The secret of a strong field of research

Boethius is about to get schooled

Last year, Brenton Dickieson wrote a series of blog posts asking the question, “Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship?”  The third post gives a number of hypotheses that may answer the question, but no definite conclusion was reached. The discussion in those posts, and the comments that follow them, is much better informed than I can be. However, I can always contribute to the low end of a scholarly debate.

The Idiosopher’s Razor: When several hypotheses are consistent with the evidence, the least dignified one is to be preferred.¹

I’ve recently been researching criticism of Poul Anderson’s science fiction. A lot of people named “Anderson” have written books,² which means that the first step answering any question, at the moment, is making sure I’ve got the right Anderson. It’s the literary equivalent of the “data cleaning” problem in statistics. It’s a huge part of the work in studying anything, C.S. Lewis for example. That’s a trans-disciplinary fact. And don’t even get me started about “Charles Williams”!

This is a problem that Tolkien scholars never have. Anybody writing about anyone named “Tolkien” is certain to be relevant. Looking up Tolkien is a lot easier than looking up Anderson, Lewis, or whomever. Eliminating a laborious step in the research lowers one of the barriers to getting the paper written. Applying our Razor, we can slice away many hypotheses in favor of pure laziness. Tolkien papers are easier to research, so there will be more of them, and the best of a larger group will often be better than the best of a smaller group, such as the papers about Lewis.

I think I just understood Shakespeare scholarship, too.

1. The fact that this is a “razor” may indicate why the idea didn’t occur to Dr. Dickieson.
2. A surprising number of them have co-authors named “Poul”.