[littlemanpoet]

....to my last post on this thread. Perhaps everybody's more taken with the critics' aspect of it. Or perhaps what I said got the internal response of "Duh, LMP, no kidding. Why even post something so obvious?" Or perhaps the rest of you are just bored with that part of the discussion and don't have anything to say about it. Or perhaps, I seemed to be breaking a taboo by bringing in the "race" issue, talking about "us" as Germanic.

If it was the latter, it's a misconception. It's about language, not genetics. Still, I understand that the Japanese reading market has responded to Tolkien as positively as the English speaking world. Tolkien's popularity is especially strong amongst those who speak a language closely related to English, such as the Nordic, Dutch, and German peoples.

What Tolkien has done is revived myth for English speakers, in a relevant modern context, such that the old words, and might-have-been-proto-words that seemed dead on the ash-heap of history, have been shown to be applicable to us, now, in our modern context.

Examples: the whole wraith construct, with its multiple meanins/applications of 'twisted' (wreath), 'tortured' (writhe), 'misty' (wreath of snow), 'riding' (writhen), & 'mad' (wrath).