Harry Potter and the First Time Readers

One of the things I hear over and over is how Tolkien is creating a soft magic system. I think in my mind I define that just as an ambiguous magic system…one where you don’t see magic all that often and then one that also doesn’t go into detail about some of the things that are happening. So I don’t know if some of you have any answers to these questions because it feels like Tolkien’s work just stays forever at a soft magic system. I would be very intrigued and curious if he ever went into detail about that? To be honest, it feels to me like he wouldn’t but I’m only a tiny percentage into the work of Tolkien.

When I was in college, I took a writing class. In that class one of the very first things that they taught was to never, ever, under any circumstances, switch the perspective of your writing. Now, there was a reason for why they forced us into this, because they wanted us to stick to either first person or third person for our writing, and they believed that when you switched perspectives too much is messes with your ability to keep that straight, and it messes with the readers ability to follow what you write. But there was another secondary reason that my teacher gave after the lecture. She said, essentially, the reason I want you to not switch perspectives when you write a story is because it’s really hard to do that in any sort of convincing way to your audience. It’s just flat out hard to do it well. Plenty of authors do it, but we needed to learn the rules before we learned how to break them.

I think you can only really know the measure of a man by how they handle adversity and challenges. In this case, you can only really know the measure of a hobbit by how they handle adversity. None of us like to be in those situations, but how we handle them is the thing that matters the most. I think that’s a huge theme of Tolkien’s writing right now.

What happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force? And then both of those things meet Gimli? It’s a question that the philosophers have debated for ages, and it was a question that was settled by JRR Tolkien in the chapter The Riders of Rohan, when Eomer meets Aragorn, and then Gimli steps in after something ticks him off.

The Riders of Rohan chapter of The Two Towers is one of the most tense chapters of literature that I have read in a long time. I’m a movie fan, so I know Merry and Pippen are alive, but if you were reading this with no knowledge of the movies or the fate or Merry and Pippen I don’t know if I’ve ever read a chapter that plays with your emotions more than this one.