Okay, so here’s a controversial one. Back in 2015 (I think), I wrote a rather scathing post dealing with Corey Olsen, the ‘Tolkien Professor’, who at that time, I thought rather superficial in his approach to Tolkien and his work. The post is certainly one written by someone in an earlier period of life, and I would not phrase my criticism now as I did then. I therefore provide the initial 2015 post first, unaltered, followed by commentary.
I should note that I have received positive feedback with regard to the inital post from a number of Tolkien scholars, all off the record, of course. There is clearly a feeling that I was onto something, even if I would not phrase it in quite the same way now, and I try to explicate that in the commentary below.
Post from 2015:
For some time now, a literature professor called Corey Olsen, who styles himself the “Tolkien Professor” (as though he were the only one deserving of the appellation) has been releasing podcasts and other material related to his work on author JRR Tolkien. Olsen appears to have quite a following these days. He has developed a new online “university” aimed at providing humanities content to fee-paying students, and more recently he has produced the “Riddles in the Dark” podcasts, which examine the Jackson Hobbit films. I was, at first, an admirer of Olsen, but over the last three or so years I have gradually changed my mind.
In the last two posts I examined Olsen’s treatment of the Turin story, and argued that his appreciation thereof is limited by his incessant need to Christianize Tolkien’s work, even in places where Tolkien’s ambiguous moral outlook is most apparent. He omits evidence and seems unaware of the scholarly opinions of others which might be pertinent to the issues he discusses. However, Olsen’s treatment of the Turin tale is merely symptomatic of a wider set of unfortunate trends which should disabuse his listeners of the notion that Olsen is in any way a proper Tolkien ‘scholar’. In this post, I will list several of these trends and discuss each in turn. I argue that Olsen’s sub-scholarly standards give a bad name to Tolkien studies and perpetuate stereotypes about it which are unhelpful. In the meantime, Olsen distracts from the great scholarship that is actually being done by luminaries like Michael Drout and Dimitra Fimi.
1. Failure to cite or discuss other scholarship.
Although Olsen has occasionally hosted podcast discussion with other Tolkien scholars (the aforementioned Mike Drout) his own work shows no signs of critical dialogue with the field. We might forgive this in his early, well produced Hobbit lecture series, but his teaching at Mythgard (I have taken a couple of his classes) leaves much to be desired. He seems stuck in a kind of New Criticism rut, wherein only ‘close reading’ counts as real scholarship. Never in my experience has he cited or discussed the works of other scholars in any detail. He has occasionally mentioned Doug Anderson and the History of the Hobbit by John Rateliff, but these authors are never engaged with seriously in his teaching or scholarly work.
However, Olsen’s greatest sin in this regard was to publish an introductory ‘close reading’ of the Hobbit without ever citing Hobbit scholarship in the text itself, despite it being a very fruitful area of Tolkien studies. Jason Fisher pointed this out in his review of the book in the journal Tolkien Studies, but Olsen was predictably silent on the criticism. When I posted on Fisher’s blog about this, several of Olsen’s fans (for that is what they are) decided to chime in and defend Olsen on the basis of the work’s popular appeal. But no scholarly work, however much it is aimed at the popular audience, should ever ignore the scholars who have come before. The very basis of scholarship is the critical back and forth, debate, discussion, and conversation. But Olsen refuses to have a debate or a discussion in his book.
Why is this important? Because literary scholarship is a part of the liberal arts, which seek to inquire into human art and production, human being and value. The very basis for the liberal arts consist in embracing the critical eye, of turning the scholarly apparatus toward the work in question and the interpretations of others. Olsen presents his own vision as though it were definitive, and seems to believe that the superior scholarship that has come before may be laid aside.
