Smivs wrote:The 'Eye of Sauron' has spoken
Sorry that was a bit heavy handed of me, but honestly. There would have been room for a fiction book with "ugly ain't necessarily evil" or even a parody, but jacking a well thought out world is just plain lazy, it maybe well written but it's bolted on a borrowed frame. This smacks of MASSIVE insecurity on behalf of the author.
I'll point you in the direction of some of the saner comments that adorn this frivolous and ill conceived review (Sunday night? Need something juicy to publish on Monday morning? Bit hung over? Don't worry Laura, we've all been there.).
Now that may sound uncharitable but I distrust anyone who has such a close connection with C.S. Lewis to be objective in such subject matters, given the historical association between the two. She can defend C.S. Lewis but can't do so for Tolkien? A touch Janus young lady.....
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 07:09 PM ET
Please Read LOTR...
....or at least read it more closely. I actually enjoy your reviews, and they're one of the few things I still click on when I visit this site. But although you were careful, the "eyeball" reference gives you away. Sauron was not a gigantic disembodied eyeball; the Eye was a metaphor for a Foucauldian-type panoptic presence ultimately internalized by Sauron's followers, and which strove for god-like omniscience. I don't believe someone of your intelligence would have misinterpreted that, it's pretty clear in the books.
The flaming eyeball is Peter Jackson's creation, and only exists in the films. No snark intended, but it's intellectually lazy to review a parody or whatever you wish to call it and not even bother to read, or at least fully read, the work it parodies.
I wasn't aware of the Russian novel, but the Tolkien deconstruct-thing has been a little tired for some time. I remember well the article in SALON a few years ago with the same critique, imploring us to "have fun with our fantasy literature," and not "accept it" at face value, etc. The net is awash in similar "Tolkien-subversive" pieces. It seems to excite a certain lefty cohort. Tolkien was white, Christian, male, patrician (by inclination if not by birth) and a bit of a luddite, so I guess I understand why. Those are pretty much all bad things by definition these days, right?
But while it's seemingly de rigueur to parody or deconstruct almost everything now and infuse it with a multicultural ethos--and that's fine--is it even that creative anymore?
Neither Tolkien nor the world he created was anti-medicine, anti-science, anti-knowledge, etc. It does bespeak a natural theistic worldview, so if that's a dealbreaker, then you'll hate it.
Beyond that, if Tolkien was a "propagandist," it was for an eco-friendly world devoid of the faceless dehumanization that has accompanied modern industrialization.
Oh, that and smoking "weed," of course.
But then he wasn't a propagandist, and history wasn't written by the "winners." It was written by the man who actually envisioned and created Middle-earth, over many years, as a philological exercise to begin with. And it's fiction, not allegory. Fiction.
The Orcs aren't black or Muslim; they're just monsters.
All the deconstructs ever spawned can't change that, and ultimately say more about their own authors than anything at all about Tolkien or the grand-scale fairy tale he wrote.
—David Schlaefer
His motivation was far from altruistic!
It always feels like a chapter that belonged in another book.![[Wikipedia]](/images/wikipediasmall.png){kind=small}
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil...