|
"motion pictures are witchcraft"
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2016 23:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 05:39 |
|
|
Chris doesn't have an imaginative bone in his body, and has made his life's work editing and compiling everything his father did. Someone else interpreting daddy's books, and interpreting them well, is simply intolerable. That's just my take on it, not really based on anything I've read him say.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 03:30
|
|
|
Doesn't it boil down to JRRT selling the film rights only as a last resort when he was strapped for cash? And that because he sold them unwillingly, his inheritors believe the movies shouldn't be made? Either that or Jackson & co made changes to the "perfect" book, therefore it's an abomination and should be shunned.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 04:04
|
|
|
webmeister posted:Doesn't it boil down to JRRT selling the film rights only as a last resort when he was strapped for cash? And that because he sold them unwillingly, his inheritors believe the movies shouldn't be made? Tolkien talks a lot in the Letters about selling the rights and the various decisions various script writers were making in various attempted screenplays of his work. The problem Tolkien generally had -- and this seems to be Christopher Tolkien's general issue also but to a far greater degree -- is that movie makers have a much less granular idea of what's "important" within the work than Tolkien did. see http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_210 for more details. I honestly think JRR would've been mostly fine with Jackson's LotR, but probably would've gone ape-doodoo over Jackson's three-part Hobbit. Christopher Tolkien is the kind of fan who gets really upset that they replaced Glorfindel, an elf so unimportant Tolkien forgot whether he was dead or not, with Arwen, a major character who otherwise has no screen time outside the Appendices. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Sep 12, 2016 |
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 05:45
|
|
|
What's the public domain date for the various Tolkien works? Google says 2044. Christ what a draconian law.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 05:47
|
|
|
Part of me figures JRRT is probably forming his own quasar just from spinning so hard in his grave, and part of me is like... well... half of the fun for him, I think, was pretending that he had discovered this ancient myth and its languages and its historical writings, and was just a bemused Victorianist Oxford don translating it in his spare time. He seemed exceedingly comfortable with, and even delighted by, the ignorance of his characters about their actual world history; he loved the idea of a dark and shadowed past carried forward in retellings, the names and great deeds deforming in the passage from mouth to mouth until their impact is lost like a drop of milk in a bowl of water. In Rivendell, Bilbo sings a jaunty song about a sailor who goes in search of some nebulous salvation, there's a boat and a star and a bird or something. Very hobbity. Elrond sorta laughs it off, but you get the idea that Bilbo has written a folk melody about some ancient, splendid hero of the lost elven world, and that he doesn't really have a full grasp on the weight of what Earendil actually did. Later, you read the Silmarillion, and you start to get some idea of what Earendil was giving up, what he was seeking, what a hopeless quest he set for himself... and you realize that he was Elrond's father. You can practically hear JRRT chuckling to himself about the audacity of Bilbo, the perverse delight he took in hiding these legends in plain sight. He changed the names of the main characters, anglicizing them so that we English speakers could really get the cultural silliness of someone named Maura Labingi saving the world. He reminded us over and over that the old ways are being lost, that the old tales are fading away, that what remains has often been diluted and edited and even completely rewritten. He wrote an unreliable history for a world he loved, and he made sure that we knew it: we read the Quenya Silmarillion, we aren't quite sure what happened in Gondor (unless we read the appendices and auxiliary material), we don't know who the gently caress Bombadil is even supposed to be. (My dad was convinced that Bombadil and Goldberry are just Beren and Luthien reborn into the world. I disagree but it's a pretty fun idea.) All this is to say: Tolkien knew that the victor writes the history. Tolkien knew that the myth twists to fit the culture. Tolkien knew that the official account reflects the political reality. Which is why I don't feel bad for subjecting his works to historiographical pseudoanalysis, for postulating weird elf vaginas, for treating his works as the biased writings of archaic historians as translated and anglicized by a professor of linguistics. When I dig into the lore, I don't feel bad at all for reading whole chapters between the lines he wrote. I think he would hate my conclusions... but I think he would enjoy my methods. So I'm sitting down to write about Eagles.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 06:10
