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Well, I didn't set out in this thread to advocate the writing of fan fic, so I can't really argue in favour of it.
My point was about the increasing amount of secondary literature. I can only imagine the effect on a potential reader of Tolkien's works wandering into a largish bookstore & seeing all those books there 'explaining' the meaning of Tolkien's work. They're likely to think 'Whoa! the book itself is over a 1000 pages, if I have to read a whole lot of other books to explain it to me as well, I'll just go for something simpler!'.
The whole point of LotR is that it is a beautiful, moving story, with characters & places we love, not some complex text which has to be translated, de-constructed & explained to the uninitiated .
And there's another thing - some 'fans' actually seem to get off on knowing more than others & being able to 'deliver the LAW about Tolkien' from their own self built pulpit, crushing any 'heresies' with a blistering quote from p.379 of HoM-e 4 like a thunderbolt from on high.
What all the secondary stuff, the scholarly analysis, does is take away the fun, the sheer pleasure of the stories.
So, I'm not criticising someone who wants to go in for all that kind of thing. It just seems to me that the interesting stuff has mostly been said by the serious scholars & that what's coming out now is so obscure as to be irrelevant to most of us, & that even the interesting stuff can actually get in the way.
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