Mythlee’s Reviews > J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam > Status Update

Two gems from the WTF?! department:

* "We have all got our Gollums. Gollum is always being suppressed and rejected, but always there. It is impossible to get rid of him. He cannot be killed." (p. 262)

* "The Crack of Doom is itself perhaps fundamentally a repellent image of the engulfing sexuality that civilization must repudiate." (p. 263)

-- Derek S. Brewer, "The Lord of the Rings as Romance"

Brewer thinks "too many of the Companions survive" (260). He'd have killed Merry off at Pellenor Fields, Sam at the Crack of Doom, and "the admirable Gimli too should have gone at the gates of Mordor" (261).

To each his own, I suppose. But why the gates of Mordor for Gimli, I wonder? If you're going to kill him off, why not at his weakest moment, going through the Paths of the Dead – or trying to?

"Self-sacrifice is most poignant when it is entirely solitary; when apparently no one can ever know of the lonely painful deed that has been ungladly volunteered, and that has apparently been of no avail. This solitary heroism is Frodo's, and the more convincing in that Tolkien does not totally isolate him physically, since Sam remains with him[...]. But Frodo becomes progressively withdrawn even from Sam."
- Brewer

Tolkien "told us that the discovery of Gothic took him by storm, a sensation as full of delight as that aroused by 'first looking into Chapman's Homer', 'though', he added, 'I did not write a sonnet about it'."
- d'Ardenne, "The Man and the Scholar"

* Hobbits "were wildly discussed at the breakfast table and in the nursery."
* Father Christmas "delivered [his letters] himself, leaving on the spotlessly clean carpet a very dirty and disreputable footprint as his signature, an irrefutable proof of the authenticity of the letters."
- D'Ardenne, "The Man and the Scholar"