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TildeATH posted:I'm surprised somebody still hasn't written LoTR or Silmarillion from the perspective of a Romantic Sauron or Morgoth. Sauron could represent the long-oppressed East and Orcs, it would be easy. Morgoth would be harder and would have to be Gothic Romantic as per Folderol. Okay, story time. Back in the middle of the Cold War a Russian dude translated the books but nobody was able to publish them for years due to censorship issues and bootleg handwritten copies were passed around for years. An officially published translation of The Hobbit and Fellowship were available in 1982 but the translation project was abandoned and no full publication happened until after the collapse of the USSR. A significant underground fandom grew up (basically LotR became the basis for Russian SF/F fandom the way Star Trek was in the US) and people sure as hell began writing fanfiction. Not only to complete the "incomplete" story but to to give backstory to the world - I don't know for sure but I bet Silmarillion was never available except as imported/smuggled English language editions. A lot of this got informally published and grew and was passed around as a side effect of the samizdat dissident movement. Anyway, some Russki had read Silmarillion and did indeed write a "dissident history" influenced by samizdat literature called The Black Book of Arda. I don't think it's ever been fully translated into English but this site was giving it a shot as of a couple years ago. More well known - and more available - is a dissident sequel to LotR called "The Last Ringbearer". Basically it tells the story of the aftermath of the war that got mythologized as the War of the Ring, from the point of view of a group of Mordorian refugees ("Orcs" being propagandized Mordorian humans) along with Faramir, who deserts to prevent Gandalf and the Elves from inflicting cultural and technological stagnation upon the world. Translation available as an ebook here. I've tried a few times to get through it but never managed it - the idea is pretty awesome but the story bogs me down in Umbar when the whole thing turns into a mediocre spy novel for a hundred pages or so. An alternative take is Jacqueline Carey's Banewreaker, an admitted Tolkien pastiche written from the point of view of a Morgoth analogue who isn't the bad guy he's been made out to be, but isn't squeaky clean either. EDIT: Beaten about the Carey book. Also, Tolkien's views on Orcs were pretty much continually changing, and he was never happy with their portrayal in the trilogy or his writings which were edited into Silmarillion, because as a Catholic he was uncomfortable with the idea of a whole race who were condemned to evil with no possible redemption. He never got around to solving that moral dilemma, though, so we don't know what he would have done if he had gotten to it. Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 09:38 on Mar 27, 2014 |
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Mar 27, 2014 08:25
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SoggyBobcat posted:Were Orcs ever described as mortal in the same vein as Men or even Dwarves? I had always assumed that they were immortal like the Elves. I'm not sure, I do remember something about them being "diminished" or "lesser" since they are a crude mockery of Elves. The problem with this is that Orcs do not live long lives in general, they usually die in conflict against the Free People or amongst themselves. Who knows how old some of the Orcs in the First Era were? They might have lived for centuries as generals since they had a pretty big period in which they were very succesfull in their campaigns against the Elves and Men.
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Mar 27, 2014 09:04
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There's a great conversation in RotK that Sam overhears when he's trying to figure out how to rescue Frodo, who has been poisoned by Shelob and captured by orcs. Two of them are talking about the "old days" and mention the "Great Siege" as if they were there. This is probably the War of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, where Sauron was defeated at the end of the Second Age. Three thousand years prior. They also talk about the Nazgul as Sauron's favorites "nowadays", implying that they remember a time before the Ring-wraiths were around. Since the Nine Rings were distributed sometime midway through the Second Age, that corroborates the dating and possibly adds at least a thousand years. So at least some orcs are old as hell, and possibly immortal if not killed by violence. Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Mar 27, 2014 |
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Mar 27, 2014 09:27
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What's more, there's very little reason for that scene to even be written that way other than to establish that backstory. The primary narrative goal was of course to convey to Sam that Frodo was alive; but there's like a billion other ways their conversation could have gone, all of which would have been way more natural, if Tolkien weren't taking the opportunity to explicitly worldbuild some immortal orcs. Given that one of the biggest twists-on-reality at the heart of the Silmarillion was that Death was a "gift" that deathless races might envy, and on top of that a special invention that Eru granted to Men, it probably makes sense that Orcs being immortal was just a "default" state and it never occurred to Morgoth to make them otherwise. Dwarves and Hobbits and animals all sort of muddle this up though.
