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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
davem, you should be ashamed for doing the very thing you are complaining about. If Tolkien made such a statement, it would behoove us to understand that those words from the Lord's Prayer apparently meant that much to him. To so criticize his most dearly held beliefs is to treat him with contempt. Do please attempt to see this from Tolkien's point of view.
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Even the artist may fail to fully appreciate or value the art they have created. Tolkien's attempts to impose a Christian interpretation on his work are as much of a failure as the attempts of others.
However much the Lord's Prayer meant to Tolkien it cannot be made to apply to every particular circumstance - & certainly not that one. He was doing exactly the kind of thing he himself condemned in the quote from the interview I gave a few posts back & in his statements there he clearly felt contempt for the very approach he himself took to his own work in that & other letters & comments:
He thinks that there is now a tendency both to believe and teach in schools and colleges that “enjoyment” is an illiterate reaction; that if you are a serious reader, you should take the construction to pieces; find and analyse sources, dissect it into symbols, and debase it into allegory. Any idea of actually reading the book for fun is lost.
“It seems to me comparable to a man who having eaten anything, from a salad to a complete and well-planned dinner, uses an emetic, and sends the results for chemical analysis.”
He would have been better leaving interpretation to the reader (if they want to interpret it at all) rather than using his work to promote his religion - which simply cheapens it.