Tea at Trianon: There and Back Again

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, June 7, 2021

There and Back Again

From The National Catholic Register:

University professor, author and Word on Fire academic fellow Holly Ordway has been fascinated by The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien since her teen years. Indeed, her doctoral thesis was on the subject of modern fantasy literature, which naturally included an in-depth analysis of Tolkien and his influence on the genre.

But what of Tolkien’s influences? After all, he didn’t invent fantasy literature. Such works existed before Tolkien, and he was known to have read and studied ancient ones, including Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Norse mythology, and so on. But how much modern and contemporary fantasy had Tolkien read, and did it influence his groundbreaking contribution to the genre?

Ordway’s curiosity about this question was the jumping-off point for her newest book, Tolkien’s Modern Reading, a deep dive into the sources and inspirations of Tolkien’s creative imagination outside the Medieval scholarship that was his professional expertise.
During the course of her investigations, Ordway discovered that Tolkien’s official biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, had provided the “definitive” answer: “the major names in twentieth-century writing meant little or nothing to [Tolkien],” wrote Carpenter. “He read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it.”

That biography was published in 1977, and, since then, every account of Tolkien has dutifully and uncritically transmitted these magisterial “facts” about him: that he was “fundamentally backward-looking, happily living in total rejection of the modern world” and that he scoffed at contemporary literature as not worth his time or attention.

However, Ordway’s exhaustive research and meticulous scholarship has proven that this widely accepted view of Tolkien is totally false. Not only did Tolkien read modern fantasy; he read widely in many genres: science fiction, children’s stories, detective fiction, poetry and general fiction. Ordway has thoroughly debunked Carpenter’s “one Rule to rule them all.”

Her criteria for what constitutes Tolkien’s “modern reading” is quite specific. First, the work in question must be a work of fiction, poetry or drama published in English from 1850 or later. Second, demonstrable evidence must exist that Tolkien had read it or that he was at least familiar with it. Ordway examined archival interviews, letters, talks and recorded statements of friends, family members, correspondents, colleagues and others. Even photographs of Tolkien provided visual proof that he at least owned a book: A photo of Tolkien in his study reveals many modern titles on the bookshelf behind him, such as Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water (1939) and Mary Norton’s Borrowers series (1952-1961). The findings are winsomely discussed throughout the text of the book and cleverly distilled into a handy chart showing that Tolkien “interacted with … a total of 148 [modern] authors and more than 200 titles.” (Read more.)