https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons-for-liking-tolkien

I went into this in parallel with reading Ursula Le Guin's essay about him, here: https://www.johnirons.com/pdfs/shadowleguin.pdf

I was kind of joking initially not realizing that no, this literally is a full-on marxist slanderfest, cheatfest, by any means necessary attack on him, which just uses weaker and weaker arguments the farther you go. Rereading it now, I see the structure - the cool little canned observations and demonstrations of the authors quality and knowledge, are legitimately neat observations that one can describe Tolkien this way:

The trick is repeated a few times. During these early stages, she demonstrates a limited amount of effort reading some sources not widely known (his bio and his letters, some of his childhood) and also even offers slight crumbs of support for him, at least enough to try to get his supporters onside.

And here we go! We're off to the races with the first of approx 10 uses of this barely hidden technique of disparagement. The essay never returns to explain the accusations of having produces a "slurry", of having fear of the masses, of retreating, of explaining what was meant by accusations of confusion.

And this, immediately continuing from the above, is another of her tics. It's a case where she is FORCED to admit that Tolkien actually doesn't fail in the way she wants him to or has suggested he did, but then the essay just charges ahead with disrespectful assumptions. The exact same pattern will reoccur soon in the passage where she ends: "this, presumably, is what he meant"

1 - The essay suggests he has some vice.

2 - The essay weakens the accusation (because it's not actually supported)

3 - The essay then intentionally forgets that it has NOT found Tolkien guilty, but then adopts a disrespectful tone ("perhaps,") to speculate weakly about whatever this old man might have been (accidentally, she must be thinking) doing with himself those years, anyway. I'm claiming that this "perhaps"

This is kind of a struggle session intro piece.

Even the phrase "half as crackers as others who we actually have evidence of having bad beliefs of."

Its equivalent to this - "You are a criminal; well, you're not as bad as the guys who actually were convicted; you may have used up your criminal desires, perhaps, upon comic books or the horse track."

It shifts from accusation, to forgiveness with a strengthened association with now "proven" criminals (evidence not included in this essay, ofc), to mere social attack. We know commies love to trigger the people to kill those they are jealous of, innocents - so this technique is great. With ZERO evidence presented (no quotes at all so far even attempting to show anything bad about him) he's been linked to a criminal.

Remember, the reality is: Tolkien earned a rare and difficult to get scholarship through very high achievement, raised by a widow, and then by an unrelated priest from his early teens, nearly lost the chance to go to university, but thrived there and in the end had a high position at Oxford, and also turns out to have written a widely loved series.

In the essay throughout, there are about 2 or 3 actual arguments and sources used; the rest of it is a series of ways she can try to convince or persuade or bribe or flatter you, or just test your willingness to go against liking him. Maybe you even like him, but maybe it'd be better if we both pretend we hate him, yes? What bait will work. But I'm stating the conclusion here, let me get back to reading it:

Bloodthirsty socialists like to argue in this way

Take that just as an example of her elevating her assumptions that she was being tricked by the covers, to the reality. The actual argument about covers and its alleged trickery is confused and I don't get the point of it.

But more to the point of how she flips this passive "the way they are published" into some kind of attack. This "how they are published" does immense work because without actually blaming Tolkien, we have somehow still earned the right to be speaking of assumptions we make about intentions, of people who if you think about it are not him at all. First of all, because he's been dead for 50 years, but secondly and more importantly that we know that he was obsessed with accuracy and minutae of his book publications, as shown by the 100s of letters which we still have which he wrote in anger at everyone involved in the illustration, editing, typesetting, correcting etc. of his works (rightfully so, since they did often ignore his demands). She doesn't establish whether the thing she's complaining about was even due to Tolkien's choice? it's such a prime target for her, too, since he was known to try to control this as much as possible. So if he's guilty of something, the information will be there. But instead we got this kind of vague description infodump on the different versions which have been published. How is that a bad thign?

God what a peach she is. She takes it upon herself to imagine Tolkien in this way: using an implement used for picking disgusting insects from one's hair, to deceitfully scrape paint, sponging grotty scraps of poisonous, smelly half-dried muck, to cheat someone on something worthless.

This is introduced as her fancy, her little dream, for our consideration.

