Scooter Nik wrote:All my favourites in one thread.

Pratchett, Biggles, Lego, an acceptance that computer games aren't (all!) junk and a healthy disdain for Tolkeins 'masterpiece'.



Minty, will you marry me?

Mintball wrote:How much Lego have you actually got?

Mintball wrote:It should be borne in mind that I also like Wagner.

Ferocious Aardvark wrote:Are you watching the Met performing the Ring? Recorded the first 2 so far, not yet viewed.

Mintball wrote:Ignoring the fact that you said "a bit of ..."

It's a major work of fantasy fiction and a jolly good romp. The creation of the languages was an extraordinary feat. Which doesn't stop it being, IMO, overrated.

It shares with the likes of John Betjeman a rather reactionary attitude toward industrial and urban Britain. The Shire is England's countryside; Mordor is the industrial England – in essence, then, the midlands and north.

He cribbed from other sources – not in itself a problem, but hilariously, JRR himself claimed that the only resemblance to Wagner's Ring cycle was that both included a ring and rings are round, although various literary scholars have pointed out that this is a tad disingenuous – not least in the fact that both were influenced by a range of source materials, including Volsunga and the Nibelungenlied, but also in that Wagner had imbued his ring with certain powers, which was not something that was in the original myths and legends.

But my point would be, in essence, that LOTR fails as 'great literature' because it is little more than what it is (and it's arguably over long and indulgent). That's not a snobbish comment on genre fiction, though: I'd rate Terry Pratchett far, far more highly than JRR – simply because the bulk of the Discworld novels go beyond straightforward fantasy tales and have something to actually tell us about the human condition. You don't have to read them like that, but the satire is most certainly there. They're also deceptively simply written, and yet can have you laughing on one page and crying on the next.

Anakin Skywalker wrote:I agree on most of this although others have also said there are hints that the ring was the H-bomb and Sauron was just the embodyment of the German nation (Evil thought to be destroyed only to return) ...

Mintball wrote:Yet Tolkien himself objected to the anti-German rhetoric that the government used during the war, even though he was avowedly anti-Nazi: he didn't like the demonisation of a whole people and didn't consider it any better if it was doneby the UK than if it was done by Goebbels.

There are major religious themes in it – JRR being a very observant Catholic, who is said to be responsible to CS Lewis finding faith (although he was less impressed when Lewis opted for the good old CofE).