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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Tolkien ... knew what he was doing, start to finish. Never said he didn’t; it doesn’t have to be a pick-one-or-the-other thing. It’s interesting to speculate what the mass-market fantasy boom would have been like with more Eddison and less Tolkien influence, though. And like I said, I really like the horrible-bros unsympathetic protagonists aspect - more of that and less GOOOODD VS EEEEVILLLL (defined by some frankly rather worrying criteria in some cases*) would have improved post-Tolkien fantasy no end. *Not a snipe at Tolkien; a snipe at gender-based magic and endless stereotyped Dark Lords and Evil Empires and what-all.
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Jul 3, 2018 13:41
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I don’t think it’s fair to call the Demons unsympathetic. They’re pure aristocrats like Homeric heroes: they’re in charge because they’re The Best (notice how unlike Tolkien’s heroes, none of them have any ancestry whatsoever) and whatever they do is full of arete, irrespective of any moral dimension. Is Achilles sympathetic? In modern terms he’d be a jerk, sure, but I still feel for the character. I think the biggest reason why the Worm works is that it evokes sympathy for almost every character, even truly despicable guys like Corinius. e: more Eddisonian influence on mass market fantasy would not have made it any less poo poo because this is mass market fantasy we’re talking about here. You’d just get more stuff like GRRM or Scott Bakker, sadbrains taking fantasy as an excuse to write gleefully about perversities. skasion fucked around with this message at 14:06 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 13:52
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It's funny to think how much Tolkien was motivated by market/publisher pressures and the desire to thrill a mass audience, while at the same time pushing his super nerdy academic world that he knew the publishers wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. He was basically bribing them with what he considered a pulp novel (the "Hobbit sequel") as a sweetener to get them to give the Silmarillion a second glance. I don't know whether he considered that sort of thing beneath himself or lowbrow? He wasn't unable to dabble in genres like murder mysteries or kiddie fairy tales, and I feel like he could have made his LotR characters more crowd-pleasing and less wooden and archetypical, even GRRM-ish, if he'd wanted to; but maybe the reason why he blew LotR up so much from a simple Hobbit sequel was a sense of spite, like "Okay you assholes want more Hobbit? Watch this poo poo" I'm terrible at death-of-the-author. Just abysmal
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Jul 3, 2018 15:04
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I was under the impression that Tolkien never seriously considered publishing the Silmarillion in any form. It was something he tinkered with for his own reasons.
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Jul 3, 2018 16:07
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He sent it out all the time and it was always rejected.
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Jul 3, 2018 16:48
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Kemper Boyd posted:I was under the impression that Tolkien never seriously considered publishing the Silmarillion in any form. It was something he tinkered with for his own reasons. Tolkien sent the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion and the Lay of Leithian to Allen & Unwin for consideration when they asked for a Hobbit sequel. It was rejected (their reader liked it well enough but didn’t get what it was) so they asked him to begin to work on a Hobbit sequel instead. He later tried to get the Silmarillion into a workable form for publication together with LOTR, but that did not pan out either (a lot of the material from this period is collected in Unfinished Tales, which suggests that the work never reached an advanced stage). It’s clear that Tolkien was not prepared to drop everything else in his life to grind out a finished version of the Silm and it’s difficult when reading HoME to avoid the suspicion that he was less interested in printing it than he was in playing around with it. Some of his very last Middle-earth work is an attempt to reconcile the entire universe to a non-geocentric model, a concept which would tear the existing Silm text a new rear end in a top hat. But I don’t see any reason to suspect that he wouldn’t have worked to finish and publish the Lay and the QS in the 30s and 40s if Allen & Unwin had been enthusiastic. He sent it to them for that purpose after all.
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Jul 3, 2018 17:08
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Much of his later rework of early stuff (like the 1960 Hobbit) has the additional issue that it felt totally workmanlike and lacking in imagination and whimsy and wonder. Granted that he was consciously trying to remove the whimsy from his stuff and make it more serious, but it had the probably predictable effect of sucking all the fun out of it.
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Jul 3, 2018 17:23
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Christopher Tolkien makes a convincing argument in one of the HoME volumes that the publishers only read and conclusively rejected the Lay of Leithian and that they probably never read the Silmarillion, just assuming it was more epic poetry they were uninterested in publishing. That said, the Silmarillion is itself a really weird book. It reads like a nonfiction history book more than a novel, by design, since it was supposed to be a broad overview of events that get fuller treatment elsewhere (elsewhere in-universe at least; I'm not sure Tolkien ever really even considered writing full forms of anything but Beren, Turin, and Gondolin).
