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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2042689" data-attributes="member: 2205">fusangite, I think we're coming to a point where we're reaching an impasse of sorts.  Rather than restate or rephrase my arguments, I'll make a few more generic points.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Your insistence that Tolkien used Healing king symbology merely because he could and because it's medieval is absurd.  You may well be right, and it's a valid interpretation (albeit one I disagree with) but I see no evidence that such a direct parallel must exist other than the fact that you like the symbology that would exist if it did.  That's not really a very compelling argument.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Just because it's literature rather than historical, I do not accept that negative evidence is any more meaningful than it would be in any other field.  Nobody else did any healing on screen because the plot did not call for it, not because Aragorn was some kind of magical or divine healer.  As the point above, the fact that your "evidence" is no more than your subjective interpretation of absences in the books, makes it completely suspect if not absolutely disposible and discountable immediately.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">As to your insistence that symbolism must have been inherent in the works because "Tolkien was a good writer," that's absolute baloney.  Writers can be good in many ways, and using symbolism is not an absolute requirement of a good writer.  And even if it was and Tolkien did use a fair bit of symbolism (which, to be sure, he did) there's nothing to support this particular bit of symbolism that you've extracted other than the fact that you particularly like it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Along those same lines, you contrast reading literature and reading history, by essentially saying that literature must be read with an eye for symbols and parallels.  To quote Tolkien on this very subject: "I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of the readers."  He's actually, if anything, supporting your ability to draw whatever parallels and symbolic interpretations you wish, but he is verifying none of them and guardedly telling us that to do so is contrary to his intention.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I also have a wariness of reading Tolkien as modern literary criticism would teach us to anyway.  Throughout Tolkien's professional life, his own priorities in the English department at Exeter were almost constantly at odds with the literature "half" of the department.  He very much disliked the way "literature" folks thought, and in some ways, consciously wrote the Lord of the Rings as a foil to their way of thinking, and expressed at various points in his life both unsurprise (and indeed satisfaction) that not only did literature folks "not get it" but that the works were quite successful in spite of their scorn of them, a scorn which he politely confirmed that he felt for their own tastes and prefered forms.  So when you insist that I read Tolkien as "literature" and not "history" I believe you've quite missed the point, which Tolkien was at pains to make on more than one occasion; the Lord of the Rings is not literature in the sense that "literature people" thought of it, and it was indeed a mytho-historical work.  So, if one of your key arguments is that I'm mistaken because I'm reading it as a history and not a work of symbol-ridden literature, that's another one that's fairly easily dismissed, since Tolkien himself wanted it read that way. </li> </ul></blockquote>

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