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Mar 27, 2014 12:54
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Dwarves are the creation of Aule so I think perhaps he didn't have the power to make them immortal. The orcs are twisted elves so presumably they keep their immortality. I think Hobbits really are men or related to men?
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Mar 27, 2014 12:58
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concerned mom posted:Dwarves are the creation of Aule so I think perhaps he didn't have the power to make them immortal. The orcs are twisted elves so presumably they keep their immortality. I think Hobbits really are men or related to men? A crossbreed between dwarves and men? Hobbits are so interesting.
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Mar 27, 2014 13:39
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Hobbits are men who got smaller over a few thousand years from a writer who was not a Darwinian.
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Mar 27, 2014 14:09
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I'm pretty sure Tolkien explicitly says somewhere that Hobbits count as the race of Men, but how they came to be is one of those no one knows things.
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Mar 27, 2014 14:09
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Hobbits are Maiar
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Mar 27, 2014 14:32
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Hobbits are to mushrooms what Ents are to trees. The Shire is full of entwives and little mushroom people.
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Mar 27, 2014 15:15
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redshirt posted:Yeah, I didn't mean like a D&D level power measurement (though no doubt D&D is based on exactly this story), but rather Sauron must have known the risk he was taking by creating the Rings as such. He obviously thought it was worth it since he did it, but I wonder about his own calculations - he must have been doing some kind of cost-benefit analysis. Heh. Like, literally if I put X percent of myself in these Rings I'll lose Y percent of my own vitality. Sauron was a captive at the time he made the rings. He basically was a huge dick while working under Morgoth and then when that poo poo all got settled he was put under watch. He fooled them into thinking he was "reformed" and made the ring in secret specifically so that he could get his dark lord thing going on again. I suspect he felt it was perhaps the only chance he had to get back on the old dark and shady side of things and probably didn't care too much about how much of himself he was putting into the ring if it meant his freedom.
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Mar 27, 2014 15:45
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rypakal posted:Hobbits are men who got smaller over a few thousand years from a writer who was not a Darwinian. According to Tolkien's fictional backstory for it, The Lord of the Rings is meant to be an account of a mythological war that purports to have been written by several people who lived through it (and who had their own fairly clear cultural biases). But like many such accounts, it was preserved by being hand copied and those who did are explicitly said to have revised and corrected the text (likely adding their own biases to it). Since the original has been lost, there is no way to know the extent of these changes for sure. Additionally, the year numbering system used in the book is completely different from our own, so it cannot even be known when those events supposedly took place. For the same reason, it cannot be known when the book itself (either the original or the surviving copy which Tolkien translated) was written. For all we know, the text could be a complete forgery. This makes it pretty likely that all the different "races" of Middle-Earth are in fact human beings who simply represent different ethnic and religious groups. Hobbits were just one ethnic group that was very short for some reason. Elves represent an old (prehistoric?) culture that was displaced by the "normal" Men. Orcs represent several groups that were universally reviled. And so on. In the case of the more obviously strange races (such as Ents), they personify one of the forces of nature (in this case, primeval forests). ... It's me, I'm the biggest nerd in the room. For real, until the Renaissance, it was fairly common for authors to write something and stick the name of someone famous on the cover. Just look at the Greek and Latin names on this page.
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Mar 27, 2014 16:00
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Honestly all that is fun to think about at times but jesus sometimes I just want a good fantasy book instead of pretending it's a real mythological text and all these cool things didn't really happen in a magical fantasy world.
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Mar 27, 2014 16:12
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Kassad posted:... It's me, I'm the biggest nerd in the room. Maybe that's the case in most rooms, but not this room.
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Mar 27, 2014 16:14
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Levitate posted:Sauron was a captive at the time he made the rings. He basically was a huge dick while working under Morgoth and then when that poo poo all got settled he was put under watch. He fooled them into thinking he was "reformed" and made the ring in secret specifically so that he could get his dark lord thing going on again. I suspect he felt it was perhaps the only chance he had to get back on the old dark and shady side of things and probably didn't care too much about how much of himself he was putting into the ring if it meant his freedom. I don't have access to any texts at the moment, but I thought Sauron was a free man when he created the Rings, posing as the awesome Maiar "Annatar", the "Lord of Gifts". Am I wrong?
