20131224.0724

I am rereading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings...again.  I have lost track of how many times I have read the piece; in my adolescence, when I first encountered it, I read the text repeatedly, and in my adulthood, I have read it annually or more often.  Tolkien's masterwork has informed my writing; my master's thesis works with his commentaries, and I offer conference papers that invoke him at greater and lesser length.  (I know the links are to a website that I am not diligent in maintaining.  I am working to improve.)  So it is...accurate to say that I view Tolkien's writing as important.

That I do will mark me in the eyes of some as being...flighty.  I carry with me the nagging suspicion that I am viewed by those who prize the older iterations of my profession of professing as something of a scholarly dilettante, wasting my time on trifles instead of working with the mighty works of the traditional English-language canon (and I suppose it means that I worry about that dilettantism myself).  And perhaps it is the case that I look largely at the relatively recent works of Tolkien and of his successors--notably Robin Hobb--because I cannot handle the "serious" pieces of writing.  Or, more likely, I look at writing because I cannot handle the "real" world of business, politics, or the STEM fields; I delve into letters not because I am stupid--which I like to think is clearly not the case--but because I am weak (again, the nagging suspicion of how I am viewed and the similarly nagging self-doubt).

My self-doubt aside, the view that the writing of the past is of more value than that of the present is wrong.  I am aware that there is a lot of insipid pap available; I am also aware that we have only a small part of the writing that has been done, and even among that small portion, there is a fair bit that is simply bad.  It does not get carried forward as much as the "great" works, admittedly, but the fact that it is there to be seen demonstrates that the writers of the past were of as varied quality as the writers of the present.  (Tim William Machan has somewhat to say about it.)  We simply see more of the variety now because we live now; had we lived then (and been able to read), we would have seen much the same proportion--and the proportion itself is an issue.  There is much more to read now than before, even with the Internet; is not most online content written even now?  That does mean there is more crap through which to sift, but it also means that there are more treasures to be found.  Jewels in raw form may need cutting and polishing, I admit, but that does not mean they are not worth value.  And some have already been burnished to a shine through much handling.

I will go add another gleam to the Middle-earth corpus.