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Originally Posted by Fordim
Is there a bit of Tolkien in all of us, or are we just rising to a challenge presented by the book in our own unique ways?
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I have to pull out Fordim's question here because it's such a good one. I've been thinking about this a fair bit lately, and whether there is indeed some common characteristic shared by Tolkien fans. By Tolkien fans, I don't mean someone who has read the books and purely enjoyed them, I mean Tolkien fans like myself who take delight in delving deeply into the texts, discussing them and coming up with mad ideas and theories, i.e. someone fan enough to be a member of a site like this.
We are all different, and while some of us respond most to the linguistic elements, some of us look for spiritual/religious significance, and I often look for echoes to folklore and history. But what unites us all, surely, is the love of detail?
Tolkien was himself very much concerned with detail. He was a philologist and an academic, hence professionally required to be concerned with seemingly tiny details, and his work is literally crammed with details and references, so many that you could easily spend your whole life searching these out, as indeed many of us have done. Do we all love detail? Yes, we might all be entirely capable of seeing the 'bigger picture' as t'were, but I think, deep inside of all of us, there's something of the philologist, the theologian, the mathematician, even the pedant (I admit it, I can be one quite often
). We all bring somthing unique to the books, but I think they do indeed appeal to that obsessive streak within us all.