LOTR wins the BBC Big Read

[samwiselvr2008]

This makes my day, Lord of the Rings is #1 (I hope that people didn't vote because of the movie) and Charles Dickens didn't get in the top five!

[Elvedans]

I loved the way they had Ray Mears the survival expert and nature lover appealing for LOTR. He was so earnest and passionate about it and seemed genuinely surprised that anyone could say anything against it. I thought it unfair when the presenter accused LOTR of having no subtlety between good and evil. What the hell was he on when he read the book? Did he not notice MEN and DWARVES and the actions of ELVES and HOBBITS and GOLLUM and - in fact there is nothing but subtlety!

[Tuor of Gondolin]

Originally posted by Elvedans
I thought it unfair when the presenter accused LOTR of having no subtlety between good and evil. What the hell was he on when he read the book?
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The "presenter" is hardly the first to miss subtleties. Witness Edwin Muir's notable 1955 and some other 1950s reviewers attitude. Tolkien noted in 1954 ("Letters", # 154):

Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right.....But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.

As to Denethor, that is the singlemost thing of the ROTK movie that ticks me off, that they so mishandled Denethor's character