XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien   
   From: steuard@slimy.com   
      
   In message <512f980e$0$1209$65785112@news.neostrada.pl>, CookieM   
    wrote:   
   > Take into consideration that the *tale* of the Ring was written to   
   > resemble the ancient Arthurian legends of Holy Grail and old   
   > Celt-Anglo-Saxon fairy-tales and poems. The most important thing in such   
   > tales was keeping in anxiety and fear/horror etc. LOTR has all these   
   > features except one: logic.   
      
   I've got to disagree with you on this one. LotR certainly does fall   
   short of perfect consistency at times, but not all that often (and I'm   
   not at all convinced this is one of them). Tolkien wrote at length in   
   "On Fairy Stories" about the importance of creating "the inner   
   consistency of reality" in fiction, and his efforts to achieve that   
   goal are often quite evident from the drafts in HoMe. (His decision to   
   discard "The Problem of Ros" because its premise was inconsistent with   
   a name that he'd overlooked comes to mind as one clear example; heck,   
   writing that essay in the first place was another. That's all   
   regarding linguistics, of course, but I think his devotion to an   
   internally consistent story went far beyond that.)   
      
   						Steuard Jensen   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)