J. R. R. Tolkien, this far land Book

This was the book of essays I almost had to throw across the room. And did force my wife to hear me rant at length and with unseemly vitriol late at night. The problem here is that lo, I am a (minor) Tolkien nerd, and lo, I am also a (former) English lit person. And I'm picky about my genre criticism, because so much of it is bad. Which means that any given essay is likely to annoy me on at least one front, and if I'm unlucky, both.

(A not-so-brief digression on genre criticism--basically you have four kinds of any note. One, common in fandom, is all about analyzing things from an in-world perspective [e.g. encyclopedias of Middle-Earth, Klingon dictionaries, etc.:]. This kind is often fun, often useful for fans, and in the case of Tolkien, big enough to be a whole field of study in itself. The second is biographical -- and is roughly the same as biographical criticism of non-genre lit, except that the author usually feels the obligation to do some hand-waving as to why the author would do something so weird as write genre fiction. The last two are harder to tease apart, but to me come down to criticism which uses the various tools found in non-genre criticism--which is a big and varied basket from Marxist to feminist to reader-response to structuralist and so on, and criticism which is based on the traditions and tropes and self-understanding of the genre communities themselves. There is actually no reason for these last two to be separate except that, up until fairly recently, almost no one who understood one did the other, and vice versa. The result is that any given work that tries to span the two, especially if written before about 1995, is likely to display either mind-boggling ignorance of the genre, or be using a set of critical tools that has nothing more recent than, oh, T.S. Eliot. If you're lucky.

There are exceptions -- Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany are two that have been doing good work for a long time. But they were actual genre writers. And in the past decade-and-a-half, there's been scads more, as more genre-addled students have entered the academy [and academy-addled refugees have decided to write genre fiction:]. But read anything before 1995 with extreme caution.)

Back to this collection. I read it for the Dianna Wynne Jones essay, and that's perfectly good. Not incredibly deep, but pointed out some structural things I hadn't noticed before (mostly about water), and I loved the reminiscence on Tolkien as a very smart and very bad lecturer at Oxford. It's always fun to find out who saw his lecture, from Jones to Auden.

There's a fun essay on how bad a poet Tolkien was (obvious) and why (much less so), which concludes with a passionate defence of a poem I'd never heard of, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, as the one true poem he ever wrote. There's another which lists potential youthful influences on Tolkien, including The Wind in the Willows (which really makes sense once you think about it). And then ... there's a poor man's attempt at a structuralist reading, the "No Sex Please, We're Hobbits" essay which was pretty disappointing, and a few real stinkers which tried to tie Tolkien to various later cultural moments which led to, in one of the worst single paragraphs of criticism I have ever read, to to LOTR to the ennui in Ultravox. Sadly, I returned the book to the library, so I can't torture you all with it.