Well, I tried to watch LOTR.

Lord of the Rings is a fabulous book, although slow starting. The Hobbit is entertaining if a little childish and clearly intended to be read out rather than simply read.The Silmarilion, the Books of Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales and all of Christophers shameless cash-ins are bordering on the unreadable.The Bible has it's moments, certainly (I always rather enjoyed Ecclesiastes) but mostly it's a turgid dirge.

Are you kidding? As a piece of literature? I get that there can be a historical interest, or a religious interest, but a dramatic one? Maybe some short poetics here and there (like ecclesiastes or the song of solomon), but as a story?Oh man, when it comes to the Bible, in my opinion the movies were much much much much much better than the book.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

I don't think a commentary on life = allegory. Tolkien did reject direct allegory, as in saying Mordor represented the Nazis, or any such direct one to one correlation. He did not, however, say that his books were not a commentary on life. I saw a documentary suggesting that the smoke and lack of greenery that characterized most evil persons in his books was most definitely a commentary on the industrialization of his home town in England. Not an allegory, but yes a commentary.

I agree. I have tried at least four times to read the Silmarilion and absolutely could not. But I have at least two friends who think it's completely engrossing.

Excuse me for jumping clear back to the OP. I'm a terrible literalist when it comes to movies, and I have been asked by good friends to leave the room when we were watching Bible movies, due to my vociferous complaining about their changes.I had to bite my tongue and adjust my attitude to make it through the Fellowship of the Ring at the theater, but it wasn't too bad. I had to take a few days to get over my irritation at the Two Towers. I really resented them having Faramir take the ring to, shoot, where was that...Isengard? I'm terrible with names. I objected pretty strongly to their portrayal of Fangorn as stupid, and their changing the decision of the entmoot. I thought their changing Helm's Deep to a place of hiding rather than a place of fighting was also objectionable. There was a fourth issue I had with Two Towers, but I can't think of it at the moment.The Return of the King was much easier for me, although it was sad that they had Sam leave Frodo when he had promised Gandalf he wouldn't. That didn't happen in the book, and it seemed against the eternal loyalty they seemed to want to portray in Sam.A couple more comments.The battle between Gandalf and Saruman over Theoden was hilarious. I'm sure they pulled it straight out of a Kenneth Copeland healing service.Someone asked about whether the elves coming to Helm's Deep was as we pictured it. It's not really a valid question, since that just didn't happen in the book. I thought that change was neat, though.I really liked several of the characters, and even though the battles with the oliphaunts (marmadukes) was completely hokey, I loved both Legolas' stunts and Eowyn's battle. I really liked Eowyn and pretty much all the hobbits. Gandalf was awesome, too, and once I got over Aaragorn's voice, I really liked him, too.Despite the pain of the two towers and the insult I felt to the totally fictional Treebeard and Faramir, I thought the movies were great, and I have watched them nearly half as many times as I've read the books. :-)

As always, you are the voice of sanity. Of course you seem to agree with my general point so that always helps.In any case, I had reread the series (this time completely) after watching the last movie and I don't know if I felt that some of the things you disliked were so out of place. He decided to take it there but got stopped at Osgiliath, where he then changed his mind. I don't think that was that objectionable a change. All it did was draw out his decision a bit more, and used that time to introduce osgiliath visually to an audience that would see it in the next movie. If I remember right, his change of mind (or final decision) was prompted by more forces moving to Mordor and some conflict of some kind. That is pretty much what we have in the movie, just a more dramatic venue. I'm not sure what you are talking about here, but I assume you mean before the spider? Again, Sam didn't really leave Frodo in the movie, but struggled with whether to do so or not and then reversed his initial decision to do so. This also occured in the book, but it was shortly after the encounter with the spider rather than before. It was almost exactly how it happened in the book. What was so odd to you? Now this is where you are just plain wrong! Heheheh. I really liked Viggo as Aragorn right from the start. What was wrong with his voice?Some of the issues I had were leaving out the scouring of the shire (major problem though I only had it after having finally read the books after watching the movie), the extra sugar coating it seemed to have on the sentimental issues, and the modernisms (using children and women as symbols of what we must protect... which is obviously why they used Helm's Deep as a defense rather than offense... and in-jokes about dwarf tossing, and surfing on a shield).But I agree that the pain was made up for by the pleasure.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