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Jul 3, 2018 17:55
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Chris‘ line for at least the last few decades has been that JRRT’s grand plan, insofar as he had one, was for full poetic versions of Beren & Lúthien and Children of Húrin, a full prose narrative of Fall of Gondolin, and the remainder of the story presented in annal/epitome form as in the published Silm.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:13
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Data Graham posted:
I don't think so. The sense I get from reading the Letters at least is that Tolkien took his work "seriously" but also playfully; he was fine, for example, throwing one of his children's toys into the mix as Tom Bombadil. There are a couple letters where he talks about film adaptations and he's fine with some major changes but others he isn't at all and it basically goes down to being faithful to the characters etc., not so much cultural pretensions. He was an Oxford don, he didn't have to be pretentious, he was already on top of Mount Pretension looking down; oxford dons can do whatever they want and it's automatically High Culture, just look at Lewis Carroll. There's an interesting comment he makes on writing a draft LotR sequel -- it would have been set about seventy years on from the events of LotR -- and he says that he realized it was turning into a political thriller and he lost interest because it wasn't the sort of story he wanted to write. The impression I have is that he meant it wasn't something that fit into his framework -- it wasn't going to be a story of mythology (whether norse or catholic), just a political tale, and that was boring to him. I think Tolkien was far more internally than externally driven. He wrote or at least imagined the stories first, then only afterwards started thinking about how to market or sell them, much like someone who gets deep into gardening as a hobby might find themselves selling leftover produce at a farmer's market.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think Tolkien was far more internally than externally driven. He wrote or at least imagined the stories first, then only afterwards started thinking about how to market or sell them, much like someone who gets deep into gardening as a hobby might find themselves selling leftover produce at a farmer's market. Yeah I think this is indisputable. When A&U first started to bug him about a sequel to his wildly popular best selling children’s novel, his response was not “hellyeah” but something along the lines of “but I already used up all the motifs I wanted to use  “.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:21
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I don't think so. The sense I get from reading the Letters at least is that Tolkien took his work "seriously" but also playfully; he was fine, for example, throwing one of his children's toys into the mix as Tom Bombadil. There are a couple letters where he talks about film adaptations and he's fine with some major changes but others he isn't at all and it basically goes down to being faithful to the characters etc., not so much cultural pretensions. He was an Oxford don, he didn't have to be pretentious, he was already on top of Mount Pretension looking down; oxford dons can do whatever they want and it's automatically High Culture, just look at Lewis Carroll. "Boring" maybe—or else (the impression I got) was that he thought anything he did post-LotR would be patently anticlimactic. How do you do a sequel to anything without the story being "bigger" (or at least comparable in scale) to what came before? And what could be bigger than defeating Sauron and witnessing the end of the Elves in Middle-earth? Certainly not a weird murder mystery (that's what I'm alluding to with that phrase) about delinquent kids in Minas Tirith play-acting in an alt-rightish orc cult.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:27
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Morgoth-worship being something Men repeatedly fall to is a very Christian theme (well, Abrahamic theme, really) so I get why it keeps coming up but I personally find it to be an extremely boring story element so I'm pretty okay with the lotr sequel that was going to focus on it not going anywhere
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Jul 3, 2018 18:32
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Hail Satan imo. Kind of bummed that Tolkien brought up the idea so many times but never gave us any of the deets. What do you do at the First Melkorin Church services? Sing discordantly? Ritually stab yourself in the foot? Barbecue people? Discuss sex?
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Jul 3, 2018 18:40
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There are deets in one of the History if Middle earths that has a close description of what was going on on the island wrt to morgoth worship.
