[JenB]

Ran across this article at a link from TORn and found it really fascinating. While I don't think that Lord of the Rings is Luddite I do admit that Luddites have embraced it a little too eagerly for some of our likings. Anyone want to comment?

[JenB]

Ring-ping!

[HairOfTheDog]

You know Jen, I am guessing that he would not have minded the Luddite title at all!... Part of the great attraction Tolkien is for me is the complete escape from the artificial world we have created. - I loathe the city and walking on concrete. Middle earth is the place I can go to when the rest of the world seems much too removed from anything that was natural.

Maybe that is why Star Wars fails to appeal to me at the heart. It is a vision of a world of nothing natural... a vast constructed environment that does not look like a place I would want to visit. Middle Earth, I would not visit either, but move in and never leave if I could!

From the article...

This doesn't mean, of course, that either Tolkien fans or Star Wars fans -- if there's any difference -- ...

[snicker] we all look the same to him.

[maquiladora]

Interesting read.

[Elenya]

Where did that first question mark come from???

[boris]

"Star Wars, too, contains countless echoes of The Lord of the Rings."

Star Wars I is the Morte d' Artur warmed over. Mmmm, fresh from the microwave. Obi-wan is Merlyn; Luke is Arthur; the light sabre subs for Excalibur. You can fill in the rest of the blanks, just as Lucas did, sort of like "Mad-Libs".

And as I always mention, "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is the Passion of Christ, and "Forbidden Planet" is Shakespeare's Tempest.

Klaatu = Christ
Gort = Holy Ghost
Patricia Neal=Mary Magdalene
Patricia's boyfriend=Judas
Professor=Apostles

Morbius=Prospero
etc...

--Boris

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

"There is only one bright spot ... and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations ... But it won't do any good, if it is not universal."

I have not read many of Tolkien's letters, but it seems to me that he had a way of making hyperbolic statements as a way of humorously showing that he didn't take himself too seriously. If any of you who have read more extensively think that Tolkien was seriously proposing that factories and power-stations should all be dynamited, I would be both astonished and interested.