|
|
|
What are you talking about
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 07:14
|
|
|
JRRT would have liked to see other people's attempts at interpreting LotR and related works even if he disagreed violently with their conclusions, and thus would have enjoyed the movies.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 07:31
|
|
|
Poldarn posted:Chris doesn't have an imaginative bone in his body, and has made his life's work editing and compiling everything his father did. Someone else interpreting daddy's books, and interpreting them well, is simply intolerable. Thankfully, Brian Herbert has a much more reasonable attitude, which led to all those magnificent Dune sequels. Just imagine, we could have had Lord of the Rings 2, co-written by Kevin J. Anderson.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 08:46
|
|
|
Hannibal Rex posted:Thankfully, Brian Herbert has a much more reasonable attitude, which led to all those magnificent Dune sequels. Just imagine, we could have had Lord of the Rings 2, co-written by Kevin J. Anderson. Help I'm screaming and I can't stop
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 11:29
|
|
|
cptn_dr posted:Help I'm screaming and I can't stop Oh, come on, they're not that baaaahahahahahaha, sorry, I can't do this with a straight face.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 11:40
|
|
|
The movies are the best movies you could have gotten out of the books. No they are not as granular, yes they cut that thing you really like, but as films they are generally well made. The performances are great, the effects work, the plot never really drags anywhere. We can't do Bombadil because it's a bad idea to bring your plot to a screeching halt for 15 minutes over something that isn't mentioned again. Imladris has to look like that because we need a big visual metaphor to get the majesty and power of the elves across without stopping to talk about their history in detail. Anarion gets cut because the plot of the film can do without him. You cast Liv Tyler for some reason. And so on. Books and films are just different mediums and if you aren't willing to make some big changes going from the former to the latter then the latter is going to suck.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 13:11
|
|
|
One of the reasons the Bakshi film was so awful was that it tried to stick too closely to the text. A novel makes a lousy screenplay.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 13:24
|
|
|
For better or worse, I can't picture the book characters as different to the film cast now.The barrow wights are my favourite part of FotR and I'm kind of glad they didn't appear in the film so I have my imaginative versions in my memory.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 13:27
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:I honestly think JRR would've been mostly fine with Jackson's LotR, but probably would've gone ape-doodoo over Jackson's three-part Hobbit. Do you want to expand on this? If your thinking is similar to elise's, I imagine one of the biggest reasons this would be true is that the Hobbit movies go to such lengths to overexplain and turn explicit all those things that the story was "supposed" to only be suggestive of. Such a lot of the book's charm is in how it never really explains certain things that feel like much bigger stories lurking in the shadows, but are deliberately left blurry because it's more fun that way. The legendarium was still fairly sketchy in 1937, but I'm pretty sure that if Tolkien wanted us to know about Sauron he wouldn't have just called him "the Necromancer" and made him into an offhand reference as though to imply that middle-earth is just full of weird old sorcerers that have to be occasionally smacked around by good wizards like some kind of magical police force. Also elise the great posted:He changed the names of the main characters, anglicizing them so that we English speakers could really get the cultural silliness of someone named Maura Labingi saving the world. He reminded us over and over that the old ways are being lost, that the old tales are fading away, that what remains has often been diluted and edited and even completely rewritten. He wrote an unreliable history for a world he loved, and he made sure that we knew it: we read the Quenya Silmarillion, we aren't quite sure what happened in Gondor (unless we read the appendices and auxiliary material), we don't know who the gently caress Bombadil is even supposed to be. I have to ask, did you mean Quenta Silmarillion? Because I'm not sure what you're getting at with this bit.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 14:25
|
|
|
I always appreciated Lloyd Alexander's take on Disney's interpretation of his Prydain chronicles. [Paraphrased] "The movie is nothing like the books, but it was a really enjoyable movie!" I can empathize somewhat with Christopher--it's his father's life's work that Jackson and authors torment--but at the same time the Tolkien family has profited fairly well, and are all educated well enough to realize that when one artist picks up another's brush, the results are rarely as the former would have it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 15:30
