Tolkein Was Right. :|
There -IS- a huge body of culture, literature, and ideas from the old folklore and "fairy tales" that got -destroyed- in the English-speaking community by certain eras (Victorian among them) deciding that folklore/fairy tales were Childish Things that weren't very intelligent and had to be sanitized and homogenized.
A 400 level History of Literary Criticism class...
And in a discussion about how "what your favorite fairy tale was says something about you"...
The entire rest of the class discarded the older versions of any given fairy tale as "gross"...
Then this line that everyone else nodded to: "Well, fairy tales are archetypes we can understand as children because we're not born able to understand Sartre."
And: "Well, I'm more interested in Pop Culture writing, so I'm not worried about any kind of meaning."
Because of COURSE anything that's not written for a narrow, exclusive academic audience and meant to exclude the majority of the culture or "Not Be Mere Entertainment" is NATURALLY crass, shallow, and idiotic, with no meaning to the culture at all.
Riiiight.
A 400 level History of Literary Criticism class...
And in a discussion about how "what your favorite fairy tale was says something about you"...
The entire rest of the class discarded the older versions of any given fairy tale as "gross"...
Then this line that everyone else nodded to: "Well, fairy tales are archetypes we can understand as children because we're not born able to understand Sartre."
And: "Well, I'm more interested in Pop Culture writing, so I'm not worried about any kind of meaning."
Because of COURSE anything that's not written for a narrow, exclusive academic audience and meant to exclude the majority of the culture or "Not Be Mere Entertainment" is NATURALLY crass, shallow, and idiotic, with no meaning to the culture at all.
Riiiight.