Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Hyarion
Here's the good stuff:
Quote:
1. The rights in The Hobbit are not controlled by Christopher Tolkien.
2. There was no dispute between Christopher Tolkien and his son, Simon Tolkien, as a result of Simon Tolkien going to see the first Lord of the Rings film.
3. Simon Tolkien was never on the Board of any Tolkien company and was not 'removed' from any such position by Christopher Tolkien.
4. Nor has Christopher Tolkien 'disowned' Simon Tolkien.
5. Christopher Tolkien does not guard his house with a wild boar.
6. Permission has never been sought from either Christopher Tolkien (or the Tolkien Estate) for a 'mathom-house' in New Zealand.
7. Christopher Tolkien is neither 'a lunatic' nor 'out of control'
|
|
It's times like this that make me realize what a sheltered life I lead in some respects. I swear I had
never even heard any rumors about any of those seven points that are now being contradicted! (Why on earth would anyone use a
wild boar to guard his house? Wouldn't it make more sense to use a
tame boar that could distinguish its master and members of his family from any other stray humans that happened to get dangerously close to it?
)
I think I can honestly say that I have never gone out of my way to try to learn any details, good or bad, of Christopher Tolkien's personal life. Why bother?
(No, I don't read the tabloids -- or even "People" magazine, as a rule -- to keep up-to-date with the latest juicy rumors about celebrities, either. I've always been weird that way.)
I do sympathize with the man's desire (according to what others have said in this thread) to have some personal privacy. Going off on a bit of a tangent, I remember reading something interesting about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the aftermath. The claim was that Daniel Patrick Moynihan (later a U.S. Senator from New York) was working as a White House staffer at the time of JFK's death, and that he quickly realized this was going to become the centerpiece of all sorts of wild conspiracy theories. With that in mind, he tried to persuade the surviving members of the Kennedy family to let copies of the full autopsy report be handed out to the press and the general public, which they were not legally required to do.
However, the Kennedys had never had this sort of thing happen to them before, came from a rich family that tended to have a bit more faith in official reports and verdicts than the average American, didn't take Moynihan seriously when he suggested that keeping anything relevant private would just inspire big conspiracy theories and general suspicion of the government's "honesty" in figuring out what had really happened, etc. Also, the Kennedys felt that the gruesome details of JFK's death as analyzed in the autopsy report were really
nobody else's business. So they refused to give permission for it to be publicly released. Years later, Senator Moynihan, looking back on it, allegedly felt that this sort of thing (maybe not just the autopsy report, but other stuff as well) threw fuel on the fire to make Americans scratch their heads and ask each other, "What are they hiding? Why all the cover-up? Why can't outsiders look at certain reports, documents, etc., to see if there's anything really, really peculiar being hidden away from the light of day?"
Senator Moynihan's feeling appeared to be, according to what I read somewhere, that the Kennedy family's strong desire for "privacy" in their time of grief only made it that much likelier that people would develop elaborate theories of cover-ups and try to invade their privacy in the future with thousands of rude questions. (However, that doesn't mean they didn't have the legal and moral right to withhold the details of the autopsy report if they felt like it!)