further proof that I need a 'blog' section

My old fantasy prof has issues with the new Lord of the Rings movie.

I haven't seen it yet, so I can't really comment. I haven't read the book, either. I got maybe 20 pages in, but that's about it.

I took Randall's fantasy literature course at least in part because I figured I needed a reason to slog through 1500 pages of Tolkien's weighty prose—something I honestly wanted to do, but never had enough motivation to carry out. Randall gave me two weeks to do it. I managed to get through Fellowship in the allotted time. That, for me, is pretty good, actually. I had to write an essay on the nature of Good and Evil in the book. He seemed to be of the opinion that Good and Evil in LotR were polar absolutes, and there wasn't any blurring of the lines. I deftly managed to pull examples from parts of the books I didn't read to prove that that wasn't the case. To me, it just seems obvious. What about Gandalf the Grey? What about Smeagol? I think that paper did pretty well. I got an A in the course (much better than the C I got in the sci-fi course, even though I thought I got more out of that).

I think I came out of that course with the conclusion that fantasy wasn't really my thing. I haven't been tempted to pick up Tolkien since.

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