My husband woke me up with this article which filled me to no end of glee, mostly because David Brin’s writing always fills me with glee, and if you haven’t read his annhilatingly cool article on Star Wars (which included the unbelievable ‘fix’ that actually cleared up almost every hole in the plot–pity they’ll never use it) then you should do so, because it’s a delight.
It’s not a rant about the flaws of the movies over the books, because anyone who is willing to expend time and energy arguing that there SHOULD have been twenty minutes of Tom Bombadil singing “hey-nonny-nonny-whatever-the-hell” needs to get out and get some fresh air and maybe take the crayon out of their nose, nor does it get bogged down in the percieved racism of Tolkien, which, while YES, the orcs are always bad and YES, the elves are always good, is not something to alert the ACLU about because, fer cryin’ out loud, it’s a movie, not a blueprint for future society. They’re slicing the genitals off three-year-old girls with dirty razors in Ghana, for Christ’s sake–go deal with that before you ask people to boycott a bloody fantasy epic because the orcs are mean. Um. What was I saying? Oh, right. Even though the headline is rather sensationalistic, it’s actually a fairly sympathetic handling of Tolkien, who was, after all, a product of his time and place, as are we all, and is more of analysis of the context in which the books were written. And his points about the Lord of the Rings being a Romantic epic are, I think, well-taken, and god knows, I agree that it’s better to be a snide and disaffected net-weirdo in this day and age then to be a snide and disaffected serf farming dirt in ages past. And yet, I feel that the essential point is that wizards and warriors and Romantic heros and so forth are really cool and thus valuable as fantasy, so long as we don’t get all weird about it.
Being that fantasy is pretty much my job–other than the occasional murder mystery cover, I essentially make money by illustrating other people’s fantasy lives or selling ’em chunks of my own–the whole topic is one near and dear to my heart, and LOTR is sort’ve the foundation myth for what I do. And it’s nice to hear it discussed without being taken TOO seriously, the way that too many such discussions inevitably go. Brin’s down on the elves. I approve of that. Elves are fantastic if you want to bonsai the forest, but I imagine they’d get really really annoying really quick. (I gotta say, I thought they did a fantastic job on Elrond in the movie, just for that reason–the Matrix agent bit was icing on the cake. “The worst thing about humans…mister…Gandalf…is the smell.”) Right, I’ll shut up now, I just wanted to share.
