Put this Phission in your Preterit Pipe and Poke it

[vze422fs at verizon.net]

Yeah, what she said.

Except, speaking as a hobbit, don't you think this size thing is over-rated?
Come on! Aragorn and Boromir are tall. Is Tolkien unconsciously reflecting a
cultural bias against the short? Do they in fact have no reason to live
except as his Christian metaphor for the weak inheriting the Earth? A little
child shall lead them? Are not the Hobbits little children to be led by the
great civilized men of taller stature and therefore superior destiny? Are
the Hobbits merely metaphors for the good white people of Canada or Belgium
(Leopold aside) who are uncorrupted by power due to their ineffectual lack
thereof? 

A dwarf shall not be tossed!

I say to you now and for all time, that The Lord of the Rings is culturally
biased in favor of the Aryan ideal of tall blond people.

I'm switching over now to the Daily Hardcore Series Blond Galleries.

Have a nice day
Joe

on 1/1/03 3:00 PM, tess marek at tessmarek at yahoo.com wrote:

> Or toke it. 
> 
> If it's about the Bomb or the War maybe it is about
> these things because that is what the book says to us
> today. Certainly that is one of the readings that will
> be common in the minds of so many young and old that
> have never read the books but will see the films.
> Even for those that have read them or will read them,
> we can expect that minds while reading will connect
> the 
> books with war and bombs and power and all that.
> 
> Death, says Pynchon, is what makes all the difference.
> 
> It's what his fictions about. What about Tolkien's
> books? How do the deal with Death? And what about
> comparing the heros of P with the heroes of T?
> Preterit, powerless? Moral vision?
> 
> P was a slow learner because he was slow to come to
> terms with Death in his fictions and everything
> suffers because of this slowness.
> 
> 
> 
> It is T. A. Shippey's well-documented argument that
> for Tolkien such a mythology is rooted in Old English
> and in other languages that derived from a postulated
> common source. Tolkien knew a number of ancient
> languages, and their epics, but he especially knew Old
> English and loved the great stories told in it. His
> essay ?Beowulf: The Monsters and the
> Critics? (1936) is not only a defense of the poem
> against the kinds of misreadings he felt it
> had received for too long, but also a defense of his
> own work against similar misreadings to
> come; and they did come. The negative critics not only
> disliked The Lord of the Rings (taste
> is, after all, personal), but they insisted that the
> work had no right to an audience because it
> was a ?failure,? and therefore must soon prove as
> unpopular as they wished it to be. Thus
> far they have been proved wrong. Tolkien's great work
> has touched a sympathetic chord in
> many readers, and that seems reason enough to treat it
> seriously. And there are other
> reasons as well: however eccentric his major writings
> may appear in this age of low
> mimeticism, they are works of literature; and they
> speak to their audience because they are
> carefully constructed and linguistically complex,
> expressing a moral vision.
> 
> Tolkien had written some of the major tales of The
> Silmarillion in various forms before he
> discovered a new race in Middle-earth, though he did
> not realize at the time that this was
> what he had done. Hobbits do not appear in any of the
> stories of the first two ages, and
> Tolkien had, by the early 1930's, written versions in
> both prose and verse of some of the
> major events in his mythic history. But he wrote these
> tales in a deliberately high mode,
> while composing light tales about characters with
> names like Tom Bombadil for his
> children's entertainment. As he discovered the whole
> narrative of The Hobbit, however,
> Tolkien began to fuse the two sides of his
> imagination, creating a work that would have
> great popular appeal and also touch on the deeper
> concerns of his slowly growing
> mythology. Although he did not realize it until later,
> the hobbits were the image of the
> ordinary that he needed to ground his grand vision in
> the popular imagination. As he
> once told an interviewer: ?The Hobbits are just rustic
> English people, made small in size because it reflects
> the generally small reach of their imagination ? not
> the small reach of their courage or latent power.? To
> put it another way, the hobbits represent
> the combination of small imagination with great
> courage which (as Tolkien had seen in the trenches
> during the First World War) often led to survival
> against all chances. ?I've always been impressed,? he
> once
> said, ?that we are here, surviving, because of the
> indomitable courage of quite small people against
> impossible odds.?
> 
> 
> 
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