Have you guys heard of connotation? have you heard of postmodernism? I will openly state rather than hide that I think the repeated use of this pattern is almost sexual in how much she seems to do it, while so overtly not at all hiding her desire to completely attack the victim with her choice of comparison.

Are we really going to pretend that this is deniable, that this is fair? Is this a real courthouse, I might ask, as the town surrounds me, japing, making me wear a dunce cap, appointing an illiterate angry farmer as judge, all chanting, just barely holding onto the facade that this is an actual fair trial with a non-predetermined outcome. Come on guys, you know me, this evidence is false. It's like a scene from a cultural revolution trial.

Emotionally, here, I start to have difficulties with how unfair she's being. I find she paints herself into a corner. It seems harsh to describe a man who lost his father, mother, was prohibited from loving and knowing his future wife (whom he met met at 15, fell in love but was then forced to never contact at all for 3 years; he chose to remain true to his sincere first love feeling, while yet not knowing her, perhaps not realizing or having the time to really check if she truly was the one for her; and after the 3 years of growing apart, marrying her suddenly), having all but one of his close friends killed by age 21 in war, then to immediately criticize his marriage as dreary, and his works... well i did love them once and they erotically charged me but... Maybe the attack would seem more fair if you didn't mention his affability, generosity, hardworkingness, immense care for all around him? (2nd time through: the author of the essay worships the man who partnered with germany to destroy poland, to both profit as dictators and enslavers of hteir people; of course she has no real sympathy for Tolkien, he was fighting against her side)

The author has learned a cool little trick; when writing about male books, just throw in a few careless-sounding disparaging remarks near the beginning; nothing quotable; the progs reading will get that you're on-side; the respecters of the author will feel pissed off (o happy day); this triggers the required disqualification of their later commentary. I can imagine her, in 1850, at the royal society with a native of new guinea; she's introduced him many times, and has learned what words and actions and types of male or female clothing and how to arrange them to make him mad, or happy, or however; either way, she has him show his lack of civilization; of course this only strengthens her redemption of him later, on her terms - once's she publicly mocked him and shown how he doesn't fit in, that he'll jape and gabber when mere words are said, mere spittle strewn upon things he thinks are worth of respect; this audience sees her and knows her as a good one and this outsider, this non-one-of-us, his beliefs are not right any longer. she's shown him guilty of crimes in her world and her court. And the gracelessness of the phrase "he was, however, an englishman of his time". And the spittle is necessary. The author takes every chance.

This has a few relevant parts to it. I claim:

1. We don't know what the letter that was sent had, but we know that the nazis demand for confirmation of Tolkien's non-jewishness was met with something which did not allow his books to be published there.

2. we know that probably two drafts were written; the one not sent is the one quoted from and the full quote clearly defies the nazis, rejects their antisemitism, and assures them that he also wishes he WERE jewish and will defend his friends.

3. the essay author leaves off the remainder of the sentence she quotes, where Tolkien states that further, he wishes he DID have semitic ancestors.

4. The selective quotation falsely weakens Tolkiens' anti-nazi sympathies.

Along with the earlier parts, it's clear that none of this is evidence against Tolkien and it easily could have shown him bad, if he were. Not disproof, but not proof; i.e. we looked for badness, we didn't find it. So what shall we think?

Well, he was English after all. This is another cheat. You can't look for evidence of crimes, not find any and in fact find defiance of criminal ways, then fall back on "well, he was white in 1930" as proof. If having white heroes and non-white foreigners (some evil some not) in a book were proof, we wouldn't be having the discussion.

Here's another fun little illogical cheat:

This is just a restatement of the authors' belief. Yes, I KNOW you think he's not good. But merely saying "critics think he's good, but he's not an edwardian englishman of great literary fortune. But actually he is, but it's not so simple". That is not an argument for your point.

This pattern occurs a lot too. Where a claim against Tolkien is made, then it's denied, then we come round to saying "well he's a baddie" anyway. I'm not convinced, and the reason I'm not convinced is that you didn't give me any actual reasoning or claims.

This kind of trick is: "I'm doing the 'exception proves the rule' where when evidence against me shows up, I spin it like it's actually FOR me! and it's a social judgement situation so I'm implicitly promising to support you when you do that, if you do me, here, now, by accepting and praising my article!" so NO I'm afraid I don't agree.

