You could well be right from the British perspective, I can only speak from coming up in America. It's not terribly popular overall here anyway, so my sample size is diminished.

Exactly.  Waugh is less than the departure lounge guy! There's actually a whole host of fluff writers I'd put over him. I don't find readability a drawback.

I'm not a huge fantasy guy myself, but I do have a lot of respect for Tolkien's ability and dedication. There was a serious amount of labor in his endeavors and he was an eloquent writer.

Oh, I agree.  I plan on perusing some very shortly.

I never met Tolkien while I was up at Oxford although I knew some people who were tight with him.

Read the trilogy twice as young man but never cared to read it again. Few people can have a greater fondness for heroic literature than I. At the moment, I am re-reading the Iliad for the sixth time. I have never read it in translation. I have read some of the great Icelandic sagas so many times I have lost count. These were all in translation. I wish I had learned Old Norse, but I didn't. I know that Tokien was a supposed to be a very devout Roman Catholic, but his world-view in the trilogy is almost totally Manichaean--gallant and noble "good guys" confronting the blackest evil imaginable. This is alien to true heroic literature. Who is the "good guy" in the Iliad--Hector or Achilles? In many of the Icelandic sagas, men who are mortal enemies because of blood feuds often respect one another because each recognizes that the other is behaving as well as he can in accordance with the prevailing codes of honor. This can lead to reconciliation, as between Kari and Flosi at the end of Burnt Njal.

Last edited by captainpreppy (2014-04-24 18:27:47)

"Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized - the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.”  Complete Works of Mohandas Gandhi, Vol. VIII, pp. 135-136