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Aunt Dora Baggins
Immortal
May 16 2017, 11:28pm
Post #1 of 3
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Terry Pratchett, on why he stopped reading LotR
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I've been reading a book of Pratchett's essays, and this one spoke to me. First he talks about his first reading, at age 12. Then he ruminates about why he stopped reading it years later:
"I remember it like a movie. There I was, sitting on this rather chilly sixties-style couch in this rather bare room; but at the edges of the carpet, the forest began. I remember the light as green, coming through trees. I have never since then so truly had the experience of being inside the story.
...
I used to read it once a year, in the spring. I’ve realized that I don’t anymore, and I wonder why. It’s not the dense and sometimes ponderous language. It’s not because the scenery has more character than the characters, or the lack of parts for women, or the other perceived or real offences against the current social codes. It’s simply because I have the movie in my head, and it’s been there for forty years. I can still remember the luminous green of the beech woods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greenery on the slopes of Ithilien, west of Mordor, still holding out against the encroaching shadow. The protagonists don’t figure much in the movie, because they were never more to me than figures in a landscape that was, itself, the hero. I remember it at least as clearly as—no, come to think of it, more clearly than—I do many of the places I’ve visited in what we like to call the real world. In fact, it is strange to write this and realize that I can remember stretches of the Middle-earth landscape as real places. The characters are faceless, mere points in space from which their dialogue originated. But Middle-earth is a place I went to."
Pratchett, Terry. A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction (pp. 118-121). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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GNU Terry Pratchett
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"For DORA BAGGINS in memory of a LONG correspondence, with love from Bilbo; on a large wastebasket. Dora was Drogo's sister, and the eldest surviving female relative of Bilbo and Frodo; she was ninety-nine, and had written reams of good advice for more than half a century."
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"A Chance Meeting at Rivendell" and other stories
leleni at hotmail dot com
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sador
Half-elven
May 17 2017, 8:11am
Post #2 of 3
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Very interesting. Thank you! //
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Greenwood Hobbit
Valinor
May 17 2017, 10:14pm
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that the landscapes of Middle Earth had a place in Terry Pratchett's heart too. Thanks for sharing that. I've read most of his work and have a great fondness for the Discworld, but I don't remember that essay; must have a look for it!
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