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"If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still lack its heroic seriousness..."
Wait! What? Ariosto! Who he?
What microscopic proportion of the English speaking population have even heard of Ariosto, let alone read him, leave aside - having read him - regarding surpassing Ariosto's imputed 'inventiveness' as a compelling recommendation for reading Tolkien?
Crazy stuff. Incompetent. Off-putting.
Luckily, not off-putting enough to torpedo the book.
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11 comments:
I almost certainly had no idea who Ariosto was when I first read that note at age 13. However, I knew who CSL was, thanks to Narnia, and what his note told me was that CSL, who had written those marvelous books, thought that LOTR was better than the work of some past genius. He was saying, look, I know fantasy, for example this Ariosto chap, who's very highly rated, but I'm telling you that this is much better. Not off-putting at all to me. It didn't ever make me want to read Ariosto, though.
I came in to comment and found tweedyprof expressed my own sentiments nearly perfectly.
@tp and R - Well it didn't put me off either! But still, what nonsense!
Tolkien agreed with this
"As for the reviews they were a great deal better than I feared, and I think might have been better still, if we had not quoted the Ariosto remark, or indeed got involved at all with the extraordinary animosity that C.S.L. seems to excite in certain quarters."
Letters #149 to Rayner Unwin
@Trotter - Nice to have you commenting here - Perhaps you could settle an old dispute?
Did you get your name from wearing wooden *shoes*, or from having wooden *feet*?
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/tolkien-nods-saga-of-trotters-feet.html
Being a Hobbit, I can only trot, I would have to be a man to stride
@Trotter - well, if it was just a group of hobbits involved, as when you led Bingo, Odo, Marmaduke etc. from Bree to Rivendell, then you might be striding - albeit hobbit-sized strides - while they trotted alongside...
Sorry no striding, as I was not wearing shoes or boots of any kind, like all Hobbits except Bilbo Baggins who does wear shoes when illustrated by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Looking up Trot, this is something that Horses do, so Trotter would be someone who uses a Horse or Pony for travel.
Thanks for this.
According to Humphrey Carpenter, Lewis was writing about The Fellowship of the Ring in a literary magazine a few days after it appeared in print. At that point it was by no means clear that the trilogy would sell at all and an optimist might have predicted the status of a minor classic for it - something like A Shropshire Lad. Lewis was trying to persuade a small, well-read audience to give an unconventional book a try.
Overlapping, but not wholly coinciding with, the "small, well-read audience" Philip Neal and the Lewis-trusting young Narnia-lovers tweedyprof mention, probably several thousand former Oxford undergraduates between the late 'Twenties and early 'Fifties who had attended the sort of lectures by Lewis lying behind The Allegory of Love, his OHEL volume, The Discarded Image, and Spenser's Images of Life (taken over, with comparable success, by Christopher Tolkien when Lewis became a professor in Cambridge)?
And let us recall as well the next two sentences of Letter 149: "He warned me long ago that his support might do me more harm than good. I did not take it seriously, though in any case I should not have wished other thsn to be associated with him - since only by his support and friendship did I ever struggle to the end of the labour."
David Llewellyn Dodds
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