quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: I read LotR over a single weekend when I was in 7th grade. I've never found it difficult, although the first time through I wanted so badly to know what happened that I did start skimming the songs.
The complaints about the writing style are as foreign to me as people not liking chocolate.
My experience is pretty much the same. I read the book during the summer break after 7th grade. I'm pretty sure it took me more than a weekend since I was checking the books out of the local library one at a time. I do remember laying on the floor of my bedroom in the middle of a gorgeous summer day total entranced by the Ents. I've never understood how people could find it boring or complain about the writing style.
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Most definitely The Silmarillion. I read that in seventh grade and seeing Lord of the Rings was all the rage I was THE authority on all that mattered. No one else even tried to read it...
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My older sister was a big fan of LotR when we were kids, and I tried and tried to read Fellowship, but Tom Bombadil got me every time (damn him!). Eventually I saw the film of the first book, then read the second and third in a matter of days and went back and read Fellowship later (and liked it a lot better).
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I enjoyed them...but they are of course not written in the same way that a lot of modern fantasy is written. It is written in an older style.
I think that is why many people don't like "classics." They simply don't feel the same as modern books. Personally, I enjoy the style...it might take more concentration to get through them...but that is part of the fun.
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One thing to keep in mind for readers new to Tolkien is this: The Hobbit was written for children (specifically, ENGLISH children) of the 1930s, a whole different animal to modern youth; The Lord of the Rings is not a children's book, but again was written for a much different audience from today's, a more literate audience. Also, when LoTR was published there was no such thing as a Fantasy section in the bookstore, the genre didn't exist, so readers had no other writers to dilute the standard Tolkien set. (The second fantasy book I read was Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara, which just made me mad because it was such a total ripoff of Lord of the Rings with none of the depth of invention.) Nowadays a lot of readers will come to Tolkien after reading any number of other fantasy writers, writing in a 'modern' style. The man was a genius, he wrote beautifully, movingly, humourously, powerfully, and there are few others who can approach him.
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Agreed. Plus Tolkien is downright light reading compared to the original myths he drew inspiration from.
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When I was about nine years old my mother read The Hobbit aloud to me as a bed time story. I loved it so much. At the end of the book it mentioned the Lord of the Rings, if you "wanted to learn more about Hobbits." Well I did. My totally amazing mother read the entire LoTR trilogy ALOUD to me over the course of the next few months.
The next year I read them for myself, and have been reading them once a year, in the fall, every year since then. As I got older I added The Silmarillion into my rereading. I love those books so much. As I mature, the books mature with me. I am always gleaning something different from them.
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Wow. Luet and I got into Tolkien exactly the same way, give or take a year and the choice of parent. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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3) Wonder why anyone is reading a book that he doesn't have to read and isn't enjoying? Proust, for example, is important but when I had read enough to know that it wasn't for me, I stopped.
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4) Simply share what it is one liked about the books, in case others can use that information to decide if the book is "worth" reading to them, or simply in case others are interested.
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quote:3) Wonder why anyone is reading a book that he doesn't have to read and isn't enjoying? Proust, for example, is important but when I had read enough to know that it wasn't for me, I stopped.
So if you don't enjoy every little detail, you shouldn't bother? You aren't "good enough" to enjoy the whole thing, so you shouldn't be able to enjoy any of it?
I myself am one who had a hard time enjoying it. I started skimming the parts which were not entertaining to me, and ended up having a highly enjoyable experience on the whole, and am glad I read it.
Here someone posts that they are having trouble, in exactly the same way I was, and they are literally asking for tips on how to enjoy the books.
I put forth some tips which I think may be helpful, and get mocked by several posters .
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quote:Why did you add the "good enough," especially in quotes?
Meh, that comment wasn't really meant for Kate.
There are at least a few posts (look for any which quote my first post for examples) where there is a clear negative value judgment made against those who did not enjoy Tolkien's writing.
Kate's post, coming so close after mind, appeared to me (and my temporarily defensive mind) to be her throwing her hat in with them.
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I think you may be reading criticism that isn't there. At least I didn't intend any. People have different tastes.
