What breaks the enchantment?

[Aiwendil]

Fordim wrote:

Is this thread still going?? Wow...seems to me that there's an awful lot of energy being spent on what is, in the end, an entirely subjective matter of readerly preference or response to the text.

I think the one thing we can deduce from this is that some people feel as though their responses to the text are "right" and therefore any resposne which is different from theirs is "wrong" and thus a threat.

Indeed! I quite agree, which is why I haven't weighed in on this matter yet. It's one thing to say "this breaks the enchantment for me; what about you?" It's quite another to look for underlying truths about the text based on one's subjective experience. For my part, I don't find that the enchantment is broken at all - except, perhaps, by hyper-serious debates about what breaks it.

I do, however, think that there's an interesting phenomenon here - it's interesting that for some people the enchantment is a fragile thing and for others it is not. I'm not entirely sure what to make of that fact.