Some things never change

[author_by_night]

As some of you know, I collect antique magazines. Well, today I purchased two - one from 1967. (No offense to anyone on my flist who was in preschool at that time!)

Anyway - I was reading Letters to the Editor, and there was some rage.

Someone, in the previous issue, had  insulted LOTR. About five fans defended LOTR, saying that it was only a children's book if you made it one, etc.

Hmm... sounds very, very familiar...

 

As the title says - some things never change.

 

(Oh, and can someone please tell me how LOTR can be for eight year olds when I couldn't will myself through the second one at sixteen? I don't see how any kid has the attention span for that).

 

 

Comments

[story645.livejournal.com]

I thought only the hobbit was a children's story. Technically though, it was considered a children's book cause the themes were considered simplistic, *rollseyes* and cause it was pretty clean. I think the kids got the better end of the deal, and I think we still do.

[feylin17.livejournal.com]

my dad read the hobbit and then the trillogy to my sister and i when we were little (pre school and kindergarden).

My sister hated the books with a passion and still does to this day. I loved them so much that I used to get caught re-reading them in elementary school. I have a 5th grade teacher that brings it up whenever i go back to visit him. :)

anyways- i think that it depends on the 8 year old, not the book when you're talking about appropriateness.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

Man, I feel weird. I read Baby-Sitter's club at eight, and people told me how mature I was for reading that. (I believed them until I found out everyone reads them at eight - I guess people assumed they were for really amazing readers because the characters were thirteen).

But yeah, I guess, but I still can't imagine many kids under ten reading - and following - LOTR. It *happens*, but its not for all. I don't even know many [i]eleven[/i] year olds who have enough patience to sit down and talk for longer than five minutes, let alone read about the vastness of the mountains.

[feylin17.livejournal.com]

totaly OT but,

i think that if kids didn't spend hours infront of TV they'd have patience for things like books. TV shows are all short- they're borken up by comercials, nothing lasts longer than 10min.

[jamc91.livejournal.com]

Actually, my friend told me her dad read 'The Hobbit' to her when she was six.

I had to read that in English. It wasn't that bad. At least I didn't fall asleep in the middle of it. And yes, I do fall asleep in class occasionally.

I was like that at eleven. Although I don't talk much anyway...I prefer listening, if the topic is right.

I tried reading LotR and I couldn't even get past the first six pages. It seemed interesting at first when our teacher gave us a copy of the first few pages, so I bought all three (they were, conveniently, on sale) and I couldn't...go...on. I fell asleep in the afternoon on the sofa, didn't wake up until dinner, and had a really hard time sleeping that night. :P

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

Oh, The Hobbit - that's kinda different. I think The Hobbit is to LOTR what the first two HP books are like for the HP series. Important, but much more childish.

[sannalim.livejournal.com]

I tried LOTR for the first time when I was twelve and just slogged through it. I didn't pick it up again until I was nineteen and the buzz about "OMB, this crazy guy is making movies of LOTR and he's shooting all three at once so they'll all get done!" started up. Then I quite enjoyed them.

[talimeeka.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised. I never heard anyone calling LotR a children's story. I always though the LotR fandom was lucky in that way when we were not.

[parallactic.livejournal.com]

That's funny. Maybe JKR will get out of the kiddie lit classification, maybe not. JKR is writing about young characters, while Tolkien wasn't.

I read Tolkien when I was 12, and just tore right through them. Then read them again, and thought of nothing but Middle-Earth for months. I even tried to slog through the Silmarillion. The funny thing is, I don't think I could sit through Tolkien today. When I was younger, I loved the descriptive bits, the epic scale, and my tastes ran towards baroque writing. Nowadays, I suspect I have a shorter attention span, and I want conflict, and faster pacing, and I'm willing to put a book down if I'm not into it after 100 pages.

[moonlinnet.livejournal.com]

Funny...

I think that books on the whole were more...wordy in those days. When you see books like Les Mis or Jane Austen or anything by the Brontë sisters or other older books, there's generally miles and miles of exposition before the plot actually starts.

That said, I still don't think it's a children's book...

[moonlinnet.livejournal.com]

And of course, Tolkien's not nearly as old as those authors. =)

[ghostlygrove.livejournal.com]

Just because something has fantastical beings doesn't mean it's for kids. The first time I ever set eyes on anything belonging to LotR was when I was, oohhh... 15? The Hobbit.

