Hi Lee,

Don't worry, I mostly disagree with everything you wrote anyway

1. The place to read/target audience of a book is absolutely relevant. You have to understand the social context in which is was written. At the start of the 20th century in middle class england children read books in bed. Book reading was a very private type of escapism for a child, and childrens books were far more central to a child's social upbringing than they are today. Remember that many children, including Tolkien I suspect, in the middle classes were sent to boarding schools, so a feeling of intimacy and empathy with the characters was something that was vital. There are a whole plethora of boarding school related book series, involving frienships, and coping with the unknown or unexpected, that originated during this period.

Kids in middle class america today who live in their family homes with TV and brothers and sisters do not have the same requirement for these aspects of feeling a sense of belonging with the characters in the story. They especially don't need it when it is projected at them in a class full of other children. There's no private connection with the book.

2. They fact that Tolkien regularly includes events that are not structured into the story as part of a connected sequence may be exactly what gives the books such a feeling of reality, and may have been consciously used a literary device. Real life is not a series of connected structured events.

3. I allow that he can say that "in his subjective opinion, book A is better than book B", but I completely refute that it is possible to seriously grade books objectively on any linear scale. This is like saying that the Mona lisa is better than The Scream or that Stravinsky is better than Schopin. Ridiculous!

Hope you don't take that personally either, its all my subjective opinion anyway; interesting discussion.
Dave L