Frank, I didn't quite gather from your post why our August exchange on Tolkien and Joyce is resurfacing but here's something I've come across since then, from Tom Shippey's AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY: ...something can be learned by putting the two men, and the two works [ULYSSES and THE LORD OF THE RINGS] into relation with each other. They were, after all, both authors of the same century, close contemporaries, not dissimilar in background. There are some immediate points of similarity. The two men's careers are more like each other's than most other major writers: each with one obvious main work, each of these to some extent a development of an earlier and shorter one with which it shares some characters (THE HOBBIT, PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST), the two sequences supported only by some short pieces and by collections of poems, and extended by posthumous publication of first drafts (like Joyce's STEPHEN HERO, and the volumes of the James Joyce Archive). It is true that Joyce's magnum opus came out when he was only forty, while Tolkien waited til he was sixty-two. Tolkien might have replied that he did not have the massive financial support Joyce received for his writing-it has been calculated, some GBP 25,000 between 1915 and 1930, certainly more than Tolkien earned from being a professor in the same period...But there are less accidental connections. Joyce never achieved Tolkien's academic stature nor his learning, but he was a philologist of sorts. We know he took a course in the subject at University College, Dublin; the "Oxen of the Sun" sequence in ULYSSES shows him putting it to use; and the "Proteus" section is assigned overtly to Philology in Joyce's own scheme for the book...More subtly, both ULYSSES and THE LORD OF THE RINGS are evidently works of the twentieth century, neither of them readily describable as novels, which are engaged in deep negotiation with the ancient genres of epic and romance...More comically, both of them got something of the same treatment from sections of the intelligentsia when they eventually appeared. The class reactions to Tolkien [have been quoted ad nauseam], but one might compare with them Virginia Woolf's nettled dismissal of Joyce's work in her diary as "illiterate, underbred." (Tompkins, not Shippey) Illiterate-and-underbred also resembles, in tone and dismissiveness, the remarks on Robert E. Howard in a certain major biography of Lovecraft a few years back...It also occurs to me that in some respects Joyce enthusiasts have a much easier time of it than Howard or Tolkien specialists: no one has cast a series of Germanic bodybuilders as Stephen or Bloom, and FINNEGAN'S WAKE remains inviolate and un-animated by either Ralph Bakshi or Rankin & Bass. Steve Tompkins
