A Critique of the LotR BOOKS

[Hypersmurf]

Reapersaurus - as far as "keeping things pleasant" goes, it applies to you too.

-Hyp.
(Moderator)

 

[barsoomcore]

Whisperfoot, you avatar has inspired in me an analogy.

The Lord of the Rings may be a hunk of junk. It may not look like much. When you mention it to some people, they may look askance at you and say, "You're braver than I thought." It doesn't really belong to you -- it belonged to others before you and it'll probably belong to somebody after you, and they'll love it just as much as you. It may appear to communicate in a peculiar dialect.

But it's got it where it counts. It's full of surprises. It's got just about everything under its skin, and it always manages to hold together (which doesn't stop some of us from murmuring under our breath, "You hear me, baby? Hold together," when the firefights start). It can make it past any blockade. It beats the odds. And sometimes, the fact that it looks like garbage to some turns out to be a real advantage.

It's the fastest hunk of junk in galaxy. Have a little faith in the old girl -- she's weathered worse and come out just fine. Heck, this is nothing compared to the Kessel run -- and we know she did that in twelve parsecs.

You've got yourself a ship.

 

[reapersaurus]

Hyp - why did you edit my post while leaving Whisperfoot's personal attacks against me and this thread up there?

I have not responded yet to his continual antagonistic posts, after he was told to stop, yet when I point out how even on NL they're making fun of him for being unreasonable over here, you edit my comments out?

 

[Hypersmurf]

If you've got something to say to a Mod, keep it to email. You've got mail.

-Hyp.
(Moderator)

 

[reapersaurus]

Since it's OK to have a word like 'fanboy' removed from the thread (as I defined it, "people who it doesn't matter what Tolkein wrote in LotR, they love it anyway"), than can I have the derogatory term 'troll' removed as well?

 

[barsoomcore]

I agree about the use of the term 'fanboy' - it's not constructive, and I don't think anyone in this thread (even barsoomcore, who takes pride in the label )has behaved in a manner that would warrant it.

But I'm willing to. You just wait.

reap, Whisper, I say enough. I don't care who started what, I don't want to see this thread shut down because people can't let one name or another slide. I'm actually enjoying this conversation, and if you get this thread closed, you'll make me cry.

You don't want to make me cry, now, do you?

(don't answer that, reaper)

 

[Hypersmurf]

Since it's OK to have a word like 'fanboy' removed from the thread (as I defined it, "people who it doesn't matter what Tolkein wrote in LotR, they love it anyway"), than can I have the derogatory term 'troll' removed as well?

God, I would be ecstatic.

-Hyp.

 

[Celtavian]

re

If the question had been "What do you personally dislike about Lord of the Rings?", or "like less" is a term I prefer, the rabid fans wouldn't come out of the woodwork defending Tolkien like you just insulted their mother.

Even I, a fairly rabid fan of Tolkien, find certain parts of the book dull or boring. For example, I usually stop reading for a few days to a few weeks after I finish the first part of The Two Towers. About the first 6 to 8 chapters of Book IV of the The Two Towers is such a huge drop off in action from the previous chapters concerning the Battle at Helm's Deep and dealing with Saruman that I just can't seem to get into the slow building journey of Frodo until I take a break. Happens everytime I read the books. I don't consider this a mistake on Tolkien's part because I personally don't find a certain part of the book particularly stimulating, it amounts to personal taste.

Once you take the books down to a level of personal criticism, rather than universal criticism, it is easier to critique parts that you may personally like or dislike without bashing the entire book. Too many anti-Tolkien fans bashing the entire book because they don't like it or don't like certain parts. That is very annoying.

I have often heard Tolkien derided for poor characterization. I personally liked the lack of physical character development as well as not knowing everything the character was thinking or had done. It better allowed me as a reader to step into the character and personalize them. For example, I didn't need to know everything about Aragorn. It was enough for me to know that he was destined to be king and was a great warrior. I could fill in all the blanks with my own imagination about what he looks like or what his life was like or what he might be thinking. Character ambiguity makes imagining the character more interesting IMO.

I personally don't like to negatively critique another person's work unless it is just outright garbage that is beyond redemption. Even then as the old saying goes, "One man's garbage is another man's treasure."

 

[Darrin Drader]

The qualities than are important in a book are dependent on the benefit the book wishes to impart. The style and devices use in a book should be judged chiefly with regard to thier effect on the what the book it trying to convey. The fact that the benefit of most works is subjective makes it difficult to give quantitative value to a work and the devices used in a work. The parts of a work can be evaluated as either adding to or detracting from the impact of the work but the absolute value of any work in depentant on the reader.

I think that anyone can name at least one book that was just awful and most people who have read it will agree. Thankfully one of the benefits of a bad book is the ability to put it down (or throw it against the wall) and stop reading. I personally absolutely hate Steinbeck, but that is such a personal dislike that even I give the guy a ridiculous amount of credit for writing novels that were well researched and were written with realistic details and dialects. My dislike centers less around the fact that he didn't do a good job and more around the fact that I'm just not that interested in reading about the historical periods that fascinated him. I'm sure that this opinion will make a lot of people reading it feel sad for me.

The weird ones are the books where the author attempted to do one thing (and may have been successful to some degree) but succeed at something that may have been completely unintended. At the time the LotR was written, I doubt that Tolkien was trying to invent a new genre of fantasy literature, nor did he know that certain setting details would be used by so many others who were inspired by his works. I don't necessarily think that spawning an entire genre of literature was the series' greatest achievement, but it is something that I feel should be looked at more closely.

I feel that literary criticism and analysis is important as a way to better understand, appreciate, and enjoy a work not as way to assign an objective value to a work.

I feel that in some cases it becomes absolutely necessary to apply literary criticism to a work in order to even understand it and get through it with any amount of sanity intact. I absolutely love James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe, but if you don't understand that their novels are largely experiments in stream of consciousness, you'll find yourself wondering 'what's the point?' Indeed, Ulysses is a masterful work which is roughly 800 pages long which describes the day in the life of one man to the most minute detail. It even goes into bathroom moments. Formatting, headings, breaks, and other elements we normally take for granted are experimented with and placed almost randomly on the page in some places. The final 45 pages of the book is all one long unpunctuated block of text. Now, if someone who doesn't understand what the heck Joyce is trying to do with this picks it up and reads it, there's a pretty decent chance that they just won't get it. Or they might get it to a point, but miss out on many of the points they should be picking up as they read it. Without the existing literary criticism and the discussions that continue to this day on Ulysses, I have to wonder if it would have eventually been overlooked in favor of books that are simply easier. Honestly, without literary criticism, I have to wonder if there would even be any perceived value of Joyce and Wolfe.

 

[Darrin Drader]

You know, I think think this trilogy was a reaction against Tolkien and those who've followed in a tradition more akin to his own (like Terry Brooks). But that's a topic for another thread.

That is something I would be very interested in discussing. Please do start that thread.