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Message: <blockquote data-quote="molonel" data-source="post: 3360680" data-attributes="member: 10412">You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.John Bunyan admitted in his letters and in the preface to Pilgrim's Progress that he was working on a story that he much preferred, but the story which became Pilgrim's Progress wouldn't leave him alone, and so he wrote it out because it annoyed him and he wanted to get on to more important work. His annoyance is our literary treasure.John Milton wrote best when he was angry at something. That's what made him so good as a pamphleter. It's also part of the reason there is such a blatant current of misogyny floating through even so grand a poem as Paradise Lost.The Hobbit began as a nonsensical comment Tolkien wrote on the back of a paper he was grading:<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit</a>Pious people burp and fart like the rest of us. Great art is filled with flippancies, mistakes that turned into diamonds, wrong turns, dead ends and flaws.I'm sorry that you feel we are staining Professor Tolkien's stories by suggesting that he be motivated by something so incredibly crass as "It worked" or "It was cool" but the fact is, it may very well have been motivated by exactly that.A deus ex machina is a cheap shot that the author hasn't really earned. The gods themselves - or something like them - have to step into the story in order to get the character out of a corner that the author has painted himself into. I'm not even entirely sure I'd call the eagles at the end of the trilogy saving Sam and Frodo a deus ex machina, because they didn't really resolve the story or decide the direction of the plot. They just made sure the main characters didn't get burnt to a crisp after the actual action was resolved.</blockquote>

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