Talk:Literary reception of The Lord of the Rings/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: asilvering (talk · contribs) 00:04, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Many thanks for taking this on. I'll respond promptly to any comments. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:10, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Good Article review progress box Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV () 3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant () Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

Preliminary comments

Sorry for the delay here. I keep avoiding it because I think this is going to be a bummer, but that's a poor reason to keep someone dangling for two weeks. I hope this comes off in the constructive spirit it's intended.

In short: I think this article in its current form isn't balanced, and doesn't pass 3a or 3b. I initially thought of a couple suggestions to pitch to you, but the more I think them through, the more I'm convinced that the resulting article still wouldn't succeed at one or the other.

The problem is that "reception of Tolkien" is not just a huge topic, but additionally it's one with many different, not particularly related subtopics. What is the overarching narrative or summary of the reception of Tolkien's work in general? I don't know that there is one; if there is, it's not in this article either. "Reception" is a huge umbrella, implying coverage of every type of response to Tolkien. But it also implies every Tolkien, which is definitely not present here. This article omits his artwork, conlangs, and children's books (except The Hobbit, if you want to count it there), and deals with his entire scholarly output in a single paragraph. The two Tolkien works I've read most recently aren't even named in this article. (Father Christmas and his edition of Gawain, if you were curious - it's January, after all.) The easiest fix to this would be to rename the article to narrow its scope, perhaps as something like "Reception of J. R. R. Tolkien's novels".

• I'm happy with that change, which we could implement immediately after this GAN. See below for what action I've taken to implement this. Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:38, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

However, then you're still stuck with the "popular reception" subtopic, which this article gestures at only very briefly. To some extent that's fair - there are other articles on that, and there's no need to reduplicate them - but the overall effect is to suggest that Tolkien's (huge) fandom and (huge) influence are roughly as important as some national reader surveys and an Amazon poll, and that none of those things are worth as much explanation as a single scholar's conclusions on Jungian archetypes in LotR. (That guy gets seven sentences all to himself; popular reception as a whole has only ten.) I thought of suggesting "Literary Criticism of J. R. R. Tolkien's Novels", but when I look at this article with that hypothetical topic in mind, I start to wonder if this should be an article at all.

• See below. I've removed the subtopic (i.e. focus has sharpened).

For one thing, it's still so big you've already started breaking pieces out of this article, which indicates to me that it's not as tidy a fix as I'd hoped. But on the other hand, when I start mentally moving sentences around to serve the purposes of this hypothetical article, I find that most of them would be more useful somewhere else. Several sentences (eg the Pratchett quote) more properly belong to "influence". Almost all of the rest are about LotR specifically, or even specific characters, and would probably be more helpful to readers in the "reception" section/article on LotR. A big chunk would be more useful on the Tolkien research article. (Which, imo, ought to be formally at Tolkien studies and the journal at Tolkien Studies (journal), so if you ever work on those and want to move them, consider this my !vote/axe in advance.) You might also consider putting some of these (like Kaveney) into Literary hostility to J. R. R. Tolkien and renaming/reconfiguring that one - it looks to me like what it's actually about is "Debate on the literary merit of The Lord of the Rings" (or some better title I hope you can come up with).

• Hm, well, an overview-level article of a large subject need not itself be very long, especially if, as here, there are already several subsidiary articles: each such subsidiary just gets named as a "main" article and summarized in a paragraph-length section. I'd not oppose having a Literary reception of The Lord of the Rings as that would capture nearly all of that side of things, and "Tolkien studies" would neatly stand alongside that. So, "breaking pieces out" is *not* a sign that things are untidy, exactly, though the process might not be complete.

So, where this goes now is up to you. It is theoretically possible to rework this article to a Good Article "broad in coverage" level of balance (would I expect it to discuss Father Christmas Letters? well... no), but I think that would be a lot of work, and I think you could do less work and achieve a better overall result by moving what you've already done here to other places on Wikipedia and torpedoing this one. -- asilvering (talk) 07:30, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

• @Asilvering: What do you mean by torpedoing? The article would end up being redirected? (Where?) I am not at all afraid of work, but am certainly interested in getting the best result for the encyclopedia. What article structure would result? Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:38, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

• @Asilvering: - are you there? Maybe the ping didn't work. I've decided that the article should be titled "Literary reception of The Lord of the Rings" – we can rename it immediately after this GAN has completed. I have removed the (modest amount of) non-literary and non-LOTR material, and I think you'll see that with this simple sharpening of focus it's a pretty defensible structure and subject. I don't see any problem with having a subsidiary article on the hostile material, it's a normal arrangement when one section would otherwise unbalance the article with detail. But very happy to discuss and edit during the GA process. Chiswick Chap (talk) 22:03, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

  It worked! I was just busy/thinking. (Tiny gnomey edits indicate that I am alive, not that my brain is anywhere useful...) I think that narrowing the focus to this level has vastly improved this, both as an article in general and against the GA criteria. Regarding a hypothetical full "everything about Tolkien's reception" article, I still don't think this is worth doing (I think it will be unbalanced or unwieldy to some degree or another), but have you considered making one of those vertical navigation templates to link all of these together? I think that would be very useful for readers, not just as a navigation aid, but as an indication of what all is on Wikipedia about the topic (and thus, in some way avoiding the "necessity" of having a big all-encompassing "the reception of tolkien" article).

