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2026-11-07 18:09:59

openculture@mastodon.social

When the Nobel Prize Committee Rejected The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien “Has Not Measured Up to Storytelling of the Highest Quality” (1961)

https://www.openculture.com/2026/05/when-the-nobel-prize-committee-rejected-the-lord-of-the-rings-tolkien-has-not-measured-up-to-storytelling-of-the-highest-quality-1961.html

2026-11-08 01:06:15

AtrusRiven

atrusriven@mastodon.social

@openculture Well, as we all grew up with his stories and as the committee surely rejected him also due to being "genre" fiction, his storytelling indeed does not have the highest quality. It is solid but is surely the work of an advanced amateur with vivid imagination and a sense for the wondrous. But the characters are in large parts quite shallow and the progression of the narrative often seems episodical. You can tell from the story that he often did not know to how progress.