Happy 116th Birthday to Tolkien: photos, letter #328, and a reflection.

Jan 03, 2008 15:15

~*~

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
January 3, 1892 ~ September 2, 1973


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tolkien's birthday, fan fiction, tolkien, lotr, frodo

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mithluin January 3 2008, 21:50:33 UTC
Thank you for reminding me! I had already planned to watch RotK with my brother tonight, and now it seems quite fitting to do so, as it's the professor's birthday ( ... )

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mechtild January 4 2008, 00:56:39 UTC
Mithluin, are you the Mithluin who used to post at TORc (and, perhaps, still does)? I thought your comments were always interesting, if so.

This made me laugh:

I could see "But all the fools are not in the other camp," applying to some fanfic stories I have read ;).

Perhaps that's how I should look at fic that I think has taken the Professor's child and thrashed it black and blue. It's not that they are doing it out of malice, they are merely benighted.

Or maybe I should apply it to my own stuff: "She really loves the Professor and his work, in spite of the appalling tripe she writes."

In any case, your post makes me feel more merciful, towards myself as well as others. As you say,

None of us write [in] such a way that our work would be mistaken for Tolkien's, and so we are all of us doing something different from what he did. But I think that many fans of LotR have captured that sense of hope, and put it into their own stories, and that is A Good Thing, I think.

I wish that to be so.

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mithluin January 4 2008, 05:19:13 UTC
Yep, I'm MithLuin from TORc. I still post there, and remember your monster posts about Frodo fondly. I am fairly new to livejoural; I joined this past summer, and am still learning my way around.

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mechtild January 4 2008, 14:15:02 UTC
Well, then, I must have seen your post there on my last lurk. I haven't opened the site for ages, but Lembas Junkie sent me an email to let me know people were beginning to talk about The Hobbit. I browsed the threads and must have seen a post by you. I am not very emotionally invested in "The Hobbit" as a book, so it's difficult to imagine getting the same level of intellectual excitement going for it as I did for LotR, yet I would love to see a good film (films?) made of it if one is being made. So I may be back.

I feel as though I've seen your LJ icon somewhere esle, though. I am betting it was in Pearl's LJ, since people from TORc post there off and on. Was it in the Harry Potter (Snape's role in the story) discussion?

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mithluin January 4 2008, 23:06:44 UTC
Yeah, I posted on pearlette's journal when she discussed Snape. I was in London this summer and got to meet her, and since it was a week before book 7 came out, we discussed Snape over dinner - when I got back, I was thrilled to see that she was on a Snape-kick, and really enjoyed her posts about him (and Harry too, of course, but mostly Snape ;)). Though I usually used my Snape icon for that ;). This is my default one.

I am not *nearly* as invested in the Hobbit as I am in LotR, but I think it's a neat story, and I'd love to see it done as a movie. Assuming, of course, that it was done well ;). So I think I feel about like you do. I bet you'd be more interested if they let Elijah Wood have a cameo as a random hobbit in the movie, though, wouldn't you? ;) No one is discussing anything like that, though - mostly, they'd just bring back Gandalf, Elrond and Saruman...and maybe find a way to work in Galadriel and Legolas.

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mechtild January 5 2008, 00:30:08 UTC
Ha! We may even have conversed on one of those Snape threads at Pearl's.

I bet you'd be more interested if they let Elijah Wood have a cameo as a random hobbit in the movie, though, wouldn't you? ;)

Actually, not. I see no reason to ask him back to play a role in The Hobbit. I think sticking him in there--or any of the LotR actors that wouldn't have a real "Hobbit" role--would be a distraction, taking away from the impact of the new film, which should be telling a fresh story, and not be "old home week" for favourite actors.

I do think they'd be jerks not to get Ian McKellen, since Gandalf should look virtually the same as he did in FotR, and Ian McKellen is a *great* Gandalf. Having seen Ian McKellen on stage this fall in King Lear, I can testify that he is still fit, able, and full of fire.

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