I just post this here: >"No one in The Lord of the Rings

>>9641140
No one cares about your book let queers who like fantasy read their shit fantasy and don't shill your shit here

>>9641140
haha lmao lmao

more like

David Dick - her, - son!

lmao lmao

damn

got eem

>>9641149
Yah, and let's discuss better thing such as Wallace, romanticism and cuckoldry.

>>9641163
I never discuss any of things here, not my problem that you give life to shit threads

>>9641163
>Romanticism
When was the last time we talked about Romanticism here?
Op is pretty bad but, I actually was interested enough to read the entire post which is more than i can say for most threads.

>>9641140
"Hand me that spoon, the silver one!", thus spoke quick-footed Achilleus, equal to gods

>>9641161
this is water

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>Tolkien is so legendary he sustains an entire industry of people criticizing him

LotR is like a coral reef that supports an entire ecosystem. It's amazing.

>>9641140
Any critique embodies assumptions about the work under scrutiny. All the criticisms in this essay are derived from the assumption that The Lord of the Rings is a novel and it should conform to the features of a conventional novel. LOTR is historical fiction set in a completely imagined world (a secondary world). It is a Fairy Story. Dickerson makes an interesting point about Joyce’s Ulysses at the end of his essay. No one would reasonably criticize Ulysses for its plot structure or level of detail. Joyce was obviously trying to create a new mode of fiction. Would any reasonable person criticize Joyce for all the epiphanies in Dubliners? Tolkien was trying to build a fairy story. He wrote a famous essay called On Fairy Stories in which he very clearly and carefully specified the elements of such a story. The major element of the fairy story is the creation of the secondary world, its setting, “the perilous realm, and the air that blows in that country”. Dickerson conveniently omits the heading of Setting from all of his other headings. Tolkien writes about secondary world creation in great detail in the essay. Most of Dickerson’s criticisms would disappear if he analyzed LOTR as a fairy story in the mode constructed by Tolkien in On Fairy Stories rather than as a modern novel written in modern, demotic (opening, bang, bang, bang, ending), movie mode. He may even be interested that his invention of the dessert spoon is an example of Tolkien’s construct of Fantasy and Recovery. The essay uses a lot of crude language (The F word etc) that could have been avoided. I have read a lot of useless, uninformed criticism like this on Goodreads and I didn’t have to pay for it. You know, Joyce mostly just wrote; Tolkien gave us an essay in which he explains exactly what he was trying to do. We can only measure him fairly against his own standard. Read On Fairy Stories, watch Christopher Tolkien's interviews on Youtube, watch A Portrait of J R R Tolkien on Youtube. Learn something before you risk a public essay.

>>9641149
Lord of the Rings is literary fiction

>>9641418
Is what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night

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>>9641140
>the illogic of there even being a One Ring
it's going to be the written equivalent of picking apart continuity errors in films and pretending it's actual criticism, isn't it?

>>9641399
Excellent job, anon and I'm not even a Tolkien fan

>>9641396
same with Homer and Harry Potter

>>9641442
Do you even need to ask?


>>9641140
>All I'm trying to do is make Tolkienists realize that they should feel guiltier than they do.
I don't think anyone aside from this autist feels guilty at all about reading LOTR. That's such an absurd presumption to make. I also already hold contempt for this guy because of his remark about Tolkien's "fake" biblical prose.

>>9641465
The Three Greats.

>>9641353
I was just thinking this. Author must be one major pleb.

>>9641471
and the bible

>>9641466
>Tolkien's "fake" biblical prose.
Clearly he's never read Lord Dunsany's fantasies which actually do that.

But there is still the burden of Tolkien’s style: stiff, false archaic, overwrought, and finally a real hindrance in Volume III, The Return of the King, which I have had trouble rereading. At seventy-seven, I may just be too old, but here is The Return of the King, opened pretty much at random:

>At the doors of the Houses many were already gathered to see Aragorn, and they followed after him; and when at last he had supped, men came and prayed that he would heal their kinsmen or their friends whose lives were in peril through hurt or wound, or who lay under the Black Shadow. And Aragorn arose and went out, and he sent for the sons of Elrond, and together they labored far into the night. And word went through the city: ‘The King is come again indeed.’ And they named him Elfstone, because of the green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own people.