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Jul 3, 2018 18:42
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skasion posted:Hail Satan imo. Kind of bummed that Tolkien brought up the idea so many times but never gave us any of the deets. What do you do at the First Melkorin Church services? Sing discordantly? Ritually stab yourself in the foot? Barbecue people? Discuss sex? Human sacrifice, I believe
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Jul 3, 2018 20:14
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skasion posted:I don’t think it’s fair to call the Demons unsympathetic. They’re pure aristocrats like Homeric heroes: they’re in charge because they’re The Best (notice how unlike Tolkien’s heroes, none of them have any ancestry whatsoever) and whatever they do is full of arete, irrespective of any moral dimension. Is Achilles sympathetic? In modern terms he’d be a jerk, sure, but I still feel for the character. I think the biggest reason why the Worm works is that it evokes sympathy for almost every character, even truly despicable guys like Corinius. I dunno, I'm a modern person and I don't have any problem calling them arseholes because they act like arseholes according to modern sensibilities - the whole hur hur the ambassador's got a tail hur hur let's be complete dicks about it and start a war thing for starters. It doesn't make them any less fun to read, and it does make them more... relatable? More human? In much the way the noblest Arthurian knights are the most boring; they need a character flaw or 15 to make them entertaining to read about. (And Odysseus. Odysseus is an utter loving prick and he's awesome.) I see what you mean about the Worm though - Gro is another example; he's almost Wormtongue treated with dignity. OK, maybe "unsympathetic" isn't the right word; can we just say that if someone wants their protagonists to be moral exemplars they should probably go read something else? And yeah, I guess your edit is right too - look at what happened to comics when Alan Moore broke the Comics Code. Blech.
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Jul 3, 2018 21:27
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They aren’t just being dicks and starting a war though. Gorice sends an embassage to them on the back of his lord admiral, Laxus, having just reneged on their treaty of alliance by failing to send forces to the war with the ghouls. The demons could reasonably expect some kind of apology from Gorice or Laxus for this, but the ambassador isn’t one of the lords of Witchland but some random, ugly, foul-smelling gently caress. That’s pretty rude to begin with, but the demons keep their sneers and disgust amongst themselves and don’t stoop to personal attacks or fail to receive him with pledges of safety and courtesy. But his message is that Gorice summons the demons to do homage to him, which is beyond rude and could reasonably be taken as a threat of war. Spitfire pops up and starts insulting the ambassador because he’s the moron little brother who the other demons persistently treat like the moron little brother. Even then Brandoch tells him to sit down and shut up because he’s being rude and threatening. So he does. But then the ambassador refuses to eat and drink with the demons and Spitfire gets mad again and says it’s because witches are all poisoners, at which point the demons decide to walk away for a bit to take counsel and stop Spitfire from saying any more dumb poo poo. Indeed Spitfire is at this point ready to imprison the ambassador and preemptively strike Witchland, but Juss knows the Witches aren’t going to fall for that crap (though he certainly doesn’t object to preemptive war on moral grounds) so decides to challenge Gorice to a duel over the insult. Then they send Gorice a rather rude message telling him that, which is basically no more than he already did to them. The ambassador can’t resist trying to taunt them once more, but Goldry makes a scary face at him and he runs off like a bitch and is subjected to general mockery as he retreats to his boat (narrator specifies by the mob, not the lords). The whole point of the embassy is to provoke the demons into war but they successfully end run around it. War doesn’t start until Gorice XII’s sending yoinks Goldry away to the ends of the earth. I guess my point is it’s easy to read the Demons as jerks because they are totally selfish and have absolutely non existent concern for those they judge their inferiors in any way. But by the same token they aren’t malevolent either, they’re good English-ish lads turning up their noses at the continental menace. e: but yeah if you want to teach your kids how to behave, don’t read them this book.
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Jul 3, 2018 23:18
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http://file770.com/visiting-middle-earth/
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Jul 6, 2018 19:34
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Welp! Guess I know what I'm doing one of these days soon.
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Jul 6, 2018 19:51
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Data Graham posted:Welp! Guess I know what I'm doing one of these days soon. Take photos and report back I'm really curious about that Iris Murdoch letter You can get the Pauline Baynes map on eBay for around $50 every so often
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Jul 6, 2018 20:54
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I’ll be pretty surprised if photos are allowed. Or shouldn’t I be?
