Have you ever wondered how a Nobel Prize committee works? If so, then look no further than Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who has disinterred the 1961 literature panel’s minutes, the Guardian reports. There is little mystery: the judges convene to discuss nominees just as any other prize panel would, although with perhaps more self-regard than is customary. In 1961, for instance, the judges rejected Robert Frost and E.M. Forster for being too old, and Lawrence Durrell for his ‘monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications’. Italian novelist Alberto Moravia was overlooked because his prose amounted to ‘a general monotony’. What on earth would they have made of Umberto Eco?
The same panel blocked J.R.R. Tolkien’s candidacy because it felt that his style was substandard. Tolkien had been proposed by his fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis — a wonderful gesture of friendship of which Tolkien was probably unaware, such were the mores of the time.
Tolkien is a taste acquired in childhood, easily lost in adulthood. He admitted to that limitation in an interview with Radio 4 in 1971, where he also spoke freely of his creations. The Shire, for instance, is an amalgamation of the domestic virtues he knew as a child in South Africa and Warwickshire, an innocent place threated by external forces. The persevering hobbits, he said, are an ‘allegory’ for mankind’s ‘impressive survival’.
Tolkien apologised for his bad grammar, but he made no apology for Middle Earth. Time has vindicated him. The Lord of the Rings is emphatically not ‘great literature’; but, with a little help from Peter Jackson, it has outlived the work of Ivo Andriæ, the Yugoslavian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. Approximate sales of the trilogy exceed 150 million.
Comments