Tolkien Events 2010

[davem]

Nice site relating to The Festival in the Shire event this August - with some interesting stuff. http://festivalintheshire.com/journal/index.html Check out the Daphne Castell interview with Tolkien from 1966:

He finds it surprising and pleasing that the “Lord of the Rings” has had such a success. It seems to him that nowadays almost any kind of fiction is mishandled, through not being sufficiently enjoyed. He thinks that there is now a tendency both to believe and teach in schools and colleges that “enjoyment” is an illiterate reaction; that if you are a serious reader, you should take the construction to pieces; find and analyse sources, dissect it into symbols, and debase it into allegory. Any idea of actually reading the book for fun is lost.

“It seems to me comparable to a man who having eaten anything, from a salad to a complete and well-planned dinner, uses an emetic, and sends the results for chemical analysis.”