Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5801004" data-attributes="member: 42582">I enjoy Tolkien a lot, but I don't think an editor would have done any harm - even if it would have made the books different from the ones I enjoy.I don't think that's fair. There are lengthy descriptive passage in Tolkien. Personally, I find the most boring one is the description of the Old Forest leading up to the struggle with Old Man Willow. I'm pretty sure I've fallen asleep more than once reading that passage, and while you may suggest that's just verisimilitude on the part of the writer, I'm not sure I agree!As to literature being "long winded" - I don't read much fiction, but most of what I do read I think would be classified as "literary" fiction - it appears on those shelves in the bookshops, at least - and a lot of it is not long winded. For whatever reason, my favourite author is Graham Greene (a very different sort of Catholicism from Tolkien's!) and he is not long winded.Hesitant as I am to compare REH to Hemingway, REH is generally pithy, if often a bit overblown. Very modernist in tone (despite the trappings), especially when compared to Tolkien.Perhaps. But it is equally legitimate to think that the author is making an error of conflating length with emphasis. It is possible to make something the centre of a work without needlessly (and longwindedly) dwelling on it.But I could equally say that comparing Tolkien to Dostoyevsky shows an ignorance of literature. I mean, I don't want to be too judgemental, but the latter is practically the founder of one of the most important post-enlightenment ways of thinking about humanity. Huge chunks of contemporary culture - and all sorts of deep features of our culture - can arguably be attributed to that school. I'm not sure that the same is true of Tolkien. His influence in this respect seems to me to have been minimal, and the ideals he favoured are more-or-less dead in the practical world.I know what you're getting at, but I tend to have a different reaction - it drives home for me the independence of aesthetics from morality and politics (which maybe is a version of art for art's sake!).I had the same thought the other evening after seeing Hero (the Jet Li/Maggie Cheung/Tony Leung movie) again. For me, at least, visually amazing and incredibly moving - especially the death of the Maggie Cheung character, which the wikipedia entry (which I just looked up to check my spellings!) misdescribes (in my view) as being prompted by guilt.Yet the values that are exemplified here - a certain sort of romantic conception of loyalty and honour, in particular - don't really speak to me as political values at all. Another instance of the gap between morals and aesthetics. (In my view - which I realise not everyone shares.)While this may be biographically accurate (I don't know much about Tolkien's war experience), for me it would tend to confirm Dausuul's criticism. I find that view of the "ordinary man" - the batman - a very condescending one (although not confiend to Tolkien). One of the best treatments of this particular motif, in my view (and also in my view a very good absurdist treatment of the war overall) is Blackadder Goes Forth (with Baldric as the batman).</blockquote>

Verification