RE: Is AR a 'childrens writer'?


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Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on October 12, 2004 at 15:30:00 from 213.38.124.194 user ACB.

In Reply to: Re: Is AR a 'childrens writer'? posted by Mike Dennis on October 12, 2004 at 14:51:29:

"The Hobbit" is definitely a children's book, complete with all the surgary trappings of the sort of late-Victorian children's books that JRR Tolkien would have known as a child, and which Edith Nesbit and Arthur Ransome scrupulously avoid. You cannot introduce an adult to Tolkien via "The Hobbit" (I have tried!)

I submit that "The Lord of The Rings" and "The Silmarillion" are neither children's books (too scary!) nor adult fiction. No sex, no politics, no economics. They are, perhaps, teenage fiction. None the worse for that, but Dostoyevsky or George Eliot they are not.

To grow up when AR and Tolkien were little boys was to grow up without proper books. My late father, who was not much younger, and who went to such lengths to present me with SA for my seventh birthday that he must have been planning for an opportunity (we were living in Mogadishu; nearest bookshop Nairobi!) said that his favourite books had been "At the Back of the North Wind" and "The Secret Garden". For a man who was 27 when SA came out, he was strangely familiar with the works of AR, and I suspect he had been led to SA via "Racundra" and a mutual friend, HJ Hanson.


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