[drigel]

sigh.. the c thread

He tells us that it is not his intended meaning. But can it not still be the readers perceived meaning?

YES of course. But, then again, any written story with characters that are men /women, implied or observed can be treated thus. Jack and Jill went up the hill. So class (in essay form), explain to me what the hill really was. Also incorporate the pail's role in this story, and fully explain how it all relates to Existentialism. Double spaced please.

If so, he was suggesting that the act of reading and interpreting is a very subtle, complex act, rather than telling us an either/or way to read LotR.

Or, perhaps, we are trying to define a masterpiece. Contemporizing an author who used a non-contemporary writing style (late 19th to early 20th century) in relaying (translating) a tale thats was laid down, and then forgotten, from the dawn of time.

Was he fighting against the victors' tendancy always to portray history from their point of view?

Interesting query Beth! Ill throw out a somewhat rebellious and thought provoking (this could be its own thread) quote from SF author David Brin:

Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.

So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?

Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?

Yes, I'm having fun with words like "really" -- relating to a made-up story. But come along with me for a minute. Next time you re-read LOTR, count the number of examples... cases where powerful beings are vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of power would allow themselves to be. Why? How does being grotesquely ugly help you govern an empire?

Then unleash your imagination to take the story a bit farther. Have fun!

Ask yourself - "How would Sauron have described the situation?"

And then -- "What might 'really' have happened?"

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy. This clearcut and undeniable fact. Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil dark lord"?

Or might they instead have thought they were the 'good guys', with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elves and their Numenorean colonialist human lackeys?

Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the Ring War -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and movie-makers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle-Earther! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return... bringing more rings.

The allegories are as endless as there are people considering them...

Brin on Tolkien