Personally I don't relate to how much reverence they're given as it is. The LotR books haven't aged well. The fantasy genre has evolved, and I daresay...improved over the past sixty years those those books were published. I enjoyed Fellowship well enough, but the Two Towers bored me. It was like 100 pages of interesting things happening and 300 pages of people walking.
Return of the King was more annoying, though, in that the dramatic final confrontation occurs about halfway through, and the rest of the book is a fight against the ultimate bad guy's junior partner and some chump back at the Shire.
This. The way he was killed off in the movie was an improvement over the original.
The problem with all of these quotes is that they're assuming Tolkien wrote purely for entertainment value, and that anything that enhanced your entertainment is an improvement, thus not disrespectful.
1. Tolkien was very old-fashioned and wrote from a much slower paced cultural perspective. I find conversion of his writing style to that of a pop culture action flick for the sake of mass audience appeal to be very disrespectful.
2. Despite popular typecasting of his work as juvenile 'shining goodness vs ultimate evil' type fantasy, I find it to be full of deep, rich themes that were either ignored or completely inverted by the movies. For instance, the way Gollum dies in RotK is extremely important. It makes a very clear statement that good does not triumph over evil. Evil defeats itself by its own nature.
It gets very philosophical if you read The Silmarillion and find that on a grander scale, good and evil are equally destructive forces when they interact with each other, but their interaction is what makes the world interesting. In the creation myth, Morgoth's attempts to disrupt the song of creation are what create all the dynamics of nature that make it beautiful. Evil is the instigator of conflicts, but "Good's" equivalent responses to challenge are what result in the most destruction, beginning with Feanor who was very much an anti-hero. Most participants are people who only get dragged into the conflicts and end up choosing sides by circumstance. The fourth age of Middle-Earth is when almost all magic and wonder has left the world and the influence of past conflicts and Morgoth's lingering will diffused into the land have left all remaining morality very neutral and grey. I think it's aged extremely well, but most people who read it have been influenced first by modern pop fantasy that tries to hard to emulate it. They take one look at protagonists battling hordes of orcs and think "juvenile hero fantasy".
3. Tolkien's explicity stated goals need to be taken into consideration, also. He really didn't write for entertainment value. He was a scholar of ancient mythologies and language. He mourned that the culture of his day had no comparable mythological traditions, and so he set about writing one. His entire goal was to develop a richly detailed ancient history, with its own abstract creation myths and epic parables similar to those of Greek and Nordic lore, and he did it from a scholarly perspective, not a popular entertainment perspective. Considering he and C.S. Lewis together generated one of the two major genres of modern speculative fiction, along with most of its major staple tropes, I think succeeded in his goals in many respects and deserves some reverence for it.
That's easy to say if you didn't grow up with the books or if they weren't the first fantasy you read.
This, too. The Hobbit was the first novel I ever read, at the age of 6. Tolkien's work hasn't just been entertaining for me, but a major influence on who I am. It's quite dear to me.
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Topic: The Hobbit (Read 54960 times)