2. Olsen surrounds himself with yes-men
This critique is especially true of the Riddles in the Dark podcast, where his co-hosts, Dave and Trish, regularly defer to Olsen’s frequent monologues. Although the heinous quality of the last Hobbit film finally extracted some criticism from Olsen, the whole philosophical edifice which he sets up in the podcast remains unquestioned. By and large, this consists in his aversion to “crit-fic”. For Olsen, crit-fic involves the manufacture of spurious theories about film making or financial motivations on the part of the script writers or (say) the studios in order to explain some defect in the film. So, for example, Olsen accuses “purists” (he always uses this time in a derogatory manner) of missing the point when they argue that a two film treatment of the Hobbit movies might have been tighter and more focused than the bloated three film monstrosity it became. Instead, says Olsen, we should only look at the films as they are, and use what he calls “analysis” to understand them. In what does this “analysis” consist? Well, close-reading. As in his approach to written text, Olsen’s approach to the films completely omits context and assumes that all speculations based on the film-making choices of the script-writers/directors etc. are founded in ignorance. This is obviously absurd. Films are not produced in vacuums, and not every script-writing decision is based in some sort of careful story consideration. Film making involves a tension between artistic endeavor and other kinds of considerations, all of which are rather well understood by film scholars. It is Olsen who displays ignorance is assuming that this context fails to have any bearing on the outcome of the film.
However, a more sinister and reprehensible motivation appears hide behind “crit-fic”. Frequently in the podcast (see the final episode as an example) the co-hosts will obsequiously apologize for “doing crit-fic” as though Olsen’s word were the last on the topic, and completely unassailable. This is just nonsense. For Olsen, crit-fic is a means of making his own arbitrary interpretive philosophy the only game in town, and thereby to shut down critics and even his co-hosts.
Although I would not accuse Olsen of deliberately fostering an environment of critical complacency, it is clear that, at Mythgard and elsewhere, Olsen has done very little to actually change this culture and introduce voices critical of his own ideas. The whole enterprise rests on the mighty ego of Olsen himself.
3. Fanboyism
It is great to be a fan of franchises or books that are enjoyable and produce satisfaction. However, the ingratiating attitude of fandom is not always the best when approaching a literary work as a scholar. This is not to argue that scholars should always maintain some kind of emotional numbness toward the works that they find pleasure in (look at the the Jane Austen scholarship these days, I bet most of the literature professors studying her loved her work growing up) but rather that the saccharine, shallow attitude fans all too often bring to a ‘legendarium’ should be avoided.
This isn’t as true of Tolkien fandom as it is for other franchises, although even Tolkien scholars have occasionally been infected by the compulsion to ‘raise a glass’ to the Professor and treat him as an unassailable icon of literary brilliance. Unfortunately, this tendency has crept into Olsen’s podcasting and his teaching.
However, the worst of this trend is not directed toward Tolkien, but toward Olsen himself. Just as Olsen is surrounded by yes-men, the culture is made worse by the grovelling fandom that has developed around the podcast and now, Signum “university”. Far from this enterprise being an endeavor in providing quality education to the masses, it is a platform for Olsen to spout his ideas to fawning fans who are predisposed to agree with everything he says. This is not a new open university, a new Coursera, a new venue for critical thinking. Olsen’s online educational endeavours are produced by and for his fans. Once again, Olsen himself is the ego at the centre of everything.
Why this hurts Tolkien Studies
As a young field of scholarship, Tolkien studies is only now beginning to find its feet. The fantastic journal Tolkien Studies regularly produces great scholarship, and more scholars than ever are producing quality monographs engaging with various hard problems in Tolkien’s fiction. Meanwhile, anthologies and reference works have started to appear. This is all great stuff, but Olsen puts the reputation of the whole project in jeopardy by promulgating his oversimplified, fawning, fanboy-wridden version of Tolkien scholarship. At the beginning, during the 60s and 70s Tolkien studies did consist in fan produced “scholarship”, often appearing in zines or other magazines. Now that it has grown into a respectable discipline, it would be unfortunate if the progress that has been achieved in universities and in publishing were hurt by Olsen’s anti-intellectualism.
Although the field has (by and large) embraced Olsen, I think many top scholars like Drout, Shippey and others need to reconsider their support for Olsen’s project. The sycophantic cult that has grown up around the podcast and the Mythgard academy/university system is ugly to behold. I urge these great scholars to disassociate themselves from Mythgard and continue their great work elsewhere.
Futher comments 2022:
Okay, now back to 2022. As I mention in my introductory comments, I wouldn’t quite put things so starkly (or, I hope, so rudely) today. Nevertheless, some of the general issues I outline do, I think, bear further consideration.
