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In the books Frodo knows that Gollum's main goal is to get the ring back. He would never ever take Gollum's word on something like that over Sam's. If Gollum had tried such a transparent ruse in the books Frodo would have put on the ring and ordered Gollum to jump off the steps. The ring's power would have made Frodo trust Gollum less.
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Jan 2, 2019 18:56
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The movies don’t do Frodo commanding Gollum with the power of the ring at all. Or they sort of do (Frodo still makes him swear on it) but they don’t treat this with much more seriousness than a pinky swear. It’s still really funny that Wood Frodo trusts the word of a naked, creepy old man he met last week when he was trying to kill him, over that of his beloved gardener Sam
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Jan 2, 2019 19:00
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The extended version of Two Towers is the real movie. Faramir's character doesn't work without it. Fans of the book were right to complain about the "character assassination" on release, not because the change is bad (it's actually really good), but because it was missing the vital establishing scene. In the cinema "Faramir is a clueless bastard" was a lazy twist used to pad out Frodo's journey. In the real film the pressure he is under is shown to be greater than Boromir's, explaining his bastardry, and he's one of the few characters that isn't a wafer thin action-adventure archetypes. The theatrical versions of the other two are still the real versions, though. Ideally a 30 minute cut of RotK would exist so I could say that's the real one.
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Jan 2, 2019 19:07
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skasion posted:The movies don’t do Frodo commanding Gollum with the power of the ring at all. Or they sort of do (Frodo still makes him swear on it) but they don’t treat this with much more seriousness than a pinky swear. His beloved gardener is also a creepy older man.
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Jan 2, 2019 19:08
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sassassin posted:The extended version of Two Towers is the real movie. Faramir's character doesn't work without it. Fans of the book were right to complain about the "character assassination" on release, not because the change is bad (it's actually really good), but because it was missing the vital establishing scene. Sadly this is counterbalanced by movie Denethor being a piggish oaf with no redeeming qualities or subtlety.
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Jan 2, 2019 19:56
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Please come say hi in BYOB! We're having Tolkien chat atm: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3765007&perpage=40&pagenumber=1521#post491191838
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Jan 2, 2019 20:37
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Ginette Reno posted:Sadly this is counterbalanced by movie Denethor being a piggish oaf with no redeeming qualities or subtlety. As I said, a 30 minute cut of RotK would be better.
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Jan 3, 2019 01:59
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Hogge Wild posted:Please come say hi in BYOB! We're having Tolkien chat atm: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3765007&perpage=40&pagenumber=1521#post491191838 Nah Ginette Reno posted:Sadly this is counterbalanced by movie Denethor being a piggish oaf with no redeeming qualities or subtlety. Yeah Denethor was supposed to be like King Lear the way Saruman was supposed to be kind of like MacBeth. That didn't come through at all.
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Jan 3, 2019 02:29
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One thing I definitely do prefer in the movies is the conversation between Gandalf and Pippin just before the war, where he goes all "there was never much hope" and then they see the big evil signal fire from Minas Morgul. In the books he hangs out with some random guard and his snot nosed son instead. Any part in the books with Men involved is kind of boring.
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Jan 13, 2019 21:05
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Shibawanko posted:One thing I definitely do prefer in the movies is the conversation between Gandalf and Pippin just before the war, where he goes all "there was never much hope" and then they see the big evil signal fire from Minas Morgul. In the books he hangs out with some random guard and his snot nosed son instead. Any part in the books with Men involved is kind of boring. The Minas Tirith chapters contain some of Tolkien's best prose. The Minas Tirith scenes contain John Noble. I know which I prefer.
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Jan 13, 2019 21:50
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I love how blatantly evil Christopher Lee's Saruman is. It makes Gandalf look massively dumb to have ever trusted him in the first place.
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Jan 14, 2019 07:10
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Ginette Reno posted:I love how blatantly evil Christopher Lee's Saruman is. It makes Gandalf look massively dumb to have ever trusted him in the first place. Yeah I really dislike him in that role, it doesn't work. Should have been John Hurt or something.
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Jan 14, 2019 07:28
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Shibawanko posted:Yeah I really dislike him in that role, it doesn't work. Should have been John Hurt or something. Derek Jacobi does an amazing Suddenly Evil in Doctor Who, it would have been great to see him do Saruman in the same style.
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Jan 14, 2019 09:27
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Ian McKellan should have been Saruman. Bernard Hill Gandalf.
