I just post this here:

Lord of the Rings is literary fiction

Is what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night

>the illogic of there even being a One Ring
it's going to be the written equivalent of picking apart continuity errors in films and pretending it's actual criticism, isn't it?

Excellent job, user and I'm not even a Tolkien fan

same with Homer and Harry Potter

Do you even need to ask?

>All I'm trying to do is make Tolkienists realize that they should feel guiltier than they do.
I don't think anyone aside from this autist feels guilty at all about reading LOTR. That's such an absurd presumption to make. I also already hold contempt for this guy because of his remark about Tolkien's "fake" biblical prose.

The Three Greats.

I was just thinking this. Author must be one major pleb.

and the bible

>Tolkien's "fake" biblical prose.
Clearly he's never read Lord Dunsany's fantasies which actually do that.

But there is still the burden of Tolkien’s style: stiff, false archaic, overwrought, and finally a real hindrance in Volume III, The Return of the King, which I have had trouble rereading. At seventy-seven, I may just be too old, but here is The Return of the King, opened pretty much at random:

>At the doors of the Houses many were already gathered to see Aragorn, and they followed after him; and when at last he had supped, men came and prayed that he would heal their kinsmen or their friends whose lives were in peril through hurt or wound, or who lay under the Black Shadow. And Aragorn arose and went out, and he sent for the sons of Elrond, and together they labored far into the night. And word went through the city: ‘The King is come again indeed.’ And they named him Elfstone, because of the green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own people.

I am not able to understand how a skilled and mature reader can absorb about fifteen hundred pages of this quaint stuff. Why “hurt or wound”; are they not the same? What justifies the heavy King James Bible influence upon this style? Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon. Tolkien met a need, particularly in the early days of the counterculture in the later 1960s. Whether he is an author for the duration of the twenty-first century seems to me open to some doubt.

Tolkein wasn't a very good writer and you could even doubt his world building skills. But the general story still made its way into western thought.

Contrarian cucks who work for NPR btfo

Shoo shoo Bloom. Tolkien will be read 500 years from now.

>which I have had trouble rereading
Decades of reading invisible style of airport novels caused your reading ability to atrophy.

Bloom's review is completely fair though. It's just not suited to his taste, and he says as much. Perhaps at seventy-seven he really was just too old to enjoy it. I'd like to think that he enjoys and appreciates some of Tolkien's work.

Ironic that literary critic Edmund Wilson is only remembered for his myopic takedowns of Chandler, Tolkien, and Lovecraft.

If Tolkien is purged, it won't be for style or literaly reasons, but because of his (perceived) politics.

I suspect that The Lord of the Rings is fated to become only an intricate period piece, while The Hobbit may well survive as children’s literature. Really good-natured fantasy is hard to come by, and one convincing personality at its center is all it requires. No other figure in The Hobbit can be called a personality, but Bilbo Baggins is so vivid and persistent that he makes up for all the others. The first thing we hear Bilbo say is “Good morning!” to the self-important wizard Gandalf, who is rude enough to overinterpret the remark. Bilbo’s last exclamation is also to Gandalf, who has become more respectful and even fond of Mr. Baggins by the end of the book but still feels compelled to remind him that “you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” Charming as always, Bilbo comforts us with a laughing “Thank goodness!”

>can't spot a Bloom quote
HOW FUCKING NEW

The genre fiction of yesterday is the literary canon of tomorrow.

Sounds awfully silly, and career shattering. He's oblivious to the fact that Tolkien is universally respected author, and target of a number of serious and well researched articles, and books by notable critics and researchers in the field.

>He's oblivious to the fact that Tolkien is universally respected author
Hahahahah what

See, here I think Bloom is deeply mistaken. I think LOTR is going to be around for centuries to come. I actually have a professor at my grad school who believes it's going to be the one big work of fiction that survives the 20th Century. She thinks it's going to last in a way that Ulysses won't, for example.

Well, she's retarded.

LOTR will definitely be around for centuries to come, but thinking that it will be held in higher regard than Ulysses is just absurdly ignorant.

>"This American Life" contributor
So libcuck shit then.

Of course he is

I didn't say "higher regard," I merely said it would survive and Ulysses wouldn't, or at least may not.

And I feel you may be overestimating the staying power of Ulysses. It's undoubtedly a great work of art, but there are lots of great works of art that haven't endured; they're still around, of course, but they haven't stuck in the broad culture. My worry is that Ulysses is too specific, too tied pointedly to a specific style, a specific art form, a specific time and place. I feel it doesn't transcend its moment in time the way, say, Moby-Dick does. Obviously all literature is a reflection of the time and place in which it's written, but the works that endure do so because they have some quality in them that touches people across time and space. Does Ulysses have that quality? I'm honestly not sure. I think it MIGHT, but at the same time I wonder if Joyce's own overpowering desire to be clever didn't sandbag the book.

