Sunday, October 15, 2000
Weekly Ebay Items
- Xoanon @ 23:35 PST TheOneRing.net makes no money from these items. Tolkien: LORD OF THE RINGS. 1st UK Ed! RARE. $490.00 BAKSHI ORIGINAL LORD OF THE RINGS CEL:GANDALF $302.00 Tolkien LORD OF THE RINGS 3-V Easton Leather $166.00 Tolkien Lord of the Rings 1st American Ed. $125.00 LORD OF THE RINGS CHESS SET & BOARD N/R $152.50 JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Game 1979 $123.50
Each week, I scour Ebay looking for the hot Tolkien items up for sale. I post the most interesting here for you to bid on. You can click on any item you wish, it does not mean you are bidding for the item. Have fun and keep checking back here every week! See something I've missed on another auction site? Drop me a line!
Tuesday, October 10, 2000
The Observer reviews Tom Shippey's new book on Tolkien
- Tehanu @ 01:39 PST "Charles Moseley was ( is still ? ) Director of Studies in English at Wolfson College , University of Cambridge. He has written his own ( short ) book on Tolkien where he doesn't shy away from ( what he perceives as ) serious flaws re. his writing skills as well as highlighting his strengths e.g. LotR great as an epic / romance / folktale." Here's the Observer review: For many in the Fifties to Seventies, Tolkien's imaginary world, despite passages of frankly weak writing, provided a diagnostic myth which, as myths do, simplified and intensified, and held contradictions in tension together. He always said he was writing a 'mythology for England'. But this mythology was wider than that, for it confronted what modern orthodoxies were beginning to relativise, the absoluteness of evil, a word one feels still uneasy about using in certain company. Tolkien created a world with a detailed history and chronology stretching over millennia. He gave it languages, some of them beautiful, with credible philological development. And Lord of the Rings had many imitators, who still thrive. Tolkien's influence on fantasy has been profound, as Shippey underlines - he altered the map. You can hardly approve of Tolkien's fiction on the basis of orthodoxies that, latterly prevailing in the academy, have become the small change of the conversation of the literati. But there is evidence of many Tolkien readers among that same group, and of a massive following among intelligent people of sensibility who simply read and trouble not their heads with theory or orthodoxy. So perhaps the 'Tolkien phenomenon', in fact, turns the tables: if theory cannot accommodate such works, then, perhaps, theories need revising. Indeed, Tolkien offered that challenge: the two essays on Beowulf and 'On Fairy Stories', to which Shippey gives proper weight, are arguably among the most important theoretical works of the last 60 years. They summarise his thinking about the nature of imaginative literature and its importance, how it transcends the fashion of the moment. While the academy, quite properly, theorises about what ought to be and has been, the imaginative and emotional needs served by ahe art of lying that is fiction must still be met. Shippey's witty, combative book is illuminating, especially on The Silmarillion. He also claims that Tolkien can be seen in the context of major developments in modernist fiction. Shippey argues the twentieth century's need for new myths, new maps of Hell, the world changed with the First World War, in which Tolkien fought, and ancient images of paradise lost provided by literary tradition were no longer viable for a writer marked by losing most of his friends in those terrible four years of industrialised warfare. You have, after that experience, to make and live your own myth and, if you are lucky, you can write about it. The central chapters demonstrate the ingenious articulation of the trilogy, the profundity of its thought about suffering, and evil, both personal and institutional, cosmic and frankly devilish: no allegory, as some tried reductively to decode it, for the problems of the Second World War, for the issues of nuclear deterrence, but something applicable to both, and to the then unimagined Vietnam, and to all struggles where Mordor so nearly wins. Tolkien, Shippey argues, was in an interesting dialectic between the Boethian view of evil, where it is, in the end, a privation of good, and the dualist or Manichean, where it is an active principle based on the corrupted will of sentient beings. And if we are not, as we once thought, beyond Good and Evil, if we are, in fact, responsible beings, how do we recognise their unchanging substances beneath the blandishments of accident? Eomer's question - 'How shall a man judge what to do in such times?' - must be our question, indeed. And fictions might help us to an answer. Thanks to HuanCry According to Amazon.com it isn't available yet, but you can pre-order it here
We may have mentioned the Tom Shippey book,'Tolkien, Author of the Century, but here is the UK Sunday paper The Observer's review of it. The reviewer is Charles Moseley. Our correspondent HuanCry comments:
A Creature of Hobbit
Tom Shippey issues a challenge that nobody can ignore with JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century
Charles Moseley, Observer
Sunday October 8, 2000
JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century
Tom Shippey
HarperCollins £16.99, pp362
Tom Shippey emerged as one of Tolkien's most acute critics and convincing apologists with The Road to Middle Earth (1983), a nicely Tolkienian title. The subtitle of his enjoyable new book, characteristically, teases as it asserts. Tolkien, 'author of the century'? Hasty, perhaps, as Treebeard might have said. But the sly echo of Germaine Greer's remark that: 'It has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the century' issues a challenge which nobody can quite ignore. For when The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit came out, many saw them as a stupendous irrelevance, a 'flight from reality', ignoring everything worthwhile in the modern novel. But others waited - for years - for (the difficult) The Silmarillion to appear, and all the other texts that emerged from material left when Tolkien died.
