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Old 06-23-2004, 12:59 AM   #8
Gorwingel
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Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Somewhere in the Northwest... for now
Posts: 1,436
Gorwingel has just left Hobbiton.
My interest in the books has changed the way that I act, think, and express myself in many ways (I am trying to expand this topic from my earlier post if you get my drift). I think that he was trying to tell us many things about our society in many ways. There are the more common things that are brought up in almost any discussion: The destruction of the environment, the fact that people should doing more, and be doing everything for their fellow man. But I think that we are trying to go deeper than that, deeper into the book and into the more subdued things that Tolkien may have been telling about our society. Now he was a professor, and one of the things that professors have to do is most likely correct papers, and since he was a teacher he most likely observed many habits that he disliked in the work of his students (because teachers just observe many things like that). So he could have been emphasizing things like modern society’s lack of fine language skills (by his use of very poetic language), and of manners and or violence in the media (by his use of not telling us every detail of a disturbing scene).

Now that I think of it, this could very much relate to his career in teaching, because one of the goals of almost every teacher is to change the lives of their students, so he could have, very possibly, been trying to change the lives of his readers by subconsciously sneaking in his own observances on habits in our culture, and telling us (subconsciously again) how to effect our culture by mildly changing the way we act (manners, language, etc.). Now this is getting very deep, and I don’t really know where this discussion will go, but I would love to see even more observances on this topic.
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