Fundamentalist Gandalfians...
March 24th, 2010 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunadelcorvo...Literalist Megatronians and other related strangeness
An essay by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dave_littler, re-posted with permission.
“Listen, I realize that Lord of the Rings is just a story written by one guy, okay? I’m not one of those fundamentalists who believes everything that Tolkien said just because it’s in some book. I don’t believe in Sauron or anything. That’s obviously bullshit. I do believe in Gandalf the Grey, though, don’t get me wrong. I believe that he was some kind of wizard, and that he had some part to play in leading the Fellowship of the Ring in destroying the One Ring, I just don’t believe in all that obviously made-up stuff in Lord of the Rings.”
Imagine if someone said this to you. Imagine how absolutely taken aback you would be by what they were saying. For someone to say that they acknowledge that a work of fiction is a work of fiction and yet that one of the main characters of that work of fiction, who was invented in order to fulfill a role within that narrative, was nevertheless a real entity. Would that be more ridiculous or less ridiculous than a person who believed the story itself to be a true story? At least someone who believed Lord of the Rings was a historical tale could be forgiven, on some level, for believing that the people described within it to have been real people; after all, the events could hardly have been real if the people who enacted these events did not actually exist.
The rest of the essay can be found in this entry at the community![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
atheist, and it's an intriguing read!
An essay by
dave_littler, re-posted with permission.“Listen, I realize that Lord of the Rings is just a story written by one guy, okay? I’m not one of those fundamentalists who believes everything that Tolkien said just because it’s in some book. I don’t believe in Sauron or anything. That’s obviously bullshit. I do believe in Gandalf the Grey, though, don’t get me wrong. I believe that he was some kind of wizard, and that he had some part to play in leading the Fellowship of the Ring in destroying the One Ring, I just don’t believe in all that obviously made-up stuff in Lord of the Rings.”
Imagine if someone said this to you. Imagine how absolutely taken aback you would be by what they were saying. For someone to say that they acknowledge that a work of fiction is a work of fiction and yet that one of the main characters of that work of fiction, who was invented in order to fulfill a role within that narrative, was nevertheless a real entity. Would that be more ridiculous or less ridiculous than a person who believed the story itself to be a true story? At least someone who believed Lord of the Rings was a historical tale could be forgiven, on some level, for believing that the people described within it to have been real people; after all, the events could hardly have been real if the people who enacted these events did not actually exist.
The rest of the essay can be found in this entry at the community
atheist, and it's an intriguing read!