[Kalimac]

Some of the descriptions could have stood with some trimming, though the quality of the writing is so wonderful that you could hardly call it a defect; it just means you've got to have a LOT of time to read it. And I may get slapped for this, but some of the minor episodes went far too long; example 1 is Tom Bombadil - as enjoyable as he is, he feels like (and was) someone who stumbled into the story from another dimension, and they spend a LOT of time in his house considering its insignificance to the plot. Yes, he rescues them from the willow, and from Barrow-Wight where they get their swords, and that second part was definitely important to leave in, but he could have done it with a lot less singing.

Ghan-buri-Ghan is similar; he spends about four pages treating with the main characters, when the main point of the episode can be summed up in the sentence "He's on our side for the duration." Not that he should have cut it down that much, of course, but it could have been cut somewhat.

That being said, though, the books are an absolutely miraculous piece of writing; all that the minor flaws do is prove that the professor was, in fact, human and ran into deadlines and disliked cutting his own work as much as the rest of us do. I only wish I could write books that had such flaws [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img].

BTW, the Harold Bloom-edited literary critics would be better employed in rereading the book than writing unreadable essays about it. I'm biased though - I suffered through a lot of those Modern Critical Interpretions books in college and to a book, they were so clotted with pretension and bad writing that the paper would have been more usefully employed as confetti. Don't worry about 'em - people will be reading LOTR long after the Modern Critical Interpretations have become Out-of-Print Critical Interpretations.