Thanks for that - Mark! Indeed - much more than “a clue” as you so modestly refer to it. Reading it, in fact, exhausted - or more charitably - satisfied my curiosity on the matter. Indeed, I don’t pretend to have fully understood all the significances of many of the great works alluded to in the linked piece to support various points, so I may be missing something. But my impression from it was that Tolkien’s dislike for MacDonald’s work was (to my relief) only over trivial matters. ‘Trivial’ to me, that is - who has no investment in any debate over literary genres or how the fairy world gets portrayed. My alarmist imagination was wondering if Tolkien had some sort of falling out with GM over the latter’s high Christology or the contents of his theologies. So imagine my relief that this article only seems to reference Tolkien’s distaste for allegory and ‘preachiness’ (the latter of which MacDonald is ‘guilty’ of in the extreme.) While I can understand Tolkien’s objections to literary choices and styles, no doubt important to him as a philologist, those are not the things that made me fall in love with MacDonald. It is his very preachiness that drew me to him in the first place, and in fact, I think I’ve read something of the same from Lewis himself (from his introduction of his G.M. book that I highlight in my thread devoted to his book of G.M. excerpts and meditations.) Lewis actually refers to GM as a 2nd or 3rd rate author as far as his stories went. Not at all high praise I take it … but then neither I (nor Lewis apparently) utlimately stayed drawn to G.M. because of any literary prowess. So with some relief I set aside Tolkien’s quibbles as something of peculiar fascination to him alone as one uniquely poised and invested to care about such things, none of which constitute GM’s greatness to me. Now … if Tolkien ever discusses serious theology or atonement theory and GM’s influences on all that - I would sit up and listen with rapt attention. But I don’t look for it, since I gather that maybe even laying down one’s views so directly on such matters was way too ‘preachy’ of a thing for Tolkien to do. Or at least that’s what I managed to ‘get’ from this essay, hopefully not doing too much violence to what all was actually there.
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