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Tolkien's Legacy: The Platypus Reads Part LXXXI

My wife and I have been reading "The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun" edited by Christopher Tolkien.  If we had picked up the book when it came out, we would have payed a pretty penny.  As it is, we got it for less than three dollars at Amazon.  So far, my wife and I are enjoying the book, especially academic material.  However, the reason it's selling for such a low price has also become abundantly obvious: the book is esoteric, technical, and has no direct connection with Middle Earth.  So esoteric is the work, that you really need to have read "The Volsunga Saga," know a fair bit about the history of the Northern European Dark Age and both Eddas to enjoy it.  I have all those prerequisites, hence my enjoyment.  This leads to the question, however, of why Christopher brought out and published this work.  Surely he must have known that it would be a commercial failure; that it was bringing out his father's "scripta minora" in the strongest sense?

And yet.  And yet, even Tolkien's 30-something flailings are better than what most scholars or authors can bring out on their best day.  Maybe Christopher Tolkien has hit upon something that is needed in our modern, crassly democratic culture: we need to have things that are high and good thrust in our faces because they are high and good; not because we want them.  In a way, this is Tolkien's legacy.  In his preface to "The Lord of the Rings," Tolkien admits that he published the work without much hope for its popular success since it was "primarily linguistic in nature."  Even Rayner Unwin admits that he and his father published the work expecting to lose money on it.  They did it because they recognized "The Lord of the Rings" as a work of enduring genius.  Tolkien's work has always been produced and published on principle.  All this is not to say that Tolkien and Co. are elitist, like pent-housed culture snobs producing deliberately esoteric work so they can sneer at the unwashed masses.  Rather, they are people who believe that some things are worthy in and of themselves, regardless of what markets and masses think of them.

Tolkien pointed to that which is worthy, regardless of what others thought, and the world is a richer place for it.  In bringing out "The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun," Christopher is following his father's footsteps.  In the end, it's not about what the fans demand or making a quick buck, it's about remaining faithful to the Tolkien legacy.

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