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Post by geoffrey on Jan 24, 2015 0:34:20 GMT -6
The Hobbit was published in 1937. That was the year H. P. Lovecraft died, and R. E. Howard died in 1936. Weird Tales was publishing some great stuff by Lovecraft, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore, and others.
So just who was buying and reading The Hobbit in 1937 and before the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954? Was it mostly children? Was The Hobbit basically that time's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone? Or were the older readers of Weird Tales buying and reading The Hobbit?
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Post by Finarvyn on Jan 24, 2015 5:44:45 GMT -6
Well, I wasn't around then but everything I read on the topic seems to indicate a little of both. Like the Harry Potter books, The Hobbit seems to be beloved by adults as a great kids story, which probably means that a lot of adults read it to their younger kids and older kids read it on their own.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 24, 2015 9:49:00 GMT -6
(Not to appear one of those insufferable internet wanna-be wise guys, but so you know where I am coming from:)
I studied English literature and wrote several thesis-sized seminar papers about fantasy literature. During all that time, I never found any sort of indication that the Hobbit was more than casually received by adult audiences upon publication. In fact, I think I even read that the first edition of the book was not commercially successful.
One of my key issues during my research was always that people did not know how to properly place Tolkien in the contemporary literary scene: Most still regard him as the "founder" of fantasy literature, and even if they don't, they assume he held way greater influence on the genre than is valid. In fact, it seems that Tolkien's status as the most important fantasy writer of the 20th century is something that he probably did not gain before the 80s. Emphasis on "probably", though.
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Post by geoffrey on Jan 24, 2015 10:01:24 GMT -6
I studied English literature and wrote several thesis-sized seminar papers about fantasy literature. During all that time, I never found any sort of indication that the Hobbit was more than casually received by adult audiences upon publication. Interesting.
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Post by talysman on Jan 24, 2015 12:43:04 GMT -6
(Not to appear one of those insufferable internet wanna-be wise guys, but so you know where I am coming from:) I studied English literature and wrote several thesis-sized seminar papers about fantasy literature. During all that time, I never found any sort of indication that the Hobbit was more than casually received by adult audiences upon publication. In fact, I think I even read that the first edition of the book was not commercially successful. One of my key issues during my research was always that people did not know how to properly place Tolkien in the contemporary literary scene: Most still regard him as the "founder" of fantasy literature, and even if they don't, they assume he held way greater influence on the genre than is valid. In fact, it seems that Tolkien's status as the most important fantasy writer of the 20th century is something that he probably did not gain before the 80s. Emphasis on "probably", though. I believe this is the case, although it might be important to note that the upsurge in popularity of Tolkien among adults began in the '60s, basically because of the hippies. That's why people were wearing Frodo Lives buttons, why Nimoy sang that song about Bilbo Baggins. "Fantasy written for adults" has gone through peaks and lulls of respectability and popularity. Before the '30s, you've got E. R. Edison and James Branch Cabell and H Rider Haggard writing adult fantasy without being frowned at. But in the '30s and '40s, it's relegated to a pulp ghetto. Then LotR in the '50s revives interest.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 24, 2015 14:22:52 GMT -6
This is exactly what I am talking about - public awareness and public reception are two different things, and especially in retrospect, it becomes ever moer difficult to differentiate both. (To give a practical example, let's postulate that we all agree that the actor John Wayne was the most generally successful Western movie actor of the 20th century. Yet, about calling him the most "influential" one, I think we can all agree that it would be extremely problematic.)
My personal theory is that Tolkien rose to prominence through his acquaintance with C. S. Lewis, and that "The Hobbit" received increased attention because it was a less charged book than the Narnia novels (with all their esotericism). From what I personally observed, the real ignition to establish fantasy literature as a genre seems to have come through more child-oriented and more simplistic "mythical age" novels, like "The Once and Future King", and Lloyd Alexander's Taran novels. - From there, we have a logical generational progression, from children's book to adolescent literature (no offense, but this is where I would place Leiber, REH, etc.), to the more complex, and distinctively adult-oriented fantasy books from the late 70s.
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Post by cooper on Jan 24, 2015 14:32:59 GMT -6
I think looking at the fantasy supplement in, what? 1972? And that wargamers were clamboring to recreate the battle of the five armies tells us that Tolkien was already ascendent even then. There is passing reference to other fantasy authors, but all of the monsters are Tolkiens.
The difference I think for Tolkien is that people bought tolkien as "literature" wether for children, or for themselves. All of the pulp authors were just that. Pulp authors in dime store rag magazines. Clearly, men who went to Oxford and other white towers knew of Tolkien and he was elite influence on fantasy culture. Nothing in Weird Tales would be in the Harvard Review of Books or whatever in 1936. The first scholarly dissertations on Tolkiens fantasy works begin appearing around 1959. His work, including the Hobbit no doubt, would have been read by Historians of English Mythology very early on and probably to their children.
It shouldn't be a surprise that Tolkien really explodes in popularity on college campuses in the 1960s.