Now, I don't know if there was anything particularly wrong with *me*, but I find (looking back, after seeing the movies and what was really supposed to be going on) that if you end up picturing Gandalf as one of the dwarves (or is it "dwarFs"? I read it in Spanish, so I don't really know :P ) so that you get this vision of a bunch of little dudes running around in pointy hats, then there's something wrong, as well as if you picture Gollum as a SNAKE... for all the descriptions this series is said to have... OY.

And oh my GOD, the bowing and the smoke rings and the songs and the names... If ever there was a case of TMI, that's it.

I only have The Hobbit and The Two Towers. A long time after I saw the movies, I thought, "Eh, maybe I just wasn't mature enough or something. I should give Two Towers another chance now that I know what's going on".

Nope. Even now it can't keep my attention.

So, LotR (books): lost case, it's off to Saint Brutus's with you. Harry Potter: WHAT A RELIEF!! *cries with joy!*

[ginnyhaha.livejournal.com]

I read The Hobbit happily when I was probably 8 or 9, but I couldn't get past the first LotR book. They just don't keep me interested.

The little girl I babysit for is just 9, and she's read all of them. And apparently understood them. She can certianly tell me 'what's wrong' in the films, although she knows them well eough to quite each one, too. But she is a pretty strange child overall, really.

[author-by-night.livejournal.com]

Well, as I said - there are kids out there. And I mean, I think a lot more eight year olds *can* read LOTR - it's not about can or can't, it's about patience.

[jan-aq.livejournal.com]

I never thought as LoTR as a Children's story. I thought that maybe the Hobbit could be for children, but that the LotR books were more for grownups. And I officially read my first adult Star Trek novel when I was 11, but that doesn't recommend much, lol. I don't think that books really should be classified as Adult or Children's. Only some books are accepible for Children and others aren't. I think that simplifying children's books often ruins them.

[lvblheron.livejournal.com]

Hex, I'm a fairly well-educated, fairly intelligent adult, and I still can't get through the verbage of The Hobbit. Someone on my flist recently told me that the first book she ever read by herself was "Great Expectations"--at the age of 8. But that was 20 years ago, in a different country.

I think kids today don't have the capacity to sit and read things like Dickens and Tolkein, because video media has ruined their attention spans. Well, that and books like "The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants" that are all pop-culture and very little substance.

To be honest, I've observed that a couple of years of reading fanfiction has made it more difficult for me to 'get into' a "real book" again. I think it's engendered a certain form of adult-onset ADD in me :0)

[auvergne.livejournal.com]

I read [i]The Hobbit[/i] at nine. I don't know if I even considered LOTR after that. Still haven't read the series to this day.

Some kid in my grade eleven English class asked the teacher if he could read LOTR for his project. Teach said no, that his ten-year-old son was reading them, that they weren't complex enough. As I haven't read them yet, I can't comment.

I read [i]Jane Eyre[/i] at eleven. I read (or started to read) [i]The Diary of Anne Frank[/i] at seven or eight, and got really freaked out, so I put it down.

I guess some kids are just precocious. Now that I study English literature, I see that most pre-Modern novels can be read by any kid with the patience, but that they're worth studying later on, too.

[auvergne.livejournal.com]

I'd fix the italics, but I'm lazy. Sorry!

[amberdiceless.livejournal.com]

I was given the boxed set of LOTR and The Hobbit for Christmas the year I was in fifth grade, and read them all through within a few days (I'd seen the animated version of Return of the King and was delighted to find out from my much-older brother that there were books about Frodo!) I picked up the The Silmarillion a little while later and read through it in a couple of hours. I've read all the books multiple times in the 24 years since.

Now, I won't claim that at that age I understood all of Tolkien's prose or the subtleties of the story, but I was able to pick up most of what was going on from the context. In fact it probably improved my vocabulary no end.

But then, I was a voracious reader almost from day one, more so than most kids I knew (or many adults.)

[scionofgrace.livejournal.com]

Fantasy = Children's literature, naturally.

Grrr.

My dad would read us The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia before we went to bed, and I loved them. I read LotR at the age of eleven and loved that, too. But it really depends on the kid: there's a lot of folks who can't even make it through until late teens/early twenties.