I am not able to understand how a skilled and mature reader can absorb about fifteen hundred pages of this quaint stuff. Why “hurt or wound”; are they not the same? What justifies the heavy King James Bible influence upon this style? Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon. Tolkien met a need, particularly in the early days of the counterculture in the later 1960s. Whether he is an author for the duration of the twenty-first century seems to me open to some doubt.

Tolkein wasn't a very good writer and you could even doubt his world building skills. But the general story still made its way into western thought.

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>>9641399
Contrarian cucks who work for NPR btfo

>>9641480
Shoo shoo Bloom. Tolkien will be read 500 years from now.

>>9641480
>which I have had trouble rereading
Decades of reading invisible style of airport novels caused your reading ability to atrophy.

>>9641480
Bloom's review is completely fair though. It's just not suited to his taste, and he says as much. Perhaps at seventy-seven he really was just too old to enjoy it. I'd like to think that he enjoys and appreciates some of Tolkien's work.

Ironic that literary critic Edmund Wilson is only remembered for his myopic takedowns of Chandler, Tolkien, and Lovecraft.

>>9641493
If Tolkien is purged, it won't be for style or literaly reasons, but because of his (perceived) politics.

>>9641506

I suspect that The Lord of the Rings is fated to become only an intricate period piece, while The Hobbit may well survive as children’s literature. Really good-natured fantasy is hard to come by, and one convincing personality at its center is all it requires. No other figure in The Hobbit can be called a personality, but Bilbo Baggins is so vivid and persistent that he makes up for all the others. The first thing we hear Bilbo say is “Good morning!” to the self-important wizard Gandalf, who is rude enough to overinterpret the remark. Bilbo’s last exclamation is also to Gandalf, who has become more respectful and even fond of Mr. Baggins by the end of the book but still feels compelled to remind him that “you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” Charming as always, Bilbo comforts us with a laughing “Thank goodness!”

>>9641496
>can't spot a Bloom quote
HOW FUCKING NEW

The genre fiction of yesterday is the literary canon of tomorrow.

>>9641140
Sounds awfully silly, and career shattering. He's oblivious to the fact that Tolkien is universally respected author, and target of a number of serious and well researched articles, and books by notable critics and researchers in the field.

>>9641547
>He's oblivious to the fact that Tolkien is universally respected author
Hahahahah what

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>>9641522
See, here I think Bloom is deeply mistaken. I think LOTR is going to be around for centuries to come. I actually have a professor at my grad school who believes it's going to be the one big work of fiction that survives the 20th Century. She thinks it's going to last in a way that Ulysses won't, for example.

>>9641622
Well, she's retarded.

>>9641622
LOTR will definitely be around for centuries to come, but thinking that it will be held in higher regard than Ulysses is just absurdly ignorant.

>>9641140
>"This American Life" contributor
So libcuck shit then.

>>9641473
Of course he is

>>9641640
I didn't say "higher regard," I merely said it would survive and Ulysses wouldn't, or at least may not.

And I feel you may be overestimating the staying power of Ulysses. It's undoubtedly a great work of art, but there are lots of great works of art that haven't endured; they're still around, of course, but they haven't stuck in the broad culture. My worry is that Ulysses is too specific, too tied pointedly to a specific style, a specific art form, a specific time and place. I feel it doesn't transcend its moment in time the way, say, Moby-Dick does. Obviously all literature is a reflection of the time and place in which it's written, but the works that endure do so because they have some quality in them that touches people across time and space. Does Ulysses have that quality? I'm honestly not sure. I think it MIGHT, but at the same time I wonder if Joyce's own overpowering desire to be clever didn't sandbag the book.

>>9641480
Funnily enough, Bloom doesn't even seem to think LotR or Tolkien are bad though. He liked the Hobbit and thinks it's good children's lit and only considered LotR overrated.

>>9641140
The whole cover first makes it sound like the whole retarded "it just WALKING" criticism and everything.

Then I read the blurb you provided and I knew it was shit, the guy just didn't get the point/style that the book was going for.

personally I think the books themselves are extremely boring, but the universe is very interesting and fantasy would look entirely different today had it not occurred. I have a lot of respect for tolkien's worldbuilding.

>>9641399
Well said. This is the 1% of /lit/ posts I keep coming to this stupid website for.

>>9641849
I bet you don't even watch anime.

>>9641399
Congratulations on the dubs and on the great post.
Any book that introduces it's authour as a "long suffering geek" deserves a talking down.

The absolute worst type of idiot is the pretentious idiot.

