Re: OT: Tolkein Non-Fanism

On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, And Rosta wrote:

>
> Do you mean _The road to Middle Earth_? It isn't recent, but it is
> excellent. But although it is a kind of exegesis of JRRT, it doesn't
> really consider his strictly literary merits. For a consideration of
> these, I warmly recommend a book on JRRT by my estimable colleague
> Brian Rosebury. Embarrassingly I can't remember the title, but Rosebury/Tolkien
> should do the trick.
>
> _Splintered light_ by Verlyn Flieger was strongly recommended to me by
> several people. I tried to read it but found it to be absolute shite.
>
There is an unbelievable number of really bad books on Tolkien. There's
one in Dutch that shows how Tolkien had learnt from the Elves that
people should only eat indigenous plants (which means the author should
have subsisted on sea-weeds) and that everyone should stay where he
or she was born...

Still, I was surprised at how _good_ his work was when I re-read it
about ten years older.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org