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

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>:
>
> > http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0123/dibbell.shtml
> >
> > interesting...
> > the end of it seems to have some significance for conlanging...
>
> Well, I don't really like to be called a nerd or a geek (not that I'm not one,
> but I like to think that I don't fit into any category :) ), nor that I have the
> "mental age of a child" (at least for this one the author didn't subscribe to it
> but merely quoted somebody else), but for the rest I must say that this is
> terribly accurate.
One could also fault the author for describing Quenya as a "dialect", and for
misspelling the name Lothlorien--but of course that would be an awfully geeky thing
to do.  :-)

I was also a bit offended at the author's patronising tone, and I think his
sociology is a tad oversimplified:  Not everybody who likes Tolkien is a
role-playing SF/fantasy-reading Trekkie computer programmer.  Tolkien is one of my
favourite writers, but I'm generally completely indifferent to most of the rest of
fantasy literature (Ursula le Guin's "Earthsea" books and Susan Cooper's "The Dark
is Rising" being notable exceptions), and even most of science fiction.  And--with
all due respect to other members of this list--I detest role-playing games,
especially those of the Dungeons & Dragons variety.

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.

Matt.

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