Talk:J. R. R. Tolkien's ambiguity/GA1

GA Review
The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.''

Nominator: 08:56, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk · contribs) 16:31, 15 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Many thanks for taking this on. I'm used to working with reviewers and will address any issues you raise promptly. I personally find it easier if comments are listed outside the table for me to reply to, and then the table is basically just for final summaries; I hope that would work for you? Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:42, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, I can put the comments outside the table. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 17:46, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm passing this today. It was a pleasure working with you. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 15:32, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Many thanks. It seems the bot didn't run, but as you've passed the article I've run it now to record the result. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:19, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Specific comments on general writing

 * "Shippey considered Tolkien lucky to have been able to balance" - this seems like a weird thing to say in the lead. Surely Tolkien was not just lucky, but skilled? uncommonly successful?
 * Good point, reworded.
 * "freedom for the reader" - freedom for what? I see that this is in the lead ("to imagine different aspects of Middle-earth"). I think that level of specificity should also be in a little introduction to this section.
 * Added a lead-in sentence for the section.
 * If Raffel concluded that LoTR wasn't literature, then what was it?
 * Just popular trash, presumably, but he didn't put that into print!
 * ha! I was thinking on the lines of literature as a category of writings that includes essay and poetry, but I see now that he was using the term in a more elitist way.


 * Can you add a little more to the lead to summarize the entire page?
 * Done, and added quite a few wikilinks, too.

Specific comments on summary style

 * My initial impression is that this is a very detailed article about a hyper-specific part of literary criticism of Tolkien. Is this level of detail necessary? Clearly there are secondary sources to support it.
 * Happy to slim anything down if you feel it's gone too far in some directions. Scholars from different disciplines have converged on Tolkien – medievalists, linguists, theologians, literary types, biographers, so it's a busy field.
 * I reviewed the summary style page, and I think that the way this page is linked from Literary reception of The Lord of the Rings complies with the guidance there. I read a little of the GA review of that page too, and I noticed that that page was changed to be more specific to LoTR. Comparing that page to this one, I think you have more scholarship about Tolkien in general and not just focused on LoTR, so the broader title makes sense. I think that instead of the hatnote going to literary reception page under "Ambiguous description", it should go to "Tolkien's prose style" under "freedom for the reader"... but what do you think?
 * Actually I don't think we need that link at all, there's more detail here than there.
 * Sounds good to me!


 * My apologies on assuming a small scope of literary studies on Tolkien. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the library where I work has many shelves of books on Tolkien. I'm using a few works from the list of the major works of scholarship from the Tolkien estate to try to figure out if you have hit the major works of literary analysis in this page. I'm also looking at JRR Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, which has an entry "Tolkien Scholarship: Since 1980". It mentions that Tom Shippey, in his The Road to Middle-earth "showed how cruces in medieval literature, tortured passages whose interpretation is disputed or unclear, were often the catalyst for Tolkien's imaginative creation" (p. 660). Do you know what it's talking about? Is that related and worth including on this page? I'm happy to add it.
 * Many thanks. Tom Shippey, a major Tolkien scholar, is already cited four times in the article, and The Road to Middle-earth is already listed in Sources. It's a matter of judgement whether we need more from him here, but I don't think that passage says anything about ambiguity; it's saying that he was specially interested in gaps in knowledge, such as who Earendel might have been and why he was described as "brightest" (and we know where that led him).
 * Thank you for your clarification--I was trying to find the passage the encyclopedia was talking about but it sounds like you are already familiar with it.


 * The sub-section "Ambiguous diction" summarizes a single article by Steve Walker. As a literary criticism nerd, I like this level of detail. As a Wikipedia editor, I want to think about this a little more. I have a similar feeling about the tables for the specific quotes. Are tables in literary criticism used in other parts of Wikipedia? I'm used to seeing them for awards and band members.
 * Tables can be used for a wide range of purposes. They're useful in this kind of article for summarizing examples in a way which allows readers to compare items easily, and to present the essence of a piece of scholarly analysis without repeating large amounts of it in quotation marks. Some editors object, too, to stepping through an author's argument to explain and summarize it, which does make it rather difficult to explain such a thing in ordinary text. Actually as I read the policy, the one thing you can't do is repeat an author's argument without attribution in Wikipedia's voice, using similar words to the original without quotation marks; the case is quite different if one is explicitly explaining the author's point of view: but that doesn't stop people from objecting.
 * Thank you for helping me to understand the rules about tables. I think that the way you cited it is clear, I like them, and I think other readers of this page will appreciate the clarity they offer.
 * By the way, Walker's work is an entire book on Tolkien's prose.
 * That was one of the ones I checked out! Very cool.


 * I know it's customary to quote a lot of literary criticism when discussing it, but there are too many direct quotes. Please change some of them to summaries. For example, instead of "Flieger states that he "trimmed his sails to meet winds from different directions"" consider summarizing this as "Flieger states that he adjusted his explanations of his work to best suit his audience".
 * Done that one, and a few others.
 * Those are great. MOS:QUOT just says "try not to overuse them."

Specific comments on verifiability

 * Some GA reviewers have had me give more of an introduction to each scholar as I summarize their opinions and work in reception sections. You've done this with some people, like when you say "Tolkien scholar Nils Ivar Agøy", but not with others, like Catherine Madsen, Joanna Podhorodecka, Pierre H. Berube, and Cynthia Cohen. I want to be careful of scope creep with GA reviews though--I'm not finding a policy that says that you have to do this. WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV and WP:INTEXT say that you have to name the person in-text, but not that you have to explain who they are.
 * Yes, reviewer mileage may vary. Positions include not minding at all, especially if a wikilink is provided; insisting on a gloss for each author; to (my view) that I provide a gloss when context is needed, but if the author's name is followed by "writing in Mythlore" (academic journal focusing on Tolkien and his Inkling friends) then no more explanation is required. I agree that policy is comfortably flexible here (long may it remain so). I'll go through the article adding any glosses that seem necessary. I've added something for Cohen and Podhorodecka; the rest seem fine to me!
 * Thank you for adding those, I am happy with the glosses.

Specific comments on images

 * I find it weird that the caption says another name for Sauron is "The Lidless Eye" but shows an image of an eye with an eyelid. Is there a different image of the eye of Sauron without a lid that would make more sense? I see that this same image is used on many other Wikipedia pages. I am concerned about it possibly being a derivative work of Tolkien's original cover art (since the description says it was based on that original design). Is it different enough to be its own work at this point?
 * I wonder. Maybe "lidless" should just be read as "always open, staring at you", which is certainly the emotion I get from this scary eye; and Tolkien's cover art has what seem to be physical but open lids too. I think it's actually so distinctively its own creation, as compared to Tolkien's cover art, as not to be an infringement; it isn't a copy even of the eye component of Tolkien's, which is a far more complex image. You can't copyright an idea, after all.
 * So, if I go with the literal definition of "derivative," the original artist of this image says he or she based it on Tolkien's work, which would make it derivative. But I think the legal definition is different. Also, based on text at Derivative work, "if the creator of an unauthorized work stays within the bounds of fair use and adds sufficient original content, the original contributions in such an unauthorized derivative work are protectable under the Copyright Act". I think we can say that the eye of Sauron itself is a small, if central, part of the original cover design. They made slight changes to the design and significant changes to the colors of the eye. I can tell the two apart very easily. So based on my armchair thoughts, I think this image is okay.