One of the things I now appreciate about the Hobbit and the following trilogy was that Tolkien was out to create an English mythology equating to the Greek pantheon or the Norse Gods. He succeeded in that much of the fantasy literature is derivative and certainly things like Fantasy video games owe much to Tolkien. Reading the wikipedia entry just now, I was thrilled to find Tolkien employed working on the letter W for a dictionary maker at one point.
Tolkien wasn't writing about fantasy, he was writing about courage in the face of extraordinary adversity. I think it is time to read the books to my own children.
For those who have not been keeping up, Tolkien's son has been publishing all of Tolkien's background work. Truthfully, it is very dull stuff, though I imagine we already have a body of scholarly work and very likely we have Tolkien majors and PhDs. Bravo, let the deconstruction begin. I'm sure Sam and Frodo...
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