Quote:
Originally Posted by Sauron the White
And, all that knowledge, all that devotion, all that love of the source material - in this case the print work of JRRT - has proven to be a handicap which prevents some from truly enjoying the films. All the weight of that knowledge has simply denied some the ability to suspend disbelief and go with the flow of the movie. Inside, they wage a fight as an inner voice screams "thats not right".... "it did NOT happen that way" .... "that character did not say that" ..... and so on. The person who views the films without having read the book has no such weight to bear. The person who has read the book once or twice probably has no such weight to bear.
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Perfectly true - & an important point. Personally I often wish I could go back to the pre-Sil days. LotR & TH are the books which touched our hearts & I doubt very much whether The Sil in its '77 form, let alone any other Middle-earth writings would have seen the light of day if Hobbits had not come forth. Some days I wish CT had left his father's unpublished stuff well alone. Some days....
I think we've lost as much as we've gained. Middle-earth is in some ways a much bigger place since Tolkien passed, but in other ways it's much smaller, because the 'unexplored vistas' have now become defined limits. We can now argue over the most intricate aspects of Middle-earth because we know so much. And I sometimes think we've crossed the line which divides 'so much' from 'too much'. Some of the magic has departed - in the main because CT's work has deluged us with the manuscripts.
And yet... I suspect that much in the movies would have annoyed me just as much if I had only known LotR & TH. But perhaps I'd have tolerated them more - even liked them maybe - simply because without all the 'secondary works' Tolkien's creation would have been a much smaller part of my life & I'd perhaps have more perspective. I often ask myself whether, if I lost all my Tolkien books I'd bother replacing any other than TH & LotR - & the answer is I honestly don't know.
But, 'There's no real going back', so none of that is really relevant I suppose.