Posted on 11/16/2002 5:26:51 PM PST by Zionist Conspirator
It would depend on where you spent your youth in the 60's and 70's. My buddy first read LOTR while on a PBR cruising the Mekong in 1968. He seemed to remember it as a story of a bunch of guys humpin' the boonies with waves of bad guys trying to overrun them, while folks back home never even heard there was a war going on.
I read somewhere that the hippies grooved on the Silmarilion even more than LOTR. It supposedly gave them a view of an older, purer world that the nastiness shown in LOTR. A few hits on the bong, and they could see themselves as elves, groovin' through history leading lives of beauty and peace, and not having to hustle for a buck.
It's strange, but in the movie, at the great battle before the gates of Mordor, I don't remember any elves flashing a peace sign at that ocean of orcs.
There's a chance of nudity in The Two Towers. Gandalf says in the book:
"Then darkness took me; and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell. 'Naked I was sent back - for a brief time, until my task is done. And naked I lay upon the mountain-top."
I suspect it will be done with taste, however...the FOTR being so excellent.
That is similar to a fantasy I often have had lately of being able to go back in time to the year 1900 with an empty mansion so that I could relive the entire century. Of course, the fantasy involves not aging so that I will return to the present 102 years later at my current age! The idea is that I would have 100+ years to absorb as many books as I could and build a huge collection of 20th century memorabilia such as books, newspapers, music and even baseball cards that would gradually fill my huge mansion.
I don't wear glasses so I would have it made!
Tolkein was a WW I vet--and that profoundly influenced him. His imagery of hiking, climate, dawns, twilight, storms, geography, etc were heavily drawn upon the time he spend in the military.
Moreover, if you read some of the PC critics of Tolkein, they are outraged, simply outraged! by his "paternalistic and simplistic" treatment of good vs. evil. His critics are also upset that in his stories, Western characters are the heroes (very English and Dutch-like), while the villains speak a language that is an amalgamation of Russian and Arabic. (I am not kidding--there are whole articles pointing this out and ridiculing Tolkein on this).
Tolkien was an amazing philologist and a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. I expect what alarms his critics is that Tolkein saw a greater good in Judeo-Christian values than they do.
But, critics find what the wish: homosexuals have seized on the friendship of Sam and Frodo to suggest they were "gay." This projection shows the hole in their own souls--not in Tolkein's. John Ronald Reuel Tolkein knew the value of supreme friendship through his military service and what he and his comrades went through. I guess we cannot expect people who worship at the altar of buggery to understand this.
the infowarrior
'Shrooms, pipeweed,, and trees.
They are amazing books. They are classed as science fiction but the are much different than what most think of when referring to science fiction. Out of The Silent Planet takes Professor Ransom to Malacandra (our Mars), where he visits a dying world as God created it but Lucifer mauled it. Perelandra takes Ransom to Venus, where God is ready to awaken the planet from it's Eden-esque slumber. Lucifer attempts to do to Perelandra (Venus) what he did to Tellus (Earth). That Hideous Strength finds Ransom back on Earth with a seemingly impossible task to perform. But he is granted assistance from a remarkable personage of the past... Best of all are Ransom's interactions with the oyarses, archons of the heavens that inhabit the solar system. His description of them will enthrall you.
A stunning trilogy! I heartily recommend them.
And nearly every book he wrote after rehashed it again and again. Very banal and irritating dialog. Obsessive stuff. I like most all of Heinlein's earlier stuff.
Lewis, one of Tolkien's closest friends until Lewis's death in 1964, counseled against making The Silmarillion a "public" work. He disliked the shallow enthusiasm for The Lord Of The Rings among younger readers who had obviously missed its profound central message, and recoiled at the suggestion that Tolkien was creating a new religion, for the obvious reason. That having been said, Lewis was delighted by, and in some ways a participant in, Tolkien's ongoing act of creation, as one can see from the references to it in his novel That Hideous Strength.
The Silmarillion was finally published in 1977, more than three years after Tolkien's death. Christopher Tolkien, who performed the final editing and collation of stories to be included in the volume, was apparently acting on his father's wish, but earlier correspondence between Tolkien and Lewis indicates Tolkien's misgivings about the matter, both out of concern for Lewis's arguments and because the fantasist was, for a time, concerned about looking like an obsessed nut.
(An aside: Did you know that Lewis's hero Elwin Ransom, the central figure in Lewis's Space Trilogy, was patterned on Tolkien? Lewis felt he owed a great debt to Tolkien, who had persuaded him into Christianity and helped to nurture Lewis's own fictional gift. In return, he cast a Tolkien-like figure as a world-savior in his own books.)
Ironically, The Silmarillion diverged greatly, more so than The Lord Of The Rings, from Tolkien's original reasons for writing the books. Tolkien was a student and enthusiast of language, and the invented languages (i.e., Elvish, Dwarvish, etc.) he stippled his creation with were the great pride of his life. His fantasies were originally his way of giving his linguistic creations to voices that would use them. Yet the two "finished products" he issued were stripped of the bulk of what must have been the dearest part of his labors -- the use of the languages themselves by their intended speakers.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.