Sunday, October 08, 2000
Weekly Ebay Items
- Xoanon @ 15:09 PST TheOneRing.net makes no money from these items. Gigantic "Lord of the Rings" Poster (37"x72") $355.00 Tolkien UK Lord of the Rings Leather DLX $150.00 LORD OF THE RINGS: "RINGWRAITH" 1979 GEM MINT $134.50 1979 LORD OF THE RINGS SEALED BOARD GAME!!!!! $105.00 LORD OF THE RINGS:"ARAGORN" FIGURE 1979 MINT! $96.00 J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit 1st/1st DJ. Rare $30 000.00
Each week, I scour Ebay looking for the hot Tolkien items up for sale. I post the most interesting here for you to bid on. You can click on any item you wish, it does not mean you are bidding for the item. Have fun and keep checking back here every week! See something I've missed on another auction site? Drop me a line!
Sunday, October 01, 2000
Weekly Ebay Item
- Xoanon @ 19:16 PST TheOneRing.net makes no money from these items. TOLKIEN Lord of the Rings 2nd Ed 1st print DJ $405.00 Vintage Lord of the Rings MOC $591.00 Rare Lord of the Rings Print Poster $511.00 Tolkien LORD OF THE RINGS UK Limited Leather $125.00 Lord of the Rings Stone Chess Set $78.00 MOC 1979 LORD OF THE RINGS FRODO VERY RARE!! $78.00 J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit 1st/1st DJ. Rare $10,101.02 J.R.R. TOLKIEN - THE HOBBIT Early U.K in D/W! GBP 200.00 (approx. $295.08)
Each week, I scour Ebay looking for the hot Tolkien items up for sale. I post the most interesting here for you to bid on. You can click on any item you wish, it does not mean you are bidding for the item. Have fun and keep checking back here every week! See something I've missed on another auction site? Drop me a line!
Sunday, September 17, 2000
This Weeks Ebay Items
- Xoanon @ 17:14 PST TheOneRing.net makes no money from these items. Tolkien LORD OF THE RINGS US 1st print 3 Vol $150.00 Tolkien LORD OF THE RINGS UK Limited Leather $125.00 Lord of the Rings-Tolkien-3 H/B-Easton Press $122.50 BAKSHI ORIGINAL LORD OF THE RINGS CEL:GANDALF $113.50
Each week, I scour Ebay looking for the hot Tolkien items up for sale. I post the most interesting here for you to bid on. You can click on any item you wish, it does not mean you are bidding for the item. Have fun and keep checking back here every week! See something I've missed on another auction site? Drop me a line!
Sunday, September 10, 2000
JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century.
- Tehanu @ 19:59 PST JRR Tolkien: author of the century by Tom Shippey (HarperCollins, £16.99) Article by Patrick Curry 8 September 2000 In the recent reappearance of Beowulf on the literary scene, one curiosity has been the praise heaped by Seamus Heaney, and several reviewers, on JRR Tolkien. His brilliant essay of 1936, which put the monsters back at thecentre of the tale, is universally admitted to have revolutionised the field. The reviewer is author of 'Defending Middle-Earth' (Floris Books)
HuanCry sent a review he saw in The Independent of Tom Shippey's new book evaluating Tolkien's contribution to literature.