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Jul 6, 2018 21:51
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So listening to the War of the Ring podcasts and it's talking about Denethor and his rather sudden transformation over the 1944-1946 break in writing from a fairly minor character into the apocalyptic freakshow he became. I don't know if it's the way the early drafts were written or how they were presented or what, and I have not done the obvious thing and googled around at all, but it struck me as a really obvious question to ask: how much of Denethor's despair and self-immolation scene might have been intended as a reference, or even a reenactment, of the then surely widely known and explosive story of Hitler in his bunker? Olsen doesn't talk about this at all, which I assume means Christopher doesn't either, but it seems suddenly like a crazy oversight. Some of the early dialogue was even more on-the-nose about it than the final monologue is, talking about how he believes there is no longer any possibility of a military victory, and all that stuff about burning like heathen kings before the Men of the West came (originally in Gandalf's mouth, interestingly) seeming to echo Hitler's grousing in those final days about how the German people had proved to be unworthy of him and deserved to burn. There's even an angle about believing / disbelieving false information fed to him by outside sources with an interest in undermining his authority — Hitler's refusing to accept the reports of his armies dissolving, and Denethor getting fed filtered propaganda through the palantir. Also notably, in early drafts Denethor was as vehemently opposed to Aragorn winning the war and usurping the throne as he was to simply losing to Sauron—submitting to Aragorn as a mere descendant of the "lesser" line of Isildur meant acquiescing to a form of cultural debasement. (This was before Tolkien hit on the idea of the corsairs' ships being commandeered by Aragorn and rolling up to the battle with surprise reinforcements for the good guys; but even then that didn't really directly affect this aspect of Denethor's motivations and his fear of Aragorn's mere presence bringing about the end of the Gondor he had known.) So I mean obviously I'm gonna google this now and probably find a thousand high school essays on this topic, but is this something people have identified before? And if not, why the hell not, even if just to debunk it? Data Graham fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Jul 10, 2018 |
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Jul 10, 2018 04:33
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Tolkien himself denied any and all direct allegory in his works, right there in the foreword. He especially denied any connection to WW2. As a human he was of course influenced by the world around him but he didn't put in direct intentional analogies to specific real-world events.
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Jul 10, 2018 04:39
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I mean I know he said that, and we've all quoted that line ad nauseam, but does him saying that invalidate the speculation? Or does this all really just come down to another "what use is speculation" discussion
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Jul 10, 2018 04:42
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Well maybe I'm misunderstanding your question. Here's the possible closely-related interpretations of what you're asking I can think of: --Did he intentionally make Denethor a reference to Hitler? No, not unless he was lying in his foreword --Did Hitler's end inspire his storytelling instinct the way any influence might? Maybe. I dunno how you'd prove or disprove it --Is Denethor's end similar to Hitler's? I'm not particularly familiar with Hitler's last moments but your argument sounds fairly convincing Basically, if authorial intent is your question then the answer is no (unless he was lying or forgot). If the question is just whether similarity exists, then it seems there is similarity, and it's possible that similarity isn't a coincidence.
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Jul 10, 2018 04:46
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cheetah7071 posted:Well maybe I'm misunderstanding your question. Here's the possible closely-related interpretations of what you're asking I can think of: The question seemed to be "is this something which has been discussed previously in Tolkien scholarship?", more than any of your three (well put) interpretations.
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Jul 10, 2018 04:55
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Yeah, that. I don't know, it seemed a worthwhile thing to at least wonder about, especially since it seemed fairly uncontroversial earlier on when Saruman's early-drafts pitch to Gandalf of joining with Sauron seemed to have been transparently influenced by collaborationist language that was then in the air. Whether Tolkien wanted readers to identify allegory in his story or not, it seems like it's possible / valuable to do a reading of LotR in an explicitly WW2-centric framework, just as people have had little trouble reading it as a Catholicism apologia, etc.
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Jul 10, 2018 05:02
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Data Graham posted:So listening to the War of the Ring podcasts and it's talking about Denethor and his rather sudden transformation over the 1944-1946 break in writing from a fairly minor character into the apocalyptic freakshow he became. I don't know if it's the way the early drafts were written or how they were presented or what, and I have not done the obvious thing and googled around at all, but it struck me as a really obvious question to ask: how much of Denethor's despair and self-immolation scene might have been intended as a reference, or even a reenactment, of the then surely widely known and explosive story of Hitler in his bunker? One of the reasons there are conspiracy theories about Hitler somehow surviving and fleeing to South America in disguise is because Stalin and the USSR deliberately kept as much as they could about Hitler's death (up to and including the fate of Hitler's burned remains) extremely secret, and deliberately spread rumours that in fact he had miraculously survived and might re-appear at any moment, like the original villain near the end of a really bad unintentional trilogy. The story of Hitler in the bunker did not become widely known in English until 1947, when Hugh Trevor-Roper made his name as a historian by publishing The Last Days of Hitler; he had worked in intelligence during the war, and he was then sent to Germany in November 1945 with the explicit mission of finding out what had actually happened. After delivering his report, he was encouraged to turn it into a book for popular consumption, with the objective of countering the Soviet disinformation. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Jul 10, 2018 |
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Jul 10, 2018 10:34
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Trin Tragula posted:One of the reasons there are conspiracy theories about Hitler somehow surviving and fleeing to South America in disguise is because Stalin and the USSR deliberately kept as much as they could about Hitler's death (up to and including the fate of Hitler's burned remains) extremely secret, and deliberately spread rumours that in fact he had miraculously survived and might re-appear at any moment, like the original villain near the end of a really bad unintentional trilogy. The story of Hitler in the bunker did not become widely known in English until 1947, when Hugh Trevor-Roper made his name as a historian by publishing The Last Days of Hitler; he had worked in intelligence during the war, and he was then sent to Germany in November 1945 with the explicit mission of finding out what had actually happened. After delivering his report, he was encouraged to turn it into a book for popular consumption, with the objective of countering the Soviet disinformation.
