From: Steele, Kirk A (SteeleKA@nafm.misawa.af.mil)
Date: Thu Jan 10 2002 - 18:07:44 MST
Dickens, another odd bird.
Another 5 point question - What style of painting did the pseudonymous
author Charles Dickens practice? Bonus question. Who was Miss Lidell?
-----Original Message-----
From: L' Ermit [mailto:lhermit@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 3:29 PM
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: RE: virus: In response to Rich's post and about LOTR (?????)
Richard murmured (amongst other things):
I am far from sure as to how this subject was broached. However, I find it
even equally difficult to appreciate why you would wish to read Tolkien. His
prose style is exactly what would be expected from a philologist and falls
under the leaden heading of what Dickens described as a preference for
liking his languages as dead as possible. Certainly, the murder of the
English language was something Tolkien was almost as adept at as his deathly
sense of humour...
====
Hermit comments:
Richard, why so hard on Tolkien?
While I agree that the LOTR trilogy is not the best work ever written
<grin>, and that he is vastly overrated by people who have adopted his (very
Christian) inventions as a religion or scholarly work, I would suggest that
"The Hobbit" and indeed some of his other short stories - e.g. "Farmer Giles
of Ham" are <em>much</em> better written works and if read as he intended
them, as stories, fun.
Now to the more serious difficulties I have with the "review."
It is worth noting that his writing began as he created stories in the
trenches of WW I (not a good place to develop a sense of humor), while
recovering from typhus caught in the trenches after all his friends had been
killed, that LOTR was published well after WWII (and the disclosure of all
its horrors), that despite his pacifist stance, he encouraged his children
when they helped fight the Germans, and that LOTR was based directly on the
Norse sagas (try Grettir the Strong) rather than anything the Nazi's came up
with. I would also suggest that it is invalid to condemn his works simply
because the Nazi's dipped into (and poisoned) the same well.
I suppose that as a devout Christian and fervent Englishman, he was well
along the road to being a racist, but I would argue that in so far as it is
possibly true, that this was simply a contemporary English characteristic
(much more so than German), that it is not valid to project modern
perspectives onto different times and perhaps most tellingly it seems clear
to me that the shallowly drawn Dunedan were created primarily to contrast
with his central characters, the "hobbits", who were not simply "heroes" in
the modern sense, but had very well developed personalities (including flaws
which threatened their objectives), hardly conformed to the heroic Aryan
characteristics short, hairy and very "Welsh" - and that Tolkien, far from
thinking of himself as one of the "high men" saw himself as Beren (which is
in fact on his tombstone - by his choice). I also strongly suspect that he
projected himself onto the aged (and scholarly) Bilbo, in other words, he
rejected the obvious Aryan heroes just as in life he rejected the Nazis, and
I would suggest that this claim about his work is not supported by anything
more than the superficial. [Reference:
http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/index.html]
Finally, and there can be no possible mistake about this, he was not writing
for "popularity" - he wrote initially for his own entertainment, later for
the amusement of children, then to develop a "World as Myth" (or should that
be "Myth as World") as part of his attempts to understand the structure of
the saga and only in mid career did he attempt to write for the public, not
so much because he was seeking fame, but because he was asked to by his
publisher. Neither Tolkien, nor his publisher anticipated the success of
LOTR - indeed they were both considerably surprised. Tolkien himself found
the resulting publicity unpleasant, and essentially retreated from both the
world and writing popular works, instead spending the vast majority of his
time between the publication of LOTR and his death, producing scholarly (and
quasi-scholarly) papers.
All in all, I don't think that your analysis, hatchet job though it may have
been meant to be, was persuasive. It hacked where it should have thrust, and
jabbed where it should have feinted.
Regards
Hermit
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Sep 25 2002 - 13:28:39 MDT