Tolkien article in the Telegrapgh

[wellinghall]

(Some of you might want to take your blood pressure pills before reading)
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100192299/send-these-horrid-hobbits-back-to-the-shire/

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Trolls never did like hobbits.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I was thinking EXACTLY the same!

Never feed the trolls... :-D

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Yes I saw this. Urgh. Not just anti-Tolkien either, but anti-Rowling, anti-Martin, anti-WoW, anti-XBox etc...

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

What an unpleasant piece of writing.

[gillo]

Nasty piece of writing. Presumably hostile Twitter followers are still better than being ignored.

Edmund Wilson said the whole thing better over 40 years ago. Even then it was sloppy, arrogant and judgemental writing.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, "horrible hobbits" is a rip-off of "awful orcs"!

[arda-unmarred.livejournal.com]

Wow, that beats anything the Guardian's ever dished out - but then what would you expect of a biographer of Pat Buchanan?! The whole thing is quite obviously a deliberate ratings ploy (or whatever you call it when you want to generate as much viewer traffic for a newspaper as possible).

[rustica.livejournal.com]

I'd pay good money to see Gollum the Musical. What an excellent idea! Someone should write it.

There are some people who think NZ has gone too far with the Middle Earth passport stamps. Me, I just want to know how I can get one without spending the money on an international flight. My *mother* will have one, and I won't. How fair is that? *sulks*

[sally_maria]

And the Telegraph is usually pretty sound on Tolkien - several articles from Tom Shippey etc over the years.

Oh, well, his loss.

[widsidh.livejournal.com]

Maybe someone felt the need to redress the balance? ;-)

[troels forchhammer (from livejournal.com)]

I saw the piece earlier, and found that like the blogger, I am also always surprised to find intelligent people who admit to reading Dostoevsky . . . ;-) (For whatever reasons, Dostoevsky has always failed for me -- his works have never held even the tiniest drop of enchantment for me -- and no, I don't really hold it against anyone that they like his work)

As for the blogger, his lack of knowledge of anything but the worst tabloid coverage of Jackson fandom (or so it would appear) is, to my mind, not in itself a problem — but it is not the best of bases for commenting on it in public. I really can't get upset about it, though.

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

Oh dear oh dear. His loss of course, but some good replies in the comments I see.