NP? �"the formerly colonised coming back to haunt us"

[Dave Monroe]

Well ...

--- CyrusGeo at netscape.net wrote:
>
> For many years, critics believed (some still do,
> apparently), that "the Lord of the Rings" was really
> about the World War and the general international
> political situation at the time. Tolkien has
> repeatedly denied that. Why not take his word for
> it? After all, the themes of his trilogy are
> universal and timeless, which is why (in my opinion)
> it had such a huge success in so many countries.
> It's not great literature, but it's quite catchy.

Well, JRRT may not consciously have intended for TLOTR
to be "about" WWII, i.e., as an allegory or whatever
thereof, but it was, is, e'er will be "about" WWII in
that it was undoubtedly written in the shadow thereof,
however (politically-)unconscious Tolkien and/or his
trilogy might have been of, well, a World War ...

Insofar as anything is "universal and timeless" (and
when it comes to cultural production, nothing is ...),
TLOTR was, is, and e'er shall be particular and timely
as well, historical, historicized, "catchy" in no
small part by virtue of its resonance with (at least
the mythologization of) recent (at the time of
publication) historical events, in which it is in turn
ineluctably "caught" ...

And one might further ask, what similar resonances
make it "catchy" now?  The "universal," "timeless" war
("war") betwixt ("betwixt"?) "good" and "evil"?  Will
be seeing The Two Towers tomorrow, so ...

But the Tolkien "phenomenon" didn't quite take off as
such until the 1960s, following an unauthorized Ace
ed. of TLOTR and the trilogy subsequently being taken
up by the, esp., American, counterculture, for which
it undoubtedly had certain resonances as well ...

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