Frankly, Tolkien has ALWAYS been over-rated as a writer. He is a great imaginer of worlds and characters but writing is simply not his forte and in any objective sense large parts of LOTR are badly written. And that is me speaking as a fan, you know.
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I shall disagree with you. Tolkien books are very well written, and the story moves along perfectly for such difficult exercise of written.
To many characters and lots facts in a new world become the written difficult too, but Tolkien found the balance between dialogue and description and between action and pauses to gave us a perfect story for all ages.
I think you should give a chanche to an academic as Tolkien.
And,
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Well, I know most critics do not. Tolkien has never been regarded as a great writer and I am confused by people who think otherwise when the flaws in his writing and the pacing of his books are relatively plain. Any person who wrote like that now would be widely and justifiably panned.
And likewise Tolkien himself said his joy and pride was in the creation of the world, the language, the cultures, and that the writing of stories was a lesser part of what he did.
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"We've got maybe seconds before Darth Rosenberg grinds everybody into Jawa burgers and not one of you buds has the midi-chlorians to stop her!"
Yeap. You are right. But the creation of the world, the language and the cultures are reason enough to think he was a excellent writer. The subject have major importance in Tolkien's world and the way he did it made him a great writer.
There are some present writers who are famous for their bad writing. Some of then have very bad critics too. But the subject and his development must be understand as part of an avaliation. So, some of them won Nobel prize.
One of the lasts Nobel of Literature went to a portuguese writer named Saramago. He is knew by his bad and difficult way of writing, but that doesn't stop him of be one great writer.
As you said "writing of stories was a lesser part of what he did". I agree, but maybe he didn't had time to write in a better way...
I just started The Lord of the Rings yesterday. I am only on WeatherTop *even though that's like page 200* I couldn't believe the difference between the book and the movie! Tolkien goes far into detail! I love it so far.
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*Sxc_Sarah*
Dec 17th, 2003 12:44 PM
Yeap. The film is great but the books are the books.