|
|
|
Ynglaur posted:but at the same time the Tolkien family has profited fairly well, I think one of the Tolkien estate's big problems with the films is that they don't think they profited enough from their success. That was why they sued New Line after all.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 15:37
|
|
|
My thought process is that Tolkien cared very deeply about his stories and his world but also had a sense of perspective. For example, I think he would have been ok with Arwen replacing Glorfindel at the Fords of Bruinen because it didn't break any "rules" -- Arwen could legitimately be seen as a powerful personage in her own right, as Elronds daughter etc., Tolkien had no problem with strong heroines, and it tells a stronger story by introducing Arwen earlier and giving her a more active role in the narrative. People like Christopher Tolkien get pissed though because Arwen hasn't seen the light of Aman so you could argue she shouldn't be wizarding around (but for that matter neither has Elrond, though he would have seen a silmaril as a child). Pretty much everything Jackson does in LotR is consistent with the details and internal rules of Tolkien's legendarium *and* with good storytelling. There are a few weird missteps, especially in two towers (the film writers just didn't "get" Faramir) but on the whole they did a decent job. Hobbit was just butchered though. The whole thing is massively rewritten, a lot of nonsensical or extraneous plot threads are added, there are huge action scenes that are incredibly contrived, there is a weird dwarf/elf romance, etc. The battle scenes were more inspired by Warhammer than anything else. Most importantly though they remove the connection between Bilbo finding the weakness, that news getting to Bard, and that allowing Bard to defeat the Dragon. That's a key plot element and character element; that's the reason the story is titled "The Hobbit" and not "The Story of Erebor" or whatever. In the book, Bilbo was the one who beat the Dragon, ultimately; the movie robs him of that. Most of the changes and added material reflect this; the book is Bilbo's story, the movie is just an action adventure extravaganza that happens around Bilbo. If you look at the critiques in Tolkien's letters, he didn't object to the concept of films being made, or even the concept of significant rewrites, but he wanted adaptation s to be telling a story that was fundamental lly still his same story and same kind of story under the same "rules" (narrative, theological, conceptual, etc.). The Jackson LotR movies fit that dictum, the Jackson hobbit ones don't. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Sep 12, 2016 |
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 16:43
|
|
|
howe_sam posted:I think one of the Tolkien estate's big problems with the films is that they don't think they profited enough from their success. That was why they sued New Line after all. Peter Jackson sued on similar grounds. At that level in the movie industry a lawsuit is almost expected as a cost of doing business.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 17:35
|
|
|
The Hobbit movies were bad, but, hell, I liked them. They are not the worst movies I have enjoyed. But, yes, I think the fact that the latter film trilogy turned out to be less an adaptation of anything Tolkien wrote and more a cynical parody of the former film trilogy (the most interesting way to view it - sort of like it's more of an adaptation of The Last Ringbearer) would not have sat well with Tolkien. It deeply alters the narrative on the most essential thematic level, to the point that there's not really a reason for it to be adapting anything and can't really be called the same story.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 18:33
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:I have to ask, did you mean Quenta Silmarillion? Because I'm not sure what you're getting at with this bit. YES that's sort of an important spelling error there. There's a big difference between the Tale of the Silmarils and, like, the History of the Silmarils. Also feel free to disregard that whole post, I was trying to hammer out some thoughts, realized I was more inebriated than I'd thought, abandoned the attempt, and hit "post" instead of discarding it GOOD JOB. Reading it now I'm cringing p hard. Anyway, Hieronymous Alloy and Bongo Bill kinda nail it there, I think. The PJ LotR is maybe not a flawless adaptation, but it tried to tell the story in a way that honors the source and draws from the same half-revealed histories. The Hobbit movies had no loving idea what they were trying to do, no sense of tone, and no interest in preserving the story-ness of the book. Love the idea of considering them Last Ringbearer-style parodies, though. That almost rescues them a little.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 19:23
|
|
|
