So wot ysayin then, I`m as good as the Mony Lisa?
in a comparative way considering… viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4371&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=troll#p35389
Also would help if I was slightly better at spelling than bird brain.
Don’t I wish!!!
If I had that much dance ability I would have 3 kids, not 2.
And how cool would that be?! Travel the world and having FUN!
My life … blows. At least I have a mac.
When I hear about dancing I go back to this video and wonder how this young whipper snapper has the strength to do what it is he does.
phoenixlords.com/videos/breakdance.php
I mean upper body strength and balance that would make any olympian green with envy!
And he is british I think…
Um - well. I am finally daring to reply.
I love the Lord of the Rings, and have reread it many times. As an adult, I notice different things in it than I did as a child. And it still strikes me as unique in many ways.
First, of course, the languages. I got really irritated when I read the (admittedly very clever) kid’s book, Ella Enchanted, and had to cope with the way she wrote Ogrish and other languages. It was just annoying. Tolkien’s languages hang together and make sense.
Second, the care and exactness with which he describes nature and the journey within it. You can really feel that you are in this world with the characters.
Third, as Ursula LeGuin pointed out, the “Mrs. Brown” factor. This is a book in which the humble people are the heroes. And that’s one respect in which it was really innovative. Most fantasies before this, I believe, involved knights and heroes and “chosen ones”. In this regard, the Potter books are a long step backward.
Finally, this is an epic quest of renunciation. It’s all about loss and partial victory, and loss as victory. Most of the Tolkien imitators are all about victory and winning - which completely misses the point.
But I have to admit - I love, love, love Scrivener, which is why I’m here. The program’s been a big boost to my writing. But I often feel a bit out of place here otherwise; so many people slam literature that I love and praise stuff I’ve never heard of or can’t stand.
Oh, well. We all get along, anyhow, don’t we?
I love LOTR but I couldn’t bring myself to possibly read everything that goes with it. Most people only read ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘LOTR’. In addition, all of his notes, debates, lectures and unfinished works have been compiled and published into (18?) companion volumes for what amounts to a life-long study of the universe he created.
It’s all more than just a story, that’s fer shizzle…
What happens when someone steals BOTH your bags? Or maybe mine weren’t stolen and I lost them? Does this mean that I am doomed to an eternity of futile attempts at filling a non-existing bag with the content of another non-existing bag?
Thank you so much for this. I must now go and find a bag to carry with me. And this just when snort got me to give up my blankie.
I think you can pick up combo luck/exprience bag replacement kit at Wal-Mart. Costs around $20 bucks.
Apple is coming out with iBag for OSX as well. You’ll have to subscribe to their .Bag service however. 
We do… but perhaps not when I point out that I am in the rare camp that not only dislikes LOTR, but I never liked it, not even as a child.
It’s one of those books where I could never understand what all the fuss was about.
You have to learn Elvish.
Dave
You don’t have to learn Elvish per se, but it certainly helps One of my professors at university is fluent in Sindarin - weird^^
For me, LOTR is in its own league. It is not my favourite book, because that would be unjust to other books - there simply is no comparison. I’m not that old (22), so my first real contact with the books was when the films came out. I did read LOTR and Hobbit before, but only once or twice. After films… oh my god. I now own all books by Tolkien in German and most of the English ones (there are FAR more English books than German) plus a number of secondary literature ranging from maps to envish dictionaries.
I think you mustn’t see LOTR as an adventure book. If you think about it it has a sad ending. Ok, Sauron kicks the bucket, but a which price? The “cool guys” are all gone - I mean hontestly, those Elvish dolks are just incredibly great, and now they are gone.
If you keep in mind that Sauron is just a tiny, tiny servant of Melkor, the real BAD GUY, and consider the difficulty of removing him for the people of the third age, you see pretty clearly that LOTR has no happy ending. Not at all.
Mm, I gotta go to university, maybe I’ll write a bit more later
I’d type out my response in Entish, but I fear it would explode the data limitations of the forum database.
I had never read The Hobbit or LOTR (this was being published for the very first time when I was starting school). And we never heard about it or read it in school.
So my introduction was the movies. About two years ago I finally read the Hobbit. I had to remind myself not to compare with the movie. I enjoyed it, but it really isn’t my style (I seldom read fantasy).
hiii
the story of this book was revolving around the historical event occurred in North-west middle east
Absolutely not … For Tolkien this was recreating a mythology for England as we had lost ours … how many English people these days know anything about Gog and Magog, Queen Mab, etc.? He was an Anglo-Saxon scholar and philologist, whose roots for his languages were Welsh and Finnish as well as Anglo-Saxon.
Though there are those who link his oeuvre to that of Lord Dunsany, Time and the Gods, etc., I can’t see it. As a devout Catholic, it is not in any way surprising that his universe starts from a creation myth involving a single godhead, creating what resemble archangels and angels and then the world. There is a parallel in Morgoth, to the Lucifer story too. But Tolkien explicitly said that his work was not religious literature, even though the Catholic Church likes to claim that the first in a revival of the Catholic novel.
The Middle-East has nothing to do with it at all!
Mark
ok mark thanks for the knowledge
I wonder if Tolken had a midget fetish.
I was going to ask,“What on earth makes you think that?” But then I realised what a stupid question it was. 
Fluff
I recently viewed the Peter Jackson films again, for the umpteenth time. After a decade, they really hold up. The language, the scenery, the acting and cutting are all exemplary. Rarely in our age of dross do we see high romanticism paired with gross realism, especially in the battle scenes and Orc makeup. (My favorite is general Gothmog; his face resembles a scarred oak, its bark growing over an old wound.) tinyurl.com/4c96swy
In the extended DVD version, the last disc reveals how Jackson’s company used New Zealand landscapes to create Middle Earth, and how the writers adapted Tolkien to suit movie narration. They cut chapters, built up characters and story lines, and even rearranged chapters for brevity or clarity. Their prose also improves on Tolkien, who can be wordy and awkward at times. Yet they are fair to his vision and do much to preserve his legacy as a writer of rare distinction. The story of his troubles in getting published and reviewed is a lesson to us all: never despair, if there’s a W. H. Auden around. tinyurl.com/6xcg8f3
On a trip to NZ a few years ago, I lectured on the books/films, mainly focusing on history and landscape. My conclusions, not very original, is that the series is a brilliant allegory about the rise of fascism during the interval of WW I & II, and that Middle Earth is the UK…but inverted, with Scotland in the south. Off to the west is Arnor, a region shaped like the British isles, with the Shire in the approximate location of Cornwall. See the map at bigthink.com/ideas/21172