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If you haven't yet read "Tolkien and The Great War: The Threshold of Middle-Earth" by John Garth: I strongly urge you to do so! (Also on Audible) My girlfriend got it for me for my birthday and it has been a real eye-opener into what shaped Tolkien's writings.
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Mar 26, 2017 13:01
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I always interpreted Sam's thoughts of the fighting Haradrim as people with homes, families and dreams as a pretty clear discussion on the nature of his German enemies during the war. The second world war was more clearly defined by ideology, and the Great War wasn't, so I imagine that one could easily be fairly sympathetic to the poor saps in the trench opposite.
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Mar 27, 2017 01:47
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Christmas Truce soccer matches and all.
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Mar 27, 2017 03:46
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BigglesSWE posted:The second world war was more clearly defined by ideology, and the Great War wasn't, so I imagine that one could easily be fairly sympathetic to the poor saps in the trench opposite.     Simply switch "Naziism" for "Prussian militarism" (for instance) and the official propaganda was just as strident, on both sides; this was a great struggle to defend Civilisation and The Values We Hold Dear from the ravages of the perfidious enemy, and there are a lot of personal accounts from people who believed they were doing the right thing by fighting ("Field-Guns in France" by Major Neil Fraser-Tytler is out of copyright, "Old Soldiers Never Die" by Private Frank Richards is not, for the first two long-form examples I can think of) and who maintained their views all the way through the war and after it too; it's just that they don't fit the established narrative of futility and disillusionment.
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Mar 27, 2017 14:19
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Trin Tragula posted:
Some good points. I guess I meant it in hindsight; politically the both sides were a lot more similar than they'd care to admit. I feel compelled to note that the British goverment was contemplating a precursive invasion of Belgium before the Germans did that very same thing. Propaganda would obviously like to demonize your enemies. Then again, if the populace buy into it, then it essentially becomes the truth. BigglesSWE fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 14:55
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Trin Tragula posted:
I don't think the two are contradictory. If anything, having to put up all these posters and have messaging campaigns encouraging your side to keep on hatin' the other guy nice and hard is proof that you're going against a major natural tendency.
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Mar 28, 2017 09:24
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Sure. The point I'm trying to make is that the war at the time was absolutely defined by ideology by media and governments in the most strident terms, and a lot of people wholeheartedly bought into that; in contrast to the one all-consuming popular image of a WWI soldier as someone who, like Blackadder or Louis Barthas, prefers talking to the enemy over talking to his own superiors because he thinks that talking to the enemy is less likely to get him killed.
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Mar 28, 2017 15:22
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Anyone got Beren and Luthien yet? Is it worth the money, or just a rearrangement of the Silmarillion material?
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Jun 18, 2017 09:50
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Runcible Cat posted:Anyone got Beren and Luthien yet? Is it worth the money, or just a rearrangement of the Silmarillion material? JRR Tolkien posted:“Now doth Tinuviel put forth her skill and fairy-magic and she sews Beren into this fell and makes him to the likeness of a great cat, and she teaches him how to sit and sprawl, to step and bound and trot in the semblance of a cat, till Huan’s very whiskers bristled at the sight and thereat Beren and Tinuviel laughed. Never however could Beren learn to screech or wail or to purr like any cat that ever walked, no could Tinuviel awaken a glow in the dead eyes of the catskin - ‘but we must put up with that,’ said she, ‘and thou hast the air of a very noble cat if thou but hold thy tongue. Well, the whole Beren as a self-insert thing just got a fair bit weirder.
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Jun 19, 2017 14:03
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Sally Forth posted:Well, the whole Beren as a self-insert thing just got a fair bit weirder. That's wonderful.
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Jun 19, 2017 16:15
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Tolkien was a loving furry
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Jun 19, 2017 19:28
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Runcible Cat posted:Anyone got Beren and Luthien yet? Is it worth the money, or just a rearrangement of the Silmarillion material? It differs quite a bit from the Silmarillion, and so far it's definitely good poo poo.
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Jun 20, 2017 08:55
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Okay, so, I'm still going through it, but it's focused heavily on the evolution of the story itself. It starts with the oldest version of the story of Beren and Luthien, which is very different and much simpler than the version you know. Then it tells the full version, alternating between summaries drawn from earlier drafts of what would become The Silmarillion, and poetic treatments of important scenes in them taken from The Lays of Beleriand and other sources.
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Jun 21, 2017 09:28
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Bongo Bill posted:Okay, so, I'm still going through it, but it's focused heavily on the evolution of the story itself. Cool, thanks. As soon as I can afford to get myself treats, then....
