JRR Tolkien Denied Nobel Due To Low Quality Prose 505
Morty writes "In 1961, C.S. Lewis nominated JRR Tolkien for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tolkien did not receive the prize. 50 years later, the archives for that year have been made available, so now we know why. Tolkien's prose was viewed as low quality."
Re:Tolkien appeals to nerds... (Score:3, Informative)
DIDNT DISPLAY TECHNICAL MASTERY?????
The man was not just a writer but the Don of English at Oxford, in other words he was THE authority on how the language worked, its history and how words are used. And in LOTR, it showed, not just in English but in the other languages he invented. The Nobel judges were rank amateur hacks in comparision
The secret to reading LOTR... (Score:5, Informative)
Nobel prize for literature is irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
List of writers rejected by nobel committee
Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Mark Twain, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie,
and last but not least Karel Capek.
Who is Karel Capek?
The author that coined the term Robot(Rossum Universal Robots) , his 1936 work "The war with the newts" was rejected for being too offensive to the German (nazi) government.
Re:Tolkien's prose (Score:4, Informative)
Yep this what exactly they mean when they call a work "timeless" .
Now, perhaps I'm completely wrong, but I remember hearing somewhere that LOTR didn't pick up popularity until much later, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#Reception [wikipedia.org] . As in it was mostly discarded at first and then was rediscovered and remains popular to date.
Re:Tolkien's prose (Score:5, Informative)
Right idea, but wrong mythos.
Anglo-Saxon literature [wikipedia.org] and its Scandanavian [wikipedia.org] cousins [wikipedia.org], plus the ancient lore of his own childhood neighborhood [wikipedia.org] are the roots of Tolkien's legendarium. Undoubtedly, the epics of the various Mediterranean cultures were there too, since they were completely unavoidable to anyone studying Oxford "Greats". But the epic-ness of the Silmarillion and the Ring are pretty much Saxon and Brythonic in character.
Re:I believe Nobel prize is of low quality.... (Score:5, Informative)
It's Saramago, you ignorant troll. And yes, people read him - in fact, it's obligatory reading for all students in my country.
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Informative)