Picture through Wikimedia Commons
I’ve simply begined learning J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit to my daughter. Whereas a lot of the nuance and the references to Tolkienian deep time are misplaced on her, she easily grasps the distinctive charms of the characters, the character of their journey, and the perils, receivedders, and Elven associates they’ve met alongside the way in which to this point. She is familiar with fairy story dwarfs and fantasyic wizards, although not with the typology of insular, middle-class, adventure-averse counstrive genstrive, thus Hobbits themselves took a little bit of clarifying.
Whereas learning and discussing the ebook along with her, I’ve receiveddered to myself a couple of possible historical relationship between Tolkien’s fairy story figures and people of the Walt Disney company which appeared across the identical time. The troupe of dwarves in The Hobbit would possibly possibly share a common ancestor with Snow White’s dwarfs—within the German fairy story the Brothers Grimm first published in 1812. However right here is the place any similarity between Tolkien and Disney begins and ends.
The truth is, Tolkien mostly hated Disney’s creations, and he made these really feelings very clear. Snow White debuted solely months after The Hobbit’s publication in 1937. Because it happened, Tolkien went to see the movie with literary pal and a fewtime rival C.S. Lewis. Neither favored it very a lot. In a 1939 letter, Lewis granted that “the terrifying bits had been good, and the animals actually most moving.” However he additionally referred to as Disney a “poor boob” and lamented “What may not have come of it if this man had been educated—and even introduced up in a good society?”
Tolkien, notes Atlas Obscura, “discovered Snow White lovely, however otherclever wasn’t happy with the dwarves. To each Tolkien and Lewis, it appeared, Disney’s dwarves had been a gross oversimplification of a concept they held as treasured”—the concept, that’s, of fairy stories. Some would possibly brush away their opinions as two Oxford dons gazing down their noses at American mass entertainment. As Tolkien scholar Trish Lambert places it, “I believe it grated on them that he [Disney] was commercializing somefactor that they considered nearly sacrosanct.”
“Certainly,” writes Steven D. Graydanus on the National Catholic Register, “it will be impossible to imagine” these two authors “being anyfactor however appalled by Disney’s silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.” One would possibly counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on pluralizing the phrase), even have enjoyableny names (derived, however, from Outdated Norse) and in addition break into track. However he takes pains to sepacharge his dwarves from the common run of youngsters’s story dwarfs.
Tolkien would later specific his reverence for fairy tales in a scholarly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Stories,” by which he makes an attempt to outline the style, parsing its differences from other sorts of marvelous fiction, and writing with awe, “the realm of fairy story is broad and deep and excessive.” These are stories to be taken seriously, not dumbed-down and infantilized as he believed they’d been. “The association of children and fairy-stories,” he writes, “is an accident of our domestic history.”
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for younger people, however he didn’t write it as a “kids’s ebook.” Nothing within the ebook panders, not the language, nor the complex characterization, nor the grown-up themes. Disney’s works, on the other hand, repredespatcheded to Tolkien an inexpensiveening of historical cultural artiinfo, and he appeared to suppose that Disney’s method to movies for children was especially condescending and cynical.
He described Disney’s work on the entire as “vulgar” and the person himself, in a 1964 letter, as “simply a cheat,” who’s “hopemuch lessly corrupted” by profit-seeking (although he admits he’s “not innocent of the profit-motive” himself).
…I recognize his talent, nevertheless it has all the time appeared to me hopemuch lessly corrupted. Although in many of the ‘pictures’ professionalceeding from his studios there are admirable or appealing passages, the impact of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea…
This explication of Tolkien’s dislike for Disney goes past mere gossip to an important practical upshot: Tolkien wouldn’t permit any of his works to be given the Walt Disney deal withment. Whereas his publisher approached the studios a couple of Lord of the Rings adaptation (they had been turned down on the time), most scholars suppose this happened without the creator’s knowledge, which appears a protected assumption to say the least.
Tolkien’s lengthy history of specificing negative opinions about Disney led to his later forbidding, “so long as it was possible,” any of his works to be professionalduced “by the Disney studios (for all whose works I’ve a coronary heartfelt loathing).” Astute learners of Tolkien know his serious intent in even essentially the most comic of his characters and situations. Or as Vintage Information’ Martin Chalakoski writes, “there’s not a speck of Disney in any of these pages.”
Observe: An earlier version of this put up appeared on our website in 2018.
Related Content:
J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a German Publisher Asking for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)
110 Drawings and Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Middle-Earth and Past
J. R. R. Tolkien Writes & Speaks in Elvish, a Language He Invented for The Lord of the Rings
When J.R.R. Tolkien Labored for the Oxford English Dictionary and “Realized Extra … Than Any Other Equal Period of My Life” (1919–1920)
Josh Jones is a author and musician based mostly in Durham, NC.