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Jun 24, 2017 09:52
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would love to see a complete version of the lay of leithian; is all of the partial material included?
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Jun 24, 2017 15:26
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Annual Prophet posted:would love to see a complete version of the lay of leithian; is all of the partial material included? It's as complete as it can possibly be considering the work was unfinished.
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Jun 25, 2017 01:43
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Bongo Bill posted:It's as complete as it can possibly be considering the work was unfinished. Yeah i mangled the wording there; I knew it was an unfinished work, but was curious as to whether those pieces he actually did complete were included in the new book. I appreciate the feedback, because I love the story but wasn't sure whether I wanted to get the book, and I think based on that I will.
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Jun 25, 2017 05:00
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Were the Uruk-Hai bred to be smarter than Orcs? Did Tolkien mention it anywhere?
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Jun 29, 2017 20:21
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Hogge Wild posted:Were the Uruk-Hai bred to be smarter than Orcs? Did Tolkien mention it anywhere? In "Morgoth's Ring" Tolkien says that Saruman bred "man-orcs large and cunning, and orc-men treacherous and vile". My suspicion would be that the former are the fighting Uruk-hai, and the latter are like the ruffians that help him take over the Shire, but Tolkien doesn't explicitly say this. In general though the Uruk-hai don't seem much smarter than regular Orcs so much as more professional -- and after all Orcs aren't necessarily very stupid to begin with. Nothing really suggests they're necessarily intellectually inferior to men, just without any intellectual culture or respect for intellectual pursuit.
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Jun 29, 2017 20:40
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skasion posted:In "Morgoth's Ring" Tolkien says that Saruman bred "man-orcs large and cunning, and orc-men treacherous and vile". My suspicion would be that the former are the fighting Uruk-hai, and the latter are like the ruffians that help him take over the Shire, but Tolkien doesn't explicitly say this. In general though the Uruk-hai don't seem much smarter than regular Orcs so much as more professional -- and after all Orcs aren't necessarily very stupid to begin with. Nothing really suggests they're necessarily intellectually inferior to men, just without any intellectual culture or respect for intellectual pursuit. Yeah, that has been my understanding of it, but for some reason (D&D?) most online sources say that Uruks are more intelligent. And after all Orcs were said to be great at constructing machines and for war and torture, so they can't have been stupid as such. Did Tolkien mean Orcs to be an analogy for modern technology obsessed 20th century Western men?
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Jun 29, 2017 20:58
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Hogge Wild posted:Yeah, that has been my understanding of it, but for some reason (D&D?) most online sources say that Uruks are more intelligent. And after all Orcs were said to be great at constructing machines and for war and torture, so they can't have been stupid as such. Nah, Tolkien doesn't really deal in that kind of clear cut analogy. But orcs are, as written, the disposable soldiers of an expansionistic military-industrial dictatorship, which is certainly a type of western man that was not impossible to find in the 20th century. "Technology obsessed" is pushing it though, orcs like making pointy objects to shank people with and such, they're not about to discover the integrated circuit or something. The kind of mechanized/"technological" societies that Sauron and Saruman want to create stem from their own godlike desires and knowledge and not from anything to do with orcs.
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Jun 29, 2017 21:20
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I meant this quote from the Hobbit: "Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far."
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Jun 29, 2017 21:52
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skasion posted:In "Morgoth's Ring" Tolkien says that Saruman bred "man-orcs large and cunning, and orc-men treacherous and vile". My suspicion would be that the former are the fighting Uruk-hai, and the latter are like the ruffians that help him take over the Shire, but Tolkien doesn't explicitly say this. In general though the Uruk-hai don't seem much smarter than regular Orcs so much as more professional -- and after all Orcs aren't necessarily very stupid to begin with. Nothing really suggests they're necessarily intellectually inferior to men, just without any intellectual culture or respect for intellectual pursuit. Saruman had his breeding operations, and certainly did employ Uruk-hai, but the Uruk-hai (and Olog-hai Trolls) were bred by Sauron in Mordor to be larger, stronger, and more resistant to sunlight when Sauron's will was laid upon them. They first appeared in the sack of Osgiliath in the late Third Age. Saruman no doubt improved upon the breed, but they were originally a Mordor creation.
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Jun 30, 2017 05:22
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There's an Uruk-Hai in Mordor who says "I'll have your number and report you!" So they had a pretty sophisticated record keeping system. Think of all the Uruk-Hai clerks keeping lists and ledgers and writing out reports. "We are the Accounting Uruk-Hai! We are the creeping death of the actuarial tables!" Teriyaki Hairpiece fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jul 3, 2017 |
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Jul 3, 2017 19:29
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:There's an Uruk-Hai in Mordor who says "I'll have your number and report you!" So they had a pretty sophisticated record keeping system. Think of all the Uruk-Hai clerks keeping lists and ledgers and writing out reports. Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics.
