Poate cineva sa-mi traduca acest text?(fara google translate)Dau coroana si 30 de puncte.

A classic of our times or an escapist yarn? Although its popularity is unparalleled, some intellectuals dismiss The Lord of the Rings as boyish fantasy, Andrew O'Hehir defends Tolkien's ‘true myth’ as a modern masterpiece, and attempts to discover the secret of its success. In January 1997, reporter Susan Jeffreys of the London Sunday Times informed a colleague that J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings had been voted the greatest hook of the 20th century in a readers' poll conducted by Britain's Channel 4 and the Waterstone's bookstore chain. Her colleague responded: “What? Has it? Oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear.” Attitudes in America are arguably more relaxed about this kind of thing. No one from the American educated classes expressed much dismay when a 1999 poll of American on-line bookshop Amazon.com customers chose The Lord of the Rings as the greatest book not merely of the century but of the millennium. Tolkien's book is so deeply ingrained in popular culture, after all, that a great many of today's American academics and journalists probably still have those dog-eared paperbacks they read avidly in eighth grade with their hallucinatory mid-1970s cover art, stashed somewhere in the attic. Furthermore, members of the U.S. intelligentsia fully expect to have their tastes ignored, if not openly derided, by the public at large. To some American intellectuals it seems gratifying, even touching, that so many millions of readers will happily devour a work as complicated as The Lord of die Rings. Whatever one may make of it, it's a more challenging read than Gone With die Wind (runner-up in the Amazon survey), not to mention Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (fifth place). Hugely ambitious in scope, The Lord of the Rings occupies an uncomfortable position in 20th century literature. Tolkien's epic-poses a stern challenge to modern literature and its defenders. (Tolkien on his critics: “Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”) Yet The Lord of the Rings has enjoyed massive and enduring popularity, it would seem that Tolkien's work supplied something that was missing among the formal innovations of 20th century fiction, something for which readers were ravenous. But what was it, and why was it important? Answering this question properly would probably require a book rather than an article. But it seems that the crux of the matter lies in Tolkien's wholehearted rejection of modernity and modernism. This is what so powerfully attracts some readers, and just as powerfully repels others. In his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, T.A. Shippey expands on this notion by arguing that Tolkien saw his realm of Middle-earth not as fiction or invention, but as the recovery of something genuine that had become buried beneath fragments of fairy tale and nursery rhyme.