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Mar 27, 2014 16:34
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Levitate posted:Sauron was a captive at the time he made the rings. He basically was a huge dick while working under Morgoth and then when that poo poo all got settled he was put under watch. He fooled them into thinking he was "reformed" and made the ring in secret specifically so that he could get his dark lord thing going on again. I suspect he felt it was perhaps the only chance he had to get back on the old dark and shady side of things and probably didn't care too much about how much of himself he was putting into the ring if it meant his freedom. Nah, Sauron faked repentance when the Host of the Valar overthrew Morgoth but refused to go to Valinor and escaped in short order and went into hiding. He had already established his stronghold in Mordor when he disguised himself as Annatar and went to the Elves to teach them how to forge Rings of Power. That was about SA 1500.
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Mar 27, 2014 16:35
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Levitate posted:Honestly all that is fun to think about at times but jesus sometimes I just want a good fantasy book instead of pretending it's a real mythological text and all these cool things didn't really happen in a magical fantasy world. The great thing about Tolkien is you can do both. Dude thought out a whole fake textual history of his stories, and used that to justify his revisions to the Hobbit and whatnot, but would have wanted everyone to just take the story at face value, at least at first. A meta-textual thing that occurred to me is that the Ainulindale sort of presents two creation stories: the great music, and the Valar actually descending to Arda to shape the world. It suggests, to me, two different accounts edited together by a later redactor. It's just like Genesis.
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Mar 27, 2014 16:36
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Kassad posted:
It's a nice theory but I don't see how it makes it "pretty likely", its just one interpretation. The whole book is fantasy and the events that go on in the book are of a fantastical nature. For instance if you take the Bible, it has supernatural beings in it. Now the historical events in the Bible that happened only happened with human beings in instead of angels and demons (if you don't believe in them of course). But to anyone who is spiritually invested in the Bible, those beings were and are real. They don't have to be Men. You have a good argument that the 'races' get twisted and exaggerated over time, but I really don't see any evidence that supernatural races were actually men and there's decent evidence that they were not, or at least believed not to be by the authors considering they are all involved in the mythology. I guess we should all believe what we want to, and I'm firmly in the camp of the religious manwe zealot.
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Mar 27, 2014 16:46
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:Nah, Sauron faked repentance when the Host of the Valar overthrew Morgoth but refused to go to Valinor and escaped in short order and went into hiding. He had already established his stronghold in Mordor when he disguised himself as Annatar and went to the Elves to teach them how to forge Rings of Power. That was about SA 1500. Dang you're right I thought, haven't read that in awhile Omnomnomnivore posted:The great thing about Tolkien is you can do both. Dude thought out a whole fake textual history of his stories, and used that to justify his revisions to the Hobbit and whatnot, but would have wanted everyone to just take the story at face value, at least at first. Yeah and I think it is cool that there is that extra layer to it all but I guess I get antsy when it gets to the point where people like "yes but see the REAL story of the LOTRs is this and Gandalf was a tyrant and the elves are Nazi's  " (not saying anyone here is doing that).I think it can just be looked at in distinct ways rather than one view invalidating the other. And yeah Ainulindale definitely reminded me of Genesis retold in a slightly different way
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Mar 27, 2014 17:03
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It also feels like it draws a bit from Greek Mythology where the Pantheon take over from the Titans.
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Mar 27, 2014 17:16
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Kassad posted:This makes it pretty likely that all the different "races" of Middle-Earth are in fact human beings who simply represent different ethnic and religious groups. Hobbits were just one ethnic group that was very short for some reason. Elves represent an old (prehistoric?) culture that was displaced by the "normal" Men. Orcs represent several groups that were universally reviled. And so on. In the case of the more obviously strange races (such as Ents), they personify one of the forces of nature (in this case, primeval forests). I think Tolkien was quite explicit that Elves were not Men, and merely shared some of the accidents of their condition. I seem to recall from Unfinished Tales that the reason we don't see even the Nandor or Sindar elves today is that eventually elves would fade, their spirits overcoming their physical bodies. Likewise, Orcs were maligned and misshapen Elves, and thus not Men. Hobbits are admittedly a conundrum, and one I'm not certain was ever really addressed.
