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Feb 2Liked by Rev. Tom Emanuel

The Amazon series is essentially bad fan fiction; it just has a big budget and mass-market ambitions. Happily it also has a paywall and one can decline to pay. Nothing can touch The Lord of the Rings itself (though some of Tolkien's own revisions for the Ballantine edition come close - it's too bad he was put in the position of having to make them, in a hurry and so much later when he was out of touch with the writing, and moreover had spent years consciously explaining the book's theological underpinnings to readers. He didn't bring his best to the work).

"Decanonizing" Tolkien might also reduce the tendency of fans and scholars to claim him for either the right or the left. People on both sides need to break rank and recognize that reality transcends ideology. More or less as with the Bible, you can find anything (almost) in Tolkien's work if you look for it, but why are the stakes so high? Why can't he just be a man who condemned racism in several clear statements but whose invented world had a racial hierarchy of sorts, with significant intermarriages and friendships that crossed those boundaries? Even hard-right and hard-left people aren't perfectly consistent if they stop to look at themselves. And nobody writing an imaginative work can satisfy ideological claims without killing the imagination.

All that said, I think he did do miracles - for me and for a lot of other children who might otherwise never have developed a sense of beauty and gratitude rising to the level of the religious (whether inside or outside of established religions). For which, perhaps, his sins are forgiven.

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I'm someone who grew up reading the revised edition of LOTR, so while I knew that Tolkien changed things, I never knew exactly what. What were some of the big differences in your view?

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Feb 2Liked by Rev. Tom Emanuel

There were some tweaks to the Elvish here and there, which are of course legitimate. Then there's a category of filling-in-the-gaps, which for me reaches its nadir in "The Field of Cormallen": originally the question of Frodo and Sam's clothing was dealt with understatedly as "'The clothes that you journeyed in,' said Gandalf. 'No silks and linens, nor any armour or heraldry could be more honourable. But later we shall see.'" End of section. In the revision it's more long-winded and culminates in the soppy "'What have you got there?' Frodo cried. 'Can it be--?'" as Gandalf gives back the star-glass. Well, of course; the star-glass and the gardener's box were with Sam. Why even bring it up? Then later in the chapter there's a lot of fuss about getting them ready for the feast, and whether Frodo will wear a sword, all of which seems superfluous and the product of the streak in Tolkien that wanted to add a long epilogue with news from Gondor and Elanor calling her father "Sam-dad."

Another thing I wish he hadn't done is in "The Passing of the Grey Company," where Aragorn is telling Legolas and Gimli about having shown himself to Sauron in the Palantir. The revision reads, "You forget to whom you speak[....] Did I not openly proclaim my title before the doors of Edoras?" In the original it was "You forget to whom you speak[....] What do you fear that I should say: that I had a rascal of a rebel dwarf here that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?" That's far more human, and conveys Aragorn's exhaustion and the fraying of his nerves by the encounter with Sauron, everything he's been through since the breaking of the Fellowship, and everything that lies before him on the Paths of the Dead. Who cares what he said before the doors of Edoras? That only seems stuffy and self-regarding.

I think Donald Wollheim has a lot to answer for in having put Tolkien in the position of having to come up with a revised edition. Letter 271 to Rayner Unwin (25 May 1965) expresses Tolkien's reluctance and essential lack of interest in the task admirably: "[Having found very few necessary or desirable corrections in Volume I] I am bound to say that my admiration for the tightness of the author's construction is somewhat increased. The poor fellow (who now seems to me only a remote friend) must have put a lot of work into it."

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