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QUOTE- "There are at least a few posts (look for any which quote my first post for examples) where there is a clear negative value judgment made against those who did not enjoy Tolkien's writing."
My "negative post" was more in response to pathetically flippant comments like "find somebody who could actually write" to do a novelisation of the movies.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Wow. Luet and I got into Tolkien exactly the same way, give or take a year and the choice of parent.
My mother read it to my brother and me when I was three and he was six. Actually, she had just intended to read it to him, and was surprised when I listened to it in rapt attention. LotR was a huge part of the mythic landscape of my childhood.
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My 3 and 6 year-old nephews listened attentively to me read the first chapter of "The Hobbit" the last time I babysat. I was surprised that the language didn't bother them a bit. I would have continued, but my voice was giving out and, although they were struggling to keep awake. It was long past their bedtime. They wanted more.
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I agree with Xavier. There are different ways to enjoy books. I never advocate slogging through things that you're not enjoying (case in point for me: the first Robert Jordan book). But selective skimming and skipping can help you to enjoy a book you might not otherwise have liked. (Just like having a difficult book read aloud can help someone enjoy something he or she might not be ready to read independently.) I thought those tips were great. That's right! Great!
I love Dickens BECAUSE I skim the parts that I find boring. I worry that thinking they have to read every single word of something in order to "really read it" means that people miss out on stories that they'd otherwise love.
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I also agree that it's quite okay to skip the dull parts. I never found any part that dull with the Lord of the Rings, but I agree wholeheartedly about whoever said that Paris of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables are better if you skip certain parts. (Also, the one and only time I read the Bible I tended to skip the parts about who fathered whom. Does that make me a heathen?)
Anyway, I got introduced to Lord of the Rings from this Finnish TV-show about Lord of the Rings that was shown when I was around seven years old. (That has to be the least well known LotR adaptation worldwide...) The TV-show was very cheesy according to those who saw it as adults, but it did garner my interests in the books, even if it was a few years before I read them. (The show was based on this six hour play that was produced at this 17th century castle in Helsinki, and the play and the show had largely the same cast. Unlike the show, the play is supposed to have been amazing... and sadly the show is likely to never come on DVD as whoever owned the rights to the LotR franchise in the early 90's gave permission to only two television showings of the series but nothing more, and it is not even fully known who owns the rights to the show these days.)
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It can't be that hard to find. I would imagine Saul Zaentz would be a good place to start. He has owned the worldwide rights to the LOTR and The Hobbit since the late 70's or mid 80's I believe.
Les Miserables I found incredibly difficult to make it through. The first few times I tried I couldn't even get past the scenes with the Bishop to where Jean Valjean actually makes it to the village. I was trying to reread it the other day and having the same problem, though it was easier the second time. But I just ordered the Children of Hurin today, so I'm going back to rereading the LOTR for the first time in 2007.
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I just don't like the idea of skimming a book. if I get to the point where I start doing that it's because I've already lost interest and have gotten annoyed with the book. If I do skim and find it gets interesting I go back to where I was and persevere til I hit the interesting part "legitimately". But generally, if I have to skim I usually end up giving up in disgust.
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I guess I feel that skimming is sort of disrespectful, to the book and the author. If I feel the book is worth my time I'll try and respect it enough to stick with it. Weird, huh?
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quote:It can't be that hard to find. I would imagine Saul Zaentz would be a good place to start. He has owned the worldwide rights to the LOTR and The Hobbit since the late 70's or mid 80's I believe.
Yeah, it probably isn't difficult. It was just an interview I read with the show's Finnish producer, he said he didn't know who owned the rights these days. The interview was practically about why the show isn't coming up on DVD, I guess they have no interest in looking into those rights because they'd have to pay something and the show only has a very small target audience in those who treat it as a sort of a cult oddity. So they see it as not worth it.
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I started re-reading the book(s) on Wednesday and I finished Fellowship today. I guess I've found my Tolkien-decoder ring. Here's my trick. Open it up- and read... Yeah man, that's like... deep.
