Oo, Those Awful Orcs!

[Anonymous No.18915936]

>There is little in The Lord of the Rings over the head of a seven-year-old child. It is essentially a children's book - a children's book which has somehow got out of hand. The pretentiousness is all on the part of Dr. Tolkien's infatuated admirers.

>The most distinguished of Tolkien's admirers and the most conspicuous of his defenders has been Mr. W. H. Auden. That Auden is a master of English verse and a well-equipped critic of verse, no one, as they say, will dispute. It is significant, then, that he comments on the badness of Tolkien's verse. Mr. Auden is apparently quite insensitive - through lack of interest in the other department.- to the fact that Tolkien's prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness.

>The hero has no serious temptations; is lured by no insidious enchantments, perplexed by few problems. There is never much development in the episodes; you simply go on getting more of the same thing. Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form. The characters talk a story-book language, and as personalities they do not impose themselves. At the end of this long romance, I had still no conception of the wizard Gandalph, who is a cardinal figure, had never been able to visualize him at all. These characters who are no characters are involved in interminable adventures the poverty of invention displayed in which is, it seems to me, almost pathetic.

>Tolkien's horrors resemble these in their lack of real contact with their victims, who dispose of them as we do of the horrors in dreams by simply pushing them or puffing them away. As for Sauron, the ruler of Mordor (doesn't the very name have a shuddery sound.), he makes his first, rather promising, appearance as a terrible fire-rimmed yellow eye seen in a water-mirror. But this is as far as we ever get. We never feel Sauron's power. And the climax, to which we have been working up through exactly nine hundred and ninety-nine large close-printed pages, when it comes, proves extremely flat. The ring is at last got rid of by being dropped into a fiery crater, and the kingdom of Sauron topples in a brief and banal earthquake that sets fire to everything and burns it up, and so releases the author from the necessity of telling the reader what exactly was so terrible there. An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly.

>Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people - especially, perhaps, in Britain - have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash.

oof

https://www.jrrvf.com/sda/critiques/The_Nation.html

[Anonymous No.18915942]

Before this becomes a 140 page thread I beg people not to respond to the bait. Ty

[Anonymous No.18915974]

Edmund irrefutably and eternally BTFO'd both fantasy and detective fiction.

[Anonymous No.18915975]

>>18915936
What's hilarious is that Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais echoed these sentiments almost verbatim on XFM when Jackson's trilogy was in theatres.

[Anonymous No.18916046]

>In spite of the author's disclaimer, the struggle for the ring does seem to have some larger significance. This ring, if one continues to carry it, confers upon one special powers, but it is felt to become heavier and heavier; it exerts on one a sinister influence that one has to brace oneself to resist. The problem is for Frodo to get rid of it before he can succumb to this influence.

>NOW, this situation does create interest; it does seem to have possibilities. One looks forward to a queer dilemma, a new kind of hair-breadth escape, in which Frodo, in the Enemy's kingdom, will find himself half-seduced into taking over the enemy's point of view, so that the realm of shadows and horrors will come to seem to him, once he is in it, once he is strong in the power of the ring, a plausible and pleasant place, and he will narrowly escape the danger of becoming a monster himself. But these bugaboos are not magnetic; they are feeble and rather blank; one does not feel they have any real power. The Good People simply say « Boo » to them.

[Anonymous No.18916079]

The Silmarillion has all the intrigue these people want. It's pretty much dark fantasy, except done tastefully.

[Anonymous No.18916096]

>>18915936
>Oo

[Anonymous No.18916102]

>>18915942
What are you going to do about it Tolkienfag, call me an Orc?

[Anonymous No.18916112]

>>18915936
>We never feel Sauron's power
>when it comes, proves extremely flat. The
Top kek. Imagine getting filtered by a book that even a seven-year-old child can understand!

[Anonymous No.18916114]

>>18915942
We always respond to bait. By discussing Tolkien. Just reading up on the sons of feanor is enough to dispel most of the myths about Tolkien's writing being white and black.

[Anonymous No.18916122]

>>18916112
>filtered
The intimidated midwit's retort.

[Anonymous No.18916126]

>>18916122
It wasn't a retort, it was a statement of fact.
This joker literally failed to understand the themes and ideas in the Lord of the Rings.

(And yes, it's not a difficult book to understand; but yes, some people can manage to fail even at this.)

[Anonymous No.18916136]

>>18916126
>It wasn't a retort, it was a statement of fact.
Snappy quips are not facts.
>This joker literally failed to understand the themes and ideas in the Lord of the Rings.
He already addressed this retard: >>18916046

[Anonymous No.18916161]

It is well known that fantasy (the genre of all great European literature) always makes postmodernists, Marxists, and Communists start seething. It is especially true of straightforward good triumphs evil stories which have no room to indulge their political trifles or victim narratives.

They prefer cringe "psychological" conflicts and plots, womanish "realistic" characters, and "blurred" lines between good and evil---devices which literally have no precedence in European literature until the Victorian era, when publishers starting printing midwit novels en masse to serve newly literate plebeians and females.

[Anonymous No.18916190]

>>18916136
Way to miss the point.
Yes, there are no "monsters" or grand swashbuckling adventures in the Lord of the Rings.
That's the whole point of the novel and even seven-year-old kids see why that is a deliberate choice.

[S10241875 No.18916196]

>>18915936
In 1000 years, the only thing that will remind people of this piece of shit will be his cursing at the Professor. Because everything connected with the Professor will be remembered by people in the coming centuries.