I was referring to Frodo believing that Sam was trying to take the ring, and then Sam climbing down the mountain...right before the spider, as you said. In the book, Sam struggled with leaving Frodo, but that was because he thought Frodo was dead. That happened in the movie also. There is no parallel in the book to Sam leaving Frodo because Frodo no longer trusted him.And Faramir, right, that was Osgiliath. He was on his way to Gondor, though, not Isengard. It is probably fair to say that delaying Faramir's decision to leave Frodo with the ring is not as bad as I make it out to be. Faramir's a favorite character, though, and Tolkien made such a big deal of Faramir's noble demeanor ("the blood of Numenor ran nearly true in him" was said repeatedly) that I didn't like seeing him not live up to the same greatness in the movie.The scouring of the Shire would have been cool in a movie. The boldness of the returning hobbits would have been an awesome thing to portray. I assume that was a length issue. This was referring to the Gandalf-Saruman battle over Theoden. Hmmm, you've obviously not been to too many charismatic healing services. I agree it doesn't wander from the book, but the methodology was so much like the healers that all of us here who had been in that religious movement at any time immediately recognized it. Gandalf's face and hand motions as he held his hand up towards Theodoen; his commands for Saruman to leave Theoden, and Saruman's "He's mine," were all right out of a charismatic exorcism. The resemblance was too uncanny not to spur laughter.

Yeah, I could have done with a bit less dwarf-tossing, myself.

On the other hand I was pleasantly surprised that they kept in all the smoking. That would have been an easy thing for a producer to target so as not to offend modern audiences.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

what kind of comparison could you make to tolkien's book of lost tales, the silmarillion?and, like i said, parts of it. leviticus and numbers may be pretty dry reading, but job is fantastic drama. which ones? i've seen a few bad ones in my time.

Wait, let me make it clear, I am not trying to defend the Silmarillion. Indeed I might question it's status as a book of literature. Even Tolkein's writings on why he wrote it appear more to be an exercise in fictional linguistics. I totally believe that taste is completely in the eye of the beholder, so if you view the job story as fantastic drama, then fine. I have absolutely no clue how you view it that way when you know from the get go who is going to win the bet, there is no real moral, and there is no character arch unless you simply like to see a guy get kicked when he is down, and then further down. Not to mention that every character that is not Job is less than paper thin. But hey, whatever.In any case that does not make a book. The book has to be taken in its entirety. Well as I write this I wonder if it does actually. I guess the Bible is more like Grimm's Fairy Tales, or some other collection of stories, so you can judge it based on the worth of separate chapters. However, I still cannot see this.The old testament is a mix of poetics, instruction and oral history. The new testament is a collection of disjointed letters and discussions many of them repeating the same events. Unless appealing to a Rashomon-like interest in these events, the whole simply does not stand up as good literature.I do think there is some objective truth to that statement, rather than to whether you enjoy certain bits of it. It is disjointed, inconsistent, repetititious, and in some very long passages drier than hell on a very warm day. Not good literature.I should note that it was during a college course specifically on the Bible as literature, where I finally made my break wholly and completely from Xianity (and the other monotheistic religions) as well as much hope for any religion.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

well, in a similar fashion, the bible is a collection of collections of tales. it's not literature in the traditional sense. and some parts are better than others. parts of it are, excuse the phraseology, god awful. i don't think of it much different from, say, agammemnon. well, exclude the opening two chapters and the closing chapter for a second. those are a different work altogether, and this work of poetry has been bookended by it.you also have to remove the idea that it's the bible. we don't know who's going to win if we just read it as literature. job spends the book tormented, and trying to rationalize a great philosophical issue (why do bad things happen to good people?). if you read it from the perspective that job doubts the very existance of god, it takes on a kind of irony. and the ending is very deus-ex-machina. god from the heavens seems to solve all of his problems, just by his showing up. the two book ends don't really fit this story at all.as for moral, well, the two sections differ. the bookends are a very simple moral: don't give up faith. the poetics in the middle are intended, possibly, to say that we should not question god, because he knows what he's doing. or maybe something else. but you're right, no real answer is given. very modern, really. similarly, they had a problem with adapting LOTR into film, because they needed a way to give the female charaters a little more, you know, character.i think job is very ahead of its time, as form of philosophy and poetry. it's more than that. genesis itself is a collection of tales. even exodus, which is all one tale, comes from a couple sources. some stories are duplicated. in the end, it breaks down much further than the individual books. like i said, the bookends of job are entirely different than the middle. they don't even make sense together. as a whole, no. but i do think there are bits to be had that are great stories. otherwise, they wouldn't keep making movies out of 'em. yeah, studying the bible is having a similar effect on me as well. i do think there's some truth to it still, but i can't seem to justify about 95% of christianity.

