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.