What a fascinating, erudite thread. So many brilliant posts. I've been hankering to make a humble contribution, but felt it would be rude to do so without having read the whole thing. At last I've had time to do so.
Bethberry, your summary of lit crit is masterly. It seemed to me, many moons ago when I did my lit crit paper, that so much of it served not as a tool of understanding but as a master. So, for example, during the time that social realism was all the rage, everyone adored Zola and disregarded Jane Austen, and so on...when in fact both are brilliant authors but for very different reasons and cannot and should not be judged by identical criteria.
For some years now, linear narrative has been deeply unfashionable. Its all been about form, and the 'old-fashioned yarn', ie the kind that Tolkien wrote, is passe.
His stately kind of writing is also regarded with suspicion. Look at this quote from the highly celebrated writer Salman Rushdie:
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Like its precursor, The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson's picture is an improvement on its source material, if only because Jackson's film language is subtler, more sophisticated and certainly more contemporary than the stilted, deliberate archaisms of JRR Tolkien's descriptive prose and, even more problematically, of his dialogue. (I am a big fan of the book version of The Lord of the Rings, but nobody ever read Tolkien for the writing.)
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(I personally find Rushdie's prose unreadable but there you go...)
And then there is the image problem that Lush and others have referred to - the kind of shelf-mates Tolkien has in bookshops, the kind of people who are believed to enjoy him.
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Whether the movies will help is another question, as they seem to have gone out of their way to present LotR as a 'Dungeons & Dragon's' tale, & probably reinforce the 'establishment's view of the book.
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Davem, you're spot on about this. The films have been even more 'linear' than the books, the fellowship in particular: 'walk, walk, fight, walk, walk, fight'.
But I would like to end on a bright note. Currently, there seems to be a swing in favour of 'whatever gets kids reading again is good.' Harry Potter for one has benefitted from this (although clearly no-one is going to be doing their MAs on 'the Goblet of Fire - a well-wrought urn?') LotR consistently tops favorite book lists, and maybe the new egalitarian mood will also encompass Tolkien.
[ April 17, 2003: Message edited by: Lalaith ]