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weaver
Half-elven
Jan 24 2011, 3:58pm
Views: 3692
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Nice job of summarizing a lot of stuff! And lots and lots of great questions to pick from -- it's like a Discussion Buffet! I only have time for an "appetizer" now, but I can share a few quick comments this remark from Shippey: Tom Shippey stated how he thought that because they had been through the War and had many terrible things happen to them needed a new definition of the word “Evil” and they hadn‘t got one. I agree with this, but would take it further, in that I think LOTR was a form of therapy across the board for Tolkien, helping him to process all kinds of things in his life. The loss of parents, being an orphan, his war experiences, the death of close friends in that war, etc. are all things he dealt with, and which all show up in the Tale. So much of the way he wrote it was not in any kind of planned out way, too -- it developed organically, with things entering into it from time to time that surprised even him. Like the way Faramir comes into the tale, seemingly out of nowhere, and functions, in part as a device for Tolkien to work out how to fit the Numenorean backstory into things...it's like he needed someone to talk to about his story, and this character gave him the way to do that. And the time when he was sending chapters to Christopher to read, when he was at away at War, has always seemed to me to have been helpful for Tolkien in terms of managing the stress of that kind of thing, having been in war himself. Thanks for leading this week - - I'll be back later for a second course and maybe even dessert!
Weaver
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