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Old 01-07-2005, 05:10 AM   #353
Hilde Bracegirdle
Relic of Wandering Days
 
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Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: You'll See Perpetual Change.
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Hilde Bracegirdle has just left Hobbiton.
Yes, Tolkien’s works had until reaching the Barrow Downs been a rather private thing for me. The only person I knew who had read it was my brother, and over the next maybe 10 years I met about three others. Still we didn’t really talk about it, and it didn’t really enter conversation until Dungeons & Dragons started up. Then the debates began at our house. D & D seemed to cheapen Tokien’s world in my view, precisely because that mystical and heroic quality was totally obscured.

And while I did not have a Frodo lives button, and only very occasionally saw graffiti bearing the names of Frodo or Gandalf, I did have two prized t-shirts in the 70’s, one with a drawing of Gandalf and one of Smaug.

If the stories had been more popular with my peers, I wonder if I ever would have read them. Probably. I confess that it surprises me to see how large numbers of college students in sixties embraced them. I simply cannot picture 'my batch' doing the same.

Also news to me was the comment that they seemed most loved in the US. Is that true? Is it still the case?

Rae, I know what you mean about some people thinking that LoTR is somehow evil. If they only knew how wrong they are!
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