Okay I might make myself unpopular here :-(
First of all, NO I do NOT think that the LOTR is boring, however I can see how somebody might find it so. I myself find the Two Towers my least favorite of the three parts, but I LOVE the Return of the King. The Two Towers simply doesn't have anything for me, it doesn't have the wonder/magic of Fellowship (except the Ents) and it doesn't have the epic climax of Return, instead we spend a whole book sitting in Rohan with the boring blonde horse people that could be cut out of the story without losing
anything -_- And the LOTR is awesome but by no means perfect (no book is)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lotrelf
You can't compare LotR to the modern literature by any means. LotR and other stuff by Professor is CLASSIC. It definitely offers much more than any other modern book can.
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Please don't take offense, but saying that is a tiny bit narrow minded and discards a huge corpus of literature. Not sure what you define as modern literature if who mean the "Twilight" "World of Warcraft" "Magic the Gathering" s***te, I totally agree, but what about all the good stuff that was written since the LOTR was released?
Even if we only count fantasy: "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle, "Gormenghast" by Mervyn Peake "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman, "A Song of Ice and Fire" by R.R.Martin "The Once and Future King" by T.H. White... do I need to go on? I would count all these books as on the same level, if different, and in some ways superior/inferior to the LOTR (Song of Ice and Fire, for instance, has imho more relateable and colorful characters, but it does have annoying, gratuitous sex scenes and the way the story slags since book 4 is the "Rohan Situation" taken to its extreme) AND "Song of Ice and Fire" has something I have always missed in LOTR: an "evil" character who, over the story redeems themselves: Jamie Lannister. In the LOTR good characters can fall from grace: (Denethor, Saurman) but there is (for instance) no Orc that changes sides. Considering Tolkien is a Christian writer that is a bit strange.
Anyway: If we expand that statement beyond fantasy....then I have to check if these posts have a maximum word count.
Bottom line, new stuff is not automatically inferior to old stuff (just like old stuff is not automatically inferior to new stuff) and if we believe that we'll end up like the Elves at the end of the Third Age; in a state of endless, cultural stagnation and melancholia for the "good old days" The LOTR times also had their fair share of horrid literature, but horrid literature doesn't survive usually and gets forgotten, while the good stuff gets remembered and remains in print to become "classics".
That all being said, I do think that the LOTR
Movies are mindboggingly boring and ugly to look at (Minas Tirith looks like poo, Llothlorien looks like unholy spiderwebs etc.) But that has nothing to do with the books of course.