: The thing I find most interesting about Tolkien and his work is this almost nonchalant attitude towards sort of creating a universe and a couple of plausable theologies to go along with it. It's just so vast and detailed, and I'm sure there are a lot of other fantasy authors out there who have attempted to do the same thing (I don't read much fantasy, so you'll have to forgive my lack of knowledge on the subject!), but I can't imagine anyone who's done it with the scope of fantastic magnitude AND plausable reality like Tolkien (I read somewhere recently that the ages Tolkien sets up correlate with our modern times-I believe it read that we are in the 7th age or something like that-that's REALLY interesting). It takes a level of bravery to truly invent something like that. I think Frank Zappa in constructing his "mobius strip within a spherical constant" cosmology exhibited the same type of bravery as did Tolkien-There are probably some who would argue with me on this, but I think that one could look at both of these authors and their life's work and come to the conclusion that they in essence produced a single piece of art, and for an artist to be that consistant, again, takes a lot of bravery and not too small an amount of genius. I suppose the thing is that both of them exhibited a conceptual continuity that was not only constistant and accurate, but also totally unpredictable for us the readers; sort of like predicting the future by totally understanding the past and the present. Such fine people are rare. Thanks to Shadowfax for the great reply to my last posting, and again, sorry about my less-than-stellar internet saavy! Peace!
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