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Old 07-26-2007, 09:55 AM   #7
Legate of Amon Lanc
A Voice That Gainsayeth
 
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: In that far land beyond the Sea
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Tolkien

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendë View Post
Would children be disturbed by it? Would they understand it? Would they even enjoy it?
Answers: Maybe; Probably not; They could as I have enjoyed some books that I wouldn't count among reading for children, though I was a child.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hookbill the Goomba View Post
Perhaps Children need to learn that not all fantasy books are about 'chosen' kids with magic and hilarious side-kicks.
But actually, if with current possibilities of reading all the volumes of that, I think HP is as brutal as CoH, and considering the 7th, I think this is stepping largely into the world of adults. If nothing else, 7th is not a book for children - and not just because of the Multi Kills.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendë View Post
There's certainly plenty of violence in fairy tales - even though so many have been Bowdlerised the gore still pops through, as do those underlying messages about sinister men and so on Yet we'd think nothing of giving a child a fairy tale to read.
Sure. Tolkien speaks on this matter in the essay "On Fairy-Stories":
Quote:
The beauty and horror of The Juniper Tree (Von dem Machandelboom), with its exquisite and tragic beginning, the abominable cannibal stew, the gruesome bones, the gay and vengeful bird-spirit coming out of a mist that rose from the tree, has remained with me since childhood; and yet always the chief flavour of that tale lingering in the memory was not beauty or horror, but distance and a great abyss of time, not measurable even by twe tusend Johr. Without the stew and the bones—which children are now too often spared in mollified versions of Grimm —that vision would largely have been lost. I do not think I was harmed by the horror in the fairytale setting, out of whatever dark beliefs and practices of the past it may have come. Such stories have now a mythical or total (unanalysable) effect, an effect quite independent of the findings of Comparative Folklore, and one which it cannot spoil or explain; they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendë View Post
Religious texts can also be extremely violent and adult - I used to wonder what on earth the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah had done, as I just couldn't conceptualise it when a kid!
No doubt they are. In ancient Jewish tradition it was forbidden to read Genesis & some of the Prophets for those who were under 30. Of course probably also for other reasons, like that they won't be even able to understand it (prophets), but still... For example, I surely won't let my children read Hosea (the first of the 12 smaller prophets), even if they were interested.
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"Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own." -On Fairy-Stories
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