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No problem gents, happy to share, and I'm glad you enjoyed it.

He did start to lose me around the 35 to 45 minute mark, I think he gets a bit caught up in to many technical expressions and the like, but I really enjoyed the rest of it; especially the first 30 and the last 10.

Thanks Rich I enjoyed that.

I'm a writer of fantasy and I get folk saying: you are going to be the next Tolkien (being kind, giving me the thumbs up etc) But in my mind I always think - No, Tolkien was the master of so many interconnected ideas and disciplines - the stuff I write is good (if I do say so myself) but it is in no way on par with what Toliken achieved.

This lecture sums up why.

Thanks Rich, this was interesting but I personally had some reservations as to its content and delivery. I perservered with Drout's lecture to the end, which although often more than a little self-congratulatory and consciously verbose*, did make a number of worth while observations. The ruin analogy was, I agree, helpful.

But funnily enough Drout overlooked one of Tolkein's stated aims with LotR, which really explains Tolkein's use of the 'broken reference'. This was that it was in part to fill what Tolkein saw as a mythic void for the English culture which lacked the survival of the classical pre-Christian traditions of Rome and Greece. Hence we find in the LotR a very heavy borrowing from, and weaving into of Tolkein's own tale of, the techniques and concepts from Norse and Finnish myth, including pre-literate oral traditional methods of story telling. That was all very much part of Tolkein's very deliberate literary device to give his work a sense of age (although Drout's use of the word 'patina' was effective in that context). This all worked fabulously in LotR if less well in Silmarillion (although I remain very fond of the latter work, if only a little in part because of its echoes of the style of the good old KJ Bible from my childhood). So I did not find a huge amount of new insight in Drout's talk, and the scarring effects of Tolkein's own tragic childhood and his horrible experience in the Great War are particularly well known (Tolkein proving the old maxim, that to write with greatness, you must write of that which you know or have experienced directly). But I concede that Drout's repeated theme of academic critic bashing was indeed amusing, and one can never have enough of such critic bashing!

cheers
Mark

* paraprahsing a little, 'philologists are the tribologists of texts' and oft repeated variations of 'communicative economy' struck me in particular.

This BBC video, including interviews with Tolkien himself was broadcast in 1968, just 5 years before his death:

http://youtu.be/XR-4vMEiQ_U

Now that link was simply delicious Rich, thanks! Tolkein reading a passage from the Ring poem in Black Speech in the 2nd video was particularly exquisite!!!

cheers
Mark

Cawdorthane wrote:Now that link was simply delicious Rich, thanks! Tolkein reading a passage from the Ring poem in Black Speech in the 2nd video was particularly exquisite!!!

cheers
Mark

No problem. With regard to Tolkien reading Black Speech, when I purchased the BBC radio play I also got a bonus CD of him reading various extracts from the books (eg, Sindarin, Quenya, excerpts, etc) and it's really great to listen to.