Nah that post was cool, I just thought that one paragraph and the idea of deliberate diegetic mistranslations by politically motivated latter-day scholars was perhaps a bridge too far if based on a single-letter transposition  Now, just imagine if that were deliberate, that Tolkien intentionally made the words that easy to confuse, and someone in-universe made that same mistake when unearthing some old Quenya scroll and misinterpreted the whole of the documented First Age as being more metaphorical than it was or something 
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 19:36
|
|
|
I quite like Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, but I really like rotoscoping The Ringwraiths and orcs have never been scarier than they were in that movie
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 19:42
|
|
|
elise the great posted:JRRT would have liked to see other people's attempts at interpreting LotR and related works even if he disagreed violently with their conclusions, and thus would have enjoyed the movies. I agree. The first 4 hours of the hobbit even matched the tone to the books well. I don't know what the third hobbit movie was.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 19:46
|
|
|
euphronius posted:I don't know what the third hobbit movie was. In retrospect, having played Total War:Warhammer now, I think it was mostly that. Just a dwarves v orcs campaign. With an elves mod that added in a cool battle elk.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 19:52
|
|
|
 terrifying
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 19:59
|
|
|
I haven't seen it but I have read quite a bit about it
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 20:21
|
|
|
Nah, let's go old school on this http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/bakshi/bakshi.htm
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 20:22
|
|
|
For anyone with both a scholarly bent and either a large amount of disposable income or access to a research library, there's a new book out that looks interesting: Tolkien's Theology of Beauty quote:In this book, Lisa Coutras explores the structure and complexity of J.R.R. Tolkien’s narrative theology, synthesizing his Christian worldview with his creative imagination. She illustrates how, within the framework of a theological aesthetics, transcendental beauty is the unifying principle that integrates all aspects of Tolkien’s writing, from pagan despair to Christian joy.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 22:53
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:Do you want to expand on this? If your thinking is similar to elise's, I imagine one of the biggest reasons this would be true is that the Hobbit movies go to such lengths to overexplain and turn explicit all those things that the story was "supposed" to only be suggestive of. Such a lot of the book's charm is in how it never really explains certain things that feel like much bigger stories lurking in the shadows, but are deliberately left blurry because it's more fun that way. The legendarium was still fairly sketchy in 1937, but I'm pretty sure that if Tolkien wanted us to know about Sauron he wouldn't have just called him "the Necromancer" and made him into an offhand reference as though to imply that middle-earth is just full of weird old sorcerers that have to be occasionally smacked around by good wizards like some kind of magical police force. I mean, Tolkien did attempt to recast The Hobbit into a form consistent with Lord of the Rings in 1960, and stopped partway into chapter three when he lent it out to someone and she said "It's good, but it's not The Hobbit." The issue being less one of overexplanation and more one of losing the beauty of the intrusive narrator, the hobbit's-eye perspective, the loose attitude towards geographical and temporal precision, the use of the ridiculous, etc. etc. Which are absolutely all criticisms you can apply to the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies, beyond the thematic issues introduced with the changes to the story. I do want to point out that in the initial drafts of The Hobbit, there was a much greater density of legendarium references, and the story was taking place roughly contemporary with either Nirnaeth Arnoediad or the War of Wrath (thus why Gandalf [in this manuscript "Bladorthin"] can't find any heroes or warriors). Beren and Luthien are explicitly mentioned as having broken the Necromancer's power (Tolkien began writing The Hobbit about the same time he abandoned The Lay of Leithian at Canto 13), Elrond is presumably not any more long-lived than a human at this point, and the Elvenking may have been intended to be Elu Thingol, or then again may not have been. Thus, in the first drafts, Mirkwood is the Taur-nu-Fuin of Beleriand rather than Rhovanion, the Withered Heath is Anfauglith, and Erebor is Himring. Bizarrely, Golfimbul is named Fingolfin in this manuscript. Most of these references were cut out in the later drafting, in large part because of the major difficulties they introduced with the scale of the narrative by having all these events happening at the same time as this book where you have mention of a policeman on a bicycle, but they in turn prompted a refining of the existing legendarium material. (Most importantly, in removing dwarves from the ranks of uvanimor and arguably in increasing the importance of the Silmarils).
