Why is Tolkien scholarship so much better than Lovecraft scholarship?

Why is Tolkien scholarship so much better than Lovecraft scholarship?

Both fields are relatively new, and yet the difference in quality is astoundingly vast.

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tolkien is good lovecraft is shite

Because Tolkien is a better writer.

It must be said that there's a lot of garbage writing about Tolkien.

I really like Lovecraft, but is there really enough depth in his work to justify anything called "lovecraft scolarship"?

I mean there are so many other authors way more profound and diverse, why Lovecraft in particular?

>why Lovecraft in particular?

Lovecraft, like Tolkien, was a mythologist.
Mythology lends itself especially well to devotion and commentary.


>is there really enough depth in his work to justify anything called "lovecraft scolarship"?

How many books has Hesiod's Theogony spawned?

Yes, but still Lovecraft's universe is far from a well-constructed, cohesive and organized mythology. Different stories tell different versions about the universe and its inhabitants.

I really don't see the point in trying to glimpse into a messy mythos that is only there to fulfill a narrative purpose. I very much believe that us making sense of his gods and cosmic deities tell more about ourselves, somehow similar to a Rorschach test, than of Lovecraft or his motivations.

>Lovecraft's universe is far from a well-constructed, cohesive and organized mythology

The Bible has multiple creation stories.
Differences prompt men to reconcile. If anything, the lack of cohesion encourages scholarly activity and intellectual contemplation.

I don't know the answer, but I found it a curious question, because I always thought of Lovecraft as the anti-Tolkien. At the center of Lovecraft reality is the dumb god Azathoth, the personification of meaninglessness, meanwhile in Tolkien even the simplest actions gestures reveal transcendent meaning and Providence (heh. get it, the city... ah, sorry).
Like when Bilbo spared Gollum's life in one, so that he could (kinda) save the day at the end much later on.

>I always thought of Lovecraft as the anti-Tolkien

What if I told you there was a connection?

1/3

2/3

3/3

...

I took it from here:

amyhsturgis.com/?page_id=510

BTW, thx, user.
I repay you with a snippet of a poem from a Catholic like Tolkien speaking lovecrafteanly.

I want to read more about this

>What if I told you there was a connection?
*EAR SHATTERING FART NOISE*

This is the way the thread ends
This is the way the thread ends
This is the way the thread ends
Not with a bump but a BRRRAP.

>>This is the way the thread ends
>This is the way the thread ends
>This is the way the thread ends
>Not with a bump but a BRRRAP.
Quite pungent my dear

>Tolkien

Lends himself to textual, religious and historical scholarship by the nature of his project: his work draws extensively on history, Christian theology, and presents quite often in unpublished manuscripts. He also had a cohesive mythology he wrote extensively about. Associated with many other well known authors of his time. His published work was also all superlative. Work does not present a thesis directly.

>Lovecraft

Did not have a cohesive mythology, but loosely associated themes and materials. Expresses a clear thesis. Published a lot of junk work. Anti-religious project does not lend itself to extension.

Tolkien was an all-around alpha who fought in World War I; had a world-tier brain for languages (he was a philologist, after all); engaged in theological conversation; had a firm grasp of ancient and medieval literature and poetry; wrote books with incredible prose and universal themes.
Lovecraft was a cuck American with access to a public library who wrote about spooky stuff.
Of course scholarly writing about Tolkien, whose work has merit, will be vastly superior.

(OP)
>Why is Tolkien scholarship so much better than Lovecraft scholarship?
His son had to work exactly like the mythographers of old: reconstruct stories, which became The Silmarillion and then The History of Middle-earth and all posthumous Tolkienian work, by cobbling together multiple, fragmentary, and often even contradictory sources. Tolkien scholarship isn't simply voluminous, it's a necessity. But before myths and genealogies, drawing from various Biblical and European sources, Tolkien's autistic pursuit was the creation of languages.

Ultimately Tolkien gave us a world which many found worth investigating and exploring, a world probably worth fighting for and living in, while Lovecraft gave us not a world but what's outside: the otherwordly beyond the edge of sanity, inexplicable, dark, non-Euclidean, and worst of all, squishy.

I have this set. It's an Easton Press edition; hard-leather, gold-trimmed, comes with fold-out maps of Middle Earth.
They only have three, but it's a 5-volume set (trilogy + The Hobbit + Silmarillion).

They're beautiful books.

They're both a waste of time.