Adolescence Triumphant

by Henri Doncks-Delane
from The Floating Egg — Volume V, Issue 4 (December 2001)

In last month’s issue, my esteemed colleague Aldean B. Hendrickson offered a play-

fully personal piece on his lifelong passion for the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (“‘There’s
room on my bandwagon’”, TFE V:3). As I say, this was obviously a very personal reflec-
tion, but as it was given in a (more or less) public forum, it is my intention to offer a
considered response; more considered, at any rate, than Mr. Hendrickson’s rambling
fan-fluff.
It is certainly evident that Mr Hendrickson loves The Lord of the Rings, indeed, loves
all the works of Professor Tolkien. This is not particularly bizarre; many people have a
tremendous fondness for one particular author or other artist. Tolkien seems to have far
more than his fair share of bright-eyed devotees, but this cannot, apparently, be helped.

What can be helped is Mr. Hendrickson’s level of enthusiasm. He seems to be under

the impression that all will read the books before seeing the series of films, or at least
rush out to read them as soon as the final credits stop rolling. Does he believe that no
one of this throng of movie-goers will prefer the easy vision of the cinema to the over-
blown and often dreary prose of the originals (an overblown dreariness that only grows
worse the further one travels into the world of Tolkien)? I think it were time someone
brought the man back down to earth.

Let me commence with a story. A month or so ago I was browsing through a local
bookshop when I noticed a little girl hovering around the table of Harry Potter books
and merchandise. She was perhaps ten or eleven years of age, the right age for an inter-
est in these ridiculous books, I suppose. What caught my eye was the way she circled
round and round the table, not just two or three times, but quite literally scores of times.
She never left the table the entire hour I was in the shop. And with each successive orbit
she appeared to grow more and more agitated, almost frantic, as if all this Harry Potter
was just too much for her to bear.
Adolescence Triumphant December 2001

It was about two weeks later, I suppose, when I was in the shop again to pick out a
book to read on the plane. As I was walking up the centre aisle, who should I see but this
very same little girl, hovering around the table like before. This time, two store employ-
ees were attempting to rearrange the waist-high heaps of books around the table to
make room for more stock, and this child-fanatic had evidently taken it upon herself to
supervise the undertaking. She leant over their shoulders, offering pointed suggestions
about which merchandise should go where, while the two young men grew visibly more
and more agitated.
I remember sharing this story with Mr. Hendrickson, and we laughed and shook our
heads together at the little girl’s pitiable fixation. He even commented that he hoped he
was never like that. But was he not? And is he not so still?

In this same book shop, not a dozen feet away from the Harry Potter display, stood a
table twice the size loaded almost to the ceiling with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. While
admittedly free of much of the silly tie-in merchandise that clutters every appearance of
Rowling’s creature, it is still a shrine for the pathetically obsessed. While Mr. Hendrick-
son may shake his head at the pitiable antics of the little girl above, I ask him how he
would be any different were he that age at this point in history.

The Harry Potter books are for children, yet adults throng to them, perhaps because
they feel it keeps them in touch with what their children are reading (or even with their
children are feeling). Or maybe they enjoy them because the nuances are so blatant (i.e.
un-nuanced) that they can get them, something they are often unable to achieve while
reading better literature.
And are Tolkien’s book ‘better literature’? Just barely. While the author's scope of
imagination is certainly more fertile, more expansive, and infinitely more original, it is
still a dead-end road leading nowhere. The imagined world is so rich that the readers
seem to prefer it to the real world. I am sure that Mr. Hendrickson knows far more
about the politics of Gondor in the Sixteenth century T.A. than he does concerning those
of the United States in the Twentieth century A.D., and most likely were he confronted
with this disparity he would be unembarrassed.
This is the problem with the delusion of the Tolkien fanatic: they recognise the utter
ridiculousness of their obsession, and yet they paradoxically see no problem with it.
Many, Hendrickson among them, develop pretensions that they are involved in some-
thing worthy of legitimate scholarly study, a life’s work, in a word, something real.

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Adolescence Triumphant December 2001

And what is this text to which Hendrickson and his like wish to dedicate their point-
less lives? It is a giant, over-inflated male fantasy. The language of Lord of the Rings is
thick and daunting. Revisiting the work recently, I was astounded anew by the preten-
tiousness of the work, by the sheer conceit of the undertaking that radiates from every
page. Tolkien’s own documented intent in his opera was to create an entire artificial my-
thology for the English people. This is, first of all, a silly undertaking, for why should a
modern nation in the Twentieth century need a mythology, be it acquired or invented?
Such things are surely for the past, a temporal realm to which Tolkien fans are appar-
ently willing to be forever consigned.
Second, this monument of dusty verbosity is utterly without redeeming value. It a
male fantasy, designed to enthrall little boys who fear little girls, and grown men who
still fear them. As entertainment for idle youth they are, perhaps, acceptable. But they
are not art. Art challenges us, and the only challenge in Lord of the Rings is slogging
through the onslaught of preposterous proper names and Elvish minutiae. Art disturbs
us, makes us uncomfortable about some condition in our lives or in the world around us.
This tale disturbs us with its nauseating maleness and overt racism. Modern literature
should provide us with solutions to narrow-minded nationalism, not pitch us a tritely-
idealised East vs. West conflict, reliant on a handful of obscene racial stereotypes indi-
cating the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ throughout.
And where, I beg to know, are the women in this tale? Defenders will, of course,
point out Arwen (a submissive elven princess who waits around for her lover to win her
father’s approval), Galadriel (a virginal elven queen who reads the characters’ thoughts
and tempts them to abandon their quest), Éowyn (who proves her equality to her
brother on the battlefield, but then trades in her sword for her dress and becomes the
proper princess and submissive wife), and Rosie Cotton (nothing more than a name at
the end of the tale). What sort of gender message is this? If this is the sort of thing that
excites Mr. Hendrickson, it is a wonder he has ever had two consecutive dates in his life!

I initially began this piece merely to point out to Mr. Hendrickson that a new crop of
Tolkien fans will spring up who will horrify him with their lack of anything remotely re-
sembling a mature understanding of them. But now I realise that there is no ‘mature
understanding’ of such rubbish. By casting in his lot with the cohort of Tolkien, Hen-
drickson has dug his own professional grave. Even were these texts worthy of serious
academic consideration — which, I feel obliged to assert once more, they are not —

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Adolescence Triumphant December 2001

Hendrickson would still be unfit for such a task. He is too much of a fan. His love for
these books is zealous, undiminished by the passing years; but it is a puerile, prepubes-
cent passion. He loves them because he always has, because they awakened his young
mind to great vistas of adventure, heroism, and mythic beauty, because he doesn’t know
how to give them up. Now he continues to obsess about this world to cover up the sub-
limated realisation that he cannot write anything creative of his own.

I am typically a proponent of the utter subjectivity of art, and decry attempts to con-
demn or belittle tastes that may differ from one’s own. But some things should just not
be, and the imaginary fairy world of J.R.R. Tolkien should not command the level of re-
spect and acclaim it pretends to, nor should continued readership of his works be en-
couraged among the young. All those who persist in reading these tomes as adults are
forever immature, clinging, like James Barrie’s Peter Pan, to the useless memories of a
childhood long past. This is not a tale that teaches the reader anything about their own
identity or the world they live in. It is a closed experience, drawing the reader ever-
deeper into an overgrown fairy-tale.