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 23:29
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Christopher Tolkien is the kind of fan who gets really upset that they replaced Glorfindel, an elf so unimportant Tolkien forgot whether he was dead or not, with Arwen, a major character who otherwise has no screen time outside the Appendices. I think you have to cut Christopher some slack. His dad told him these stories from like, age 3 onwards. If my father had made up these great stories and told them to me in various retellings over the years and later even discussed various critical aspects of them with me as a man grown I'd be pretty emotionally attached too. e: I mean people like to carry on about their child-hood being raped and all. Murgos fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Sep 12, 2016 |
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2016 23:35
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:I do want to point out that in the initial drafts of The Hobbit, there was a much greater density of legendarium references, and the story was taking place roughly contemporary with either Nirnaeth Arnoediad or the War of Wrath (thus why Gandalf [in this manuscript "Bladorthin"] can't find any heroes or warriors). Beren and Luthien are explicitly mentioned as having broken the Necromancer's power (Tolkien began writing The Hobbit about the same time he abandoned The Lay of Leithian at Canto 13), Elrond is presumably not any more long-lived than a human at this point, and the Elvenking may have been intended to be Elu Thingol, or then again may not have been. Thus, in the first drafts, Mirkwood is the Taur-nu-Fuin of Beleriand rather than Rhovanion, the Withered Heath is Anfauglith, and Erebor is Himring. Bizarrely, Golfimbul is named Fingolfin in this manuscript. Most of these references were cut out in the later drafting, in large part because of the major difficulties they introduced with the scale of the narrative by having all these events happening at the same time as this book where you have mention of a policeman on a bicycle, but they in turn prompted a refining of the existing legendarium material. (Most importantly, in removing dwarves from the ranks of uvanimor and arguably in increasing the importance of the Silmarils). This sounds like a hoot. What book is it in? I've only read a scattered handful of the HoME volumes.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2016 01:23
|
|
|
Yeah it's pretty cool how the Hobbit world is like a strange mirror of Beleriand.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2016 01:24
|
|
|
Murgos posted:I think you have to cut Christopher some slack. His dad told him these stories from like, age 3 onwards. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2016 01:29
|
|
|
Murgos posted:I think you have to cut Christopher some slack. His dad told him these stories from like, age 3 onwards. Oh I'm not saying that I would be acting any differently if I were him. I get pissy when people get minor details about my hometown wrong in novels. But that just means I'm not being objective or fair to those novels. I don't blame Christopher for not being objective, just recognizing that he isn't.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2016 01:33
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:This sounds like a hoot. What book is it in? I've only read a scattered handful of the HoME volumes. The History of The Hobbit, John Rateliff. Seven bucks for the Kindle edition. Guy did his doctorate on Lord Dunsany and was a close personal friend of Taum Santoski, who gets a lot of mentions in the LOTR sections of the HoME volumes. Santoski started working on a textual history of The Hobbit and Rateliff ended up completing it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2016 02:15
|
|
|
Making a good adaption is more about getting the spirit of the thing than the details. Which is why the LoTR movies are good and the Hobbit movies suck.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2016 02:16
|
|
|
Brainiac Five posted:The History of The Hobbit, John Rateliff. Seven bucks for the Kindle edition. Guy did his doctorate on Lord Dunsany and was a close personal friend of Taum Santoski, who gets a lot of mentions in the LOTR sections of the HoME volumes. Santoski started working on a textual history of The Hobbit and Rateliff ended up completing it. Awesome, thanks! That's a few commute cycles taken care of.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2016 02:23
