Quote:
Originally Posted by Pitchwife
Also I'm afraid I've got burned out discussing Middle-earth over the years, or at least I'm not interested in discussing the world-building rather than the actual literary works, which is a direction many recent threads seem to be taking (i.e. I couldn't care less which kind of units were in Sauron's or Gondor's army in the War of the Ring, stuff like that); but I'll always be up for close reading and dissecting Tolkien's prose, so... time to revisit Chapter by Chapter, I guess?
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This is a good distinction and thinking about it, I think I'm almost the complete opposite: I love to talk lore--the worldbuilding and the factoids and the gap-filling, but I have always been protective of things around literary worth and meaning where Middle-earth is concerned, but this topic has been on my mind since I re-encountered the
What Breaks the Enchantment thread while looking for a link to the great Canonicity thread, and setting aside the self-analysis of why I resist talking about the MEANING of Tolkien's literature (to me or anyone else), I think it is very much accurate to distinguish between the two.
And I think you're right: in my early days (let's define that as 2005-2010), there was a lot of literary discussion--some of it quite heated, but in a generally thrilling and usually no hurt feelings way. Since then, the Books discussion that has least been impacted by the general slowdown of the forum is the "lore" stuff.
While, obviously, I enjoy that, I do associate the former sort of discussion with the halcyon days of yore and agree it would be nice to see something of that sort return.
EDIT: X-posted with
Inziladun and we both used the word "protective" with reference to our attitudes toward Tolkien. There might be a topic here...