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Jul 3, 2017 19:47
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Sauron was motivated, at least initially, by the appeal of laying the world out in an orderly manner. Black Speech was a constructed language in-universe, ostensibly invented by Sauron for the use of his servants (though in practice only the high-ranking ones used it; most orcs just spoke a pidgin of it and their native orcish), without any irregular terms. Unlike his boss, he never poured his essence into the very matter of Arda, instead deeming it sufficient to control it by means of minions. Industrialization, especially the bad, dehumanizing parts of it, was overwhelmingly associated with the Enemy in Tolkien.
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Jul 3, 2017 19:55
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Which makes it especially funny when he was surprised that people were reading that message out of it.
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Jul 3, 2017 20:26
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What message, exactly?
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Jul 3, 2017 21:28
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Anti-industrialism
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Jul 3, 2017 22:02
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Since when was Tolkien surprised by people reading that into it? His critique of industrial society is fairly explicit, it's not like some meta textual poo poo, all the industrial societies in the book are straight up bad things or at least deeply misguided. He made no secret of it being a major theme either ("Fall, mortality, and the Machine" being the main subjects of the book according to him).
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Jul 3, 2017 23:11
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Bongo Bill posted:Unlike his boss, he never poured his essence into the very matter of Arda, instead deeming it sufficient to control it by means of minions. Except for the Ring, of course.
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Jul 4, 2017 00:13
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I thought Tolkien objected to, like, "this book is REALLY about... the Atomic Bomb, the Perils of Industrialization, the Great War" in the sense of a literal allegory, rather than themes and influences.
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Jul 5, 2017 06:54
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I'm phone posting, so there's I'm not going to bother with the actual quote, but Tolkien clearly stated his disapproval of allegory as the purposed domination of the author over the reader, that is, forcing the reader to accept only one understanding of the story and making the story itself subservient to that. He took the story itself and his readers' emotional reaction to it as most important. Of course, he never denied that the story was heavily influenced, or even thoroughly shaped by his personal beliefs. He simply didn't intend to his works to only communicate a single, immutable message. As regards industrialization, Tolkien clearly hated it. But science and technology itself, apart from the way Tolkien perceived it as developing in the real world, is not inherently evil in his works. Lothlorien, for example, could absolutely be considered a high tech society. If any one disagrees, I'll post my reasoning when I have access to a computer, but I think there's strong evidence that what the Noldor made was an idealized version of technological development. The Numenoreans and the dwarves were less ideal, viewing nature as a tool more than as an end it itself, but they still built their cities in harmony with it and were careful not to use more than could be replenished. They are probably roughly analagous to sustainable development today, rather than rampant industrialization. The Enemy clearly represents the worst of modern excesses in placing economic development above any nature or tradition.
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Jul 5, 2017 07:25
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Heithinn Grasida posted:Lothlorien, for example, could absolutely be considered a high tech society. If any one disagrees, I'll post my reasoning when I have access to a computer,
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Jul 6, 2017 20:30
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Any sufficently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Say you bio-enginered a highly nutrient and calorie dense food source that doesn't spoil and can sustain an adult for days on just a few bites. Why not make it look like bread? If you don't know what a semi-intelligent, waste energy absorbing, carbon nano matrix is you might just think this is some really good rope. You think Elves are just that good with arrows? Miniturized guidance and thruster systems. Point and shoot. sunday at work fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jul 6, 2017 |
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Jul 6, 2017 22:03
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I think that's just technobabble.
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Jul 6, 2017 23:24
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Sure it's technobable but so is magic bread.
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Jul 6, 2017 23:52
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I mean, I think Orc-brew medicine is probably antibiotics, but I'm the opposite of a canon maven
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Jul 6, 2017 23:57
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elise the great posted:I mean, I think Orc-brew medicine is probably antibiotics, but I'm the opposite of a canon maven
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Jul 7, 2017 00:12
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Elves have a technology in the sense that they have an obviously comprehensive full suite of skills and knowledges needed to make things and use them to fulfill their desires, even if those desires are significantly different from Man. I don't think this necessarily means it's nanomachines or whatever. Probably a lot of it involves arcane touches of art they learned off the Valar (even if they may be third or fourth-hand now for many Elves.) Orc-medicine being kind of antibiotic makes sense.
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Jul 7, 2017 01:37
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