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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1301699" data-attributes="member: 812">That's more of something we can talk about. Energy of writing -- I won't argue that over the course of his works, REH moves his stories ahead with more urgency than Tolkien always does.I will say, however, that the energy that Tolkien generates in scenes like the fall of Theoden and Eomer's subsequent wrath is something of a whole other category of power.Only if you consider tangents a bad thing. Try reading Byron's Don Juan for extreme tangential writing.Tolkien isn't ripping us along from one event to the next. Now, if you happen to like being ripped along, that's a problem. But is it a literary virtue to move plots quickly? I don't think so. I think slow, thoughtful works can be just as powerful and effective (even more so, depending on the effect desired) as lean, speedy works. Milan Kundera's Immortality isn't much of a page-turner -- but it's definitely worth reading.What I'm saying is that you may not like slow-moving stories, but I don't know that you can argue that only fast stories are good stories.To suggest that LotR is "about" Middle-Earth is to ignore pretty much everything that's interesting about the books. LotR is about many, many things, but chief among those are the sacrifice required to fight evil, the need for grace (that is, the need to allow the divine into your life), the all-consuming nature of selfishness and fear, the futility of secular power and a whole host of other things -- but most definitely NOT elves, dwarves and an imaginary land. If it were, it would be... well, pulp writing.</blockquote>

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