[davem]

Originally Posted by Lalwende

Not being very well-travelled, my 'pictures' of Middle Earth were a lot more provincial; more on the scale of Scotland (which is the ultimate in 'awesome' to me), as opposed to Mount Cook. So the films did offer a different sense of scale to me, not always a welcome one, as some of the magic in the books for me is in my personal images of an intimate, almost fairy-like quality to some of the landscapes.

I think this is kind of the point - its not how much you bring to the esperience, how good you are at visualising. Its the fact that you bring something, play some part - that makes the experience personal, give you a connection. This has nothing to do with the morality or values you 'contribute', which I feel get in the way more often than not, but rather with the images & memories you bring:

However good in themselves, illustrations do little good to fairy-stories. The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible presentation & true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind & is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal & more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination. Should the story say 'he ate bread', the dramatic producder or painter can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general & picture it in some form of his own. If a story says 'he climbed a hill & saw a river in the valley below', the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, & it will be made out of all the hills & rivers & dales he has ever seen, but specially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.

On Fairy Stories

So I think Tolkien would have felt that your experience:

So the films did offer a different sense of scale to me, not always a welcome one, as some of the magic in the books for me is in my personal images of an intimate, almost fairy-like quality to some of the landscapes. For me, the film was more 'epic' whereas my own images are more 'folklore'.

was the right one for you, & that the reason you felt the movie's 'scale' to be 'not always a welcome one' was that at those moments the story was actually being taken away from you & replaced by something else, imposed by the director & designers. Your 'folkoric' LotR is your unique co-creation with Tolkien, so its special, & in a sense its your 'tribute' to him. Its certainly a kind of artistic 'conversation' between the two of you. This is the source of power of myth & fairy story, & its what cannot be reproduced in drama.

Originally Posted by SpM

But I don't see this as a reason not to make them, or to regard them as failures. After all, this was not what they were aimed at achieving.

But i still don't know what they were aimed at achieving - entertainment, homage, an introduction to Tolkien's works, so I suppose it is a bit unfair of me to judge them as 'failures'. I can only say that, they failed for me to communicate the spirit, the numinosity, which comes through the books (but which did come through the Radio series - but that is really a dramatic reading, & its the images which are important, specifically the source of the images).

If the movies don't 'have the potential to add to our "mythic" experience.' as you put it, then the answer to Imladris' question:

So do you guys think that Jackson did a good job capturing the general mythic feel, or did he fail abysmally?

must be the latter (well, it must if we have to choose one extreme or the other).