Tolkien Media Watch

[Mithalwen]

Hopeless case clearly. I shall give you a looking-glass though as a wedding present....

[Lalaith]

Not quite sure where to put this bit of news, but today ex-PM Tony Blair revealed LotR as one of his Desert Island books.
"It has its share of wizards who become collaborators, good people who fall from grace, and those who are in some sense redeemed. For the scale and majesty of the invention, the details of the imaginary world created by Tolkien and the rich and deep themes of good and evil, nothing compares to it."

Full story here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...ks?INTCMP=SRCH

[Galadriel55]

The quote was well said!

[Lalaith]

*sits back and waits for Ang or even old Saucie to leap on this like a duck on a June bug*

[Lalaith]

Charles Moore in today's Telegraph:
"If News International fails to get control of BSkyB, what sorcery can Mr Murdoch employ now? He finds himself in the position of Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. He has been exposed, and he is losing the battle for Middle Earth – or rather, Middle England. "

[Lalaith]

And yet another political Middle-Earth analogy:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europ...lkien-scholars

[Galadriel55]

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2011...erview_lo.html

I'm not really sure where to put this, so I just put it here. It's not really political, but...

What Obama read as a youth: "I think I was getting into, like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and stuff like that. And I confess that I did read comic books as well, like Spiderman was one of my favorites. And then I read what I was assigned at school.
....But by the time maybe I was Malia's age, I was starting to read more serious books like, To Kill a Mockingbird, or some of the things that I see her reading now that made you think a little bit more. They weren't just kind of adventure stories, but they were also stories that taught me about social problems and taught me about how people interact with each other, and how some people are kind and some people are cruel. And history sweeps them along, and people have a lot of challenges in their lives.

I felt more than a bit indignant when LOTR was called "just kind of adventure story". It might not have been as "useful" to Obama the polititian as To Kill a Mockingbird, but it's certainly more than an adventure story.