Fantasy Morality

[Mithalwen]

Actually, Pitch, I think to start a post - particularly your first ever post on a message board with "My God, people..." followed by an attack on posters you don't know and a reprimand that they are going against what the Professor would have appreciated, is hostile and frankly when I read it I assumed the poster was a troll.

Apart from saying stuff that just don't bear scrutiny (Tolkien did start a sequel to ROTK and those aren't the reasons he abandoned it - he simply thought it would be depressing and not worth doing) there was the diktat on how the work should be taken and describing not doing it the poster's way as one of the "biggest tragedies"....

Tolkien is very far from a simplistic writer - the more I read him the more I aprreciate the depth and complexity of his work, the care given to give characters an ideolect appropriate to their history.