Tom Shippey, välbekant Tolkien-kännare och författare till bland annat böckerna
J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century och
The Road to Middle-earth, har skrivit en trevlig artikel apropå 75-årsdagen av att
The Hobbit först publicerades (vilket var i förra månaden). Artikeln funderar över vad det egentligen är som gör den boken så bra och så framgångsrik. Rekommenderad läsning!
The Hobbit: What has made the book such an enduring success?Tom Shippey skrev:
Anyone could have told Tolkien this is not kids’ stuff. Nor, for instance, is the death of Thorin Oakenshield. An American lady told me once that she read the whole book to her sons, aged seven and ten, and when they got to this scene, she saw the tears rolling down their cheeks. Until JK Rowling started producing 700-pagers, publishers used to say that children’s books had to be short nowadays, because the kids’ attention spans were also short.
They were wrong. Just as she brought back length, so Tolkien boldly, or maybe unthinkingly, brought back emotional depth.
Tom Shippey skrev:
Politically correct, of course, The Hobbit was not and still isn’t. One of its most attractive characters — in a way — is Beorn. It’s perfectly clear that he is a were-bear, and his manners are frankly bearish. He’s also, and this is a feature borrowed from Norse sagas, not someone to hang around with once evening comes on.
Tom Shippey skrev:
He was good at landscapes, too. He got the name “Mirkwood” from very old poetry indeed, but his description of it — dark, untrodden, spider-haunted, and above all stiflingly airless, like the long-closed room of a very elderly relative — is one of the great forest pictures of English literature, which has many of them, from Robin’s Sherwood to the stoats’ Wildwood. The Misty Mountains are another borrowing from Norse. And the hobbits’ Shire is now the world’s image of England.
Ni som är bekanta med Shippey sedan tidigare, visste ni förresten att han själv har skrivit skönlitteratur? Det var en nyhet för mig i alla fall. Han har bland annat skrivit en serie kontrafaktiska vikingaromaner tillsammans med Harry Harrison:
The Hammer and the Cross. Någon som har läst?