Tolkien studies remains a fairly young field, as I note above, and there are all sorts of pressures currently acting on the field which, collectively, make ‘getting in’ very difficult, especially if an academic career is on the cards. Scholars hoping to pursue academia are faced by all the usual roadblocks, not least the general oversupply of PhDs as compared to postdoc positions (for more on this see Dennis Wilson Wise’s review of A Sense of Tales Untold by Peter Grybauskas, published in The Journal of Tolkien Research). On top of this, prospective academics are obliged to face the ongoing stigma associated with the study of Tolkien and fantasy in general. Although this is changing to some extent, as Wise notes there are no major Tolkien scholars in tenured positions at Ivy League universities in the United States (contrast this situation with, say, Austen, or the Modernists).
Does Olsen’s Signum University address this problem? It certainly provides a venue for the kind of research quite a few academically minded Tolkienists want to engage in, but to my mind it cannot replace a proper fusion of Tolkien studies with literary studies more generally, and that, I think, is what we should look for. If we (as Tolkien’s readers) hope to both produce and consume quality scholarship, the best places to facilitate these activities remain major research universtities with access to resources and top-tier researchers, where ideas can cross-polinate and theories are exchanged. That is not to say that Signum doesn’t have its place, but it will only hurt Tolkien Studies in the long run if we don’t also push aim for representation in the existing infrustracture of academic institutions, whether in Australia (where there are a surprising number of people working on Tolkien), Canada, the UK, US, Japan, etc. I would have less of an issue with this is Olsen did not also imply that the current set of institutions (like journal writing) are somehow unfit for purpose. Sure, we can all agree that some practices (like peer-review) are in many cases in need of improvement, and the journal publishing industry certainly disgraces itself in many instances. However, this should not imply that podcasts can replace proper, peer-reviewed scholarship, and the danger as I see it is that Olsen’s popularity is both drowning out better, more thoroughly academic voices, and making it difficult to find or appreciate those voices in the precarious contexts where they do appear - the small number of journals or publishing houses that will publish work on Tolkien. Olsen has identified a real problem, but the solutions he advocates are not always conducive either to the furtherance of properly academic work, nor to the acceptance of Tolkien Studies as a proper discipline within literary studies more generally. Olsen’s solution is a kind of ‘Benedict Option’ - for Tolkienists to carve out their own spaces and on some level forget about and ignore the rest of the scholarly community and their theories. In some instances this might work, for example, in the founding of new journals, but to establish an entire university on this principle, is, whilst heroic, open to accusations of vainglory.
I believe that the best scholarship, on Tolkien or on any other topic, is still to be encountered in existing institutional contexts, as imperfect as these may be. Public facing Tolkien scholars should certainly seek to engage audiences via podcasts or other means, but this ought not to replace or diminish real scholarship, which is distinct from this kind of outreach. Youtubers are not scholars, and podcasts are not academic papers. The best work in any field is produced through conjecture and refutation (as scientists like David Deutsch have noted) and this is best permitted to occur in contexts like the academic journal, where interlocutors are afforded the time, space and institutional resources to fill out their arguments fully and respond thoroughly to one another. This goes for literary scholarship as for physics. In Olsen’s repudiation of this tradition, I hear faint echoes of the recent anti-intellectualism espoused by, among others, the Weinstein brothers. This is not to accuse Olsen of some kind of collaboration, nor influence, but there is something in the similarities in both articulations which speaks uneasily to the ‘anti-institutional’ zeitgeist of recent years, best exemplified by the ‘intellectual dark web’.
In closing, I would submit that Olsen’s brand of public facing fan-scholarship, whilst admirable in many respects, ought not to be taken as literary studies per-se. It is a kind of fan outreach, which is fine, but we need to approach it as such, and Olsen’s ideas ought not be granted any more credence than we might grant to equivalent platforms: Youtubers, or podcasters like your’s truly. Note, this is still high credence - I think a lot of what Olsen does is valuable - but his Lord of the Rings podcast series (to take one example) is no substitute for reading the latest peer-reviewed scholarship. The problem I have is that the two endeavours are often conflated. Whilst the Youtube community, or Olsen’s podcast, or my own, might be a good start, I would encourage academically inclined Tolkien readers to look elsewhere for nourishment, especially to those scholars who are producing some cutting edge work and publishing it in Tolkien Studies, Mytholore, The Journal of Tolkien Research, and elsewhere. It is in supporting those scholars that we can begin to shift sentiments toward Tolkien Studies as a reputable branch of literary culture and scholarship more generally.
good post
good post