Tolkien is well-known as the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it is popularly understood that he was a competent scholar of some kind. In fact, this popular perception is close to the truth, as Tolkien was a top medievalist, whose translation of such vital works as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight were accepted as standards for decades. What is interesting in this is the reason why Tolkien's status as the author of the definitive Gawain text was stripped away, to be surpassed by such poet-scholars as Burton Raffel. Raffel himself, in his own, as it were, "heroic yelp" prefacing his Gawain tells us exactly what is so wrong with Tolkien:

...[Tolkein, et. al.] have concentrated much more on the arcane trade of editing than they have on the much simpler and more direct occupation of understanding, of reading the poem as the poet tried to have us read it. I do not mean to be ungrageful, or bite the hand that feeds me, but I'm afraid John Spiers is (for a change) right when he groans that the Tolkien/Gordon/Davis text "merely slavishly reproduces the deficiencies, confusions, and inconsistencies of the copyist's spelling in the Cotton Nero IX manuscript." He is right too when he attacks the books lengthy, mostly irrelavent notes... It is no defense of Tolkien, Gordon, and Davis, but most literary criticism suffers from just their kind of "lengthy, mostly irrelavent" insensitivity to the poem as a poem. [1]

Raffel, after declaring this challenge, proceeds to slay the Tolkien beast in classic knightly style, giving us a version of Gawain worthy of the original's poetic strength and emotional power. In particular, Raffel reveals the original work's humor and it's sexuality, two things that Tolkien seems to fail completely to sense or to communicate.

In Tolkien's creative fiction, the lack of jokes and sex is not in any way due to his use of medieval motifs and settings. Recall that Victorianism is a 19th century phenomenon, and Puritanism goes back only to the 16th century. The writings of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries are positively florid with physical passion, emotional torrents (told in external symbols to be sure) and even sexual violence. The medieval sense of irony too was keen, and humor is everywhere in these stories, from the most subtle social critiques to a full measure of the most juvenile bathroom humor.

Tolkien, however, does not go there. When he isn't anesthetizing it in his translations, he is fully expurgating all sex, romance, bodily functions and humor from his fiction. Beyond this, he has written seemingly endless tomes populated by some of the flattest characters ever seen in serious 20th century writing. While the medieval originals made use of stock characters to fill many roles, the protagonists were typically quite rich, again, albeit with little or nothing hidden on the inside. What you see is what you get, but what we see in such authors as Wolfram is far more human than the emotionally stunted Tolkien.

If Tolkein's translations were doing such violence to the literature he modernized for other scholars, why did they rely on him at all then? It is important to realize here what the craft of textual preparation and translation was prior to the wide availability of computers. It was a wide open field for anyone to enter for many years, due to the mind-numbing tediousness of finding and judging textual variations in the available manuscripts, and in the rote mental chores of analyzing the original meanings of the language for translation into a more modern English. When someone like Tolkien came along, who could through his own extraordinary mental gifts produce a large quantity of texts in translation, few were able to challenge him and go and do a better job. Most who had the ability were, like Tolkien, hobbled by the same near-autistic inability to grasp the full range of human emotion and to read and write poetry as we would hope a translator could do.

The irony, of course, is that the tool given us by other functionally autistic geeks in another field, computers, changed all that. Now, textual analysis can be done at speeds unimaginable to dusty bookworm like Tolkien. Now, those whose minds encompass our experiences, whose lives hold a complete range of human joys and sorrows, and whose pens (or keyboards) can write words that can do justice to the English poetic tradition are able to enter the field and give us a true understanding of these brilliant works. Compare the warm and funny John Gardner to the cold and eunuch-like J.R.R. Tolkien to see the difference.

It is a difference not everyone is capable of appreciating, as testified by the ongoing popularity of Tolkien's fiction, even as his scholarly work grows ever more obscure. Where geeks squirm in their seats when reading the uproarious anus-kissing scene in Geoffrey Chaucer's Miller's Tale, or flinch at the rape scene in Chrètien de Troyes' Lancelot story the The Knight of the Cart, they sail smoothly through the passionless, sexless, joyless world of The Hobbit and the other Middle Earth tales, lingering over the tedious details of a character's costume and arms, drawing stark lines between good and evil that are hardly evident in real medieval romance, and reveling in the triumph of the child-like Hobbit mind over the dark complexities of the Tolkien villains.

The literature of the modern world's functional autistics is simplistic and two-dimensional, but it is nonetheless important, because these modern-day village idiots have been put to work building and maintaining the information systems that we take to be vital to our civilization. Dealing with them and their machines is a challenge we all must face, and we can better face it armed with understanding. What do these cute stories say about those who love them? Obsess over them, in fact. How does this obsession make itself known in the workings of modern technology?

This series will explore the role of functional autism in modern literature and in modern technologists. It will also take a detailed look at what it means to be functionally autistic, and how that is expressed through medievalist literature. If you are qualified to be reading Adequacy, I hope you'll stay around for the next installment.

Peace and joy to everyone in this season of the Christians' most expansive and extroverted holiday!

To be continued.

[1] Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Newly translated and with an introduction by Burton Raffel. Mentor, New York. 1970.