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What I want to know is, what's wrong with something stereotypical anyway? If a story is interesting, well written, has sympathetic characters...why would it matter that there had been similar things before?
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In fact, Stephen King and Louis Lamour made a killing at it. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]
Whether or not Tolkien is archetypal or stereotypical is beside the point; if someone doesn’t like that sort of thing, they probably won’t pick it up and read it, but if they did, they would would be surprised. I can’t stand fantasy, but I was lucky enough to have read Tolkien. I do think that there is more to Tolkien than mere fantasy, I would even go so far as to say his work isn’t fantasy at all, but an artificial mythology. On the other hand, a person could (as inconceivable as it might sound) live a totally normal and fulfilling life without reading
Lord of the Rings, as they could without reading
Beowulf,
Le Morte D’Arthur,
One Hundred Years of Solitude, or anything else for that matter. For those of us who have read Tolkien… we are the lucky ones.