That was a most inspiring post, Sharon. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img] I feel almost like doing something heroic. Or just going, "Ditto" (grandiosely, of course).
It never occured to me that the Sil makes the LotR characters diminish. Actually, my opinion of the Sil was "It's great and all, but what it's lacking is Hobbits and other slightly more 'accessible' creatures." In other words, just like Sharon said, it's not who the characters are, it's what they did. I found reading about four (or five if you count Bilbo) Hobbits rising far above anything any of their kind ever did to be most inspiring, more so than some inherently mythic demigods coming to tragic ruin.
So, though I found The Sil to be very beautiful (I read it in two sittings, that tells you something) and perhaps more epic than LotR, my view of the LotR characters did not diminish. Rather, the Sil lifted them up, because it made the whole world and story larger, so that the deeds they did seemed even more important. Plus I became nostaligic for LotR, and read it again after reading the Sil.
A good topic for discussion. [img]smilies/cool.gif[/img]
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All shall be rather fond of me and suffer from mild depression.
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