|
|
|
REALLY BAD THEORY TIME. I want to make a quick disclaimer: I've read the theory that Gandalf was trying to tell Aragorn to seek out the Eagles for transportation to Mordor when he fell with the Balrog into the dark. I think it's a fantastic theory, if maybe a little hard to support. If I were a wizard falling into a chasm and I could yell three words of instruction, I'd go for "Find the Eagles," not "Fly, you fools." I dunno, maybe Gandalf just really needed to express how much of a dumbass he thought Aragorn was. Also, I'm too loving lazy to use a character map. Add all the umlauts and tildes and accents yourself, if it bothers you. So let's talk about the Eagles. They're probably the number-one thing that people complain about if their first exposure to LotR was the movies. "Why didn't they just ride the Eagles to Mordor?" And reading more about their involvement in history doesn't really fix that-- they appear out of nowhere, over and over, saving the day and behaving like huge angelic deii ex machina every loving chance they get. They guard the borders of Gondolin, providing a convenient explanation for how an entire self-sufficient hidden city could avoid being spotted by Morgoth despite being in the same zip code. They help Fingon rescue Maedhros from his chains on the mountainside of Thangorodrim, although they don't seem to give a poo poo about their dangling, screaming neighbor until Fingon shows up. They pull Fingolfin's body out from under Morgoth's feet, wounding Morgoth himself, and return it to his kinfolk for burial... which seems like a strange priority for a bunch of birds in the middle of a continent-shaking battle. They rescue Thorin's Company from the burning treetops. They bring down a loving Nazgul on a field of battle. And they rescue Frodo and Sam from the slopes of Mount Doom. Some of the things they do make sense. There's definitely a Gwaihir Windlord character, an eagle dude that's pretty tight with Gandalf and lives in the Misty Mountains. There's also a frankly angelic cohort that's sent out by Manwe to keep an eye on Morgoth in much the same way that Gandalf and his ilk are send out to keep an eye on Sauron. It's not weird that Gwaihir is willing to pick up a bunch of dwarves that are burning in his yard, or even (if you're really generous) to fly all the way to Orthanc to rescue Gandalf. But all of these things seem to test the limits of the Eagles' interest in humanoid creatures, and honestly the limits of their ability to help at all. Their other behaviors, especially the ones that seem to pop out of nowhere to save the day, are just loving bizarre. It's like half of the story got left out. Why did the Eagles have any interest in guarding Gondolin? How did they get the idea to go pick up Frodo and Sam, or leave the Misty Mountains and fly all the way to loving Mordor in the first place? Why do they intervene at the last minute sometimes, when it would have made more sense for benevolent angels to show up fifteen minutes ago and dive-bomb Morgoth's face while Fingolfin was fighting him, or pick up somebody and go rescue Maedhros a decade ago when search parties were still on? Here's what I think is going on: the biased historians that wrote the Silmarillion ran into something, some event or aspect of history, that just didn't sit right with them. Something that was so disturbing, so shocking, that a bunch of folks who didn't bat an eye at murder and incest and dismemberment couldn't bring themselves to actually write what happened, so they just replaced it with something that sounded cool instead. Something that challenged them in ways that even glorifying Feanor-- a murderous, narcissistic idiot-- didn't quite match. Something that made them feel ashamed. There's not a whole lot left, once you're done shrugging at the hunting of petty dwarves for sport, tidying up the rape and imprisonment of Aredhel, and glossing over the horrors of the Helcaraxe. It gets narrower when you start looking for something that would also fulfill the actions of these apocryphal "Eagles." You need some entity that would be present in the mountains around Utumno, on the battlefield where Fingolfin died, possibly in the Misty Mountains (though this one seems a little more likely to actually be Eagles), and on the slopes of Mount Doom. You need some group of thinking beings that isn't benevolent