I'm going to get around to reading the books one of these days. But for some reason I can not get into LOTR!! I love the movies...but the books are just a bore...I remember the cartoon that they did of Narnia, and the british "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." Hmm..I wonder if they got british actors..

Going to have to go with Shiri here. Tolkien was a great storyteller, and the movies lost some of the depth and the story...but Tolkien was a mediocre writer at best. He had pretty iffy control over the English language.

You know he was a linguist, right, and invented several languages?

The only problem I had with his books were the pages and pages of essentially useless information. But, that's an epic for you.

Amendment: He had iffy control over his own vast control of the English language.

It just went on and on, argh. So boring.

Epic doesn't HAVE to have pages and pages of rubbish! I've seen good epics and that is not one of them, in my opinion, because it's just spoiled by the blah blah blah. Meh. I think Xav and I are in the minority there though.

No you're not a minority, I didn't much like the writing itself either. It was the story that kept me hooked though.

So am I the only one who loves the Silmarillion so much more than LotR? And the Lay of Beren of Luthien... Heh, you think reading the trilogy is bad, try getting through 300 pages of verse.

And Narnia's Christianity honestly means nothing to me. It's the core of the series, but also so well done that you needn't notice if you don't look. I have absolutely no problems with Christians or Christianity, just when government does it, or it's hideously blatant and not at all fun. Narnia transcends even the Christian core it's built around, and is truly a fantasy classic, regardless of who reads it.

Own all of his writings that were published.

As for the claim about his control of the English language... you do realize he was one of the people that WROTE the OED right?

Would you sit and read the dictionary for entertainment purposes?

Yes, and there's not an article in my set of encyclopedias that I don't at least recognize, if not actually remember reading.

Isn't that normal?

So you should have said, his writing wasn't a style you liked. It is very none standard, but to claim that Tolkien didn't have a grasp of English, just defies belief.

What next Shakespeare using too many cliches?

I was forced to read the Hobbit in fifth grade. Hated it. Then watched the LOTR a good while later, and enjoyed a movies. Then I tried to read the first of the trilogy. At least five times. Its just not interesting enough to keep reading when I already pretty much know the general idea of what happens.

I like the world more than the actual story by itself. Without knowing the history and background, it's so much less exciting. For example, did you know that Gandalf is actually a demigod, as is Sauron? And that elves really are immortal; there's only a few generations between LotR and the creation of the world for some of the elves in the story (Galadriel, Elrond, etc).

I'm not sure why, but for some reason I really liked the 300 page ending.

You're not the only one. LOTR is a classic, sure, but the Silmarillion is a wonder of the modern world.

I love the detail and scale of the mythology Tolkien created, and LOTR barely scratches the surface. The depth of history and spirituality is phenomenally beautiful, I'm with you, Sylphas!!

The best parts are definitely the Ainulindale and the Valaquenta.

Edit: Oh, and I'm really really excited about Narnia... I love the actress who plays the frost queen, though I can't remember her name.

She's stunningly beautiful, but has this eerie, odd aura about her... she's so cool!

I guess another thing is that I enjoy high-fantasy worlds, rather than low-fantasy worlds like Tolkien's. Of course, that's partly because it has become the "generic fantasy" archetypal thing, so by the time I got round to it I'd experienced a much broader genre and found what to me seemed much more original works. If you consider that LoTR was really one of the first of its kind if not -the- first, it looks a lot better by comparison, but his world just doesn't interest me as much as some of the other ones made.

If you can invent an archetype, you're pretty damned good.

Only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Poe with the detective story. And if anyone argues that Poe is crap, I'll have to be all and kick your ass.

What's the difference between high fantasy/low fantasy?

Um. I didn't mean that in the traditional sense of "high fantasy", which generally means things like Achaea or Tolkien, that are "traditional fantasy" as opposed to gothic fantasy or whatever.

I meant as in has a large amount of things that are different compared to the real world. So look at elves. They're not that fantastic, they're just people with pointy ears and thin faces. (Obviously there's more to it than that, but you get the picture.) Then you take Dark Sun's Thri-kreen, which are like tribe-based desert-living psionic mantis people. It's much more alien.

That's what -I- meant by it, anyway. That's not generally how the terms are used, as I say.

Most intersting thing about tolkien that I almost was never able to get over, was the lack of "magic" in LOTR.. it all worked very differently.

The thing that I remember most about crhonicles of narnia, was that I never read it because all the other kids were doing book reports on it.

Well, Tolkien wrote his world as a prehistory, so by that definition it isn't a fantasy at all!

Ah, I always suspected it was real.