THought you might be interested on Ms Flieger's latest published words - she's commented on a Sunday Times article I linked to yesterday
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle1613657.ece
Quote:
This is a well-intentioned review, and the comparison of Tolkien's aims with those of Joyce and Eliot is perceptive and right on the money, but in other ways the writer is unfortunately misinformed on several counts. The influence is Finnish, not Wagnerian, as Turin is drawn from a specific section of the Finnish Kalevala, including the dark tone and (specifically) the talking sword. To cite A.N. Wilson's dictum that Tolkien was "not really a writer" because he created a larger mythological back story (all of it written, by the way), is for both the reviewer and Wilson to put writers into a very small pigeon-hole. To accuse Tolkien of not worrying about style but simply charging in with sub-William Morris prose is (again for both Wilson and the reviewer) to ignore the carefully-drawn distinctions among various characters' speech patterns from kings to orcs (and has either of these guys read the Gollum passages?) and dramatic the use of contrasting high and low styles.
Enough said
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