How Not to Write an Article

I offer this little piece as a reminder for myself as well as a hint for other scholars.
Background: A student of mine works for the department secretary here at Wheaton. This is one of those jobs that alternates between total boredom and manic overwork: for days at a time no faculty are in the office except for me, and then all of a sudden everyone shows up with forty piles of work that all need to be done immediately. To try to keep the students who have this job from losing their minds, the department secretary asks me to come up with projects that can keep them both busy and interested. These projects have had a tendency to take on a life of their own. The Tolkien Bibliography began one summer when I asked a student (who was in high school at the time) to start ILL-ing Tolkien articles. This is now a gigantic project from hell that will never end.

So I decided to ask the current student to first collect a complete bibliography of scholarship by Albert S. Cook. I did a dissertation chapter on him that is past due to be turned into an article, but I want to nail down loose ends, etc. After the student finished that, she wanted more work (and is getting good at biblio), so I've asked her to gather all the articles ever written about the Ruin (a poem in the Exeter Book).

I hope L doesn't read this blog, because after she gathers all the Ruin articles, I'm not going to read them. And that's my connection to the title of this post. The worst thing you can do when starting an article is to go read all the bibliography. You will almost certainly fail to produce anything really original or interesting because you will be sucked into whatever the critical debates were in the articles that you read. To be original, you need to interact with the poem first on your own, then write down your ideas, then read the bibliography and work your argument into the critical conversation. This is not to say that there aren't some basic critical problems that are inherent in particular poems. For example, in the Seafarer you just can't get away from the argument about the number of speakers and (if there are two) where to divide them. But if you read all the arguments first your own inchoate ideas, which might be original, will be magnetically attracted to what has gone on before. Reading all the bibliography and not immersing yourself in the poems themselves is the biggest mistake graduate students make. I always know when someone has fallen into this trap when he or she begins a conference paper with four minutes of summary of scholarship.

So to avoid this fate I'm doing my translation of the Ruin, working as closely with the manuscript as possible, before I read any criticism. Should be fun.

Conferences

Way back in April or May I promised to write something about Kalamazoo. Now I'm just getting ready for leave for ISAS (and just got asked to chair a session... hellooo reimbursement!). Let me explain.

Because the academic world is so specialized, it's pretty unlikely that you'll have another person at your college or university who works in exactly the same area. So scholars go to conferences like pilgrims to Canterbury (and act like some of the pilgrims, too, but that's another story) to share their work, get new ideas, see old friends, and drink a lot.

For general medieval studies, the two big English-language conferences are at Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo) and the University of Leeds in England. Kzoo is always in early May, Leeds in July. Both are huge conferences, with hundreds of papers; there are always at least twenty sessions (with three papers each) going on at any one time. There are different strategies for getting the most out of the huge conferences. You can rush around, trying to get to all the papers relevant to your sub-field (what I usually do), or you can allow for some serendipity. One year I just stayed in the same room for the whole conference, listening to every paper presented there, regardless of topic. It was interesting.

ISAS, the conference I'm off to in a week, is very different. First, it is really specialized: Anglo-Saxon stuff only. Second, there are no separate sessions; one paper at a time is delivered to the entire conference (probably 200 people or so). So it's very competitive to get papers accepted and there are some rather arcane rules for balancing sub-sub-disciplines, geographic regions, etc.

Whether because of these strictures or in spite of them, ISAS is by far the best conference I ever go to. It's only held every other year, on alternate sides of the Atlantic, and I'd estimate that over 80% of the papers are eye-opening and brilliant. I always walk away excited about Anglo-Saxon and ready to dive into new projects (which is actually the real reason to go to conferences; you can learn things when the publications come out, and you can keep in touch with friends by other means, but nothing charges you up like a good conference). It also helps that, for whatever reasons, the people at ISAS are the least phony and most collegial in academia. They would fit in very well at Wheaton (and that's a serious compliment)

Thus, while I'm not totally thrilled about the idea of Arizona in August, and I don't want to leave wife and daughter for a week, I can't wait for ISAS.

