David Bratman – Inside Edmund Wilson
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Of all the negative reviews
that “The Lord of the Rings” ever received,
the most infamous is “Oo, Those Awful Orcs,”
by the renowned American critic Edmund Wilson. […]
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Of all the negative reviews
that “The Lord of the Rings” ever received,
the most infamous is “Oo, Those Awful Orcs,”
by the renowned American critic Edmund Wilson. […]
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It is with the same disquiet
that one might feel stepping into a cold morgue,
where a body killed after continuous pain
from some deadly nerve gas he inhaled on purpose
might be seen laying on a steel slab,
to reread the words of the dismissive review by Edmund Wilson
on what history has since decreed unambiguously
to be the best novel of the modern era.
The kind reader may well wonder why any time or effort should be spent
on dissecting a review over half a century old, worthy of no attention and no memory.
That we must answer only after reading the review itself.
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De “Troll” Núm. 9 – Enero-Febrero 1988
El Señor de los Anillos. Apéndices.
Ediciones Minotauro. Barcelona 1987. […]
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“There are two novels
that can change
a bookish fourteen-year old’s life:
The Lord of the Rings
and Atlas Shrugged. […]
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Recently, a friend of mine tried to convince me
that The Lord of the Rings is a story of good versus evil,
a simplistic fable of light triumphing over dark,
and that Tolkien liked to write in black and white morality. […]
Published in ‘Beyond Bree’, January 2009
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For reasons that we shall discuss later, this work starts with a quote from Tolkien:
“We all know the differences in kind, but we are not always sure how to place anything that we hear. A child may well believe a report that there are ogres in the next county; many grown-up persons find it easy to believe of another country; and as for another planet, very few adults seem able to imagine it as peopled, if at all, by anything but monsters of iniquity.” (On Fairy-Stories, page 42). […]