Greetings — Quickbeam here:

Excellent news! The brilliant new boardgame from Reiner Knizia, which I reviewed in February (please see my previous “Out on a Limb” for an in-depth look), [Out on a Limb 02/01/01] has been re-launched with a slew of major retailers across the U.S.! At last this superior game can be easily purchased by fans.

It was previously hard to find but now — with the building wave of marketing for PJ’s first film — the selling strategy has been expanded greatly. Before now, you could only buy Lord of the Rings from the British publisher (with a hefty shipping cost) and at specialty stores that catered to gamers/hobbyists. I recall the Wizards of the Coast chain had copies to sell.

But what I found at Target yesterday surprised me. There it was, just as beautiful a green box as you ever saw.

Even though the official release is set for June 15th, if you run — and I mean run FAST — to Target stores you will find Lord of the Rings all over the shelves for $34.95. Please look in the Toy Deptartment first. It’s also up on Amazon.com [here] but they will probably delay shipping until the 15th. In a matter of days the game will be all over K-Mart, Toys R Us, and other large retailers.

Happy day!!!

There is just not enough praise for this wonderful boardgame, for many reasons. It is stunningly illustrated by John Howe. It is the most thematically pure representation of Tolkien’s books ever put to paperboard. And it’s damn fun to play, too! The publishers have been whispering in my ear about a future ‘deluxe edition’ and a fun new ‘expansion set’ so stay tuned for more updates!

Much too hasty,

Quickbeam

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THE Fanboy even of the year is not too far off, Comic-con will bring together some amazing talent and some very cool events. Here’s what they have as far as LOTR coverage:

The Lord of the Rings

In addition to the above themes, we’ll feature panels with the major comic book publishers, (DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Image Comics, Dark Horse, etc.), plus spotlights on our SPECIAL GUESTS. And look for a wide assortment of workshops, seminars, slide shows and special panels with some of the top creators in the comics world. It’s all coming together for Comic-Con 2001! [More]

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Thoughtful debate continues; today we heard from more people that thought Dibbell had some valid points, but focussed on a few areas of disagreement.

Michael read the Dibbell article more carefully than most, and perhaps figured out what was actually being said better than I did, for one. If he’s right, then this article wasn’t as offensively meant as most of us took it to be:

“I was kind of surprised at the reaction to the articles from the Village Voice.

I don’t see anything remotely offensive in the one called “Hobbit Forming”. It pretty much just said that there is going to be a trilogy of movies based on The Lord of the Rings and that they are likely to be very popular. No argument here on that point.

The other, “Lord of the Geeks”, had some critical remarks, but it didn’t strike me as particularly snobbish. It simply acknowledged the fact that Tolkien has some very opinionated critics in the literary world. Like it or not, everyone has critics, we’re just going to have live with it.

Dibbell catches a good bit of flack for using the “G” word. It seems that the word “geek” is becoming one of those touchy words which may or may not be offensive depending on who says it and how it is used. The word is often used, not as an insult, but as a label for a particular subculture. I for one am not ashamed to be part of that culture and its as good a label as any, I guess. Sadly, however, labels lead to stereotyping and, let’s face it, nobody likes to be pidgeon-holed.

None of us wants to hear someone say “Oh, their opinion doesn’t matter; they’re just geeks.” But, I don’t think that’s what this article is saying. Check out this quote: “If you feel that’s no particularly meaningful achievement, I understand. But maybe you could indulge me and imagine, just for a moment, that the fact that we live in a world increasingly made by geeks actually makes their collective imagination worth understanding.” Okay, so it’s still a stereotype, but it’s saying that our opinion counts. It’s saying that Tolkien’s work is important precisely because the people who love it are important.

Dibbell then goes on to quote from literary critics both for and against Tolkien, before giving her own opinion. She emphasizes the fact that critics have given Tolkien a hard time over the years, but she never says those critics were right.

Finally, she gets into her own opinion which I found very insightful. Her argument is that the greatness of the work does not lie in some “hidden message” or meaning in the text. With this I heartily agree. Too often, I think, we feel the need to “justify” a work of fantasy by saying that it contains some hidden meaning. It is true that, as Tolkien has written, a reader can find applicability in a well-written story and The Lord of the Rings is full of it. But, then again so were many stories before and after it. Dibbell contends that the true greatness here lies in the creation of Middle Earth itself. I think Tolkien would agree. He wrote Lord of the Rings to satisfy demands for a sequel to The Hobbit, and because he thought it would help him to get The Silmarillion published. His real passion was Middle Earth: its history, its people, and its languages. The stories are merely the windows through which Tolkien shows us his world. That’s not to say that there are not many wonderful things to say about the stories themselves, but the fact is that Tolkien introduced an entirely new approach to literature. The critics, Dibbell points out, are slow to realize the value of this.

Okay, there is one thing I do have to take issue with. In making her point that the “issues” are not the real point she goes overboard and seems to miss some of the real depth of the novel. Others have pointed out the innaccuracy of the implication that Tolkien had a childish view of good and evil and the silliness of the “cultural relevance” issue so I’ll take the other one. Here’s the quote that gets me: “Tolkien’s take on ‘human existence’? A hard gig, certainly, full of danger and tough decisions, but fortunately not enough to threaten the wise Gandalf, the noble Aragorn, the sly Saruman, or any of Tolkien’s other characters with more than the occasional moment of psychological complexity.”

Are you kidding?! This is the only statement which forced me to wonder if Dibbell had read past the first few chapters. When I read the trilogy one of the aspects that struck me the most about it was the overwhleming sense of despair. It caught my attention because it is rare in adventure stories. Usually, quests and wars are presented as more or less fun outings with a few nasty bits thrown in to make them exciting. Not so with Lord of the Rings. None of the heroes ever seems to have much hope of success. The world teeters on the verge of destruction through most of the tale. Gandalf and Frodo are both believed to be dead for a while. Denethor is so overwhelmed by despair that he burns himself alive. And “the sly Saruman” goes insane and is murdered by his assistant on whom he has heaped severe psychological abuse. That seems like more than an “occassional moment of psychological complexity” to me.

That part aside the real reason I’m surprised by the response to this article is because, whether you agree with every point she makes or not, Dibbell’s overall point is that The Lord of the Rings is a great and important work despite the lashing it sometimes gets from critics. How did we miss that?

Eric wrote from a highly literate perspective, and this is a copy of his reply to the Village Voice:

“Julian Dibbell’s piece on Tolkien was very interesting and, on its own terms, mostly hard to argue with. But he got the broad perspective all wrong.

Dibbell reiterates and expands a fairly cogent argument against the worth of Tolkien as literature. Essentially, however, these are straw man arguments. Of course Tolkien has little value by the standards of 19th and 20th-century mimetic literature, which mandate psychological depth, a distinctive rather than a transparent prose style, etc. However, from any perspective (especially historical) such standards represent a narrow and suffocating concept of what literature might be.

For Tolkien, for instance, the creation of an imagined world (“subcreation”) is inherently worthwhile; it requires no justification in modern literary terms — a view he defended at some length in essay, and a view that the popularity of _The Lord of the Rings_ seems to have supported. And, of course, for Tolkien and his readers, a goddamn great *story* has inherent worth — a notion, as old as literature, that modernism and post-modernism
have been in danger of forgetting. Tolkien was not trying to write a 20th-century novel; he was (by his own testimony) trying to write a myth for modern times. Isn’t it obvious that he succeeded?

Furthermore — the fears of Germaine Greer et al to the contrary — the qualities one finds in Tolkien are not antithetical to those of mimetic literature. They are separate but equal. I’ve read _The Lord of the Rings_ 16 times, and I have an A.B. in English from Harvard, where I was one of the late Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry students. (Bishop herself understood that “high” art had no hegemony over “low” — the two poets she insisted we read were Hopkins and Lewis Carroll.)

That Tolkien has special appeal to geeks is undeniable. However, the notion that it’s some *adolescent* quality that connects the two is facile and just plain wrong (although understandable coming from a non-geek). If you want to correlate pop-culture popularity with an adolescent mind-set, you’ll probably have better luck with _Baywatch_ than Tolkien. The correlation you *will* find is between a specific type of high intelligence and love of Tolkien — the same type of intelligence, of course, that makes one a good computer programmer. That’s a highly interesting phenomenon that has probably been under-explored.

Finally, a correction: the computer game Adventure predated (and probably inspired) D&D. But Dibbell is right to infer that it was hugely influenced by Tolkien: in fact, its author had an adolescent pact with his two best friends (one of them myself) to produce a film version of Tolkien should any one of us become sufficiently wealthy!”

Chris summed up the point of a lot of other letters:

“It seems that these two self-absorbed writers are members of the ever growing clique that has forgotten the value of a good story. Some of the best stories were written merely out of a desire to do just that – tell a good story. The writers weren’t working from a motivation to communicate some message, or convey a truth. However, a good story necessarily conveys deep truths, and for a story to be gripping and compelling, it must be able to reach deep down inside of you. In order to reach deeply, an author must have a deep understanding of what it is to be human, and must be able to put those basic elements into his or her characters.

