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J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

Book by Tom Shippey · 5 quotes · Lord Of The Rings, Tolkien, Language

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All Lord Of The Rings Tolkien Language Old English Saruman Evil Fantasy Fiction Mythology Old Norse Technology Th White Tollkien Wyrd

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century Quotes

“Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory's work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder that provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defense but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil.”

Evil Th White Tollkien

Book:J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

Source: J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“The Old English word is wyrd, which most glossaries and dictionaries translate as ‘fate’. Tolkien knew that the etymologies of the two words were quite different, ‘fate’ coming from the Latin fari, ‘to speak’, so ‘that which has been spoken’, sc. by the gods. The Old English word derives from weorÞan, ‘to become’: it means ‘what has become, what’s over’, so among other things, ‘history’ – a historian is a wyrdwritere, a writer-down of wyrd.”

Language Mythology Old English Old Norse Wyrd

Book:J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

Source: J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Man deÞ swa he byÞ Þonne he mot swa he wile, ‘A man does as he is when he can do what he wants’, and what this means is that power reveals character, not that it alters it.”

Language Lord Of The Rings Tolkien Old English

Book:J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

Source: J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“One sees ‘Sandyman’s disease’ in an advanced form in Saruman: it starts as intellectual curiosity, develops as engineering skill, turns into greed and the desire to dominate, corrupts further into a hatred and contempt of the natural world which goes beyond any rational desire to use it.”

Fantasy Fiction Lord Of The Rings Tolkien Saruman

Book:J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

Source: J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

“Sarumans of the real world rule by deluding their followers with images of a technological Paradise in the future, a modernist Utopia; but what one often gets (and this has become only more relevant since Tolkien wrote and since he died) are the blasted landscapes of Eastern Europe, strip-mined, polluted, and even radioactive.”

Technology Lord Of The Rings Tolkien Saruman

Book:J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

Source: J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century