[Anonymous No.18916277]

>>18916161
>devices which literally have no precedence in European literature until the Victorian era
Shakespeare?

[Anonymous No.18916747]

>>18915936
The literary establishment were absolutely seething with envy over the sudden appearance and meteoric popularity of LotR, your post is a great example of this. Literary sensibilities had moved a long way away from what Tolkien was doing with his books, and they assumed wrongly that THEY would be the ones to produce the 20th century's most popular and influential novel- one filled with pretentious modern subversive degeneracy, not old-school Christian values steeped in pagan aesthetics and heroic sagas of old. No-one likes to be proven wrong like this, no one likes the rug being pulled out from underneath them. So they cope and seethe, and probably did some rudimentary dilating, over Tolkien's "childish" understanding of good and evil; they maintained either a wilful ignorance or deliberate obtuseness over what Tolkien was actually attempting. That is, a modern mythology where good and evil are reverted back to their essential elemental forms as primordial forces of nature that we partake in and which move through us, as understood by all of the great religions of the world. Ironically it is the attitude of the over socialized "literary critic" types who have the childish understanding of these most important matters, with all of their lazy relativism and petulant social constructivism. Which is also why they never have and never will actually produce anything of worth themselves, resorting to trying to 'deconstruct' actual literary achievements like Tolkien's. Truly a pathetic breed of people.

[Anonymous No.18916798]

>>18916161

yeah Im thinking based

[Anonymous No.18916841]

>>18916747
Deluded genre fiction poster. The greatest Christian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries were existentialists and modernists (Dostoevsky, TS Eliot, etc.). Do you really want us to believe that all of humanity indulged in nothing but fairy tales before modernity?! What of Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare...!

[Anonymous No.18917022]

>>18916841
>>18916841
When humanity indulged in mythology, we indulged in fairly tales. Tolkien was trying write a modern mythology which often have more simplistic views of good and evil. Augustine didn’t write like this because he was a theologian. Dante didn’t write mythology, he wrote on love and human beauty. I don’t know why you brought up Chaucer as his first major work was a fairy tale featuring Juno. The anon you’re responding to never claimed all pre-modern literature was mythology. Just that Tolkien was writing a mythology.

[Anonymous No.18917030]

>>18916841
No I'm not saying that anon I think you misunderstand me. I'm saying that Tolkien brought back to life mythological elements of storytelling that were long dead by the 1950s and that this took everyone by surprise.

[Anonymous No.18917420]

>>18916277
Pleb theater innit govna?

[Anonymous No.18917480]

>>18915936
lotr may be for kids, but this review is even worse "lmao we don't see sauron shooting fireballs" marvel-tier garbage lmao

[Anonymous No.18918856]

bump

[Anonymous No.18918888]

>>18916747
One thing I've learned is that there has always been snobbery and gatekeeping surrounding literature; The Odyssey and the Illiad were intended to be publicly performed for uneducated plebians, same with Shakespeare's plays; when the modern novel as we know it came into being, it was mocked as "low art:" critics and academics of the time thought that a written that focused on human characters was "romantic" and "sentimental" and "feminine." Later on the modernists, who viewed novels not as entertainment or stories but as intellectual exercises, decried novels having things like "plots" or "stories" (I think it was Virginia Woolf who wrote about how she wished a novel didn't need an actual story to sell well, how she wished she could just write whatever she wanted and not be buggered for not having a "story" or "plot"), and so on and so forth. At the end of the day, the ugly truth is that authors and writers write for different reasons, and readers themselves read for different reasons; academics and grad students and people who primarily enjoy "literary fiction" look down on lowly genre fiction for it's lack of merit, while people who read fantasy and science fiction scowl at those pretentious authors and their literary masturbation. And so it goes

[Anonymous No.18918949]

>>18916747
Also the drive to 'deconstruct' artistic achievement is a dynamic that Tolkien himself represented so well with Morgoth who, seething over his inability to actually create anything, twists and dements the created world to satisfy his arrogant drive to leave his mark. This then becomes the root and source of primordial evil.

[Anonymous No.18919116]

>>18915936
The whole bit about the characters completely misses the point of what Tolkien was trying to do lmfao. Embarrassing.

[Anonymous No.18919141]

>>18918888
Regardless of the times, those with a brain will always be drawn to Shakespeare and Dante

[Anonymous No.18919525]

>>18915975
Apparently there's a lost chapter that featured Frodo and Sam actually going to the Tower of Sauron after they destroyed the ring. When the pair ventured into the tower and explored its ruined halls, they were suddently startled by an inhuman screeching. They were confused and a little scared, obviously, but continued on, believing that nothing could have seriously survived the destruction they had caused. Creeping inside further, they entered a room piled high with sacks of what appeared to be little pellets. Just as they were about to inspect the pellets, they heard a shuffling ahead of them; slowly looking up, hoping what they heard was nothing more than collapsing rubble, they were confronted by a figure in the doorway. They stumbled back, horrified that their efforts had gone to waste, that Sauron lived! As the figure approached, they squinted their eyes, trying to make out what, or who, it was through the thick dust. Turns out, Sauron was a little monkey fella who was coming for his afternoon snack; they were in his peanut pantry. Weird innit?

[Anonymous No.18920168]

>>18919525
play a record

[Anonymous No.18920820]

Academic drivel. Everything he suggests would make it worse and destroy what it's trying to be (which he apparently doesn't get).

[Anonymous No.18922166]

>>18916747
That's one cool depiction of the fellowship wish someone adopted Tolkien like this