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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 1216286" data-attributes="member: 177">Yes.  I just don't agree with you.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Some folks here have talked as if the author's will was paramount.  You, instead, talk as if the author is pretty much irrelevant.  I'm a middle-of-the-road person.  I don't think you can come particularly close to fully appreciating what the work has to say unless you consider the author's intent, the time and culture in which the work was written, etc.  This is less important when reading something fairly contemporary, like Tolkien.  In such a case the author is rather similar to the reader in many respects.  However, it becomes more and more apparent when you read things from the distant past, or from other cultures.  Japanese films are a reasonable approximation here.  An American viewer can watch a subtitled or dubbed Japanese film, and walk away without much idea of anything.  Without the cultural context, the behaviors of characters and even the cinematogrphical style just don't speak much to you at all. In order to dervie much meaning from them, you have to know something about the makers, and the conventions they use. Even in some places in Tolkien it becomes important.  The Frodo-Sam relationship, for instance.  A great many modern readers who ignore where and when Tolkien was from interpret it as a suppressed homosexual romance, and get confused by how the two characters then behave.  But it isn't really a romance.  It's a master-servant relationship the likes of which are extremely rare in modern America.  If you describe the relationship of an Edwardian lord and his head butler to the reader, however, the reader goes, "Oh!  That makes so much more sense!"The terminology I prefer may cause more confusion.  However, your terminology tends to lead one to ignore things I find very important.  I'd prefer to have to wrangle in discussion and get it (IMHO) right than to miss so much.</blockquote>

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