Tolkien, Twilight, and Cultural Optimism

Twilight is a huge seller and one might be tempted to despair.

But don’t.

It is still amazing the number of Tolkien references one finds in Twitter and on Facebook. Tolkien! Not J. K. Rowling. (I would assume she has more references, but she still has movies coming out. Tolkien is still amazingly influential.)

And for all the idiocy of Twilight, I’m sure there are many readers who wanted something better and will continue to look for it.  True, they will be misled by a host of books trying to imitate the worst features, but eventually another Rowling or two will come along.

And Tolkien will continue to be a lighthouse in every scifi/fantasy bookshelf in the world.

There was a time when “Swords and Sorcery” was a real minority report among readers.  It was mostly pulp fiction.  Tolkien changed the world forever by both transforming and popularizing the epic fantasy genre. He and Lewis had insisted people were hungry for it and, while nothing about Tolkien resembled an entrepreneur, he did in fact find a new market.

Gary Gygax has said he was expecting to market D&D to a small group of wargamers. He two broke into a new market, in large part because he had Tolkien to make a way for him.

Yes Twilight has been successful, but it is not going to be here a half-century later. No one is going to vote for Meyers as the author of the century in 2101.

It will pass.

Instead of judging the world by the popularity of Twilight we should look at the enduring popularity of Tolkien and also his better innovators like Rowling.

Just my opinion; but you know what an optimist I am.

6 thoughts on “Tolkien, Twilight, and Cultural Optimism

  1. pentamom

    Yes, Twilight is just a fad. It never occurred to me that people might worry that it would be more — it’s so obviously non-substantive, mass market, and so forth. Harry Potter is no Lord of the Rings, but there is far more substance in that than in Twilight. Harry may endure at least unto the grandchildren of the first generation fans, the way some kids still read E. Nesbit. But Twilight? Nah, that’s a fad on the level of the mullet, the muffin top, and junior clothes with pink skulls all over them.

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  2. pentamom

    I’ve seen enough pics of your family to know you’re not the mullet types, and I can pretty much guess you have better sense than to let your daughters do the muffin top or the skulls. 🙂

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  3. Jenn

    While it is true that it won’t stand the test of time as great literature. All literature is subjectively critique – I personally hate “To Kill A Mockingbird” and think that Jane Eyre is of far greater literary importance. In the end, the point is there are teenage girls in a TV/Internet fueled world who are reading – hopefully they’ll keep on reading and grow in the knowledge that books can take us to different places as they grow. You may not like it, you may not understand it, but it doesn’t mean we should believe that reading these books is a intellectual death sentence

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  4. pentamom

    You may not like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but I think it’s hard to argue that Twilight is written with as much intelligence and literacy as that book. That you even compare it to “Jane Eyre” rather than “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” is itself telling — there are identifiable levels of writing.

    Those teenage girls who are reading aren’t necessarily better off for it, if what they’re learning is that sacrificing your personhood for the sake of a passion for an emotionally abusive non-human is the ultimate romance. While I think that reading is extremely important to forming the person, there are some things that are so bad that there’s no net gain from reading trash, over sticking to TV and the Internet. It might not be an intellectual death sentence, but it’s moral and emotional poison. The lack of literary quality is by far the secondary issue here, but it is also a reality. I don’t mind girls reading stuff of low literary quality, as long as it’s not poisonous trash — but at the same time, I’m very thankful that my teenage daughter fully understands the difference between the amusing fluff in the “Christian fiction” section of the library, and real literature. In fact, both my teenage daughters have read Twilight — with the full understanding that it was relaxing entertainment, NOT anything they would want to learn ANYTHING — literary or moral — from.

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