one of these days I might actually write up something for my website about why the Peter Jackson LOTR films rubbed me very much the wrong way, and also using that as a vehicle for reexamining the books and talking about what about them still works for me and what doesn't. I'm not nearly the Tolkien fan I used to be, but LOTR _was_ my "Undertale" for a while, the popular work that woke something up inside me that I hadn't felt before.
@kara_dreamer the simple answer to me is that Tolkein was a pre-Modern, and Jackson is a postmodern.
I grew up saturated in pre-1950 and 1800s literature. The expressed longing of JRR Tolkein was for a mythic England from his childhood. There is almost no functioning soul kinship with 1990s/2000s Hollywood megafilms.
Tolkein was building a myth of mythical Little England from something like a Roman Catholic Pre-raphaelite vision from before World War 1.
@pnathan there's a lot of truth in that, I think. Tolkien's LOTR is _very_ backwards-looking in much the same way that (say) Hesiod is: his Middle-Earth is a world filled with relics and reminders of a heroic age that's gone forever, and even the greatest achievements of the story's present-day heroes come across more like the last gasp of that older, greater world.
@kara_dreamer I am wrapping up my work for the week and I don't have my scotch yet, but, how do you say...
Tolkein saw the Modern as destructive of the beautiful world he had grown up with. He lived through the last of the Industrial Revolution and two World Wars. As a student of ancient literature by profession, how could he do other but cry for the world that had been lost?
@pnathan *nods* and as an old Classics student myself (and I went into Classics in college partly because of Tolkien, although C. S. Lewis was the greater influence by that time) I can really sympathize.
@pnathan my attitude towards Lewis has fluctuated considerably in the last few years. I'll say this for him: he wrote _Till We Have Faces_, which automatically puts him far ahead of Tolkien in my books even if I fall out of love with everything else he ever wrote.
@kara_dreamer never read. I imagine you'd recommend I should? :)
@pnathan oh yes! it's his most pagan story, and therefore his strongest ;)
@kara_dreamer hahah! Not a fan of Narnia
@pnathan I like _some_ of Narnia, there are nice touches, but yeah, Narnia doesn't do much for me. It's Lewis's most popularly known work, sure, but it lacks weight. it's a poor "subcreation", to use Tolkien's term
@kara_dreamer Looking back at it from an adult, I think it's somewhat shifty in quality. I would have to check, but I'd guess it was his first fiction work. And, too, it has a certain British twee to it, which sets my teeth on edge (Almost certainly this was a product of the time). I favor things Deeper and Wilder, more of a brisk and sharp wind from the soul.
Almost all Christian fiction is never sure if it wants to be a good yarn or evangelism. Which is a pity.
@kara_dreamer Too, Lewis in many parts was fighting a particular form of Modernism, sort of the next generation past Chesterton. The polemics become nearly illegible: that battle is past.
@kara_dreamer I like Lewis, but Tolkien I think will hold up better