News

So much for the resolve to blog daily. How Glenn Reynolds does it is beyond me. But there is some pretty big good news to share. First, Beowulf and the Critics won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies for 2003. It's a big honor to be chosen for something like this, particularly since the people doing the choosing are those best qualified to evaluate my work. Since I put so many years into B&C, it's even more gratifying. And best of all, I get a statuette!!!

Then, out of the blue last week, I was called by National Geographic TV & Video to be an expert talking head for a show/video, "Beyond the Movie: The Return of the King." It all happened very quickly: from a call one day to a meeting at the airport the next, to flying to Princeton to be interviewed on Wednesday. The TV people work quickly and don't mess around! It was very cool, though. I really got along well with both the producer and the tech people; they were incredibly efficient and professional, but also friendly and up-beat. The show will air sometime in either October or November, and since I talk between each of the segments, not all of my jabbering will be likely to be cut out. Fun.

There's more news, also, but I have to keep quiet about it for a while longer (nothing huge, but another pretty cool thing).

What I want to do now is to try to keep pace with my Anglo-Saxon stuff, because in another eight months, none of this media attention, etc. is going to exist. On the other hand, I'll always have Beowulf, and the fact that I had such a great time teaching the poem to inner-city kids from Brockton (kids who were awesome, by the way), suggests that I'll never get tired or burned out, the way I'm starting to feel about Tolkien stuff.

Return of Blogging (?)

Maybe. There are so many reasons for my long hiatus of blogging that there's no point in going over them all. But here goes anyway: I said "yes" to too many things; I had to go to Bucknell, Italy and Kalamazoo all within a month and give 3 different papers. I had to finish a book chapter and a major article by the beginning of May. I had to edit the first issue of Tolkien Studies. Etc., etc.

But now I had a new computer, some of the other crap is done (not enough) and it is blissful, sweet summer.

Summer is probably a good 50% of the reason that I'm in academia. Even though I probably put in just as many hours of work per week in the summers (and in fact I've been in my office more hours/days per week in June than I was during the semester) as I do during the semester, summers are still golden. I think it's a deep psychological thing implanted by growing up on the Jersey Shore.

Anyway, while I was blog-silent, a few good things happened. I was given the Faculty Appreciation Award at Wheaton, which is a huge honor and was a total surprise. I gave well-received papers at Bucknell (on Tolkien's Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England), Palermo (on the intellectual history of the study of Monsters -- teratology), and Kalamazoo (on Tolkien's Beowulf translation). I finished my book chapter for Jane Chance and my article for Tolkien Studies. I've gotten the grammar book revision rolling. I put up a screen door, planted trees and shrubs, built a vegetable garden planter out of 4x4's (all squirrels must die!), and the New Jersey Devils won the Stanley Cup(!!!!)

Tomorrow's post will be about Kalamazoo and it's significance in medieval studies. I'm hoping to post daily from now on.

It has been a long time since I've posted, and that delay is due partially to a whole variety of professional and personal-life things that keep coming up. There is some good news: my book, How Tradition Works has been accepted for publication by Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Text and Studies (MRTS published Beowulf and the Critics). An essay collection for which I'd submitted an article has gotten a book contract from U. Kentucky Press (unfortunately I now have to write the article; that's the danger of submitting an abstract that sounds great but requires a ton of not-yet-accomplished research). The first issue of Tolkien Studies is coming along, albeit slowly, and I'm now at the arm-twisting stage of my essay collection Anglo-Saxon Poetry in its Tenth-Century Context.

But it's been a busy semester, teaching Old Norse for the first time and running a Beowulf seminar (both as unpaid overloads) as well as teaching SciFi and English 101 all eat up a lot of time. And now I've got a graduate student (and we don't even have graduate students at Wheaton) who has come all the way from Hungary to study with me. Bizarre, the thought that someone would travel that far just to study with me... (and actually, he's really here because he needs to work with the mammoth bibliographical collection... he doesn't need me, just my volumes of photocopies...).
The post-tenure bug hasn't really hit too badly, except that I now find it easier to decide to go to bed instead of staying up late to plow through more work. But if a proposal I'm working on comes through (and there's some good signs) I'll have cool Tolkien-related news soon and an exciting project to work on this summer (though my wife suggests that now that I have tenure I can spend the summer putting in a new floor in our upstairs and painting the outside of the house...)