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Mar 27, 2014 17:46
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Oh they're around, they're just really good at keeping out of sight.
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Mar 27, 2014 17:55
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They've all moved to the Shire movie set in NZ and no one even suspects.
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Mar 27, 2014 18:23
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SHISHKABOB posted:Oh they're around, they're just really good at keeping out of sight. It's really sad what happened to the Hobbits. As men grew and multiplied the Hobbits were bullied off their land and forced to live like animals hiding from people in the forest. They lost their culture, and dwindled to only a few, their time spent primarily in the search for food.
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Mar 27, 2014 18:31
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I believe at some point Tolkien said elves were basically the equivalent of Adam before the apple.
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Mar 27, 2014 20:32
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Hobbits all moved to the Netherlands after being forced out of their comfortable holes in England as a result of the enclosure movement starting in the sixteenth century
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Mar 27, 2014 22:03
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Well aren't hobbit still around and we Big Folk don't see them cause we're just clumsy oafs? I'm sure that's somewhere in there or maybe I'm thinking of another series. My personal idea is that hobbits are somehow akin to Bombadil in that they're spirits of the land itself that have taken bodily form. Perhaps he's even created them. I'm sure the guy can change form but it's worth nothing that Bombadil doesn't look like a man but rather a large hobbit when they first see him.
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Mar 27, 2014 22:10
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:There's a great conversation in RotK that Sam overhears when he's trying to figure out how to rescue Frodo, who has been poisoned by Shelob and captured by orcs. Yes, but then a chapter later the orcs all kill each other in a fight. It's hard to believe any orc could survive more than a few years (months/weeks/days).
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Mar 27, 2014 22:34
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I believe at some point Tolkien said elves were basically the equivalent of Adam before the apple. Yeah, I remember this too.
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Mar 27, 2014 22:45
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Octy posted:Yes, but then a chapter later the orcs all kill each other in a fight. It's hard to believe any orc could survive more than a few years (months/weeks/days). Collective consciousness. All orcs have the memories of all orcs before them, because they're remade over and over when they die to save on materials, like recycling clay.
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Mar 27, 2014 23:04
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InediblePenguin posted:Collective consciousness. All orcs have the memories of all orcs before them, because they're remade over and over when they die to save on materials, like recycling clay. When orcs die I'm pretty sure they go to the Halls of Mandos to eventually be reborn as their past elf self. Elfself.
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Mar 28, 2014 10:21
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concerned mom posted:When orcs die I'm pretty sure they go to the Halls of Mandos to eventually be reborn as their past elf self. Elfself. Thats got to be super awkward...
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Mar 28, 2014 10:23
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I think my working assumption has been that there must be some orcish counterpart to the Halls of Mandos where orcs go when they die, then they just respawn. Which is why they're so murderous. Life is like a big video game to them.
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Mar 28, 2014 12:56
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p. 411 Morgoth's Ring(HoME 10) posted:It remains therefore possible there was an Elvish strain in the Orcs. These may then even have been mated with beasts (sterile!) — and later Men. Their life-span would be diminished . And dying they would go to Mandos and be held in prison until the end.
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Mar 28, 2014 14:14
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Not exactly fair on them. They never asked to be created that way.
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Mar 28, 2014 14:54
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Catsplosion posted:Not exactly fair on them. They never asked to be created that way. Well, maybe Eru will take that into account at the Judgment.
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Mar 28, 2014 15:05
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Not sure where exactly that quote is from but as mentioned before a lot of stuff was never really finalized as the "definitive version" and we have a lot of information from Tolkien's notes and letters, but much of it is him working out ideas or things he changed later or meant to change later.
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Mar 28, 2014 15:07
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How are new Orcs born? The movies indicated they were born out of mud, somehow. I don't remember how the books addressed this.
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Mar 28, 2014 15:29
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There is no consistent theory on Orcs. You can dig and dig but really this is one area where I think it is ok to make up Head Canon.
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Mar 28, 2014 15:33
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I like to think there really are no new orcs and they are all corrupted Elves. The amount of time between Morgoth finding the elves and their exodus to Aman was a long time.
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Mar 28, 2014 15:51
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