If a character in a book gets mad at someone for killing his family, and then is bent on revenge the rest of his life, yes I can identify with it, but it’s such a shallow and obvious thing that it doesn’t compel me to read on. I’m much more drawn in by a scene like that in FOTR which occurs just before the Fellowship finally reaches Lothlorien. The Fellowship is caught up in the timeless beauty of the place they find themselves in. The hobbits are walking or running about like children. The grass, the trees, the flowers, the very air is full of youthful, yet eternal energy. Then we see Aragorn, who is caught up in some old, at once painful and happy memory. We read that one of the hobbits comes up to him, stirs him out of his reverie, and says that it is time to go. Tolkien tells us that Aragorn leaves, and then throws us the curve ball “and he came there never again as a living man.” There is insight that speaks to me on a much deeper level – the insight that things change and fade away, and somehow in the fading become more beautiful than they were.

When you stop reading the story just for the sake of the story, when you “grow up” and become “intelligent” and begin looking in all stories for the author’s secret message, you lose something. Certainly there are many great stories that were written with the purpose of communicating a message. However, to adopt the idea that a story should have no other purpose is to greatly limit yourself. In adopting that mindset, I think one loses a little bit of the child inside. Instead of taking joy in the beauty of the spoken word, you wind up arguing over what the author is *really* saying, and miss the entire point. “

Thanks to all our correspondents in the last few days.

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Whenever there’s changes to the story we know, thousands of sharp minds get involved in the speculation game. Why did they change that? Here’s some of the best answers that have come in.
Tengwar wondered who we saw battling Lurtz in the trailer – Aragorn or Boromir? He makes a strong case for the former:

“This is just a guess, but I would bet my bottom dollar I’m right. Lurtz is going to kill Boromir and then Aragorn is going to kill Lurtz — a’ la Qui-Gon being killed by Darth Maul who is in turn killed by Obi Wan. Not that I’m suggesting that’s where they got the idea, but think about it: They have to end this movie on some sort of victory. They can’t make it all the way to Helm’s Deep [in the first movie] like Bakshi did so they created a character Lurtz who could be a villain Aragorn could kill. They couldn’t use Ugluk because they need him for the The Two Towers. This would be the only reason to make up a new character (ie to kill him as a climax to this film). I’ll bet you a hundred bucsk I’m right about this. It makes perfect sense. When I thought about it, it soothed my anger about Jackson creating a new character for this movie. It’s necessary because Fellowship ends so anti-climatctically. “

As for the Sword that Wasn’t Broken that Strider wields on Weathertop, Nick Friend agreed that Strider would need to carry a usable weapon for normal foes (why a sword, though?) but he also said something else very interesting:

“It occurs to me that Aragorn’s decision to carry no sword but broken Narsil is symbolic more than anything else. He is an incomplete man, as it is an incomplete weapon. When he is revealed as the heir toIsildur and is prepared to make open war against the East, he knows it’s time to reforge the sword and carry it whole for the first time. It’s a bit of chivalric posturing, much like the English knights of the 14th century who would put on an eyepatch before leaving on campaign (even though they had two very good eyes), while taking a vow not to remove it until they had done some deed of valour dedicated to their lady. Or something like that.”

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Ringer Spy Ryan sends along word of his encounter with some LOTR Cast members!

My girlfriend is working on a movie that Bernard Hill (Theoden) is currently in, and he told her that he was bringing “some hobbits” to the set last night. So she had me come up to visit on the off chance that I could get an autograph or two. Sure enough, I was lucky enough to meet Bernard, Elijah Wood (Frodo) and Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn)!

They were also more than happy to show off their tattoos, which were beautiful (Elijah!! Send me a pic of that tatoo!! -Xo). Bernard also has a tattoo, of Theoden’s stamp, which is a lovely, intricate square. Unfortunately, I was too excited to make any sort of decent conversation, so I really don’t have anything newsworthy to report, just that all three of them were incredibly nice and positively enamored with the project.

Check out the story of just WHICH film Bernard Hill is working on now!

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Just one week after announcing their suprise agreement with the Burger King chain, New Line have made their second big deal for merchandising the Lord Of The Rings as December approaches. This time, it’s not burgers but chocolate eggs.

New Line seem to have made an agreement with Nestlé to market the Lord Of The Rings with the incredibly popular chocolate egg chain for children, Kinder Eggs. Though not available in the United States, this chocolate candy for kids can be found in most countries in Europe. Usually found with a little toy inside it that you assemble together from little parts, the Lord Of The Ring Kinder Eggs will have some sort of figure or character from the film that can be assembled together. These chocolate eggs will be slightly more expensive than the usual ones.

The first country to have confirmed this will happen in their country is Germany, where the German Kinder Site has announced the series which will be released on November 5th, 2001. Hopefully, more countries will follow suit soon enough. The announcement for this series (in German) can be found by following the link. [More]

The website has also produced a little mock up of what the packaging the eggs will have, with the image of six members of the fellowship walking across Middle-Earth, a starlit sky above them and the German name for Lord Of The Rings above them. [More]

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