[Child of the 7th Age]

Helen,

I guess I am now thoroughly confused! I thought this thread was for anyone who was interested in discussing books about Tolkien.

I don't mean to tread on toes, but perhaps we need to work this through.

In you first post of January 3 (edited two days later), you mention "Novice Tolkien Enthusiasts (and potential Tolkien scholars)" I interpreted that to mean there would be some folk totally new to Tolkien criticism and others who had just a bit more background, and that we'd all learn from each other.

Like Lindil, I've been hoping for a thread where we could discuss books about Tolkien for a long time. I've sometimes tried to throw out ideas to provoke such a discussion, or more recently responded to things that Davem said, but met with limited success in keeping the thing going. When I saw this thread go up and saw you putting energy into it, I began jumping up and down with glee. So I scraped together a few ideas and came up with two posts.

But, from your cautionary response to my posts on the need to keep the novice squarely in mind, I began thinking that I'd misunderstood the purpose of the thread as a place for all of us to post and respond at whatever level we're at. And I was baffled when I read this:

By and large, experienced readers don't need this thread; most experienced Tolkien enthusiasts can eventually find what we need to find using google, amazon, and a few decent scholarly sites including this one.

But I did not start this thread to make research easier for experts. I started this thread hoping to offer motivated novices (*potential* Tolkien scholars) hope and courage and guidance enough to dive in and get started.

I guess I couldn't disagree with you more. I think we all need a place to discuss books about Tolkien. And, to my frustration, I just haven't seen a lot of that happening on the Downs in the years I've been here.

Moreoever, I have a natural dislike of anything that divides people who love Tolkien into artificial camps like "experts" and "novices". For the life of me, I have no idea who qualfies as an "expert" and who doesn't. There are a lot of people on this site who are one-third my age and who know ten times as much as I do about the characters in Silm. I have as much or more to learn from them as they do from me!

I guess my honest preference is to have this be a thread for everyone, and that the books represented here would run the gamut from general ones with wide appeal to more specialized, scholarly works. When you encouraged Davem, and Esty and Finwe and Lindil (all folk that I consider pretty "expert") to post on a variety of popular and scholarly sources, I thought that was what you wanted too.

So please clarify a bit more once your head gets ungroggy tomorrow morning!

Sharon

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Bethberry,

Thanks for that link on Literary Resonances. Chance's new book isn't out yet, but I suspect I will finagle a way to get it for my birthday in the spring! Either that or I will slink down to Rice and have a look.

Sharon

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 1:01 AM January 07, 2004: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]