >Off to work amidst the Numenorean monumentalism of lower Manhattan, > >Steve Tompkins -- Frank Coffman popliterateur at eBay (also [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Assoc. Prof. of English and Journalism, Rock Valley College Editor, THE DARK MAN: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies
