OKAY so the tolkien scholar working on the amazon show:
has actually MET WITH AND TALKED TO JRRT HIMSELF, is in agreement that tolkien’s experiences in war were traumatic and that this influenced his work, and worked on peter jackson’s trilogy, particularly regarding dialects! (x)
is a self-described “Tolkien polemicist,” aka someone involved in controversial debates ?? not sure what’s so controversial about his tolkien interpretations yet (x)
“Shippey's witty, combative book [J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century] is illuminating, especially on The Silmarillion.... Shippey argues the twentieth century's need for new myths, new maps of Hell, the world changed with the First World War, in which Tolkien fought, and ancient images of paradise lost provided by literary tradition were no longer viable for a writer marked by losing most of his friends in those terrible four years of industrialised warfare.” (x)
aka Shippey agrees w/ what Tolkien was arguing in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” with mythology/fairy stories as a necessary act of emotional escapism, sort of... stuff about sub-worlds and worldbuilding... i haven’t read the essay in over a year sorry but it’s really good
“The central chapters demonstrate the ingenious articulation of the trilogy, the profundity of its thought about suffering, and evil, both personal and institutional, cosmic and frankly devilish.... Tolkien, Shippey argues, was in an interesting dialectic between the Boethian view of evil, where it is, in the end, a privation of good, and the dualist or Manichean, where it is an active principle based on the corrupted will of sentient beings.” (x)
aka Shippey talks about the duality of Good and Evil and how Tolkien believes we’re ultimately all changeable bc we’re sentient aka that’s how we get complex characters like feanor, maedhros, and turin, who each deal with a sort of unpinnable morality, and corruptible-but-redeemable characters like frodo, gollum, and boromir
yeehaw! i should actually read this guy’s stuff instead of reading book reviews though