But that is the way half of humanity or more is sometimes. So I bear it and see what else she has to say. It's hard to blame her - this was written before the release of the first movie, in 2001. Maybe she'll learn one day that to be heard, it's useful to establish trust with the reader.

Here I was expecting a thesis

How we have fallen! Why are you writing to an audience who would accept this as proof? Or is this more like vibing a new cool way to be where we all act like sure we liked tolkien but ya know, right, he's just not the thing is he. Let's try this out, see if this takes.

At this point it becomes clear she has read all the letters and the bio of his life, and him in the war, and him as a young man, which I read last year too. This could be good - I read them very pro-Tolkien at the time; I came out thinking that he had 10/10 power and energy, but maybe 6/10 wisdom, and managed to mostly patch up the logic and fairness etc. within his beliefs; but he wasn't primarily an earth shaker; in person he was very confrontational but his works weren't particularly against anything or setting out to criticise them.

One wonders too about the author: exactly how IS an author to behave to be acceptable in her eyes? The lack of good will, and the obvious willingness to tar him and burn his books, were she to find actual fierly letters she'd be unable to defend liking the author of as she imaged being struggled against for liking Tolkien, or for writing a nice word for him? She didn't find any so she's not actively burning his books. But she isn't showing much grace towards him either.

I'd agree his theology was very weak; and moreso just his decisionmaking; his choices of where to live, how to spend his time, not to break from Oxford earlier; not finding a partner or friends for his wife; constantly drinking, smoking, hanging around with weirdos like Charles Williams; the break from Lewis may be forgiveable, who really knows, here. Never visiting Iceland, Finland, really much of anywhere - when I go there i think of him often and honor him, hoping that in some cosmology this balances out his quirks.

I honor him as a consciousness born into turbulent vessel, which basically, randomly, had generational drive and talent; he lived a long time and did more than most do in such situations.

Appaling. Was this normal in 2001? I suppose even I hated christianity then; yet would I have said it was appalling for an author, to use his own religion, within his own book? That seems a bit unfair.

presumably what he meant (subtext is: because i'm pretending I didn't get what he meant ... when I ... accused him of inserting appallingly anagogic dates into his book... wait... i did get what he meant... but i want to criticize him as a bad writer so ill just leave this in here I guess. The word "presumably" will do the work cause it suggests "we, the readers kind of glance at each other trying to figure out exactly what this freak means by "the work is fundamentally religous" how confusing "The religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism". wow that's super direct and obvious. anyway, i'll do the "presumably by that you mean X" thing to try to keep the higher ground. ya'll just go along with it okay?)

wow, she does go far doesn't she! it was 2001 after all! Ah, so it's a case of someone who loves pullman and hates Tolkien and Lewis! (I have no problem with Pullman; if you'd like me to defend Tolkien, first defeat Le Guin and if you would like to go on, call me. This is an especially strange sentence because Lewis has some suggestive boys school background I'd imagine that today the left would be a bit more naturally careful about attacking him unnecessarily.

Hmm, have I cheated here? Have I quoted falsely, or misread quotes, or merely slandered as she did, when I didn't provide quotes? I don't think so.

Aha the escape of the passive again! "When [...] sex is permitted"! This could be the key - because here she was blaming Tolkien and Lewis for not including sex in their books - yet let's flip the grammar - rather than them "not permitting it" (as if we must know the characters wanted to but the author was preventing them), actually it seems only fair (in a universe I want to live in) to reserve the right to include, or not include sexual passages in books to the choice of... the author, not the critic? accepting otherwise puts us at all kinds of risk; is she not letting Tolkien take the 5th here?

Further meta-defense: does a woman not have a right to just lash out at male books because they violate her particular preferences? Well, does a man have the right? I'd think not. Do I have the right to criticize the internals of other voluntary groups, legal systems, nations, armies? Actually no, I don't. At least not in a frame of "actually, everyone knows that..." But, am I doing that to her, here?