I don't take that as modern, just poor writing. Personally, and yes I am saying this is personal opinion and not objective fact, I do not see any true philosophical debate within job. I see a guy getting tortured such that he would question, yet he never actually does. That is to say where is there an intellectual discourse on suffering and evil?To me it reads, here is a guy that suffered a lot and still there was faith. Have faith no matter what. That is a bad message in my eyes... a very very bad message.That may be why I like things like Buddhism where you have the Buddha roaming around to understand the suffering of others and contemplating its nature, and instead of coming up with "have faith", it has a more practical answer of how to live with the suffering. Much more introspection on that one. That isn't similar at all. One may say that to be more PC, or appealing to a wider range of viewers, they played up a couple of the female roles, because all the main characters were male in LOTR.That is nowhere near the same as there being only one character and the rest of the people fall like matchsticks. If this was a meditation of suffering, where was all of their suffering? Or do we only care about Job, and the rest are conveniences for him (like losing furniture)? I think we both know the answer to that question is yes. No doubt there are plenty of great story ideas, which can be built upon. I mean with all of that sex and violence even the most sordid audiences will be entertained. How could they not be?That does not mean it is great literature.I might also note two of the biggest reasons Bible based movies keep getting made is that the stories are free... no copyright worries... and they have a huge target audience that will generally buy it no matter what the quality. It could be that you have some sympathy for things within that religion. I was alienated from it from the beginning. I never felt right about it. It was just that I still had the feeling that maybe it could be true, and maybe I just wasn't giving it a thorough enough chance. All that ended with a final read as literature.I guess intellectually I will always admit that anything could be true and so in that fashion Xianity could be true. But that is not the same as actually believing "it could be true", as in there is a realistic chance.If I felt some personal connection to what the faith has to say, maybe I'd be able to hang on to something. I like much of ecclesiastes, and I like a few things that Jesus says. For the rest I'd believe LOTR has more of a chance of being real... manifestations of our memory of the past middle earth.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

6 of one, half dozen of the other. what's the difference, really?early writing, especially hebrew, was all written with some kind of moral involved. job was not, exactly.it's the lack of an answer that should drive you to question a little deeper. why is job satisfied with god's speech, even though it contains no reason for why the good suffer, and no mercy for job? i think the answer is simply that god showed up. looking at it from this perspective, all of job's speeches read like jabs at god, taunting him -- daring him to show up. job is almost an epic hero like odysseus, challenging a god. not something you see in earlier hebrew literature. well, job and his friends go back and forth a bit.
job: my life sucks. why does god hate me i'm a good man
friends: god is just, you must have done something to piss him off
job: no, i haven't
friends: but you must havein the end neither logic really plays out. the friends' position is shattered, but job repents for god-knows-what anyways, and get's everything back. a very confusing ending, really, neither side wins.there is a plain discourse on good and evil in the literal text, but the subtext, and i think the point of the book, is really something else. probably, but welcome to religion. is it really now?
1. all existance is suffering
2. suffering is caused by desire
3. desire can be removed
4. follow the 8 fold path.the buddhist answer really boils down to "be buddhist." similar tidbits are to be had in christianity, only they phrase it as separation from god instead of suffering. buddhism gets away better here because it is more of a philosophy than christianity. job is centered on one person, yes. but the friends do have some degree of character. they are the opposing argument, the agrument the author is addressing. he doesn't want to make them too convincing. because job is, after all, an argument for SOMETHING although it appears that author never quite makes it clear. hahaha. ever seen "a clockwork orange?" (or read the book?) as a whole, no. most of it isn't even meant to be literature.but, hey, what's greek tragedy but a bunch of death, revenge, and sexual debauchery, right? probably true, but you can't tell me that you don't find some of the stories moving? "prince of egypt" was a particularly good animated movie. i was too, actually. as far as the accuracy of the bible, i have no sympathy. i'm pretty positive now that exodus never happened, but that doesn't make the movie i mentioned above less powerful.similarly, i'm pretty sure lotr is fiction too. it's still a powerful story. well, i think there's some truth to be found in lotr too, and i'm pretty sure that never literally happened. (who knows, maybe tolkien was inspired? lol)

I don't believe the message, at the heart, is have faith no matter what. It goes deeper than that.The reason Job gives for regretting his earlier challenges to God is "I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I abhor myself, and I repent in dust and ashes."An insightful writer that I like very much once portrayed Job as showing up in the modern age to give advice. A modern person asked him, "What did you learn?" Job answered, "God didn't consult me when he made crocodiles," and then he walked away. As the modern person scratched their had about the answer, Job turned back and said, "Oh, and I saw him. It was all worth it. I saw him."So, while I don't want to reduce the heart of Job to one sentence, if I had to, my pick would not be "have faith no matter what." It would be "God, and even just a view of God, is worth it."If I can add one more thing. Back when I was a New Ager, and I didn't believe there was a personal God of any sort, I watched In the Presence of Mine Enemies. When the prisoners of war, some of whom had been mistreated and tortured for years, got on their knees and thanked God for their release, I was horrified. I literally shouted at the TV. I thought they should have been mad at God, if he existed, for what had happened to them, not thanking him for their release. Something in me, however, told me that there could be only one reason they were thanking God, and that was if God had been present for them in some helpful way during those years of imprisonment and torture. It was one of the more major events that led me to faith.I tell that story, because it says to me that Job's not fantasy, but occurs in modern day as well.