[Bill Ferny]

7th,

Its just a pet peeve of mine, and not meant as a personal attack. After traveling abroad for many years, I've found that nobody criticizes America like Americans, and the vast majority of it is utter crap. I’m a bit hypersensitive to the whole issue, and sometimes I get alittle gun happy. [img]smilies/frown.gif[/img] So don’t take it personally! Today seems to be my day for ruffling feathers, and I apologize. I’ve never had a problem accessing primary sources from American colleges, except for a few exceptions when dealing with the Vatican archives. The digital age, as I’m sure you can attest, has done wonders for research at a distance. In fact, I had just as much access to primary sources at my college in Ohio than I had to the same sources when I was at the Gregorian in Rome.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t outwardly discuss Tolkien’s Englishness (is that a word?). However, I think it strange that discussing his Englishness is “getting back to basics.” Of course, I haven’t spent as much time in England as I would like, but to be honest, I don’t think of England when I read Tolkien, or at least its not something that immediately springs to mind. For example, when I think of Rohan, I picture, for some reason, eastern Montana or southwestern South Dakota. The hobbits of the Shire are disturbingly similar to the people from my hometown in Ohio. Bree reminds me of a town in Ireland that I once spent a couple of days, and Washington D.C. monuments remind me of Minas Tirith. Northern Indiana reminds me of Mordor, but I won’t get into that! While Tolkien was British, and wrote the Legendarium to recreate a missing link in the mythological heritage of England, in the end I don’t think the LotR is basically English.

That is, I believe, the treasure of Tolkien, and is why the LotR is loved by so many people.

Evenstar1, I really don’t know anything about Texas, so I was stating a fact. The only part of Texas I’ve ever seen was Fort Hood. I mentioned it only because that’s were 7th is matriculating, so smooth your feathers. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] The Authorian Legends are based largely on the French courtly romances of the later Medieval period. After the Norman conquest, Anglo/Saxon culture was subsumed (for lack of a better word) by continental influences. King Richard I (probably?) didn’t even know how to speak the native language of England! While the culture that emerged in England after the Norman conquest was unique from the rest of the continent, the England of the colonial period was very different from the England of Edward the Confessor. It was for this pre-conquest culture and tradition that Tolkien was nostalgic. Hope that helps a little.