On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:13 PM, David Estes <cyclotour...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess I came into this the opposite way. I was a BOB, Bridgestone > Owner's Bunch member that ended up on the Rivendell mailing list when GP > started the company. Although I read the Hobbit and LOTR in middle school, > I didn't really make the connection right away. It had been fourteen years > or so since I read the books, and "Rivendell" the place didn't really stand > out for me. Plus I'm just slow that way. > > I'll probably start reading them to my oldest rather soon. Right now going > through the L. Frank Baum Oz books which have a lot of the same elements in > them. > > Bonus question: Anybody re-read the LOTR books after seeing the movies, > and did that make the books better/worse for you when you read them again? My situation was similar, although I didn't read any Tolkien until I was in my 40s. LOTR and Hobbit were popular among some of my fellow 7th graders (1967-8; "Frodo Lives! was a popular graffito) but I somehow never got around to reading them. However, I have read Hobbit and the Trilogy at least 20 times since my first reading; they sit on my shelf and I will often pick them up and skip and skim for a quick before-sleep read. It's funny, even now I don't think of LOTR, etc, when I seen things from Riv Bic Works; I think of Grant. And vice versa: Frodo doesn't make me think fondly of my bikes. I thought the movies were quite well done, as I had been dreading their Hollywood-ization (hobbit song and dance numbers, gratuitous sex and nudity among the elves, slow motion dismemberment, with closeups of severed limbs and spurting arterial blood, among the orcs, car chase scenes in the caverns of Mora, Gimli talking jive). The battle scenes in particular were interesting and, I think, well done, and Gandalf hit the right mix of avuncular crustiness and hieratic wizardly dignity. I found some of the elven folk a little too elevated, and I didn't like Legolas's hairstyle. But all in all, quite well done, from this Hollywood skeptic. But I find the books, still, better, and the movies didn't change my opinion of them. Favorite passages, for the language and the images and feelings they conjure: A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful; and there great lords had dwelt, the wardens of Gondor upon the West, and wise men that watched the stars. But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived -- for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which donfly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery, of that vast fortress ... Barad-dur, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its prie and its immeasurable strength. (II, 8). And: Naked I was sent back -- for a brief time, until my taks was done. And naked I lay upon the mountain-top. The tower behind was crumbled into dust, the window gone; the ruined stair was choked with burned and broken s tone. I was alone, forgotten, without escape upon the hard horn of the world. There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth. Faint to my ears came the gathered rumour of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping, and the slow everlasting groan of overburdened stone. And so at the last Gwaithir the Windlord found me again, and he took me up and bore me away. (II, 5) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
