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Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

I think you're being too hard on Christopher Tolkien. The first time I read through The Silmarillion I was disappointed by how much it resembled a history text book...then I realized: it is a history text book. This interview just cements what I had already suspected: much as the history of the real world is mostly mundane, punctuated by a few good "stories", the same is true of Tolkien's works. Surely, when you see the Mona Lisa your eyes are drawn to the face and slight smile, but da Vinci still had to paint the background for it to be the painting it is. In some regards, this is the difference between art and pop culture. Once you get past the surface, pop culture is typically hollow.

All that said, I think the original movies are artistic masterpieces (haven't seen the Hobbit yet, so I can't comment)...just masterpieces of a different sort, in a different medium.

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> Once you get past the surface, pop culture is typically hollow.

I'll be pedantic and take issue with that.

Pop culture is unable to stand on its own, but once you get past the surface, it's really more of a guidebook to the nature of culture which can rapidly become a very deep exploration if you have the stomach for it.

Art tends to be able to stand on its own outside of the culture it came from.

Yeah, it's Middle Earth's Bible, which is part of the reason why I disagree with its existence. Some argued that elder Tolkien would not have published his notes and thoughts in that form, and it dilutes Tolkien's published works of their artistic value.

Yes, I've heard that argument as well, and felt it myself to some extent. Not to torture the analogy too much, but one thing to note about the Mona Lisa is the amount of discussion, debate, and research that has gone into questions such as "what location does the background represent?" and "who is this lady, anyway?". Literally hundreds of years have gone into an analysis of that painting, and posthumously publishing Tolkiens background notes almost guarantees that the legacy of his work will be treated very differently. That said, Tolkiens works exist at an interesting cusp in the course of human history, as we are transitioning from a dearth of contextual clues surrounding works of art, to an extreme excess. Nothing is sacred, but such is the way of things today...

You make a good case, and I don't disagree.

Agreed. My experience of Tolkien was reading the hobbit (which I remembered from an animated version in my childhood) without realizing that a whole trilogy would follow.

Learning that I could return to middle earth, I was excited, and devoured the lord of the rings trilogy soon after the hobbit.

Then I learned that I could spend some more time in middle earth with the Silmarilion, so I dove into that next. Total buzzkill. I quit a little way in, my enthusiasm for middle earth mostly drained.

You shouldn't have quit. There's really good stuff in the Silmarilion and if you really like middle earth and all that, you won't be sorry to have read it entirely in the end.

When I read a great book, I usually end up thinking, "Damn, I wish there was more about that one thing they briefly mentioned". Usually, if somebody goes in later and tries to fill in the blanks, you end up with a turd, because they're going in later to answer questions.

The Silmarillion is different. I'd argue it's the main work, and I appreciate it largely because it's not a novel, it's a Biblical compilation covering thousands of years that required decades of world-building and re-writing to bring it to the incomplete state it's in now.

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