Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I wasn't being serious - of course I can understand how people don't like it. Can't say the same for the criticism of "LOTR", though.
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I can, even though I am a major Tolkien fan, have reread LoTR once a year for
many years, and have about half of the volumes of annotated manuscripts his son has been issuing, because it's fascinating to see the evolution of the concepts.
When I first read LoTR, I started at "When mister Bilbo Baggins announced hsi eleventy-first birthday", I said something like "What?". I had to push myself to get through the first hundred pages. Once I did, the book kicked in, and I read the rest of the trilogy over a weekend.
But what you think of it depends upon what you are used to and expect. I can easily see modern readers losing patience, if nothing else.
Some years back, I saw an article about a TV production company producing content for the native population in South Africa. They discovered the hard way that things they thought were universal were not. For instance, we are used to jump cuts, and interpolate the travel between when a character exits one location via a door, and is next seen entering a different location. The native audience did not. If a character was traveling from one place to another, they had to show the travel, and not expect the audience to assume it happened.
I think there are similar changes over time in literature, and there are conventions in older books we find foreign, and conventions in newer books we expect to see and have problems if they aren't there.
I don't expect everyone to love LoTR. My concern will be the reasons for the dislike. (I
will have problems with people who think _The Sword of Shannara_ is superior...
)
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Dennis