And I guess I got into my head that I wanted to know more about the world than the internal motivation of every character. I read too much OSC between 6th grade and now (end of my Senior year) and so until recently it was hard for me to read a lot of different styles that weren't very similar to OSC.
But I've quite enjoyed it. Even the songs- it tried to sing the songs in my head. Sometimes they slow me down- but I do enjoy the use of song like more older civilizations did. It increases the beauty of the story ever more so.
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quote:Originally posted by Shawshank: And I guess I got into my head that I wanted to know more about the world than the internal motivation of every character. I read too much OSC between 6th grade and now (end of my Senior year) and so until recently it was hard for me to read a lot of different styles that weren't very similar to OSC.
I love Tolkien a lot, but character development and motivation is definitely not his strong suit. Scenery, history, mythology, he does well and in depth. I've always found his characters to be two dimensional and somewhat wooden. But I still love them dearly. Weird.
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I wouldn't say they are necessarily two dimensional or wooden, but I'd say they are deeply idealized. They're mythic characters, not ones that you could be expected to encounter in your daily life.
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quote:not ones that you could be expected to encounter in your daily life.
They're fictional characters sure, and I wouldn't expect to meet Aragorn tomorrow because people generally don't run around with swords proclaiming they are a kind descended from a long line of kings that fell after their island nation was sunk into the sea by angry gods.
In that same sense, I also don't expect to meet a child prodigy being groomed to lead a massive fleet of earth ships bent on destroying our interstellar neighbors.
I believe SOME of them are idealized, but they are also deeply, deeply flawed as well. But I think without a couple characters to be stalwart standing fast, the story wouldn't have worked as well. I know the intention of the creation of these characters, but if you remove that and just look at it as a work of literary fiction and analyze the characters within, there is plenty of depth, fault and quality in there.
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I don't think idealized means the same as two dimensional or non-flawed. Tolkien's view of good and evil, for example, is that otherwise good men become corrupted through external evil powers.
What I meant with idealized was that I can't imagine any real medieval rulers or princes to have been like Aragorn or Denethor or Faramir. All in all Tolkien's Middle Earth is a very sanitized version of Middle Ages, and that is not something the myths he threw inspiration from necessarily were. Which is all as well because it doesn't try to be realistic, and as you said it works well on its own as literary fiction. But I don't think you can say Tolkien's characterization to be realistic in the same way that, say, A Song of Ice and Fire is realistic.
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*Cough* No I'm not obsessed with LOTR at all. Nope. Really! Honest! Don't look at me like that...
On a side note, we had an LotR extended edition movie marathon at my apartment... two weekends ago. It rocked, we showed it on my projector, baked lembas (from a recipe my housemate had, it was actually very tasty and very filling) and had a full hobbit meal (roast beef, mashed potatoes, green peas, various ales and tea). It rocked.
I think the Fellowship is my favorite of the books, I read them all sometime in late elementary/early middle school. I reread them fairly regularly in high school and read the Silmarillion in high school. It was a long slog, a bit like reading a history text book, but totally worth it Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: You think Tolkien's LOTR characters are two dimensional and wooden?
Are we talking about the same Tolkien?
Yes. Except that you're being much more generous than me. Now that I've read OSC, I find that a lot of characters in a lot of books that I've read and loved come up flat. It's not really a matter of flawed/idealized for me. It's more like, could I converse with them? Do they feel anything that's not always highly elevated or completely debased? Would I like to have tea with them? The answer for Tolkien's charaters is not really. I mean, I love me some Gandalf, Eowyn, Pippin, et al, but I can't imagine them as flesh and blood people.
His most in depth character was Sam, and that's because he was based somewhat on himself. I think Tolkien spent a lot more time perfecting a cohesive world history than he did peopling it with anyone I'd actually want to hang with. And don't even get me started on his portrayal of women. Ha.
Regardless of the flatness of his characters to me, I will read those books once a year and love every minute of it. I've been doing it for fifteen years already, and I'm so not done yet. Posts: 511 | Registered: Mar 2006
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I've been thinking a lot about the comments on this thread about Tolkien's supposed inability to write decent dialogue as I've been reading The Two Towers (for the umpteenth time). There is a noticeable shift in the style of the dialogue in The Two Towers. It becomes "grander", especially in the opening book of TTT.
