Re: Article in the "Village Voice" about the Tolkien Movies

J Matthew Pearson wrote:
 >Tolkien, in my opinion, was the victim of bad timing.  He was both before
and after
>his time, and got impaled by the critics on both counts:  At the time,
>critics
>didn't know what to make of "The Lord of the Rings" because there was
>almost nothing
>else like it except for the myths and medieval romances that inspired it,
>and so
>Tolkien got labelled as an anti-modernist (a fatal criticism at the time,
>however
>true it may have been).  Nowadays, critics confuse "The Lord of the Rings"
>with the
>swords 'n' sorcery fiction that it inspired, some of which is good but most
>of which
>is just awful, and so Tolkien gets dismissed as just another 'genre'
>author.
I heard some interesting critic of Tolkien last autumn - a guy said that
Tolkiens work was remarkably un-original and cliché-filled. I asked for an
example of this un-originality, and the guy replied that Tolkien didn't even
bother to think up any monsters of his own, but used those dreadfully
clichéed orcs. I of course told him Tolkien invented the orcs, but I doubt
he believed me.

                                                   Andreas
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