Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
Do you know the most interesting thing about this badge thing - everyone, pro & anti, just believed it!
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Speak for yourself! I was withholding judgment, and I still am, because both the Estate's interpretation and the "why go after this one?" interpretation are still believable to me. If people are willing to believe that the Estate is being a censor in the case of the buttons, I think that has a lot more to do with the narrative built up about the Estate in particular, and authors' estates in general,
well before the Estate had done anything to justify that interpretation, than because its actions are now fitting closer to that pattern.
Regarding the book--could it be the reason that
this book was targeted over other Inklings books is because this one uses the fictional Tolkien that Tolkien himself created, who translated the Red Book of Westmarch from the Westron?
In other words, the other Inklings books that I've heard of may use Tolkien in a fantasy type setting, but I don't think they've yet tried doing it in the sense of "Tolkien translated all of these manuscripts and Middle-earth was real in some way, shape, or form." This isn't what the news sources have said, but it
would give the Estate's case of "copyright infringement" something to stand on. Of course, this would open up a whole, huge can of worms, over what the difference is between an author and the author's own fictional representations of himself, the difference between fact and fiction, etc. But it certainly makes the Estate's actions appear more
logical, if not necessarily justifiable.