enough to step in early, but might have a reason to step in when things are dire. You might even look for some group that could benefit directly from protecting (and trading with) Gondolin, and from ransoming Maedhros and the body of Fingolfin and maybe even the rescued Frodo and Sam. You're looking for orcs. Free tribes of orcs, settling in the mountains in the centuries after Morgoth bred them and before he started making armies from them, operating independently from Morgoth's command, trading with and protecting the borders of Gondolin. A party of independent orcs, familiar with Thangorodrim, guiding Fingon to a place where he could cut off Maedhros's hand in exchange for favors from the Feanorian allies. A platoon of orcs enslaved to Morgoth's military, seeing the battle going the wrong way, seizing Fingolfin's body and selling it to his family in return for safe passage and maybe even land of their own (as the continent was colonized by Feanorians and humans). If you squint, a rival tribe of orcs might have helped Thorin's company escape, though honestly I still think that was actually Gwaihir. And if you think about it, Frodo and Sam traveled in the company of orcs across Mordor itself, somehow totally avoiding notice... or perhaps not avoiding notice at all, but instead being followed and eventually rescued by a band of orcs who had once marched with them and now offered them back to their Gondorian king in exchange for safe passage to Harad. It wouldn't even be a stretch. Mordor was swarming with orcs. Frodo and Sam left a hurricane of rumors behind them as they moved toward Mount Doom. Orcs are designed by Morgoth himself to operate in conditions of bad air, extreme heat, and no water. Eagles would have risked volcanic missiles and poor visibility; orcs could have just picked up the hobbits and run for it. Eagles would have been flying a suicide mission in search of hobbits who might or might not have already died; orcs would have been snatching up valuable hostages they'd been following for days and trading them for their last chance at safety. Nor would Aragorn, newly enthroned and marrying a woman of mixed ancestry, fresh from a war that seemed cleanly divided along racial lines, want to admit that he'd traded prisoners for amnesty with a bunch of orcs. It would have undermined his public image, raised questions about his willingness to treat with the enemy, and violated millennia of traditional thought about the pure evil nature of orcs. People might not even have believed it, if he'd told them. It would have been almost as incredible as if the Eagles had just flown from the Misty Mountains and rescued them, like Maedhros of old, as the historians wrote so long ago. I have no doubt that the Eagles existed, though I think they were more concerned with Morgoth than with Gondolinian border control. I have no doubt that Gwaihir and his kin rescued Thorin's Company, crashed the Battle of Five Armies, and saved Gandalf from Orthanc. I just don't think that the Eagles were prepared to fly all the way to Mordor, or that they performed every miracle ascribed to them throughout history. I think that the Silmarillion touches on the breeding of orcs but ignores the centuries of settlement, expansion, subjugation, colonization, enslavement, and eradication that followed. I think that Morgoth's armies conscripted free tribes; that Feanor's sons displaced native populations of orcs to build their kingdoms; that the Girdle of Melian existed not just to avert Morgoth's eye but also to keep the local orc nations out of her kingdom; and that the internal politics of the orcish peoples were much more complex and motivated than merely mindless worship of Sauron. It wouldn't be comfortable for the historians to admit. It would have gone beyond reflecting poorly on the Feanorians. It would have been the Tribes of Man all over again, worrying about which ones are good and which are bad, humanizing a group whose culture and traditions seemed alien and monstrous, and whose monstrosity was terribly convenient when you needed to assuage your conscience about colonization and war. Much easier just to tell everyone the Eagles did it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2016 05:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 05:39 |
|
|
I like that. But it's easier to silence twerps by saying that Sauron had an air force.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2016 05:49
|
|