{"id":244,"date":"2011-07-08T20:56:37","date_gmt":"2011-07-08T20:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/?page_id=244"},"modified":"2011-07-08T20:56:37","modified_gmt":"2011-07-08T20:56:37","slug":"tolkien-points-lord-of-the-rings","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/tolkien-points-lord-of-the-rings\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien points: Lord of the Rings"},"content":{"rendered":"

by KEN CHIACCHIA
\nFrom Pittsburgh City Paper<\/em> Vol. 11, No. 51<\/p>\n

copyright \u00a9 2001 by Ken Chiacchia<\/p>\n

You probably know at least one or two of us. We\u2019re the ones sulking around the watercooler grumbling about the fuss over Those Other Books, cursing Hollywood in fluent Elvish. You may have learned, the hard way, not to get us started about what That Movie did with the elf-lady Arwen. J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings trilogy simply has that effect on some people. <\/p>\n

Curious about why this series of books has such a hold on generations of readers, I turned to the experts: Pittsburgh\u2019s professional fantasy writers. <\/p>\n

“Why are people so nuts about this?” asks Lawrence C. Connolly, arguably Pittsburgh\u2019s most successful fantasy writer. “This is a shared dreamscape … the writer has dreamed up a world and you dream yourself into it.” Connolly is author of numerous short stories and novelettes, including “Circle of Lias,” “Decanting Oblivion” and, in this January\u2019s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “Great Heart Rising.” By putting very human personalities into a fantastic adventure based on Anglo-Saxon legend, Connolly says, Tolkien tapped into something primal. It\u2019s easy to forget that he was the first popular fantasy writer to do this. <\/p>\n

“There are these adventures, but they always end up together around food and drink,” Connolly explains. “There\u2019s always the coming together in between and around adventures just to talk — and to kind of mull over the adventure. … That\u2019s the way life should be.” Much of Connolly\u2019s own work, especially the short story, “\u2018Mercenary of Dreams,” he says, reiterates this basic plot cycle. <\/p>\n

It may be the story\u2019s accessibility to successive generations, its ability to speak to readers with very different life experiences, that lies at the core of the Rings trilogy\u2019s success. Living through World War I — Tolkien survived the bloodbath of the Somme, to be incapacitated by trench fever — instilled in him a profound gratitude for the home life for which he had sacrificed his youth. <\/p>\n

Fascinatingly, children of the \u201960s and \u201970s like Connolly found a completely different context into which the books fit just as comfortably. Hippies found themselves, he says, “barefoot … and just ready to go out and explore the wonders of the world. There was, of course, a lot of drug use at the time, and [Tolkien\u2019s Middle Earth] was a very hallucinogenic kind of world.” Mary Soon Lee, who\u2019s published numerous fantasy and science fiction short stories, and whose first collection of stories, Winter Shadows & Other Tales, was published in November, focuses on Tolkien\u2019s meticulous “world-building.” <\/p>\n

“I\u2019m sure the thing that makes it really popular is how the world is created in such detail,” says Lee. She adds that as readers mature, the dark themes that propel the plot of the Rings trilogy — themes of power and betrayal — may age better than those of admittedly fine fantasy works like the Harry Potter series. <\/p>\n

Although both Connolly and Lee credit the trilogy as a major influence, they don\u2019t consider themselves Tolkien fanatics. “I have not cracked the cover on those books since I first read them in \u201973 or \u201974,” Connolly says. Lee admits to being a serial reader of the trilogy, but “I\u2019ve only read The Silmarillion once,” she says of Tolkien\u2019s mammoth, biblical pre-history of Middle Earth. “I think to be a Tolkien fanatic you have to read it several times.” <\/p>\n

“I don\u2019t know any complete Tolkien nuts,” she tells me, utterly deadpan. “You\u2019d probably be the closest.” <\/p>\n

Thanks, Mary. <\/p>\n

And what of this Tolkien nut? I plan to be at the theater this week, and I expect to enjoy myself. Either the new Lord of the Rings movie will be great, or I\u2019m going to have a blast pissing on it from the greatest of heights. <\/p>\n

Either way, I win. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by KEN CHIACCHIA From Pittsburgh City Paper Vol. 11, No. 51 copyright \u00a9 2001 by Ken Chiacchia You probably know at least one or two of us. We\u2019re the ones sulking around the watercooler grumbling about the fuss over Those Other Books, cursing Hollywood in fluent Elvish. You may have learned, the hard way, not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-244","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/244\/revisions\/245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}