Funnily enough, Bloom doesn't even seem to think LotR or Tolkien are bad though. He liked the Hobbit and thinks it's good children's lit and only considered LotR overrated.

The whole cover first makes it sound like the whole retarded "it just WALKING" criticism and everything.

Then I read the blurb you provided and I knew it was shit, the guy just didn't get the point/style that the book was going for.

personally I think the books themselves are extremely boring, but the universe is very interesting and fantasy would look entirely different today had it not occurred. I have a lot of respect for tolkien's worldbuilding.

Well said. This is the 1% of Veeky Forums posts I keep coming to this stupid website for.

I bet you don't even watch anime.

Congratulations on the dubs and on the great post.
Any book that introduces it's authour as a "long suffering geek" deserves a talking down.

The absolute worst type of idiot is the pretentious idiot.

ITT: We see how faggoty and humourless and pseudointellectual literary culture has become. If you can't even accept different opinions without claiming a lack of intelligence or understanding then wtf are you doing in a board about a form of entertainment?

Why would anyone be familiar with Bloom?

>Why “hurt or wound”; are they not the same?

No.

>>Decades after first being told he should love The Lord of the Rings, this longsuffering geek has had enough. In "How Tolkien Sucks," humorist and "This American Life" contributor David Ellis Dickerson does a hilarious takedown of Tolkien's masterpiece, proving, in meticulous detail and with withering commentary, that "Tolkien’s utter awfulness on damn near every level is a matter of mathematical provability." The fake-Biblical dialogue; the surprisingly thin characters; the horrible pacing; the illogic of there even being a One Ring—all get put under a microscope and checked against Tolkien's reputation for genius. You may never read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in quite the same way again. But that's okay. As Dickerson says, "I have nothing against guilty pleasures....All I’m trying to do is make Tolkienists realize that they should feel guiltier than they do. You're welcome."
jesus, what an insufferable little shit

wouldn't read another sentence from this guy, nevermind a book

>you could even doubt his world building skills

Except we have an unfunny, pseudo-intellectual faggot who made a book on why his opinion is better than yours.

Fuck off

Your professor is right.

Fuck you David, I'll excite the shit out of you with a hammer forged within the bowel of the Ijmuiden tata steel ovens with magically enhanced steel of Mesabi passed on to descendants of the hardware emporium unto me and from unto the preordained fate of providing your skull with a draft hole.

Ugh... cause yeah, all books should be boring "realism" about ordinary people living ordinary lives in existential angst and morasses of failure.
And what the fuck is that criticism of "no one in The Lord of the Rings can say so much as..." ? There are plenty of dialogues in the book that don't sound quite so lofty.

Kek. That's how you know you've truly made it.

Does this moron really not understand that hurt = sickness and wound = injury as from a weapon?

As always, good works of so-called "genre" fiction endure and become the fabled classics of their time in the future's eyes. Meanwhile, the "realistic" fiction of the current day becomes forgotten, and the future sees it as quaint, strange, and too-much bound to its particular cultural context.

Very well said indeed.

(((David)))

Those lines are 100% straightforward and clear...

I had a comic strip in mind about this subject that I will never draw:

Frodo and Sam walking in the Shire come across a Hole in the ground."I wonder what this is,Mister Frodo,"says Sam. Aragorn pops in.
"Its the entrance to the Barrow of Ulfraith the Unconcecrated,third king of the Nargoth Ulltamire"
Elrond steps in,dismissing this with a shake of his head."This was the lost entrance to Finrod Felegund's Forge of Fir'FaalFufufufu,where the Fundaments of Falialfuf were fashioned".The others nod,and quietly wipe away the flying spittle. Gandalf appears.
"Impossible! The markings in the earth denote Noxious Noldor Nadgers and this is that rare beast's burrow!"

Then all jump in surprise as an outhouse is slammed on top of the hole by an old whiskered hobbit holding a newspaper.
"Garn! This is me new CESSPIT!" He enters,slamming the door behind him.
Loud defication ensues.
And after looking at each other sheepishly, the group runs away .

Guess I don't have to draw this NOW,do I?

It's always funny when bad, irrelevant writers make fun of good, timeless writing.

If a work is compelling enough to spawn not only a slew of poorly received imitations, but an entire genre full of them that are hoisted onto every pedestal imaginable, I dare say that there is merit in the work.

Personal taste not withstanding, of course. Tolkien also isn't for me. But I can recognize good writing when I see it, even if I don't enjoy it. Celebration of ignorance is self-serving nonsense.

I remember when i wrote an article in my high school news paper on how the olsen twins are evil.

I remembered writing it not becuase i felt an injustice being done in the manufacturing of this image of these wholesome twin sisters going on adventures.
I hated them so much becuase my sister watched them non stop, and had bought into their makeup line.

Now in hindsight i realize that the olsen twins arent evil, they are oppressed like the rest of us. Im just reminded more of thier oppression than of my own.