10 thoughts on “Controversial Takes”

  1. I have not read “The Lord of the Rings” but my friend read it to his kids. I think “bad book” and “long, redundant book” are two different things. Is the latter the reason for the former or are there additional things informing your opinion that it is bad?

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  2. Hi Scoot,

    LoTR is really interesting to me – people I know and respect A LOT have had major life changes through reading it. I was really just ho hum about it, and I did think it was poorly written in many places. But I am entirely up for being wrong. I once thought Poe was pretty bad, and now I find him fascinating. It is also interesting to me to consider if a “bad” book can still be great? I think The Fountainhead for example is a bad book, and yet its (malign if you ask me) influence is immense. I can think of certain music or songs this would apply to as well.

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  3. I am not in a position to dispute your opinion–ad gustibus non est disputandem–but from an aesthetical pov how much can “poorly written” qualify as a stylistic choice vs a flaw in authorship?

    I guess to disconnect the idea from the specific book in question: Is Jackson Pollack bad at painting or is he good at painting that way?

    I’m not even sure what would qualify as something being poorly written, I tend to qualify books as being bad if the content is so poor I can’t finish it. Especially in undergrad I had to “read” several such books. I’m not so much a bibliophile but it’s an interesting discussion of taste/aesthetics/quality.

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  4. My own confession: when I first tried to read LotR at about age 14, I didn’t even finish it. I loved the Hobbit and read it cover to cover many times, but LotR seemed really long and redundant to me, too.

    Not sure what your circumstance was Wood, but I was not at all Catholic or even Christian when I first tried to read it. I went back to it when I converted and have read through the entirety at least twice with much less annoyance at even the parts most liable to annoy, and see it as outstanding even from a purely literary view.

    Thinking on “bad but great” books, I read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as a libertarian youth and loved them, but now recognize the deep literary flaws, let alone philosophical. And for comparison, I read much of the Quran as a youth and an adult and always thought it was a bad book, but one billion Mohammedans disagree.

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  5. Interesting point from Scoot. “Bad” literarily seems to mostly mean “not engaging to the reader,” or bluntly, boring. There is certainly a subjective aspect of how engaging a book is to a particular reader.

    G.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire is essentially the anti-LotR, and I will admit I really enjoyed it. Morally I came to totally disagree with it. I still would say it is technically well-written enough to be engaging, but as my worldview changed it could no longer really grip me. I view it like I would a Pollock painting, “Fine, but so what?” There is no payoff for me, something that makes those works an organic whole, whereas LotR I have come to see as exemplary for its coherence to an actually beautiful ideal.

    I have seen it suggested that LotR is not really a novel, but a modern heroic epic. There are structures in poetry that I would say are bad when applied to a prose novel, and I wonder if LotR’s flaws as a novel are related to that. The art of a good novel seems to me to focus on the kinds of things that makes it engaging when read through straight, pacing, structure, clarity, etc. Many have said it is the kind of book that should be read aloud for full effect.

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  6. If it weren’t for LotR I wouldn’t be a Catholic today, so you’re wrong! J/k, but not about the becoming a Catholic part, or so I judge it. LotR was very influential to me about twenty years ago (yes, the movies moved me to read the book for the first time), and it seems to me the beauty therein was what won me. I had to confront the question of how something this beautiful could come from a serious Catholic. Sorry if that makes you cringe, but I did see it as a work of beauty and also saw how Tolkien’s Catholicism was necessary in order to create the beauty.

    I’m going to indulge my Bruce Charlton obsession here, but since then I’ve been intrigued by Charlton’s inclusion of LotR in his uber-canon of books that he considers foundational to his approach on many matters in the world. The effect Charlton’s praise has had on me is, while not concluding that I should mistrust LotR, giving a reason to explore whether I ought to mistrust it, or at least some aspects of it. I don’t want to be unfair to Charlton’s position, but I take it he thinks there was something of higher aspirational value in Tolkien than Tolkien’s Catholic faith that drove him to work and create; and that he (Charlton) can latch onto whatever that is and reap its benefits without committing to something so this-worldly as the Catholic religion.

    It’s the way LotR and Tolkien in general attract Charlton, and my perception of what it is that is attracting him, and whether that thing is a fair assessment of Tolkien, that have made me examine my taste for Tolkien in more recent years. So far I’m pretty sure Charlton is in this matter, as in so many others, out to lunch. But just the same, I’m still examining my taste here to see how ordered it is.

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  7. Buckyinky, if I may swoop in and reply before Wood gets a chance to be more measured and reasonable than I:

    I have two thoughts.
    1- Christ is used by Christians (and non-Catholics) the world over to manipulate, abuse, and scam people. That something is used by evil hands for evil ends doesn’t make the thing bad. Your description of LOTR as beautiful matches the description of my friend, and it makes sense that others would clue into that but miss the point. Charlton, as a devout non-catholic, has an incentive to see something different than true God-given beauty because if he acknowledged true God-given beauty he would have to confront his own beliefs. Instead he’s managed to get you to confront your own, to the detriment of a beautiful work like LOTR (as its been described to me).

    2- There’s a loosely related second point to be made about attachments in general. There’s a blog on this platform called “Saintly Sages” and recently I read an article about a Hermit and his cat. The hermit moved into the woods to live a life of solitude, prayer, and detachment, but brought his cat to keep him company and occasionally to pet and care for and otherwise show love to. An Angel came to him and the Hermit asked what fortune awaited him in the hereafter. The Angel replied that his fate will be the same as Pope Gregorys (who was Pope at the time). The Hermit was shocked and dismayed because Pope Gregory was awash in riches and the accidents of wealth in the center of Rome, while the hermit had given up all attachments to live as a hermit. The Angel replied “You are more attached to that Cat than Pope Gregory is attached to all his worldly possessions which daily surround him”.

    All this to say that, on the levels of taste I would say it goes something like Appreciation at the lowest level, then Attachment, then adoration, then deification. A taste for Tolkein can hardly be said to be disordered. Making him the cornerstone of your religious and political philosophy may require deeper evaluation. I don’t accuse anyone of having a disordered attachment to Tolkein, just don’t want Charlton’s bad cooking to ruin your taste for Beef, so to speak.

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  8. Wood really has picked a good and controversial take to drive conversation, lol.

    My two cents on Dr. Charlton and Tolkien is something that I will also admit to an uncomfortableness with. That is the idea of “sub-creation,” i.e., creation by a creature. I have read a decent amount of Tolkien’s other works, like the Silmarillion, as well as his letters and papers about his works, and as far as I can tell it is at least not incompatible with the Faith. Sub-creation, as Tolkien describes it, is like a refraction of light through a prism, the light being God’s creation and man the shard that diffuses the light. He relates this to the dominion man possesses from Eden.

    Dr. Charlton fits this into his Mormon inspired metaphysics in a way I think Pr. Tolkien did not intend. Much is made that the mythos is not the same as the Faith, but I and many others take this to be a humility on Tolkien’s part, that he recognized his sub-creation is not a *new* creation, but drawn from a particular part of God’s creation and filtered through not only himself but the Western and particularly Nordic culture he participated in.

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