I generally dislike the tagging of the Lord of the Rings as a "fantasy" work, mainly because nowadays "fantasy" is related with light teenage novels that make no real input--> and I think that's the reason why fantasy literature is just "trivial literature" for the critics.
Fantasy works (short stories specially) were well received during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, but it got to a point where the subjects just began to repeat themselves a lot and on the second half of the 20th century it fell a bit into oblivion, with few exceptions such as J. G. Ballard's dystopian sci-fi novels, Stephen King's horror stories and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter.
Few critics and writers (W.H Auden, C.S Lewis) appreciated The Lord of the Rings for what it was.
I, personally, put The Lord of the Rings alongside works of importance such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, etc. To me LOTR is an epic poem in the form of a novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment