NP Tolkien Picks Up A Few More Bits Of Cultural Baggage

[jbor]

on 6/1/03 2:42 AM, Otto at ottosell at yahoo.de wrote:

> I must admit that when it comes to cultural artefacts I'm not so much
> interested in "vast majority"-opinions but in the voices of people who, I
> think, are worth listening too (like Rushdie).

I'm interested in the way political ideas and cultural attitudes are formed
too. But I don't discount "'vast majority'-opinions" either. I don't agree
with this implication that 'most people aren't worth listening to' at all.

> And I still prefer the
> original text to any movie.

The movies are very very good.

> When I read _TLOTR_ first I did not think for a
> second that it could be a parable on WW-II, while I clearly noticed the
> racist layer when I read it the last time.

Again, the case just hasn't been made, as far as I've seen.

> But I do not buy Shapiro's main
> thesis that this has made its success.

I note that there's still no more news on that Shapiro guy's "work" which
Doug was deferring to while he was promoting the guy's press release last
month. Perhaps Doug was just plain wrong about that as well?

> If there's any such thing I think the major echo is that the (fictional)
> Ring-War and the (real) Second World War were both just wars, the latter
> even "the last just war" in Rushdie's opinion,

Tolkien's Tom Bombadil might disagree, of course. But I think Rushdie is
drawing a bit of a binary here himself, between "just wars" and, implicitly,
'wars which aren't just'. It's not an abstraction I can buy. People fight
for "just" causes, or what they truly believe are "just" causes, all of the
time.

best