When to stick a fork in it?

I've spent the past week (in between teaching English 101, Science Fiction, Beowulf and Old Norse) doing revisions on How Tradition Works. Part of this process has been reading new books suggested by my outside reviewers. Some of these have proven helpful, some less so.
My question is: when do you just say "stick a fork in it, it's done?" I finished HTW in April, revised it in August, and then got reader's reports back in December and January. But really the bulk of the reading and research was done when I was on research leave in 2001. Since then there has been a lot of important scholarship that has come out. But I can't completely re-write HTW each time I read a new book on Memes or on the 10th century. It's frustrating. For example, I just read Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer. Brilliant argument. Only tangentially related to my book, but I wonder if I should go through HTW and at least reference each time Boyer's argument might be useful or connected or (my favorite) "not incompatible" with my thesis.

Any writers out there have good rules of thumb for deciding when to stop and just include all the new scholarship in the sequel?

Sorry about the lack of posting since I received my tenure. It's been a busy week or so. We were interviewing job candidates WThF (all excellent people, which was nice, though it makes the actual decision difficult) and then I was "single-dad" for a week while my wife made the world slightly safer for democracy, and our semester started up at the same time.

But the big news is that my book of my own research, How Tradition Works: A Descriptive Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century received its second favorable reader's report. So it looks like it will be published, but I am in the throes of revisions.

For my family members and non-academic readers, let me explain how this process works. An academic press has procedures in place to try to keep things on the level: books shouldn't be published because you're a drinking buddy of the editor-in-chief, etc. So presses get external, anonymous reviewers to go over a manuscript and recommend whether or not it should be published. Both of my outside reviewers said "publish," and the ed-in-chief of the press seems to have liked the book before he sent it out, so I am much of the way to publication. I now have to do the revisions that the readers suggested (or decide that they're bad revisions, but more than 90% of them are in fact good), then write a letter to the Board of Directors of the press, explaining what I did and why (i.e., I took these pieces of advice, but I thought this was wrong because...). Then the Ed-in-Chief and the Board meet and decided whether to offer me a contract. This isn't a done deal, but with two very strong reader's reports, my willingness to actually make the changes (i.e., sometimes you are asked to make changes that you just don't want to agree to), and the Ed-in-chief already having read the book, things look very good.

And I got the news on the Friday after I got tenure, so it was a big week.

Once I have a book contract in hand, I'll say who is going to publish How Tradition Works, though you can figure it out if you read through my site.

With the publication of How Tradition Works, Beowulf and the Critics and the big articles coming out on the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang (JEGP) and on the Anglo-Saxon wills (SELIM), I'll be in good shape to focus my attention on getting the first issue of Tolkien Studies edited and printed by May 1 and getting my essay collection, Anglo-Saxon Poetry in its Tenth-Century Context in shape to give to a press [hear that, contributors, I have three essays; I need the other four so I can edit over Spring Break in March]. Maybe I can get enough done so that I can spend part of the summer painting my house....

Now I Can Become a Barnacle...


Today the tenure committee at Wheaton voted to promote me to Associate Professor and award me lifetime tenure. It's actually a serious honor (as opposed to bogus things that one might win) because it's awarded by people who actually know you day in and day out. So I'm pretty thrilled even if I means I now get to die in Norton, Mass.

And if people thought I was insufferable before, think what I'll be like now that I can't be fired...

Art, Artists and the "Author Function"

Sorry for the light blogging of late. First there was the media firestorm and now my tenure case is tomorrow. So at this time tomorrow I'll either have a guaranteed job for life or I'll be fired. I don't think I'll sleep much, though I'll pass the morning waiting quite well by taking my daughter to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. If you haven't been, you should: they're a great, old fashioned set of museums all linked together.

Anyway, I thought that it might be interesting to begin a continuing series (which I already started in the post below about Beowulf line 1382) about the ways that some Post Modern ideas are actually better illustrated (and even make sense) in light of medieval literature.