"Article title : Lord of the Ratings - and with very good reason
Contrast that with the reception of the news - beginning with the Waterstone's poll in 1996, repeated many times since and confirmed by sales figures - that The Lord of the Rings is the most-read and best-loved book of the 20th century. Apoplexy and dismay across the expert spectrum, from Germaine Greer to Auberon Waugh, reached comical proportions. Such a reaction was hardly new. The work's first TLS reviewer sniffed, in 1954, that it was not one "many adults will read through more than once". Edmund Wilson consigned it to what he saw as a peculiarly British taste for "juvenile trash". In 1961, Philip Toynbee said, "These books have passed into a merciful oblivion." Rarely has a death been so prematurely celebrated.
Considering that catalogue of ignorance, arrogance and sheer animus, Tom Shippey is remarkably restrained. He concentrates on explaining the reasons for the extraordinary popular success of such an unlikely book: no sex,serial murder or courtrooms. Unlike works by Orwell and Golding, its closest competitors in the polls, it is decidedly not a set text. Shippey succeeds brilliantly. Along the way, the reason for the reaction of the literati becomes apparent. It isn't just Tolkien's popularity, but that The Lord of the Rings is based on deep learning and a set of values that represent a challenge to their authority. The learning - philological, historical and cultural - cannot be doubted. And the values Tolkien places centre-stage are precisely those that modernist acolytes of progress have tried to marginalise: community, the natural world, the reality of the sacred. Tolkien's sin is to have spoken to so many readers' persistent attachment to, and fears for, those things.
For encouraging the escape of the prisoner, he is blamed - as he once put it - for the flight of the deserter. On the one hand, Tolkien the scholar is inseparable from the author. On the other, as Shippey also shows, The Lord of the Rings is actually a characteristic work of the late 20th century. Both aspects are particularly striking in terms of the parallels with Beowulf. Just as the latter uncomfortably mediates between the passing pagan world and a new Christian one, so Tolkien's work reflects a post-Christian world, saturated with gnawing uncertainties. Shippey's exploration of Tolkien's themes, especially the nature of evil, power and what one character calls "the long defeat", is superb. He also reveals Tolkien's ability to give names and faces to things we have either lost the words for or not yet articulated. The former include Treebeard's sadness without unhappiness, or the hobbits' cheerfulness without hope (what Tolkien called the Northern "theory of courage"); the latter, the way Saruman exemplifies "one of the characteristic vices of modernity - a kind of restless ingenuity, skill without purpose, bulldozing for the sake of change". Taking on the critics on their own ground, Shippey reveals Tolkien's use of a complex narrative structure, and the flexibility with which he moved between different literary modes.
If there is a weakness to his book, it is Shippey's reluctance to move far off-page, which sometimes leaves neglected important aspects of Tolkien's appeal, such as his profound feeling for nature. There is also the striking resonance, despite obvious differences, between his work (including its reception) and that of Orwell. These have been discussed elsewhere. The point is that until Tolkien's intervention, it was still possible for critics to insist that the Beowulf poet had written the wrong book. Shippey has now firmly established that the same commonplace about Tolkien is equally fatuous.
Here's a link to the book where it's for sale in Amazon.co.uk
This Weeks Ebay Items
- Xoanon @ 13:30 PST TheOneRing.net makes no money from these items. WOW!! LORD OF THE RINGS...ON LASERDISC!!! $300.00 TOLKIEN Lord Of The Rings Set 2nd Ed.1st Prnt $255.00 EASTON PRESS-The Lord Of The Rings-Tolkien $177.51 BAKSHI ORIGINAL LORD OF THE RINGS CEL:GANDALF $157.50 Painted Lord of The Rings Chess Set & Board $151.50 LORD OF THE RINGS CHESS SET & BOARD N/R $132.50 Tolkien RETURN OF THE KING - RARE UK 1st ed $250.00
Each week, I scour Ebay looking for the hot Tolkien items up for sale. I post the most interesting here for you to bid on. You can click on any item you wish, it does not mean you are bidding for the item. Have fun and keep checking back here every week! See something I've missed on another auction site? Drop me a line!
Sunday, September 03, 2000
This Weeks Ebay items
- Xoanon @ 15:49 PST TheOneRing.net makes no money from these items. Easton Lord of the Rings Leather Tolkien $200 Lord of the Rings Ringwraithactionfigure MOC $152.50 Tolkien Lord of the Rings UK Millenium Ed $101.00
Each week, I scour Ebay looking for the hot Tolkien items up for sale. I post the most interesting here for you to bid on. You can click on any item you wish, it does not mean you are bidding for the item. Have fun and keep checking back here every week! See something I've missed on another auction site? Drop me a line!