Subject:
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Re: A good use for Jar Jar figs.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.fun
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Date:
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Fri, 21 Apr 2000 19:32:55 GMT
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Viewed:
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616 times
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Frank Filz wrote:
> John Robert Blaze Kanehl wrote:
> >
> > Lucas is a visionary of sorts, legitimizing sci-fi in mainstream movies,
> > etc. Tolkien, however, was revolutionary...his writing (like C. S. Lewis)
> > can simply be dismissed as "fantasies" or "children's stories" or critically
> > on a scholarly level, analyzing war, politics, religion, society and
> > philosophy...
>
> And in fact is. I have a nifty little book which is a bunch of research
> on Tolkien's writings.
Or, if you want the semi-pejorative analysis of Tolkien ("warts and all"), you can
pick up the acerbic, possibly polemical, _Inventing the Middle Ages_ by Norman Cantor;
he gets into the ugliness and downright weirdness involved in creating our
(ironically) "modern" sense of the medieval. He's got his own axe to grind, granted,
because he's a maverick among his fellow medievalists and seems vaguely angry about
this...but I can't argue with a lot of his assertions.
Tolkien was a scholar of the first rank who successfully disseminated a fantasized,
romanticized medievalism, the Europe That Should Have Been, at a time when our own
world just didn't look too pretty. And who can complain about that? Personally, I
like his view. It keeps us all in Castle sets. ;)
best
Lindsay
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