LORD OF THE FLICKS
by Website Manager/Cartoonist Ian Kay

For years, the realm of fantasy literature has been dominated by one virtually unreachable name - The Lord of the Rings. Though many have tried, none have been able to usurp the title as premier scribe of the fantastic in the possession of J.R.R. Tolkien...until now. An impoverished single mother named J.K. Rowlins has single-handedly brought a renaissance to the industry with the remarkable Harry Potter book series.

Since the release of the first of the books, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the popularity of the writings have spread like cholesterol in a fat man's arteries. Finally came the imminent arrival of a movie based upon the series, and although this new wave of fantasy readers rejoiced at the announcement, the older generation doesn't share in the excitement. Merely a month away from the opening date of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was announced the first of three films based upon The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien, writer of The Lord of the Rings, was an English Professor at Oxford University. His primo boat-floater was in British mythology, such as Beowulf and The Tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Therefore, his diction and sentence structure is sometimes complex and certainly not crystal clear. Also, when Tolkien set out to create his own World, he took it very seriously - he created entire cultures, from languages to shoe preferences to religious tendencies. The only problem with his painstaking and resultantly beautiful efforts are that he takes no time to fully explain them to you - it's assumed you know all the history of the Elves of northern Mirkwood, and you understand just how complex the Ford of Osgiliath is to cross.

Rowlins, on the other hand, is new age, and certainly sees no necessity to always remain proper in her language or her story. She isn't writing an epic, she is writing a tale. And where Tolkien created his own World, Rowlins simply modified the current one, making reader comprehension much less thought requiring. Her story is imaginative, creative, and individual of anything that has been previously written. Her characters are whimsically animated, and the scenes are interwoven with a witty sense of humor, where, although the book is childish in its plot and writing, can easily be enjoyed by people of all ages; something that Tolkien strongly lacks.

The Lord of the Rings is a brilliantly written story, yet it is extremely old fashioned when compared to the lively scribblings of J.K. Rowlins. When moviegoers walk out of Fellowship of the Rings, they'll be holding it up to the Harry Potter yard stick, and chances are it won't make it any higher than the composite amount of respect the Spice Girls still have to their name.