Slashdot Mirror
Tolkien Vs. The Critics In 1954
meganthom writes "The BBC is running a story about how the critics viewed The Fellowship of the Ring, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication... One critic's view: 'To have created so enthralling an epic-romance, with its own mythology, with such diversity of scene and character, such imaginative largess in invention and description, and such supernatural meaning underlying the wealth of incident is a most remarkable feat.' One of the most insightful of all the comments at the time was provided by the Spectator's Mr. Hughes, who said, 'I think we should be well advised to remember that what we have before us now is the first volume of a larger work... and be willing to suspend judgement... until we have seen the whole... The pleasure to be derived from this first volume is a pleasure not to be missed.'"
use tolkiens method! "Tolkien created 37 new languages for 34 books".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Q: Is LoTR really based on Christian Mythology?
A: Yes. Tolkien wanted to demonstrate that even the mentally and physically challenged were capable of success and that therefore we should love everyone, regardless of their defects.
Q: So who represents the mentally and physically challenged?
A: Well obviously the hobbits are the physically challenged ones here, but the central mentally challenged figure is Gandalf, responsible for the most horrible attack plan in literature.
Q: What's so horrible about a poorly armed team of two hobbits infiltrating Mordor?
A: Well, basically it ignores the fundamental strengths of the forces of light. Anyone who's played C&C or Warcraft knows that if you have an advantage in air units, you have to use it. Remember that elves can ride eagles, and that elven archers are incredibly potent - early on, Gimli dismounts a Nazgul with a single shot! With about a thousand eagles (given elven archers on each one), the forces of good would have matched up pretty well in the air against Mordor's air units: all nine of them. While the leader of the Nazgul cannot be killed by any living man, this does not prevent a team of twenty eagles from tearing him to little shreds, especially if Gandalf rode along for help. So basically an air battle would have been brief unmitigated slaughter of the Nazgul as about a thousand eagle-mounted elves blew them out of the sky in a hail of arrows.
Q: But I thought that there was some other book that said that the eagles wouldn't help?
A: We're not talking about some other stupid book here, we're talking about the Lord of the Rings. And in this book, the eagles most definitely help out, first by flying Gandalf off the tower and secondly by pitching into the Final Battle in full force, attacking ground units (stupid!) at great risk to themselves. So obviously they would have been content to take part in a brief airborne slaughter of the Nazgul.
Q: Ok so you defeat all Mordor's air units... then what?
A: Well with air superiority, you command the skies. Which means that you can fly right over Mount Doom and drop anything you want right in there... like a ring. Mordor only had nine airborne units, and with them out of the way Mordor has absolutely no way to prevent anyone from flying anywhere.
Q: But the ring would corrupt the eagles trying to drop the ring in, silly.
A: Actually, the ring can only corrupt those who touch it or those in the nearby area. This is a trivial mechanism to defeat. The first step is permanently bind the ring to a weak and helpless creature, like a rat. Second step is of course to put the rat on a long rope, so that the creature holding the rope is out of the sway of the ring. Then the eagle carrying the rope, having total air superiority, flies over Mount Doom and drops the rat in the volcano. An utterly trivial victory.
Q: Ok, so why the elaborately stupid attack plan? Why send the physical rejects as the only hope of mankind?
A: The lesson is that, though they succeed at great cost and great risk, they are still capable of success. This, of course, was the lesson of the Holocaust - that we should never feel so superior to the weak or inferior that we decide they have no place. Even idiot tacticians like Gandalf and weak, pathetic creatures like Hobbits can add some value here & there.
Q: Wait a minute. I just saw the movie, and there's this scene where they're like "this is the last stand of the Men of the West", and all the men of the west are white, and they face off in total war against Indians on Elephants and "black orcs" (er... maybe we just call them "blacks" for short) and the white Men of the West achieve a total genocidal victory. Doesn't that invalidate what you just said?
A: Well, um, no. That's all fine & good, but remember that in the Holocaust we were committing genocide against white people
"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer."
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I read it more than once. It might have been because of my girlie crush on Aragorn, though. He's got to be the hottest fictional character ever. (for some reason it's hard to hear comic book guy saying that).
This is hardly a surprise - how many other works of art were reviled in their time, only to be acclaimed by future generations?
Well, if I knew anything about art, I'm sure I could come up with a few names...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
"It is better than any book that has been written in the past. It is better than any book that will ever be written in the future. And I haven't even read it yet."
This is hardly a surprise - how many other works of art were reviled in their time, only to be acclaimed by future generations?
So your saying that Star Wars Episode I & the Matrix Sequels may be lauded by future generations? They ceratinly seem reviled today.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
If such a manuscript existed, Christopher Tolkien would have already released 347 editions, including one with solid gold covers.
;-)
So I think we can conclude it doesn't exist
sPh
You read it for the first time every few years? Unforseen advantages of Alzheimers disease ...
If they're not one word reviews, they're not worth reading... who has time anymore for such language... just tell me if I should read it or not.
No, jeuvenile is an adjective, modifying trash. It's a type of trash, and the implication is that there's other types of trash. Perhaps "mature trash".
It also implies that the reviewer is an expert in trash. He not only knows about trash in general, he is such an expert that he classifies trash into multiple categories. Most people consider trash to be worth very little consideration. The consider trash to be trash, and don't waste any more time thinking about it. So someone who has multiple classifications of trash might be though of as a "trash fetishist". One wonders about why this reviewer fetishizes trash, and exactly what form his (possibly obscene) fantasies about trash could take.
There. Now that is the proper way to take two words and twist them into a slur against a reviewer's character. Yours was a good attempt, but needed some improvement. Hope that helps.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Jeez, the reviews all sound like James Lipton on In The Actors' Studio!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
No, he wasn't happy with the battle at Helm's deep, and so in the new revised Extended Special Edition, the Orcs shoot first!
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
An *American* literary critic? Good grief, next you'll be telling us Australia have one too.
Would they be correct in saying that, since I cannot code,
Hey, this guy is a NORMAL! Who let him in here? Don't we have a rule about people like this? Next thing you know, the non-coders are going to be wanting to sit at the front of the bus and marry our geekettes! HARUMPH!
(This message was sarcasim, for the humor-challenged out there. See, he's going on about elitist attitudes, and I, well- oh, forget it.)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!