In class on Thursday, we all discussed essentially redacting pieces of information without changing or altering the story. I think this type of redacting would be fun to do to the whole book. People redact for a living, getting the cut-and-dry or need-to-know on important documents.
If someone were to actually redact, or maybe even multiple, I would be interested to see what people would redact. A fun experiment would to have a side-by-side redaction with someone with little Tolkien knowledge, versus someone like Dr. Donovan, and see what would come out of their redactions.
Tolkien is known for his vivid imagery, and I would be intrigued to see how much would get taken out and see how much we could still picture. I mean, it sucks that most people (like myself) put a lot of the imagery from the movies (still upset To Bombadil was not even MENTIONED) and not from their imagination; However, Tom is a perfect example. How important are certain things and characters when it comes to a need-to-know basis.
I guess I pose the question:
What would you expect to see redacted in both a noob and expert in Tolkien's work? Why?
Its interesting that you talk about the movies and Tom being removed from them, and I think its an interesting comapareison between book and movie. You talked about how someone might remove the more descriptive passages to cut down the length, and in a way, thats what the movies do. They can cut down on the descriptions because of the visual aspect of the media. Thats a big reason that movies are a lot shorter than books (even if LotR is still a long movie collection).
ReplyDeleteIn regaurds to your question, I think it would depend on the person. I think a noob is more likely to cut a lot of the more lengthy description passages, but I dont think as much as one might expect, at least if they are a book person (I am assuming you mean noob only in terms of familiarity of Tolkien rather than not much of a reader haha). I think someone more familar with Tolkien's work would be less inclined to cut things, because the closer a person is to a topic, its probable the less they want to change (but some people like to change it a lot, and I guess thats where fanfiction comes into play).