ITT: We see how faggoty and humourless and pseudointellectual literary culture has become. If you can't even accept different opinions without claiming a lack of intelligence or understanding then wtf are you doing in a board about a form of entertainment?

>>9641531
Why would anyone be familiar with Bloom?

>>9641480
>Why “hurt or wound”; are they not the same?

No.

>>9641140
>>Decades after first being told he should love The Lord of the Rings, this longsuffering geek has had enough. In "How Tolkien Sucks," humorist and "This American Life" contributor David Ellis Dickerson does a hilarious takedown of Tolkien's masterpiece, proving, in meticulous detail and with withering commentary, that "Tolkien’s utter awfulness on damn near every level is a matter of mathematical provability." The fake-Biblical dialogue; the surprisingly thin characters; the horrible pacing; the illogic of there even being a One Ring—all get put under a microscope and checked against Tolkien's reputation for genius. You may never read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in quite the same way again. But that's okay. As Dickerson says, "I have nothing against guilty pleasures....All I’m trying to do is make Tolkienists realize that they should feel guiltier than they do. You're welcome."
jesus, what an insufferable little shit

wouldn't read another sentence from this guy, nevermind a book

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>>9641483
>you could even doubt his world building skills

>>9641923
Except we have an unfunny, pseudo-intellectual faggot who made a book on why his opinion is better than yours.

Fuck off

>>9641658
Your professor is right.

>>9641140
Fuck you David, I'll excite the shit out of you with a hammer forged within the bowel of the Ijmuiden tata steel ovens with magically enhanced steel of Mesabi passed on to descendants of the hardware emporium unto me and from unto the preordained fate of providing your skull with a draft hole.

>>9641140
Ugh... cause yeah, all books should be boring "realism" about ordinary people living ordinary lives in existential angst and morasses of failure.
And what the fuck is that criticism of "no one in The Lord of the Rings can say so much as..." ? There are plenty of dialogues in the book that don't sound quite so lofty.

>>9641396
Kek. That's how you know you've truly made it.

>>9641480
Does this moron really not understand that hurt = sickness and wound = injury as from a weapon?

>>9641515
As always, good works of so-called "genre" fiction endure and become the fabled classics of their time in the future's eyes. Meanwhile, the "realistic" fiction of the current day becomes forgotten, and the future sees it as quaint, strange, and too-much bound to its particular cultural context.

>>9641399
Very well said indeed.

>>9641140
(((David)))

>>9641480
Those lines are 100% straightforward and clear...

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I had a comic strip in mind about this subject that I will never draw:

Frodo and Sam walking in the Shire come across a Hole in the ground."I wonder what this is,Mister Frodo,"says Sam. Aragorn pops in.
"Its the entrance to the Barrow of Ulfraith the Unconcecrated,third king of the Nargoth Ulltamire"
Elrond steps in,dismissing this with a shake of his head."This was the lost entrance to Finrod Felegund's Forge of Fir'FaalFufufufu,where the Fundaments of Falialfuf were fashioned".The others nod,and quietly wipe away the flying spittle. Gandalf appears.
"Impossible! The markings in the earth denote Noxious Noldor Nadgers and this is that rare beast's burrow!"

Then all jump in surprise as an outhouse is slammed on top of the hole by an old whiskered hobbit holding a newspaper.
"Garn! This is me new CESSPIT!" He enters,slamming the door behind him.
Loud defication ensues.
And after looking at each other sheepishly, the group runs away .

Guess I don't have to draw this NOW,do I?

It's always funny when bad, irrelevant writers make fun of good, timeless writing.

>>9641140
If a work is compelling enough to spawn not only a slew of poorly received imitations, but an entire genre full of them that are hoisted onto every pedestal imaginable, I dare say that there is merit in the work.

Personal taste not withstanding, of course. Tolkien also isn't for me. But I can recognize good writing when I see it, even if I don't enjoy it. Celebration of ignorance is self-serving nonsense.

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>>9641140
I remember when i wrote an article in my high school news paper on how the olsen twins are evil.

I remembered writing it not becuase i felt an injustice being done in the manufacturing of this image of these wholesome twin sisters going on adventures.
I hated them so much becuase my sister watched them non stop, and had bought into their makeup line.

Now in hindsight i realize that the olsen twins arent evil, they are oppressed like the rest of us. Im just reminded more of thier oppression than of my own.