The Lord of the Rings, books and movies...

I've just seen all three movies of the Peter Jackson trilogy on YouTube, binge-watching, comparing it with--and judging it against--the printed works of J.R.R. Tolkien, which, thanks to constant re-reading (maybe, at a guess, 50 times) throughout my life, I bear with me in memory and can summon for perusal within myself virtually verbatim--even Tolkien's dreadful, flat, mediocre poetry.  Because, apart from the poetry, I have never enjoyed reading, and re-reading, anything so much (except, well, let us not be forgetting Voltaire, Racine, Pope, T.L. Peacock, E.F. Benson, and P.G. Wodehouse). I think we must agree, Jackson & Co. did catch the heroic (though, as Ebert said, ultimately silly) spirit of The Lord of the Rings, although of course he did what he could to spoil it (as modern feminist mores require) by over-emphasizing the female characters--particularly Arwen.  I am reminded of the ladies that I have known who frankly, indeed quite obscenely, have not given a rusty fuck that Shakespeare's female characters were all originally played by boys, and have plainly said that the very idea of such "authenticity" infuriates them.  And having seen Dame Judith Anderson play Medea and Lady MacBeth, I must admit that they have reason, or at least maenadism, on their side.

Yet there are those, male and female, but mostly the latter--among whom, notably, my friend Kristen--who find nothing of value, interest or charm in TLOTR, not even in the enchanting first chapter (the Birthday Party) of The Fellowship of the Ring.  Kristen says simply, "I don't like those guys," and will say no more.  Jeez.  I suspect that her disaffection is based on (1) The utter maleness of the author's point de vue (I mean, the man wrote it for his grown sons), and on (2) the centuries (nay, millennia) old perspective of scholastic culture which lies 7/8ths submerged within it, but perceptible in the pedantically perfect correctness of diction, style, grammar, spelling and vocabulary which glitters razor-sharp and treacherously barbed,   scarcely concealed beneath the author's wizard's cloak of colloquial affability. In a word, I suspect that Kristen hates Tolkien for precisely the same reasons that I love him--and that I fiercely hate and utterly despise, for that matter,  J.K. Rowling.  The prose stylist, I mean of course, not the person.  But still.  One thing women are incapable of understanding, and should just leave the hell alone, is Magic.