Today The Author Function. The "author function" is associated with both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (the flip side is the "death of the author" essay that every English student is force to read two or three times during his or her trip through purgatorial required theory classes). The basic idea of "death of the author" is that reading to try to find out 'what the author is trying to tell us' is impossible and foolish, since author's themselves aren't always sure and even if they were they might lie and anyway, if the author just wants to tell us something, there are simpler ways than writing a sonnet.

The "author function" suggests that there is a value put on an artifact if it is associated with a particular artist that goes beyond the intrinsic value of the artifact. There are lots of good Modernist examples, especially from surrealist and dada art, but there's a better example in medieval literature.

At some point after Chaucer's death, some people wrote up some additional tales to fill in the "missing" Canterbury Tales (if you look at Chaucer's original conception, laid out in the General Prologue, there would be a lot more tales than there are in the completed work). Of these pseudo-Tales, the one that was considered the best, and which lasted the longest, was the Ploughman's Tale. This was probably written in the fifteenth-century (remember that Chaucer died right at the end of the 14th century) and for various political reasons dealing with Lollards (which are interesting, but which always make my students' eyes glaze over), it was appended to the Canterbury Tales right next to the Parson's Tale (the Ploughman is the Parson's brother).

This work was printed as part of the Canterbury Tales in William Thynne's 1542 edition of The Canterbury Tales dedicated to Henry VIII. Presumably other authors who were influenced by Chaucer's work read this Tale and commented upon it. It was, for a while, part of the literary tradition.

Then, when scholarship had become good enough to recognized the Ploughman's Tale as spurious, it was deleted from the Canterbury Tales and is no longer studied as part of the Chaucer canon. This deletion raises some important questions. Is the Ploughman's Tale a good piece of literature independent of Chaucer's authorship? Should it be included in the Canterbury Tales since, for a while, it was part of the tradition? If it's a crappy tale, but later on we discover that it is by Chaucer, does it become un-crappy?

Let me give another more modern example: There's a line in Moby Dick about a "spoiled eel." Critics went on and on about the meaning of this beautifully poetic phrase and how Melville was, well, you can imagine what a genius he was to have combined these two words. Then a textual scholar found out that this was simply a printer's error for "coiled eel." Not particularly poetic, and many a thesis was now invalidated. The question arises, then, how much of the "genius" that we perceive in art is due to our reverence for an author so that we accept lousy work or non-sensical statements from him because he's an author.

I think this problem is at the heart of the ACD vs. others debate on other blogs (links via Andrea Harris). If you allow in the facts (and they are facts) that often what genius we attribute to authors is due to accident or later error (Michelangelo's Moses has horns due to a translation error), then you have to accept that a lot of definitions of "greatness" are very contingent on what critics say and have said (the horror). The evil Stanley Fish takes this idea as far as it can go (in a demonstrative rather than logical sense) by noting that aesthetic interpretation is based upon "interpretive communities" : if you can convince enough people that something is "good," then it's good. There's nothing intrinsic about it.

This is the ruling paradigm in the arts today, and I don't like it. Not because I can't follow its logic, and not because I hate its political ramifications, but because there seems to be some intelligent middle ground that can be staked out. I'm hoping that my work with meme-theory, as well as more recent work in psychology of perceptions, will help to provide us with a new starting point to dicuss these issues in a way that involves a lot less of the appeal to the author function and much more to finding some way to logically and empirically characterize aesthetic effects in a cultural context.

P.S.: Mozart wrote a piece of music, K. 522, A Musical Joke that's probably based on transcriptions or memories of his pet starling's songs. K. 522 is not usually considered one of Mozart's triumphs, but does that make him less or more of a genius for creating it? Is it possible that our "author function" for Mozart is getting in the way of us simply recognizing a not-so-great piece of music and instead over-analyzing so that we convince ourselves that it's great?

Ah, that glamorous academic life...



Today was a great day. I now have my very own microfilm viewer right on my desk.

More importantly, my daughter is going to love playing in the giant box, which may turn into "Ursula's Cave."
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What Does a Beowulf Scholar Do All Day?


Andrea Harris links to and discusses my earlier post about academia vs. intelligent non-academics on the internet. A.C. Douglas (with whom I'm still going to disagree about myth. Writes a nice post in response to some of my comments.


The "Town / Gown" problem is long standing and not resolvable on an obscure blog (or even in Andrea's), but I thought it might be useful to talk about what exactly we scholars do besides grade [and I am not making this up] a stack of papers that was 27 inches high, every single one of which I read and commented on, though, sadly, less than 30% of the students will pick them up.


One of the things that makes Beowulf (and other medieval literature) so interesting is that it takes up some of the more standard tropes of postmodernism and shows how they really might work. Let's take the famous "indeterminacy of the text" that Derrida is so fond of. Derrida and others would like you to believe that "reading is impossible" because there is no way to fix a meaning to a given text, dictionaries notwithstanding. This critique (which is philosophical in nature) falls on deaf ears because people see themselves reading and think "this French stuff is a load of BS"). But a text like Beowulf is truly indeterminate. First of all there are errors, manifest errors, in the manuscript. But because we know there are some errors, we can't be sure about others. For instance, in 1731 a fire at the ironically named Ashburnham House damaged the Beowulf manuscript. Subsequent use in the 18th century led to a gradual loss of letters around the edges of the page. Fortunately many of these can reconstructed by the transcripts made by Grim Jonsson Thorkelin and a scribe the hired. But the two transcripts do not agree with eachother, and at times they disagree with the manuscript. So, for example, in line 1382, the manuscript reads "wundmi." This is not a possible word in Old English, so editors have tended to emend it. The Thorkelin B transcription reads "wundini," which would be the only example of an archaic (i.e., before the Age of Bede) spelling in the manuscript. However what is in the manuscript can be read as "wundun" (I'll show why below), which would be a regular, late West-Saxon dative/instrumental. All of a sudden the evidence of an early 8th century date disappears, sort of.


The reason this is so confusing is that all of the various words are construced similarly in the script that the scribe is using. wundimi would be "wundiiii," with the i's "ligatured" into "mi" (note that there are four minims, which I've represented by "i" in the form. Then note that "wundini" would be "wundiiii" -- same number of minims, just ligatured differently. Likewise "wundun" would be "wundiiii" -- again note 4 minims with different ligatures.


I like to throw 1382 in the face of scholars who prattle on about the indeterminacy of the text. Yes, such you have in James Joyce, but not anywhere to the degree in Beowulf, where we must constantly struggle with the mediation between manuscript and editors. Which conjectures will you accepts, and which will you throw out. Do you dare to emend yourself (I haven't emended Beowulf yet, but I've emended a few lines in the poem The Fortunes of Men. I'll explain why in another post.


But to return to the original topic: I think that a lot of students and intersted individuals, particularly scientists and engineers, would be less hostile to English if they knew that a lot of what we are doing (at least among the medievalists) is attempting to do logical detective work to figure out what the text is in front of us before we read it. Of course we can't be 100 % logical in prospects; we use creativity. We then try to use logic to justify our conjecture. And, to end which Tolkien, which is all anyone who reads this blog really cares about, Tolkien's genius was that he was able to combine, without sacrificing either, the hard-core linguistic analytical ability with a wide-ranging historical knowledge and a true poet's sensibility toward literature. He could thus put together widely separated pieces of data and use it to reconstruct lost history and culture. But that's another post.

How to alienate potential allies



The long-running discussion on Andrea Harris' blog/journal and the way that ACD "argues" has gotten me thinking about the state of the humanities in academia and our relationship to the wider world of people who are interested in books, art, music, culture, etc. Right now I'm going to set aside ad hominem and petitio principii problems (i.e., asserting without ever offering evidence, etc.) because for anyone who knows me, my teaching and my research and the various battles I've fought on behalf of traditional works, the idea that I'm 'typical of my generation' of academics (using scare quotes b/c I don't have time to dig up the post to get the exact words) is beyond silly. But I think that at the core of ACD's invective is an important critique of the humanities that we neglect at our peril.