The more I read, the more I disagree that he couldn't write dialogue. He must have been particularly sensitive to all styles of speech, with his love of language, and would have been exposed to all levels in his time in the trenches of WW1.
He deliberately writes in a whole range of styles, from the down to earth of the Hobbits, to the high tone of the Elves and Aragorn. More than anything he used speech to characterise his characters, both as individuals and as types.
So the Orcs and Gollum speak in totally different voices from the rest of the characters. (Tolkien mentions in an Appendix that you can still today find modern examples of 'Black Speech' amongst those of an orcish temperament.)
The hobbits speak in a straightforward voice that is quite modern and down to earth. Frodo's speech patterns change and become more 'noble' the closer he gets to Mt Doom, as he himself changes.
Aragorn the same, as he asserts himself more strongly as the king of Gondor.
I think he was acutely sensitive to the idea that the way people speak reveals their character, and tailored his dialogue to that principle. It's not that he couldn't write decent dialogue, it's more that he chose to use dialogue to express the nobility or otherwise of his characters.
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I just finished Return of the King today and am now quite glad that I have read it. Very much so. I don't think I will ever read it again- it wasn't 'entertaining' enough for me to do that. But it was amazing.
Return of the King was my favorite- the build up of tension through books 5 and 6 were completely tangible IMHO- even despite the fact I had seen the movie several times. The Scouring of the Shire was of course the only major event that wasn't covered in the movies but I still knew about it- made me just laugh quite a bit. And then watching the Hobbits kick out "Sharkey" was just pathetic in a good way.
Fellowship was my second favorite, and the Two Towers my least favorite. I didn't actually skip over any parts that I know about- except some of the really long songs. Now I think I might try to make my way through the Silmarillion.
So woohoo for me- I finished it. And as to some people asking why was I trying to force myself to read it. It wasn't so much force- it was I could tell even from the movies that the story would be one I love- the nobility, the sacrifice of it all- I sensed there was a powerful story for me to read and unearth if I could get past the style. Which in the end I came to appreciate very much.
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I just finished rereading the Silmarillion for maybe the dozenth time, I love it.
I'll give you a warning though, it's quite literally an Elvish history book, albeit far more entertaining (for me) than any other history book I've ever read. There's little dialogue in it, it's mostly storytelling and it has a very slow start. If you want to read more about the Elves, and want to hear some of the best characters and stories in 20th century literature, by all means read it, just go into it knowing what to expect. One last warning is you might want to refer to the back of the book a few times to try and get all the names right. Tolkien throws a LOT of names at you, and considering Middle Earth's penchant for naming children after the fashion of their parents, you get main characters like Finwe, Ingwe, Elwe and Olwe, who sound a little similar, but are the leaders of four very different peoples. And then you get the leaders of the Noldor, Finrod, Fingon, Fingolfin, Finarfin, Finwe, Feanor, and still more. Even just looking at that list, and having read the Sil a dozen times my memory isn't always good enough to readily identify which was which. I forgive Tolkien, because he left the work unfinished at his death, and it was finished later by Christopher before he could polish it up, but it's the driest of his texts. Don't take any of this as a slam on the Sil though, I've read it more than any other Tolkien book, and I love it. It's also extremely depressing, I was (and am) really attached to the characters, and some of them don't make it to the end of the story, which is sad to see for many reasons.
Let us know how you like it when you finish it.
Personally I love the stories of Beren and Luthien, the life of Turin Turambar, the rise and fall of Beleriand, the all too short story of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin (for more on many of these stories, check out the Unfinished Tales).
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I'm with Lyrhawn, but I'd also strongly recommend not judging the book by the first section, the Music of the Ainur, which is Tolkien's creation myth for Middle Earth. It's very poetic, and can be hard going. The second section, The Quenta Silmarillion, is the real meat, and contains some extraordinarily powerful and tragic stories, as cited by Lyrhawn above.
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I'm the opposite, I love the Music of the Ainur. I find that creation story beautiful and magical.
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