Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendė
Maybe it's a symptom of the modern world that we're all Utilitarians and everything must have purpose, rather than just exist as a purely decorative and pleasurable object? Critics try and work out what the Mona Lisa is all about; isn't it just a beautiful portrait?
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And isn't even the beauty itself a purpose? (Or, as one of my teachers - and a priest he used to be - once said to a similar argument: "Life itself is a purpose.")
I guess Tolkien's works just have so many dimensions, which just proves how rich they are, like many other epics which deserve the attention, and which have found their popularity and enduring popularity in the history and throughout centuries or even millenia themselves just because of the same reason. With those books, and I believe Tolkien has the potential to belong to the cathegory (let's talk about it in a few hundred years), it's that they don't need any "advertising" or artifical way of labeling them as "classics", because they have and still can find their way to the humans' hearts themselves.
Books like these of Tolkien differ from the pure works of "simple belles-lettres" which do not have any more purpose than to amuse us, and also from the purely utilitarian books written in order to convey some message (which are often, alas, very badly written even if they are supposed to be nice to read).
It makes me wonder - it just occured to me - it is really possible that Tolkien himself did not perceive, or expect, the deeper thoughts and meanings behind his texts, and when he was writing it, he, just like Valar in his own story, "did not know that it had any other purpose apart from its own beauty".