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Jul 10, 2018 12:41
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Trin Tragula posted:One of the reasons there are conspiracy theories about Hitler somehow surviving and fleeing to South America in disguise is because Stalin and the USSR deliberately kept as much as they could about Hitler's death (up to and including the fate of Hitler's burned remains) extremely secret, and deliberately spread rumours that in fact he had miraculously survived and might re-appear at any moment, like the original villain near the end of a really bad unintentional trilogy. The story of Hitler in the bunker did not become widely known in English until 1947, when Hugh Trevor-Roper made his name as a historian by publishing The Last Days of Hitler; he had worked in intelligence during the war, and he was then sent to Germany in November 1945 with the explicit mission of finding out what had actually happened. After delivering his report, he was encouraged to turn it into a book for popular consumption, with the objective of countering the Soviet disinformation. Ah cool, that's good to know. I wasn't too clear on the timing of that stuff. Which is kinda why I was asking the question. If Hitler's final days were not common knowledge at the time, it's a pretty remarkable thing how Tolkien was able to depict Denethor's madness and have it turn out so strikingly similar.
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Jul 10, 2018 12:59
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I could be wrong, but I believe Denethor was more based on *allied* leaders.
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Jul 10, 2018 13:06
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I don’t think Denethor needs to be based on any leader in particular. His despair, his guilt, his first defiant and then suicidal bitterness, or most of all his sense that win or lose, everything important will be taken away from him, are surely generally inspired by late WWII. These things were in the air.
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Jul 10, 2018 13:20
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Nessus posted:I would have thought the Soviets wouldn't have wanted to suggest he escaped. Obviously he didn't live or they would have, for starters, made him walk back to Moscow barefoot. So that just leaves dying. The war was a fight against Fascism. Surely the political advantages of, immediately after the war, accusing formerly-allied countries of Fascist backsliding by protecting senior Nazis, up to and including Hitler, are obvious? After all, if our former allies are, in true capitalist lickspittle tradition, betraying their previous empty words, then surely we, the noble Soviet Union, are entirely justified in occupying Eastern Europe and installing friendly regimes to ensure that there can be no Western-sponsored anti-Soviet Hitlerite resurgence in five years' time? https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2015/12/10/hunting-hitler-part-vi-the-search-begins-may-1945/ https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2015/12/17/hunting-hitler-part-vii-the-search-continues-june-september-1945/ quote:From Moscow on May 3 came a story that the Soviets were looking for Hitler and were not convinced that he, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders actually committed suicide. Well-known Pravda writer Nikolai Tikhonoff, wrote: “We shall see what has really happened to him. And if he escaped, we shall find him, no matter where he is.” Stalin also told Truman to his face at Potsdam that Hitler was not dead. And all this is just the stuff they were actually putting their name to.
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Jul 10, 2018 13:34
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cheetah7071 posted:Tolkien himself denied any and all direct allegory in his works, right there in the foreword. Well if the author said something then it must be true.
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Jul 10, 2018 13:35
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Here are all the denethor quotes in the Letters:quote:Denethor in Tolkien’s letters
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Jul 10, 2018 13:39
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sassassin posted:Well if the author said something then it must be true. I mean the question as I misunderstood it was whether Denethor was an intentional Hitler reference, and if intentionality is in play hours words on the subject do matter
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Jul 10, 2018 18:27
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cheetah7071 posted:I mean the question as I misunderstood it was whether Denethor was an intentional Hitler reference, and if intentionality is in play hours words on the subject do matter
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Jul 11, 2018 18:43
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Nessus posted:I feel like Denethor is more about semi-willing embrace of defeatism. If you want a Hitler in the story you’ve got about five better candidates. Denethor is the personification of the mortal sin of despair. Tolkien's Catholic as gently caress.
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Jul 11, 2018 18:49
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https://aleteia.org/2018/07/14/will-tolkien-and-chesterton-be-declared-saints/quote:
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Jul 14, 2018 15:31
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