I love that. I've been on retreats in a very similar place (the sisters where I go ride around smoking in golf carts, but they've built a walk through a magical forest with notes on stones taking the walker through the history of consciousness, with a stop-off in a cemetery of enslaved people).
Before the films, I used to read Tolkien every five years just at Christmas. A retreat, indeed. Other books that have that spell for me are Peter Matthiessen's--some not even fiction. I read Snow Leopard at Thanksgiving, some years.
And the world you made, too. I think Sartor and all may well become my summer retreat. Many thanks.
Yes, Lord of the Rings had become my traditional Christmastime read, too, beginning with my second read when I finally was able to get my own copies, the summer of '66.
This is going to sound odd, but my feeling about the movies is in one way the opposite: A thing about them that I like is the sense of Middle-Earth as a place. In a way it's almost the opposite of his sense of it: The scenes that work best for me are the ones that just have the landscape going off seemingly forever, as in the approach to Moria or as when Pippin lights the beacon of Minas Tirith and the camera tracks the line of signal fires from mountaintop to mountaintop. That has a power for me that the battle scenes and the scenes of danger usually lack. (On the other hand, the scenes about what battle means to people-the king's men going through the caves under Helm's Deep and calling out boys and old men to fight, or Faramir and his men riding out to hopeless battle and the people of Minas Tirith casting flowers under the horses' hooves-are very powerful for me. And of course there is Boromir's final battle.)
I love some of the images, the Shire most, and then Gondor and Rohan. I do not object to the movies the way some do, though I personally am disappointed with some aspects of how Jackson envisioned the story. But more than that I love how Middle-Earth gets bigger, in a sense, with each treatment, and in this I am including the better of fanfics I've read over the decades.
There are a couple of Tolkien's letters in which he seemed to be working himself toward this sort of paradigm, that I really love, though I don't think he ever made the leap to opening up his world to other minds and pens.
Tolkien was entirely agreeable to musical interpretations of Middle-earth, even if he didn't happen to like the music, because it wasn't an art he practiced himself, so it wasn't horning in on his territory, and it didn't attempt to rewrite the plot as dramatizations did.
The reason his view changed from the more open one he expressed about his early creativity is that he changed from being a mythographer to being a novelist. He was writing a differnet kind of story that expects a different reaction.
Much as I would like more of Middle-earth, I don't find fan fictions, even good ones, subjectively satisfying in the way Brian describes Tolkien being satisfying. That is because they're not from the same mind and hence have their own flavor. They feel like an artificial re-creation.
The only moments when I felt I really liked Jackson's films was some of the landscape-spanning setting shots, especially the one of the Argonath in FR. The most heart-breakingly good thing turned out to be one of the extras on the DVD, an interactive map of Middle-earth with little inset clips at various places showing the landscape settings.
I've disabled updates on that fundraiser--at this point I'd rather be pleasantly surprised. I hope that the original authors get some of the extra riches but also that the publisher can use some of it for future good: it must feel strange for them to feel that they must give backers even more rewards, now that this one project is technically way overfunded. (Why can't Kickstarter projects be more middling? Neither feast nor famine is great, really, because of expectations.)
I believe what they are doing with the extra money is adding new stories to the lineup. It was pretty thin, but they want to pay everyone, as well as the printing expenses and the illustrators. As each new goal is met, they add new writers, and the TOC will increase.
Judging by the other three projects "Silence in the Library" has Kickstarted, this one isn't too extreme on the overfunding yet so I imagine they know how to deal with extra money as it comes along. It has a lot more backers than the other ones, though. I think they must be getting more exposure. Either that or this one appeals to a whole lot more people who prefer to back things at the $5 level. :)
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Before the films, I used to read Tolkien every five years just at Christmas. A retreat, indeed. Other books that have that spell for me are Peter Matthiessen's--some not even fiction. I read Snow Leopard at Thanksgiving, some years.
And the world you made, too. I think Sartor and all may well become my summer retreat. Many thanks.
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Yes, Lord of the Rings had become my traditional Christmastime read, too, beginning with my second read when I finally was able to get my own copies, the summer of '66.
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There are a couple of Tolkien's letters in which he seemed to be working himself toward this sort of paradigm, that I really love, though I don't think he ever made the leap to opening up his world to other minds and pens.
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The reason his view changed from the more open one he expressed about his early creativity is that he changed from being a mythographer to being a novelist. He was writing a differnet kind of story that expects a different reaction.
Much as I would like more of Middle-earth, I don't find fan fictions, even good ones, subjectively satisfying in the way Brian describes Tolkien being satisfying. That is because they're not from the same mind and hence have their own flavor. They feel like an artificial re-creation.
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There are so many awesome offerings through the fundraiser. I was glad to finally be able to support. :)
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--C.B.
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