Posted by Duncan on December 15, 2001 at 00:24:21 from 152.163.197.178:
In Reply to: Re: Cherry Picking...? posted by Robert Hill on December 05, 2001 at 21:06:39:
Must just mention a favourite AR line - I can't remember it exactly but it's the line about 'AND DAT SMALL CAT!' in WDM, the Dutch pilot says it obviously, and it creases me up every time!
Interesting about Tolkien and AR. Their correspondence is fascinating, but AR was obviously quite quickly bored by Tolkien's academic treatise of faerie that he delivered in response to AR's sound recommendations for the Hobbit. They were my two favourite authors as a kid and probably still are as an adult, so I was interested to see that they were acquainted and more interested still to see their interchange - I think it's fairly clear that Ransome was the better writer and was interested in fairy stories and folklore from the point of view of a story-teller whereas Tolkien was interested in such things from the point of view of a theologian, a scholar and a linguist (interestingly, I suppose AR was interested in them as a linguist too...) I wouldn't mind sitting down with the correspondence and writing an article about that exchange some time.
Duncan