Am I leaving an room for criticism of Tolkien? Am I leaving enough? I wonder myself. I do think that in the fullness of time, quite a lot of deep criticism would accumulate. This knowledge is painful, when associated with someone whose made something I love so much. So my personal way to do it, which I suppose I AM trying to force others to adopt, is to "appear balanced". When criticising something sincerely made, which brings great joy and meaning, yet has faults, if you give the impression you'd trivially destroy the person and abandon their work, you scare people. You set up a world where attitude doesn't matter at all, and where one has no security. This is bad because it would lead to people living in fear, and to a cult-like attitude of always being prepared with reasons why someone else is worse than you; it prohibits a general build-up of esteem among people so that they as a group know that at first attack, it's assumed that they have each other's back. (ofc this can go way too far, cops, nationalism etc.) but yeah, I settle at like +1.5 on a -5 to +5 "how much you should openly glorify and praise those whose values and work you admire.

Performing this allows us to criticize things really deeply, without implicitly threatening them. Doing it with kindness and sympathy and analysis, and also not assuming bad intentions on their part, and not cheating (obv), is good. Unless your intention is to remove everyone to the right of yourself now, and whoever shows up later, I'd think you'd better mix the threats with some sincere attempts to persuade.

Of course that's still below the proper level, which I think is at that that of "Acknowledging differences." Was Tolkien allowed to write what he wanted to? It's got to be yes, outside full information control societies. Similar for the publisher. So, what are we to do? People seem to keep on liking Tolkien despite you not liking him today. It would be nice if we got somewhere better than retrying to make me hate him. Sorry I don't want to hang around with old cigarette-smelling progs in London (sorry, this is where I start making my own slanderous assumptions)

In the long term, sourpuss essays like this which seem to both be 1) arguing on the merits against him 2) only after openly signaling that hey if you already hate him, just letting you know I hate him too so we could just call it a day and find him guilty right away and be done with this, I don't think work well.

This is also an attempt to use evidence against one's position as evidence for it. Imagine if the first draft were "Tolkien had obviously never seen combat". Well, following a statement like that, I'm ready to accept the critic's damning strike. Oh dear though - Tolkien HAD seen combat, and the critic... hasn't. Ah well, go on then, let me just restate my original point: I, the person WITHOUT experience think the way the person WITH experience chose to show something HE knows about, which I do NOT know about, is wrong. As editor, probably take that out. But here it's honest to leave it in. She so desperately wants to criticize him. I love this "Unlike most writers of this sort of nonsense".

"Many quacks believe that fluids can cure people. Take a look at this guy - yes, he DOES cure people with fluids, nobody doubts they get cured. But he uses fluids! Just like those quacks! What a loser. I don't cure people btw, I don't know how"

In general the method is to say true things, then to imply that they are bad.

...and? YOU are the one who summed it up as Scary, Safe again. Yes, in fact, a lot of life, when summed up to two words, sounds simple. You live, you die. You love, you lose. Yet within that there's more. 1000 pages of more, lifetimes more, all novels are this way.

This is pretty despicable snidery. Yes, perhaps Tolkien, knowing his best friends were dead, did hum a song to try to cheer himself up. Do you have a problem with that?

Now I think it's more out in the open. She just hates Tolkien, or something about him, or what he means to her. I'm not going to psychoanalyse. Best of luck with marxism.

Wow, yeah the end is nothing but cheating. Oooh, let's find some admirers who say things which I can attack! Did you know the littel dictator liked dogs. I heard you like dogs too. Hmm. See it's easy, anyone can do this you realize? That's why the salary for fiction critics is so low. Because the salary we give people is proportional to how hard their work is, and this shit ain't hard.

God there are more pages of this? Yet again with the self-contradiction. She damns Tolkien for making the lords of middle earth big, tall and strong.

Okay, FINALLY something real. An actual statement now that she's done slandering his character with tricky lying words. So this is about power. Don't worry, I've already figured out she's a marxist, quite a while ago. The thing where you know what you're going to say, and then you plow forward, and if you notice the facts contradict you, you just use the contradiction as proof that you are right. It's a doozy, I'll tell you. You can't lose with arguments like that.

Marxism is: you keep suggesting that virtue is stupid, faith will be betrayed, false arguments win, evil is good, good is hopeless, and thereby give yourself away. etc.

From just before - she's forgotten that she wasn't able to lie about Tolkien being too on the record English, fighting for England's side (which OPPOSED Hitler, natch) and has already written words exculpating him for naziism; yet here she slips in this old volkischness anyway - cause you know anybody who lives in villages and likes beer, i mean that sounds pretty like, germany in ww2 type of thing yeah?

