Tolkien in the old days

One feature of the early Tolkien fandom days of the 1960s whose import is hard to recapture today is the little cries of bliss that Tolkien fans would emit whenever a major publication dared to acknowledge that Tolkien existed, and maybe was important, by publishing an article about him.

One such article appeared in the Saturday Evening Post issue with a cover date (normally the date the issue goes off sale, but whatever) of exactly sixty years ago today, July 2, 1966. It was titled "The hobbit-forming world of J.R.R. Tolkien" - puns on the word 'habit' were almost obligatory in media coverage of Tolkien in those days - by Henry Resnik, and you can read it on the SEP website here.

One thing you'll notice if you read the article is that, despite some useful factual information on Tolkien and how he came to write The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - Resnik could have drawn a lot more than he did from his telephone interview with Tolkien which is transcribed here, starting on page 37 - it's mostly about what the article calls "Tolkien people," i.e. American fans, whom Resnik has also interviewed in quantity. As with most such articles, the interviewees are better at demonstrating their intense devotion to Tolkien than at explaining what about his work excites or moves them so.

Despite its prominent publication, then - and it was the only article the SEP ever published on Tolkien, by the way - I find this a trivial and rather useless article for anything other than recording testimonies to this devotion. The presentation of the article - the tireome-pun title, Tolkien's photo inserted in a drawing of flowers, with photos of buttons reading things like "go go Gandalf" in Tolkien's alphabets running down the page without explanation - suggests that the editors didn't take the article very seriously either, and sure enough, they didn't.

This is from a memoir by Otto Friedrich, then managing editor of the Post, describing the editors' attitude towards the whole phenomenon of 'teen articles' (the youth of Tolkien's fans is emphasized by Resnik):

It was the celebrated youth movement, though, that precipitated the most vehement and irreconcilable arguments. Emerson [William A. Emerson Jr., the editor in chief], who had two adolescent daughters, regarded the whole phenomenon with a mixture of horror and fascination. His commercial instincts, however, convinced him that this was a subject that would sell millions of magazines. [After the magazine's first Beatles cover] sold out, and a second Beatles cover did the same, Emerson knew that nobody cared very much about explanations. A cover story on Sonny and Cher sold very well too, and so did one on Bob Dylan, and Drugs on the Campus, and Teen-Age Drinking, and the Peril of Pep Pills. Our younger editors were still not satisfied with this paternalistic approach, however, and in time the youth fad became almost a religion among magazine editors, and so we went along with the herd in publishing stories on body paint and old-costume fashions and various weird rock groups.
Whether this was really good journalism was a matter of endless debate. I myself strongly opposed the whole trend, arguing that most Americans do not dance to rock music or smoke marijuana, after all, that all the teen-agers together represent a relatively small part of the population, and that the median age in this country is not getting younger, as many people think, but older. In short, as the times changed, my own role gradually changed from that of the young militant to that of an aging conservative. ... I vetoed the whole subject of Tiny Tim. (Decline and Fall (Harper & Row, 1970), p. 218; Friedrich was 36 at the time, Emerson was 43.)

I think the condescending and dismissive attitude that reeks from this passage, which clearly applies to the Tolkien article - Resnik says the Tolkien Society of America was so wildly popular it had 800 members! 800! - is also evident both in the presentation and the content of the Tolkien article.

And that's what we had to deal with, back then.