XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien   
   From: g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies   
      
   In message    
     Troels Forchhammer  wrote:   
   >  From the on-line translation of the recent /Le Monde/ interview with   
   > Christopher Tolkien, 'The Ring of Discord':   
      
   >      This policy, however, has not protected the family from the   
   >      reality that the work now belongs to a gigantic audience,   
   >      culturally far removed from the writer who conceived it.   
   >      Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred   
   >      not to. Why? "They eviscerated the book by making it an   
   >      action movie for young people 15 to 25," Christopher says   
   >      regretfully. "And it seems that The Hobbit will be the   
   >      same kind of film."   
      
   So, he's annoyed that the movies are aimed at precisisley the same audience as   
   embraced the books in the first place?   
      
   I don't know a single person who didn't first read TLOR at about age 15.   
   Maybe slightly younger or slightly older. What made the books popular   
   was not the linguistics, it was the imaginative action adventure story.   
   Very few people get past that initial level of the books to everything   
   else that is going on, but that doesn't mean their reading is invalid.   
   That surface reading has generated hundreds of games and movies and   
   thousands of books.   
      
   > I will admit that I find myself agreeing entirely with Christopher   
   > Tolkien here.   
      
   To mean it reads like an old English Professor getting mad because   
   people are laughing at a Shakespeare Comedy instead of treating it as the   
   serious scholarly work he imagines it to be.   
      
   LOTR *is* an action adventure tale filled with battles and swords and   
   magic and bad guys and risk and peril and *that* is what gets people to   
   read it. Anyone who ignores that is ignoring a key facet of the work.   
      
   Yes, LOTR is one of those very rare works that has levels upon levels of   
   story buried under the surface, but it is under that surface that   
   Christopher Tolkien seems to discount.   
      
   --   
   Anybody who tells me what happens to me after I'm dead is either a liar   
   or a fool because they DON'T KNOW   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)