They literally show you that it's all words to them. Commies w/Russian accents dispatching orders to Jenny Turner about how to write about Tolkien: "This guy, has no shame we have to destroy him. Load yourself up with 10 paragraphs, hmm no this is a hard case make it 20 paragraphs of words. Load the words, make them good and strong. Yes some are defective but there are a lot. etc."

You, english major who's mad at me: Explain to me why it's fair to slip in germany-in-ww2-language to describe the shire, here?

Okay I'll be straight with you, I know it's a game too - what you really hate is the concept of a village, a nation, a people, an inside and an outside, quality which would exclude you; a place the 25% of assholes wouldn't be allowed to gang up and beat the ones who rule over them; who wouldn't be able to vice signal, ally against your betters. We both know that. I'm on the good 75% side, you're scum of the earth. But actually you're not, you could have been with us, but you chose otherwise. So you imagine, somehow, that good people would accept your comparison of the shire to germany villages. And you don't realize it just gives you away. Cause no, we really do like them, and no, we aren't evil, we just like nice things, not like you.

For my regular audience, I'm so sorry. I don't believe in the contradiction of tolerance. I don't practice tolerance, I practice "tolerance of anyone who meets minimum standards of fairness and honesty". This essay is just propaganda and trying to convince me that good is bad, that the walls cannot hold. But you know they can. Good beats evil cause evil people cheat, fail, scheme, lie, and fear.

• The most silly fascination they have is that they think they're getting away with it when they do the postmodern thing where they word-associate something good, holy, and honorable with something dirty or low; they're like a 9-year old who is secretly punching a so-called friend, cursing him, slandering him, angry that the kid is well-liked, and thinking this is going to work, while everyone around sees him as he is: a bad seed, vicious, unloving, on the wrong path. We may forgive him like we did Gollum a few times, to Tolkien's credit. And I do hope he is redeemed. But the kid seems to love the viciousness, it gets harder and harder to believe he's doing it out of poverty or deprivation, rather than just malice.

"Thinking about those maps makes you realise how spatial and spreading The Lord of the Rings is – it’s not temporal and plot-driven like most junk fiction. "

Is she literally thinking (tee hee, see what i did there? If they complain they look like losers, and if they don't complain, they've accepted my frame that it's junk. Oh I'm just too delightfully evil) like wtf? no the magazine is just a rag, toss you out onto the street

okay, reading more. the point that what you learn in LotR is mostly made up is fair, that's not a cheat.

Once again, this author is SCUM. It's funny, when she doesn't research it, her vileness and hatred and evil assumptions choke her. In fact, Tolkien was incredibly creative and loving to his children; all through his life he painted art, made cards and hand-made gifts for everyone around him, which were often preserved and today make up books. So no, actually there was more to him. Now, Tolkien did go pretty crazy (as older people tend to do) and also was a sputterer and an aggrieved type of person. But there are many of those; not many produce this kind of art

I agree he's not the wisest, but he devoted his time and his relations towards support, love, curiousity, beauty, truth as he saw it, sticking to a system he believed would benefit everyone, to self-discipline as he knew it, to faithfulness.

To me it's fine if this is not deep; nothing but texture and shape, superficial, like pottery, textiles, decoration. Is that such a crime?

https://museoteca.com/r/en/gallery/artist/1/3923/j_r_r_tolkien/!/

Every year he'd paint and draw a story about santa claus and his friends, animals, creatures and their battles and lives, continuing year after year for his children.

Enough time wasted on this trash. I am glad to write this once so that people can learn one way to respond to it.

It's fine actually if my economics and free enterprise and all is wrong, and even if socialism or something more like it works, that's also fine. The worst part is that they hate things so much and unite with each other over it. If this kind of person would leave me alone, that's fine, although I hope they'd learn and I'd try not to get mad at them. But this is insane.

Actually criticizing Tolkien for something technically bad about his writing would be welcomed. Criticizing him fairly, about plot, style would all be fine. But this was just using that and other devices to slander him and she threw everything in at the end.

I normally resist the mercy shown to Gollum but maybe the only way to truly win and not descend to this kind of level is NOT to wish harm to people like that, to somehow forgive them, help them see light, nurture them? Because their intention seems to be to attack good things and make themselves hated. I don't know where I stand here really.