Lord of the Geeks

An anonymous reader sent in links to two LOTR pieces in the Village Voice - a short bit about the LOTR excerpt shown at the Cannes film festival, and a longer piece about Tolkien and geekdom written by the guy who wrote A Rape in Cyberspace. I don't think I really agree with him, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

Comments

interesting but flawed

[joss]

The long article is interesting, but several things bugged me a lot:
"he was a straitlaced, archconservative Catholic himself"

Bullshit - compared to who ? Tolkein was an Oxford don:
"How many Oxford dons does it take to change a lightbulb ?"
"CHANGE ?? !!"

Calling him a straightlaced conservative is disingenuous at best. My grandmother knew Tolkein, he was a regular visitor to her antiques shop in central Oxford (where I actually met him a couple of times, but can't pretend to remember the experience since I was being babysat at the time). My grandmother mentioned him as being charming, with a mischeivous air.

As for the critical disclaim from the likes of a young Germain Greer (she was a militant feminist back then, and most likely rankled by Tolkein's chivalrous attitude) or some pompous, self-satisfied Private Eye hack, it doesn't deserve repetition without ridicule.

But, the central point about Tolkein's significance to geeks is valid, and I've never heard computer games referred to as culture before, let alone as "culture's center of gravity". Hmmmm...

Why Tolkien wrote his books

[Alatar]

Tolkien didn't write his books as allegory, or to give obsessive people something to obsess over, or any of the usual reasons people write books. Professor Tolkien was a linguist, and liked to invent languages. Being a linguist, he realized that languages are nothing without a cultural context to place them in. Hence, he created a world, based it on some legends he had grown up with, populated it with cultures and races such as Elves and Dwarves, and gave them each unique languages. And he wrote a story about one of the events that happened in that world. Nothing more, nothing less. That's actually one of the reasons I like LOTR so much, it's just a good story, you don't have to work at reading it. You can just spend time reading and re-reading each paragraph, so rich are the descriptions and scenery. Tolkien's work is "fractal"...every person in it has a darned good reason for being there and good motivations for taking the actions they do. From the green hills of Hobbiton to the cracked plains of Gorgoroth, the story just gets better and better as it goes on, and takes on bigger and bigger events. Damn...what a story it is. I have to read it again before the movie release forever changes the way I think about LOTR.