Through Webs and Threads, The Pattern Evolves
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.Denne tråden er ingen spesielt god tråd, her hives bare alt som handler om Tolkien inn. Derfor bør det startes en ny tråd, hvor det blir diskutert på en litt mer oversiktlig måte - slik det er med de nye anmeldelsene...hansito wrote:Tre tråder om RH?
Dette var for øvrig det Treskjegg og med-entene hans konkluderte med etter Enttinget i Jacksons utgave...Treskjegg: Pokker heller, vi går og drikker entvann. Drit i Saruman.
Men de ombestemte seg. Det har jeg ingen planer om.Terje wrote:Dette var for øvrig det Treskjegg og med-entene hans konkluderte med etter Enttinget i Jacksons utgave...Treskjegg: Pokker heller, vi går og drikker entvann. Drit i Saruman.
There is no happy ending to the Romance of Robin Hood, however, whereas Tolkien, going against the grain of his subject matter, forces one on us - as a matter of policy:The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it, and it is one of the reasons why they are superior to the artificial romances of which Lord of the Rings is merely one of the most recent.And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy stories provide many examples and modes of this - which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies... But the "consolation" of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. For more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending.
J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"
I think it is simple neophobia which makes people hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes them unable to imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the boundaries of their particular Shire.
(Akkurat dette litteratursynet formulerte jeg for meg selv tidligere denne uka, etter at jeg diskuterte hva det er som gjør at vi liker fantasy; hun liker eskapismen, noe jeg også gjør, men jeg setter i tillegg stor pris på de nye perspektivene fantasy kan gi oss på vår egen verden.)Ideally fiction should offer us escape and force us, at least, to ask questions; it should provide a release from anxiety but give us some insight into the causes of anxiety.
The crux of the thing remains: the writers admired are not "literary" or "literate". As often as not they flatter middle-brow sensibilities and reinforce middle-class sentimentality and therefore do not threaten a carefully maintained set of social and intellectual assumptions.
Alt i alt, ikke en dum artikkel, spør du meg. Tolkiens moral (slik den er uttrykt i RH) er middelklassens og status quos moral; dette er Ole Brumm for "voksne barn", som bare vil ha trøst. Konservative saker, med andre ord.Is it a sign of our dumber times that Lord of the Rings can replace Ulysses as the exemplary book of its century? Some of the writers who most slavishly imitate him seem to be using English as a rather inexpertly-learned second language. So many of them are unbelievably bad that they defy description and are scarcely worth listing individually. Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin. He is lucky in that he appears to be the only Terry in fantasy land who is able to write a decent complex sentence. That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.