It's very sobering to read through the blogosphere and see the contempt and even hatred with which people in academia are held. Sadly, I think that there are a lot of professors out there who deserve it: I've had teachers myself, up through the Ph.D. level (though not my advisor, thank God), who attempted to politically indoctrinate their students, who were mendacious in grading and classroom behavior, or (and this is actually worse) who were betraying their calling by not really doing their jobs. I think ACD and I would be on the same side against the professor at Carnegie Mellon who wasted a semester of literature class critiquing advertisements (n.b. to professors: your students will always be able to do this better than you can; they are, and will always be, more media literate). Gerald Graff's assertion that it doesn't matter what one studies as long as 'important' questions are being asked might have sounded really cool in the 1980's, but it's obviously a huge waste of time to critique commercials instead of reading good literature. So up to this point, I'm with the conservatives.


But the same people who would find me an ally for fighting indoctrination and avoiding silly media-related stuff (and don't get me started on the six schools of resentment...) then always go and take things a few steps too far. It's not enough to try to spend class time on quality literature instead of on ephemera: there has to be a huge hissy fit about what's quality, and the only judgments allowed standing are those made 50 years ago. The objects of study can only be approached with an almost mindless veneration, simply held up so that we can say "how beautiful," rather than critiqued and taken apart to see how they work. The author function is always in place, so that we must only consider what X "intended" (as if one could ever come to a definitive answer). And never can anything new, whether from an old period or not, enter the canon. [n.b., I am exaggerating, in that few individuals assert all of these points at once, but in my experience most share the world view]


Well, if you want the humanities, and the study and enjoyment of culture, to be the preserve of a tiny band of high priests who are busy toasting each other's brilliance while the roof falls in, this is definitely the way to go. But if you want to avoid the fate of Old English study in the US (which is just barely keeping out of the death spiral of classics), then you need to think of ways to excite students about material so that they'll at least show up for the classes. I had the largest Anglo-Saxon class in the US this year (as best I can tell). 37 students, at our tiny liberal arts college, learned Old English, memorizing paradigms, doing 100 lines of translation per night, memorizing Caedmon's Hymn and the first 11 lines of Beowulf. I don't think you could find a more canonical, traditional class than that. But the students weren't all there due to my sparkling personality. And they weren't there because the course was a requirement and they were forced to go. They were there because I was able to draw connections between The Lord of the Rings and the class material. And I was able to do that because I approach both LotR and medieval lit with a great deal of love, but also with a deliberate attempt to avoid snobbery.


Alcuin, the great English monk who organized Charlemagne's educational system, once wrote a letter back to England in which he admonished monks for listening to heroic stories in the refectory. "Verba Dei legantur in sacerdotali convivio; ibi decet lectorem audiri, no citharistam, sermones patrum, non carmina gentilium. Quid Hinieldus cum Christo? Angusta est domus; utrosque tenere non poterit" (Let the words of God be read in the refectory of the priests; there it is fitting for the lector to be heard, not the lyre-player, the sermons of the fathers, not the songs of the heathens. What has Ingeld to do with Christ? Narrow is the house; it cannot hold both of them.")


If the house is made narrow, does anyone have any doubt which works will be the first ones forced out the door?

The insanity continues


Now the story of the "discovery" of the "lost" manuscript has spread like a virus through the Germanic world. There are stories on Germany's CNN,in a German newspaper, in a paper from the Netherlands, and this Dutch paper, and this one, and in another German paper. There are also some links to Danish papers in Google. There is now no way to correct all the inaccuracies, etc., so I am going to bed now that it is the New Year (wife and daughter fell asleep long ago). Happy New Year all. May 2003 be happy, healthy and prosperous for all of you.

UPDATE: I'd switched the German/Danish links by confusing .de with .dk. Fixed.

There's a long-running debate going on about myth on and off of Andrea Harris' blog. I have said what I have to say, so I won't repeat but will just suggest that you scroll down for that discussion, but I wanted to add a clarification: My contention is that there is no such thing as a 'genuine' myth. There are simply stories, some of them older than others. Every one of these stories was made up by a human being. The difference between a "myth" and any other old story simply seems to be that a myth has circulated widely through a culture over a long period of time, with many "singers" or "poets" adding value at each iteration. That transmission process may be the explanation for why "myths" appear to be so aesthetically effective, since there's a rigorous selection process at work for many generations, but that does not mean, as someone keeps asserting without argument or evidence, that "myths" are fundamentally different than any other story.

