Meet Michael Drout, Tolkien scholar and former E-bay user (2001)
Assistant Professor of English Michael Drout is a medievalist who also studies the works of novelist and fellow Anglo-Saxon scholar J.R.R. Tolkien. With the impending release of a film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, Professor Drout is in the news. He is featured in stories published by the Boston Globe (Tolkien was a Hobbit at heart and Staying faithful to the Fellowship), Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (Experts divided on trilogy's significance) and the Worcester Telegram-Gazette (Professor still making discoveries about the Lord of the Rings).
One of Michael Drout's earliest encounters with literature was his father's reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy to him as a youngster. "There was this great Ballantine paperback poster above my crib," he recalls, "I loved it...it was the Hobbit map of Middle-earth," Tolkien's fictitious land inhabited by the characters in his books.
The assistant professor of English says he and friends later "enhanced" the map with pens and crayons, and it was eventually lost to the place into which so many childhood things disappear. But his regard for Tolkien has remained, and grown over the years.
In fact, Drout now shares Tolkien's scholarly interests and field--Medieval literature--and is working on three ambitious Tolkien projects: creating the world's most comprehensive database of works about the author and Oxford professor; working with colleagues internationally to establish Tolkien Studies, a new scholarly journal, at Wheaton; and editing long-lost Tolkien manuscripts for the writer's estate.
"The previously unpublished book is entitled Beowulf and the Critics," he says. "Tolkien wrote it in the 1930s, just before or even while he was working on The Hobbit, and he drew from it for his famous lecture on Beowulf--"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"--but he never published the entire book."
Drout discovered the unpublished work while on a graduate research project in the U.K.. "I found the manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1996 and, after some negotiations with Tolkien's son, Christopher, the Tolkien Estate granted me permission to publish an edition, which should be available in late December," he says. "The other project, our bibliography will eventually either be published on a CD-rom or simply put on the web for all scholars to use."
Drout has also gained a reputation as a technologist who uses the Web and Java programming to revive a "dead" language, Middle English. His software, King Alfred, helps students learn to speak and write it.
The searchable Tolkien database will allow researchers to better understand the author's work, and to gain insight on what shaped his writing. "We'll be better able to understand his patterns," notes Drout. "It will be possible to gain new insights on how his writing changed as he got older, to identify what he was reading, and to see what his influences were."
While Drout is excited about the new Tolkien trilogy about to hit the big screen, he says he is well aware of the author's fear of having his works mass-marketed. According to Drout, Tolkien was forced to sell the movie rights to his books before he died. "The result of a complicated situation," he says, "in which some things remained in his estate and some went to other interests." Tolkien's estate has worked carefully to maintain control over merchandising, notes Drout. "They were recently approached with an idea for Hobbit-foot slippers, which they turned down," he says. "A line of coffins, each containing the names of Tolkien characters was also developed for merchandising. They were also turned down."
Interestingly, Tolkien's writings exploded with the counter-culture of the 1960s. "Ace published the first paperback editions in the early '60s," notes Drout, "and the Ballantine editions really took off on college campuses in the early 1970s." Students at one California university even named dorms after Hobbit characters, according to Drout.
The Hobbit remains one of the most popular children's books year after year. Readers young and old still devour The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Even the Harry Potter books themselves are direct descendents of Tolkien's literary genre of fantasy; the Dungeons & Dragons, popular fantasy and sword and sorcery phenomena are deeply rooted in his writing. "Computer hackers routinely run searches for passwords using Tolkien characters," says Drout. "They're among the most commonly used."
Why the huge following? Drout compares Tolkien's formula for success with that of the Beatles.
"The Beatles took rock and roll and cleverly blended it with dance hall music--making it accessible to a new generation," he argues. "Similarly, Tolkien fused modern 20th century literary technique with the epic tradition from the Middle Ages." The result is an accessible and much-duplicated formula, he says. "His genius was to invent the Hobbits and their world," notes Drout, "because, where the epic tradition was elevated to tell the tales of kings and noblemen, the Hobbits are the everymen of the story. They are you and I...and we follow them as they mediate this complex, terrifying and beautiful world."
Tolkien's increased popularity during the height of the Vietnam War is no coincidence, according to the Wheaton professor. "Readers in 1969 didn't want black and white," he says. Tolkien's messages about power and the lack of pure good and pure evil seemed to ring true with many young people at the time. This message has remained popular. "Tolkien says there is a morality...the morality is that you have to make choices. His writing argues that power can lead to corruption in the purest among us, and even good guys can make bad mistakes."
Mike Drout says he hopes to have advance tickets to an early screening of The Lord of the Rings movie in December. While his year-old daughter is too young to attend the premier, Drout says he and his wife have already read the Hobbit trilogy to her at bedtime.
"She has a new poster above her crib," says the proud father and Tolkien scholar. "I found the Ballantine map on E-bay...the same one I had." Drout says he was up until three in the morning bidding on the map. "It cost me $300, and I paid $180 to get it framed. I'm not allowed to use E-bay anymore," he laughs, "but it was well worth it."