View Single Post
Old 12-16-2007, 11:25 AM   #24
Lalwendė
A Mere Boggart
 
Lalwendė's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: under the bed
Posts: 4,814
Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Lalwendė is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Tell you what tickles me with all this faith-driven comparison of Tolkien and Pullman and the business of whether it's anyone else's business to tell us what's good for us...that Lord of the Rings is religion-free and yet His Dark Materials takes religion on board as a theme! And even compare what you can find of earthly religion in Tolkien's work (which it takes a serious fan to do) to what's in Pullman's work; Eru is really quite an unpleasant and negative character - nowhere even close to my idea of God, whereas the 'God' in Pullman's work is a sad figure, beaten by what people have done to him, and he is treated kindly in the end.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bb
The idea that Fairie is Love and that the elves are part of that love is intriguing, but does this attribute really adequately explain or suit the elves as we know them in The Silm? I hardly think it does, with their stiff necked arrogance and honour and oath-dependency.
Though I often think the Elves of the Silm are Elves as they ought not to be - fallen, jealous, angry, snobbish, violent, proud etc...etc...

Quote:
Faery might be said indeed to represent Imagination (without definition because taking in all the definitions of this word): aesthetic: exploratory and receptive; and artistic; inventive, dynamic, (sub)creative. This compound - of awareness of a limitless world outside our domestic parish; a love (in ruth and admiration) for the things in it; and a desire for wonder, marvels, both perceived and conceived - this 'Faery' is as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life: sunlight as distinguished from the soil, say, though it in fact permeates and modifies even that.
Ties in almost perfectly with the idea of Dust and Daemons...can the words Love and Imagination be interchangeable here? Tolkien's idea of a world without Imagination conjours up the same thing portrayed by the Severed Child who has lost contact with his Daemon. And if you think about it, what could possibly be more sad than a child who has lost his ability to Dream?

There's a very close link between Gollum, wandering the wild in search of his Precious and the frightened boy huddled in the shed without his Daemon.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bb
Really, I think it's kind of sad to wish ill of Pullman and Compass on some preconceived notion of hierarchy that one has to be better than the other, that Tolkien alone got things right where others fail, that somehow Tolkien's star will shine the brighter if the Pullman movies fail to be as successful as the LotR movies.
I agree. Tolkien has in some ways 'failed' to move me, not in any way with Lord of the Rings etc, but in what he showed us of Eru in the Silm, well, this god he created leaves me utterly cold. Eru is fascinating in a Jovian kind of way, but he also disgusts me more than a little bit; I simply cannot reconcile the idea of an often petty, bad-tempered and disinterested god (he actually reminds me of Henry VIII quite often ) with anything good - indeed, does Tolkien think Eru is "all that", I suspect not... But what I saw of the possibilities of the Universe/s in His Dark Materials was not a little mind-blowing...it moves me the way some of the concepts of Doctor Who do.
__________________
Gordon's alive!
Lalwendė is offline   Reply With Quote