Stop the Insanity!

Ok, a little attention was nice. A lot is, well, creepy. Don't believe me? Read the thread here on Slashdot.

I've temporarily removed my further comments regarding any potential future work with Tolkien since I found my words being copied, edited and moefied, without my permission , in various media.

Media Focus

It's a little strange how things just spread through the media. Out of nowhere on Thurs I got a call from the London Sunday Times and did an interview with them about the Tolkien stuff. Then all of a sudden the floodgates burst open and I've been getting calls from Australia (!) and England and doing radio interviews, etc.

UPDATE: I've temporarily removed my further comments regarding any potential future work with Tolkien since I found my words being copied, edited and modfied, without my permission , in various media.

Hard Drive Crash

Of course just as people are becoming interested in Beowulf and the Critics and sending me tons of email, my hard drive crashes. I'm working from a backup now, but if you emailed recently, I've now lost your email address and the email itself, so please email me again and I will try to get back to you.

And if anyone has a recommendation for data recovery, I'd appreciate knowing about it. Norton won't find anything on the disk even though I've been using File Saver. I'm hoping that Wheaton's IT guys (who are amazing) can help me on Thurs, but we'll see. Will be blogging more about JRRT stuff and the various newspaper / radio stories later.

How Not to Influence People (even Intellectuals)
This is so unfortunate, because the author is actually not a moron; he's a deservedly well-respected historian. Other bloggers have already pointed out the manifest inaccuracies and distortions in the article, so I want to try to figure out why an obviously intelligent person (ok, not from the article, but if you read his other work) would write something so stupid.

This is an important question, since self-described intellectuals really need to ask themselves "why do they hate us?" of, well, just about everybody. I think the scorn and contempt directed at intellectuals in general is a bad thing, but it's been partially earned by articles like this and by the behavior and statements of the most high profile intellectuals in the arts and humanities over the past many years. Scholars do have useful things to contribute (at least I think I do) to a better understanding and fuller enjoying of, say, The Lord of the Rings, but foolish categorical statements and the petty bashing of fandom makes it very hard for people to give scholars a chance to convince anyone outside their immediate cocoons.

The dumbest thing in Fernandez-Arnesto's article is this:"But unreconstructed myths are usually better. They spring from collective effort, from folk memory and from a shared subconscious. Reading them gives you satisfactions no fantasy can supply: contact with other cultures, insights into the past. They enhance your life by stimulating your understanding, for the arts of every civilisation are rooted in its myths."

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. There is no evidence whatsoever that myths "spring from collective effort." Every study of South Slavic guslari, every analysis of Beowulf or the works of Snorri shows exactly the opposite: epics are created by different individuals each adding a bit to the story. Different singers bring different geniuses to their songs. All myths are invented by inventors. Therefore the idea that some myths can give us actual "insights" into the past or "contact" with other cultures but fantasy cannot is a logical contradiction. It's all made up, and so the only thing separating fantasy from myth is time and popularity. In fact, some "genuine" epic literature is far more tedious than The Lord of the Rings could ever be accused of being. I love Njal's Saga, but 85% of the chapters begin "There was a man X. He was the son of Y who was the son of Z..." out to the fifth or sixth generation." I'm a crusty medievalist and like wading through such stuff, but it's hard to make an argument that by stripping away such material, Tolkien didn't make his material more palatable to the audience in the same way that a Homeric bard or a guslar would have adjusted his song to a particular audience's reactions.

Also, no one should print a line like "For the intellectuals in the audience, the only pleasure lies in observing a world created by cannibalising exotic cultures and eluding rational limitations." and expect not to be hated. I don't have quite as many degrees, honorary and otherwise, as Prof. F-A, but if I can't be also considered an "intellectual," then it's a very, very exclusive club indeed. So simply by my taking pleasure in the film (though not nearly as much as I take in the books), I have disproved his paragraph and called into question his general reliablity. In English we tell students "avoid sweeping generalizations: they're too easy to prove wrong." Maybe historians could learn from us.



