(no subject)

[fajrdrako]

On one of my mailng lists today someone quoted J.R.R. Tolkien:

I can't improve here on JRR Tolkien's remark that the people who most strongly object to escapism are jailers.

I hadn't come across the quote before but I love it. I wonder where he said it?

Comments

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

. . . me too. If you happen to get an answer, drop me a line?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I will indeed! It does sound like something he would think, but I don't recall the line from either his writings or the bios of him that I have read.

It's too good to forget.

[widget-alley.livejournal.com]

0_0

That's awesomey mcrockin'socks. Which mailing list was that?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I recall exactly... I think it was the Lois McMaster Bujold discussion list.

[sparklebutch.livejournal.com]

That's a great line.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I thought so!

[elynross.livejournal.com]

That's kind of a summation/paraphrase/distortion of what he said (unless he also said something similar, yet different, somewhere else), which actually is even more interesting, to my mind:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the “quisling” to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say “the land you loved is doomed” to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.

From On Fairy Stories, (http://larsen-family.us/~1066/onfairystories.html) which is available in The Tolkien Reader.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

An extremely intersting passage! Thank you so much for reproducing it here. Hmm. Lots of food for thought.

[elynross.livejournal.com]

It's a compulsion. Someone says "I wonder where..." and I go hunting. *g* Glad I could help!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

It's the same impulse that keeps me running to the dictionary during dinner-table conversations!