George RR Martin expressed his pleasure at a long overdue acceptance of fantasy “into the canon of world literature”, as he donated a rare first edition of The Hobbit to a Texas university.
The volume, one of only 1,500 first editions printed, was purchased by the fantasy novelist for Texas A&M University. JRR Tolkien’s story of Bilbo Baggins’s quest is the university library’s five millionth volume, and was presented to the university by Martin in an official ceremony.
Martin said he first read JRR Tolkien as a junior high school student. “There’s no doubt his effect upon me was profound and I take a strange pleasure in seeing him included in a library like this, to be a five millionth book with Cervantes and Walt Whitman,” said the author. “It represents an acceptance of fantasy into the canon of world literature which I think is long overdue, frankly.”
The university acquired its one millionth volume, CC Slaughter’s Prose and Poetry of the Livestock Industry of the United States (1905), in 1976, and its two millionth, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707-25) by Sir Hans Sloane, in 1992. In 2004, Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass became its three millionth volume, and its four millionth was Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha, parts I and II (1617), donated in 2008.
Martin’s personal collection of papers is also kept at the Texas A&M University’s Cushing Library, and the novelist has had a relationship with the institution since he began attending science fiction conventions there in the 1970s.
At the ceremony which saw him present the Tolkien edition, Martin spoke of how crucial the preservation of literature has become. “Even in our modern centuries … we’re losing stories,” Martin said in a speech reported by the Battalion, the university’s student paper. “All of this is incredible [tragedy] to me. That’s where I think libraries, like the great Library of Alexandria, are the fortresses of our civilisations. The stories that we tell each other, the stories that we grow up on, the stories that help shape our values and shape our lives, we still love and remember. This is the stuff that should be preserved.”
The hugely successful fantasy novelist added that all work should be treated as equally worthy of preservation. “All of it should be preserved,” Martin said, according to the Battalion. “Not just the stuff that we deem high culture, but popular culture and ordinary culture and ephemera and juvenilia, preserve all of it because we don’t know what we’ll want 50 years from now, what’s going to be important 100 years from now, or whether indeed 1,000 years from now, Stan Lee will stand next to Shakespeare.”
On his personal blog , Martin mentioned the “marvellous time” he had at Texas A&M, adding that he was now “home again, facing the usual mountain of mail and email, and of course the monkeys on my back”, which include “the Son of Kong”, the sixth book in the series which has been adapted for television as A Game of Thrones, The Winds of Winter. “Once more into the breach …” wrote the novelist.
