Actually, at one point Bilbo calls for an adjournment for lunch, but I don't think he gets it.
I don't keep a lot of hack fantasy around to point fingers at, and it's been decades since I devoted any time to reading hackwork, but the one that Le Guin cites as her typical bad example (it's from Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising) will do.
Yes, it was reading Tolkien that led me to Lewis, but I appreciate Lewis for his own merits, though he exasperates me in ways Tolkien does not. I most like his blazingly clear work on literary aesthetics, and I'm most annoyed by his breezy dismissal of any theological position he doesn't take. He does not say that everything was better in the Middle Ages; what he does say is that the advent of modernism has caused the loss of some things that were valuable (and by "things" he means aesthetics and manners of thinking, not the absence of indoor plumbing). Tolkien takes a similar attitude: that the destruction of the Ring is altogether a Good Thing doesn't mean we can't regret the valuable part of what is thereby lost.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-12-24 04:35 am (UTC)I don't keep a lot of hack fantasy around to point fingers at, and it's been decades since I devoted any time to reading hackwork, but the one that Le Guin cites as her typical bad example (it's from Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising) will do.
Yes, it was reading Tolkien that led me to Lewis, but I appreciate Lewis for his own merits, though he exasperates me in ways Tolkien does not. I most like his blazingly clear work on literary aesthetics, and I'm most annoyed by his breezy dismissal of any theological position he doesn't take. He does not say that everything was better in the Middle Ages; what he does say is that the advent of modernism has caused the loss of some things that were valuable (and by "things" he means aesthetics and manners of thinking, not the absence of indoor plumbing). Tolkien takes a similar attitude: that the destruction of the Ring is altogether a Good Thing doesn't mean we can't regret the valuable part of what is thereby lost.