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Originally Posted by davem
I suspect we all have a very deep sense that it is about something very important & very specific - if only in its effect on us - & we feel very annoyed when someone says its about something else...
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Self preservation. Literature emotes. If a writer wanted to Say Something, he could just say it. But he doesn't. He covers the barest fact with painted lace, writes in calligraphy, dances with his words. If he wanted us to know, he would tell us. But instead, a literary master shows. He makes us feel.
And when we are told that he didn't mean for us to feel that way, we don't like it.
Given that, think about what he made us feel. Was he writing tragedy, such that in the end, we feel as though we have lost something and can never have it back?
Sure. Elves are gone. Frodo can't be healed. Life goes on, but nothing was as it once was. In the Bible, Job gets new kids, new goats, new whatever, and it's all Better Than Before, but it's not what it was. Tolkien did write a tragedy.
But he also wrote a comedy. And a romance. And a hero quest. He wrote fantasy and history and hope and wonder.
He wrote an epic. He took his readers through as many emotions as he could carefully draw out of them.
I'm less curious about what he was doing, what his final purpose was, than why that was his purpose.
Why would anybody actively manipulate emotion? Seems like a pretty sketchy thing to do. Power trip, anyone? Perhaps he was unpopular in junior high school.
I should be ignored.