I recently stumbled across AN Wilson’s “Tolkien was not a writer“:
“Take the example of the Ents, the talking trees. It seemed obvious to me on this reading that the Ents in The Lord of the Rings have partly been suggested by the talking apple trees in the film of The Wizard of Oz, and more by the suicides who have turned into trees in Dante’s Inferno. Beside both originals, Tolkien’s imitation seemed feeble.”
Jeesh! Of course you’re not going to like Tolkien’s “writing” if you try to read it this way–if you can’t willingly feel swept away by the miracle and mystery of (just for example) talking Ents. It’s like eating limburger cheese while holding your nose–all very well if you’ve made your mind up you won’t like it, but not the right way to find out what’s so great about it.
One of my favorite don’t-be-a-culture-snob factoids is that after the death of Charles Dickens, he was despised by a whole generation of English highbrows–at the very time Dostoevsky was studying how Dickens got his effects and Tolstoy would feverishly re-read David Copperfield when he ran into trouble while writing War and Peace.
The magical talking trees of Middle Earth are enormously different from the magical talking trees of the Emerald Kingdom. There’s no shame for Tolkien in his being inspired, if he was, by such richly-imagined and well-loved popular culture as Wizard of Oz.
These ruby slippers live in the Smithsonian’s American History Museum, now closed for renovations. But you can see Dorothy’s slippers (and Abe Lincoln’s top hat and Thomas Edison’s light bulb and Jim Henson’s Kermit the Frog and more) at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in DC, plus a special all-the-items exhibit online.