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Post by geoffrey on Jan 24, 2015 15:32:16 GMT -6
Good points all around.
My interest in this is primarily in the pre-Fellowship days (1937-1953), when The Hobbit was a single, stand-alone book with no connections to anything else. For nearly 17 years, The Hobbit was all there was. Who was reading it in 1948? Who was talking about it in 1944? Where did the book stores and libraries shelve it in 1951? Etc. Was this a mostly juvenile thing? Was Bilbo of interest primarily to pre-teens? Or were more teens and 20-somethings reading The Hobbit?
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Post by cooper on Jan 24, 2015 16:05:26 GMT -6
"It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. The book remains popular and is recognized as a classic in children's literature...George Allen & Unwin Ltd. of London published the first edition of The Hobbit on 21 September 1937 with a print run of 1,500 copies, which sold out by December because of enthusiastic reviews and encouraged by the book's critical and financial success, the publisher requested a sequel. As Tolkien's work on the successor The Lord of the Rings progressed, he made retrospective accommodations for it in The Hobbit."
Here's the original 1938 NYT review.
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Post by talysman on Jan 24, 2015 17:33:43 GMT -6
That review suggests that it was, indeed, seen as children's literature with a positive appreciation from some adults, basically the Harry Potter of its day. There was now Narnia influence, since that series didn't come out for another 12 years. What CS Lewis was writing around the same time was Out of the Silent Planet, which came out at the same time as The Hobbit. Tolkien definitely wasn't riding on Lewis's coattails. If anything, they were riding on Charles Williams's coattails.
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Post by cooper on Jan 24, 2015 17:38:52 GMT -6
It was basically "Peter Rabbit" if Beatrix Potter had then followed up with "Watership Down"...
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Post by Deleted on Jan 26, 2015 1:12:01 GMT -6
"It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. The book remains popular and is recognized as a classic in children's literature...George Allen & Unwin Ltd. of London published the first edition of The Hobbit on 21 September 1937 with a print run of 1,500 copies, which sold out by December because of enthusiastic reviews and encouraged by the book's critical and financial success, the publisher requested a sequel. As Tolkien's work on the successor The Lord of the Rings progressed, he made retrospective accommodations for it in The Hobbit." On Wikipedia, we have a pretty good summary of the printing history, but not of the print numbers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_editions_of_The_HobbitFour print runs between 1937 and 1942, that's pointing towards the demand being way higher than the publisher might have expected. Then again, the four year gap between the 1938 and the 1942 edition also suggest that sales, for all the praise, were modest, or rather, that the second edition did not sell out immediately. Still, for a debuting, independent writer of children's fiction, 1.500 sales in six months is pretty sweet, even today.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 26, 2015 1:46:53 GMT -6
Good points all around. My interest in this is primarily in the pre-Fellowship days (1937-1953), when The Hobbit was a single, stand-alone book with no connections to anything else. For nearly 17 years, The Hobbit was all there was. Who was reading it in 1948? Who was talking about it in 1944? Where did the book stores and libraries shelve it in 1951? Etc. Was this a mostly juvenile thing? Was Bilbo of interest primarily to pre-teens? Or were more teens and 20-somethings reading The Hobbit? The review cooper posted sums up what I know about the topic - the book was well-received, its more literary elements dutifully noted, but outside of that, it did not have a cultural impact even remotely comparable to "The Lord of the Rings". FWIW, if we look at the dirty dozen of the more famous fantasy writers of the 1940s - arguably comic artist Hal Foster, T. H. White, ERB, Mervyn Peake, Fletcher Pratt, and Austin Wright, I find it very hard to establish a connection to "The Hobbit", outside of them being all arguably part of the same genre. - In fact, some have said that Tolkien owes them more than he himself admitted. - It's here that Tolkien's critics like Michael Moorcock usually on pile on, by the way, when they dispute a relation of their works to his: That his actual impact on the genre is overstated, because many concepts today attributed to Tolkien's work are already found in the works of writers that were already descending in popularity when he rose up to success.
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Post by Falconer on Jan 26, 2015 11:12:00 GMT -6
My sense is that The Hobbit was seen exactly as Alice in Wonderland — a book for children (under 13) to read or have read to them. Obviously any adult could be “fond” of it as such, but probably not a “fan” in the same way as a grown man might loudly profess, today, to love Harry Potter or comic books.
As for authors like Moorcock, Gygax and Feist, who long claimed that Leiber was a bigger influence than Tolkien, that never seemed genuine to me. It’s like they wanted to climb out from under Tolkien’s shadow, so they tried to place themselves in a separate genre, where the giants were not quite so giant. Yet their works were so largely homages to Tolkien, even if “in resistance” (eg., Pullman, so consciously peppering his works with anti-Christian messaging). I think, in later years, they all came to admit it more freely. Perhaps jumping on the movies bandwagon, or else because Rowling and Martin succeeded in making Tolkien seem less insurmountable.
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