  At any rate, now that this is sorted, proper review forthcoming! -- asilvering (talk) 02:58, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Review

• I think the lead should be expanded a bit in general; specifically, I think it's possible to read this and come away with the idea that the dominant perception of Tolkien today is still "acutely hostile", since that ends a paragraph and the next paragraph is mostly about specifically academic takes on Tolkien.

• "slurs" is a strange word to use here, and it doesn't appear to be Curry's. Swap something else in?
  • Replaced.

• "The Inklings" doesn't really fit with "jungians" and "marxists", since there's no "inkling mode of criticism" and their responses are more "I liked/hated it". I don't think you need this as a subheading at all, and where you put these opinions or this sentence is up to you. You could simply move Lewis to the "enthusiastic support" and Dyson to the "hostility" part. The whole chunk might also work as a transition sentence at the beginning of "Literary hostility", reworded a bit?
  • Moved Lewis to the enthusiastic camp and Dyson to the hostiles.

• The other "Specialist points of view" would probably work better as subtopics of "The growth of Tolkien studies" (with "rehabilitation with" removed). The overall arc still heads towards "Literary re-evaluation. Try it and see how you like it?
  • Done.

• The lead says/implies that it was the academic interest in the 1980s that prompted a literary re-evaluation of Tolkien's work, but the article itself doesn't say this. The "Literary re-evaluation" section should either say so at the beginning, and cite a source, or the lead should be more clear that these are two separate phenomena. You might also want to find someone to cite in that section from the 20th century...?
  • It's scholars who conducted the rehab and then (in a snowballing growth) who joined the party and conducted the re-evaluation. The rehab phase was more defensive, and more inclined to attack the hostiles; later, all that came to seem a distant memory (deep inside the snowball, or something) and attention turned simply to Tolkien and his sources. Looking at it again, I see we've actually said quite enough about this but in the wrong places, so I've reorganised it slightly to make the snowballing growth clearer. Hope this works for you too.

• Le Guin is an early supporter, so her words aren't "literary re-evaluation" and don't belong here. But actually I don't think this paragraph belongs in this article at all - it's two writers' opinions about LotR, but they don't really fit into this "enthusiasm --> hostility --> re-evaluation" narrative. Everything else in the "Literary re-evaluation" section works fine, keep it.
  • OK, removed.

• That's all for now. Sources are good at a glance; I'll get to them after you respond to these comments.
  • @Asilvering: Thanks. I think I've got it into shape now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:06, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

  Ok, I moved another paragraph and did a few line edits, have a look and see what you think. The Rosebury bit at the top of "Literary re-evaluation" still doesn't belong, I don't think, but I haven't touched that because it would need a new opening sentence there instead, or the jump to Pratchett is (imo) too harsh. I do think that Pratchett quote is a good one to keep in, I'm just not sure how to de-orphan it and leave that one up to you. -- asilvering (talk) 00:25, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

  • Led in. The statement is supported by the following citations.

Source notes

• Shulevitz's trouble with the book appears to be more that it's pedantic and full of "fusty archaisms" than that it's childish and unreadable.
  • Added.
• actually, Wilson calls him "pedantic" too, so maybe it's worth bringing that word into the article.
  • Done.
• having looked at a few more, I'm pretty sure every one of the negative reviewers from the "literary hostility" paragraph that I've checked have complained about his archaic/over-traditional/dated style, so it is a bit odd that this isn't mentioned in the paragraph
  • Added.
• the "as late as 2001" is a bit strange here, since these articles are being written because the Peter Jackson movies brought the subject back up; it's not so much a late tail of negative criticism as a new interest in the story in general (of course there are going to be people who criticize Tolkien as long as there are people reading him!)
  • "In 2001" it is.
• ok, I've spot-checked sources instead of going through all of them systematically because you're letting most people speak with their own words; in general the sources look fine and there's nothing hanging around without a citation. I do think this article doesn't give the critics in "literary hostility" a fair shake: for one, the people countering that hostility actually get more words in this section than the people expressing that hostility; the second issue I see here is that these critics aren't unequivocally anti-Tolkien. Kaveney gets a chance, at the end of the article, to say both positive and negative things about LotR, but the ones at the top of the article are scooped up into "thinks it's childish and unreadable" and then immediately countered by pro-Tolkien voices. The people you've chosen really do have very negative things to say about Tolkien's stories so I really don't think that it would be confusing or that it would undermine the article if there was a bit more "So-and-so described LotR as engaging and comforting but ultimately found it too pedantic and archaic" kind of thing in here.
  • Expanded the hostiles a bit.
• and that's it. I don't think any of those are GA-killers. However you handle this, I expect my next edit here will be to close the review as a pass. -- asilvering (talk) 01:28, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
  • Many thanks for the review. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:22, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

    Alright, time to stamp the pass on. Congrats! I assume the GAN itself needs to be closed under this title so as not to break anything, but I'll wait for the rename before I add it to the main list at WP:GA. -- asilvering (talk) 03:22, 28 January 2022 (UTC)