Google| Subject | Re: Reading LotR and the newsgroups |
| From | Shanahan |
| Date | 08/15/2004 09:02 (08/15/2004 00:02) |
| Message-ID | <cfmn43020l5@enews1.newsguy.com> |
| Client | |
| Newsgroups | alt.fan.tolkien,rec.arts.books.tolkien |
| Follows | John Swanson |
| Followups | Christopher Kreuzer (1h & 59m) > Shanahan John Swanson (4h & 24m) ?jevind L?ng (4h & 58m) |
John Swanson <nospam@nospam.com>declared:
John SwansonFascinating discussion, gentlemen. It's helped me clarify some of the reasons why I got hooked on these newsgroups, and how they differ from the reasons I read/re-read the book. I rarely get involved in the discussions where the posters seek "to become historians and geographers of Middle Earth as if it had existed" (nice phrase, John). In fact, these discussions often make me impatient, and I skip them. So why the heck am I here, I ask myself...
"Christopher Kreuzer" <spamgard@blueyonder.co.uk>wrote:
I can see why you were taken aback, and when I see the fresh, keen interest in Tolkien flowing in the CotW-threads from intelligent people like you, Belba Grubb from Stock and lots of others, I almost feel ashamed of my (comparatively) blas? attitude....and this is why. To find a community of people who are passionately in love with this book, as I am. I have never found many people in RL with whom I can discuss Tolkien at any depth. I've read the book something more than 100 times, and there aren't very many people I meet on the street who can get into the details of it on a level that will satisfy me. But hey look, here they are! And they're intelligent! And they can write, some even without spelling errors! Immensely satisfying.
I've never found another book that moves me as this one does. I've found many many books that I re-read dozens of times; I'm kind of a compulsive re-reader. I dive headfirst into a text, and let it snatch me from RL into its world. I willingly suspend disbelief. But only Tolkien requires no such suspension from me. Only LotR, as many times as I have read it, utterly consumes and convinces me.Christopher Kreuzer
But I find that some books, good as they are when read for the first time, still don't compare to the experience of re-reading Tolkien. In a sense though I don't really re-read Tolkien, I explore his writings, rediscovering memorable and moving passages.
I think this is why I am impatient with the D&D-type power points discussions, and the was the Balrog subservient to Sauron or not discussions, etc. etc. etc. For me these discussions trivialize and distance me from Middle Earth. Is this at all what you meant by 'banalize'?
John SwansonI have this feeling too, sometimes. (But it's okay, they're not really there! <g>)
Nicely put. I have explored Tolkien too, in my teens, but from a point it became a home-coming rather than an adventure. I don't know if I've read the trilogy 25 or 30 times. And now with the movies and newsgroups, it isn't even that anymore, it is almost to enter the town square, a public activity. I have to read with the entire aft/rabt posse looking over my shoulder...
But certainly, there are no books that I have returned to as I have to LOTR. Normally I only read a book once or twice, with the exception of books that I read with my children.When queried as to why the heck I would read a book over and over (usually by someone who is quietly inching away from me as they speak), they often say "You already know how it turns out!" Mindlessly teleological. I respond by asking them why they listen to certain pieces of music over and over. To me, it is the same thing. One does it, not to find out what happens, but because the work says something important, something that one needs to hear, in a way in which one wants to hear it. And in a work of sufficient complexity, say a great symphony or the Dune series, one can always find something new to "hear".
Ciaran S. -- Positivists read myths literally and find them false and foolish; interpretivists read them metaphorically or allegorically and find them true and profound.
08/15/2004
