(Untitled)

[laughinggas13]

I've been attempting to read Brian Bates' The Real Middle Earth since maybe March, and the library have decided I can't renew it any more times, so it's time for me to buckle down and actually finish the damn thing.

Only trouble being that I haven't been this annoyed by a book in a long time. I'm on page 16 and there have been at least 3 points

Comments

[tweedymcgee]

Race memory of dinosaurs???

(!!!)

Yeah, um. Wow.

[laughinggas13]

Didn't you know we can remember 60 million years before our species even existed? It's obvious!

(In fairness, I haven't reached his comment about the dinosaurs yet, so possibly it's less headdesk inducing than that review makes it out to be. I don't have that much hope though. And the number of 5-star reviews are giving me a quiet feeling of despair.)

[tweedymcgee]

I love Tolkein. But I think I could happily go to my grave without reading another word of criticism aboutTolkein, astute or otherwise. Anything smart and critical that anybody has to say about Tolkien tends to make me feel like a tool for enjoying the stuff. And if the crit isn't sharp, why read it, eh?

Though I did once read a fake dialogue between, I think, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky about oppression and class and such in Middle Earth, which was just howlingly funny as a parody of progressive historiography, and which I should try to find again. It had some great bit about orcs. Unfortunately I read it in a bookstore and didn't buy the book, so I don't remember where it's from.

[laughinggas13]

I know what you mean. Looking at the books objectively (as in, when I'm not actually reading them cover-to-cover), I can see their flaws and all the ways in which they're the product of a certain type of mind in a certain time period (example time: I read in a book called Bluestockings, about the first women to get a university education in Britain, that Tolkien (among others) used to freak out when women attended his lectures. I don't think he was the one who simply refused to say a word until they'd left, but even so, he could hardly be called progressive. And women get a fairly good deal in LOTR compared to, say, anyone who isn't white).

Was that dialogue this one? Because if so, I love what I've read so far. Apparently everybody ships Sam/Frodo.

[laughinggas13]

Yeah. If a kids TV show (admittedly a very good kids TV show, and one that I really should get round to watching) is doing a more historically accurate job than you, it doesn't really make yours seem like the scholarly research you'd like it to be.