Finally, I want to refer to a few of the comments on Andrea Harris' post. First, it doesn't matter, for the purpose of judging his fantasy literature, that Tolkien was a major scholar of Old Norse (he knew ON forward and backwards, but he published very little on it, btw). Either he created great art, or he didn't: his scholarly credentials can be used to argue for a disputed reading of a medieval text; they cannot justify his own art. Second, the idea that people reading fantasy literature is some kind of problem is absurd, but it springs from a reasonable premise: that we have not world enough and time to read everything good, so that every moment spent on fantasy is one not spent on Dante or Plato. True enough. But, as an economist would point out, the person who wants to argue this point needs to prove that fantasy is substituting itself for Plato rather than substituting itself for some other pleasure. Impossible to do. In my experience as a teacher of fantasy and of medieval literature, students who read fantasy can be drawn to other literatures and traditions, and they can expand their reading horizons (and fantasy is actually in and of itself good, anyway), thus being more likely to read Plato than if they had never encountered fantasy (I've lured quite a few students into Plato by mentioning the Ring of Gyges...)

Andrea Harris, whose blog I read daily, has an interesting discussion of this exercise in missing the point by David Brin. Andrea has already done a thorough job of taking the argument apart piece by piece. I just wanted to add something about the "nostalgia" in LotR.

There is indeed something "backward looking" about LotR, but it's not anti-technology (what are the Elven Rings, after all, but good technology that allows for Lorien and Rivendell?) or wholly pro-monarchy. It is rather a completely and characteristically human longing for the good things in the past (I mean here the personal past), projected by Tolkien into a deep, bittersweet sadness about inevitable loss. You might say it's what someone would feel in 1918 looking back at the summers of 1913 or 1914 (but that's another posting).

I have an amazing two-year-old daughter, and I love watching her grow up, but every once in a while you get an incredible pang of sadness at what will never happen again: she'll never fall asleep on my chest like she did when she was a tiny baby; she'll never wear certain things again, or like certain toys. The past is gone forever. Tolkien's genius was to capture that emotion and give it a shape and form, so that Frodo at the Grey Havens is immediately understandable to readers in a deeply personal way. People, like Brin, who want to claim that this feeling is politically retrograde or base or wrong are simply missing out on a great deal of human emotion. We don't have to live in the past, and in the character of Denethor Tolkien shows how destructive such living could be. But it is not merely acceptable but actually good to remember, long for, and even grieve for those things that were great and beautiful but which are now, as a price paid for our free will and open future, gone forever.

In regard to this idiotic screed that the Lord of the Rings is racist, I recommend this MISTing by Vegard Valberg. He does a lovely job proving that the writer for the Guardian is, well, a fool. I particularly like his noting that the Southrons are not inherently evil, but simply deluded by Sauron and are in fact valiant fighters.

Let me just add a few bits. First, Tolkien in the 1930's made it very clear that absolutely hated the German race laws and wanted nothing to do with them. He said that Hitler was guilty of "ruining" and "perverting" the noble Northern spirit with his "Nordic nonsense." He also stated publicly that he hated apartheid in 1959.

The "good is white / black is evil" thing may be traditional, but it's not really completely true in the Lord of the Rings. The livery of Gondor is black (they are good guys, you know). Saruman is "the white" and his symbol is the white hand (duh!).

Finally, the evilness of orcs does not come from "genetic engineering," Mr. Guardian writer doofus, but from their original torture and enslavement by Morgoth (and anyway, the origins of orcs was a vexed question for Tolkien). Saruman may or may not have crossed orcs with humans to allow the Uruk-hai to travel in daylight (which is not the point that our genius film critic was making), but the evil in the orcs is inherent; it's one of the rules of the world.

"Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain." What kind of pompous ass could even live with himself after writing a sentence like that? Someone who shouldn't try to review work that is so far beyond his crabbed, simplistic, self-righteous understanding.