[Bêthberry]

Dear Imladris,

I wish to make a comment here on behalf of the mods of all the RPG fora, but I am sure my words do not preclude comments from Pio, Child, Mith and others.

All games at the Barrow Downs must be true to the spirit of Tolkien and not merely a general form of fantasy or Middle Age scenario. It is true that as gamers move from The Shire to Rohan to Gondor, there are greater expectations for understanding Tolkien's Middle earth and greater scope for interpreting his work. In fact, the Golden Hall for Rohan explicitly states the expectation that gamers will know the books and not merely Peter Jackson's movies.

That said, if you as the Game Founder are uncomfortable with aspects of the posts in your game, I would think you could contact your gamers via PM and explain your thoughts, asking them to reconsider their phrasing.

I do this regularly as I moderate games and The White Horse in Rohan and I know that Pio and Child also help new gamers understand Middle earth in The Shire.

Of course, I think your thread is about more than just our games here; it is, as I see it, related to issues of how books are read and interpreted. In literary theory, this is referred to as the cultural dissemination of books (which is akin to but different from literary criticism).

There are wide-ranging ways in which we come to know texts. Some authors are part of the cultural furniture with which we furnish and decorate our houses of the imagination. People can refer to and understand authors' characters, stories and events even before reading the primary texts themselves. Or, indeed, they can read other authors' interpretations of their books before reading the 'original'. We can know "Wuthering Heights According to Spike Milligan" and Jane Urquhart's Changing Heaven before we ever read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights itself. We can know Henry James' take on 'Jane Eyre' in The Turn of the Screw before we read Charlotte Brontë's novel. We can know Francois Truffaut's Two English Girls before we know the Brontës. And then there is Jules and Jim. I know students whose first exposure to Wuthering Heights was from a Second City TV sketch, a wordless skit using semaphor.

This does not, of course, mean that books exist only in this process of cultural referral. But it is one way in which our understanding of books is filtered through this cultural static.

And, of course, another way to look at this question is to ask why Peter Jackson portrayed the elves as he did.