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Jan 14, 2019 10:39
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Lee is totally capable of seeming like an ok guy right up until he stabs you, has nobody seen The Wicker Man? The thing is that the movies don’t ask him to do that, and neither does the book really. Saruman’s first real appearance in “The Council of Elrond” makes him seem almost as rude and dismissive from the first as the screen version, and he gets scary almost as quickly (“Saruman Ring-Maker, Saruman of Many Colors!”). The reason why book Gandalf (and book Saruman) doesn’t end up looking like (as much of) an idiot is because he has a better accounting of their actions, Gandalf’s long-term opposition to Saruman, why he actually went off to go find him, and how Saruman tried to talk him around. By contrast, in the movie Gandalf goes off apparently completely trusting in Saruman, who immediately calls him a nitwit, tells him “join Sauron or I’ll kill you” and then kicks his rear end around the room. Of course I shouldn’t have to mention that all this material is cut the better to spend time on two goofy old men and their stunt doubles flipping all over the place in an adaptation of a scene where the most interesting thing about it is the total lack of violence. skasion fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jan 14, 2019 |
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Jan 14, 2019 13:43
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sassassin posted:The Minas Tirith chapters contain some of Tolkien's best prose. The Minas Tirith scenes contain John Noble. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sMAKnG2sEM
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Jan 14, 2019 14:50
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I started reading Tolkien's letters and it's kind of depressing. That guy was broke and sick as hell for the entire time he was writing LOTR. At the end he had one typed copy which he had to do himself because he couldn't afford to pay anyone to do it. I had always assumed he was at least comfortably middle class given how popular The Hobbit was.
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Jan 15, 2019 01:28
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Raising four kids on a professor’s salary was probably a bitch, even before there was a world war to worry about. Oh yeah there was also the Great Depression in there. skasion fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Jan 15, 2019 |
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Jan 15, 2019 01:37
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https://i.imgur.com/gpDc7PV.mp4
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Jan 15, 2019 09:39
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Townes van Zandt's The Silver Ships of Andilar is pretty cool. It's from the perspective of a soldier of Ar-Pharazon who was fed anti-Valinor propaganda
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Jan 15, 2019 12:44
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Reading Tolkien's letters makes me feel really dumb.quote:I’ve wasted some precious time this week-end writing a letter to the Catholic Herald. One of their sentimentalist correspondents wrote about the etymology of the name Coventry, and seemed to think that unless you said it came from Convent, the answer was not ‘in keeping with Catholic tradition’. ‘I gather the convent of St Osburg was of no consequence,’ said he: boob. As convent did not enter English till after 1200 A.D. (and meant an ‘assembly’ at that) and the meaning ‘nunnery’ is not recorded before 1795, I felt annoyed. So I have asked whether he would like to change the name of Oxford to Doncaster; but he’s probably too stupid to see even that mild quip. Also I don't think I've read this take on Bombadil before: quote:Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron. Also this on whether LOTR is too "black and white" quote:Some reviewers have called the whole thing simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were ‘embalmers’. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be ‘artists’ – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only ‘hallows’ were their tombs. But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.
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Jan 16, 2019 00:59
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Reading Tolkien's letters makes me feel really dumb. Truly the posters of old were far greater than ourselves. Shibawanko posted:Townes van Zandt's The Silver Ships of Andilar is pretty cool. It's from the perspective of a soldier of Ar-Pharazon who was fed anti-Valinor propaganda Or something. The song came out a couple years before the Silmarillion so I doubt it is product of any significant reading of the matter of Numenor. I would need to think good and hard to get a grasp on what was known to readers about Numenor at that time, but a lot of elements of the backstory were apparently inchoate to a degree that is hard to understand now. My mother has a Tolkien encyclopedia from this period in which Sauron’s background is explained such that he must have been either one of the Valar, or possibly one of the high-elves. There was as yet no understanding of any intermediate category. Remember also that LOTR was big stuff in American counterculture in the late 60s/early 70s, names like “Valinor” could certainly have been picked up by osmosis. Great song though.
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Jan 16, 2019 14:16
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skasion posted:My mother has a Tolkien encyclopedia from this period in which Sauron’s background is explained such that he must have been either one of the Valar, or possibly one of the high-elves. There was as yet no understanding of any intermediate category. R haha, I'd love to see that. If you get a chance and remember, could you post some scans sometime? You have to be fairly old now, and have to have been a HUGE nerd then, to remember pre-Silmarillion LOTR lore; Silmarillion was released in 1977. One of the really interesting aspects of Tolkien's work to me is the shifting cultural impact. quote:
And of course, even there, when Beagle says "explode into popularity almost overnight" -- my first copy of The Hobbit was bought for me from a grade-school library discard sale because nobody in my school was checking it out. It wasn't till high school that I ran into other people who had actually read the Lord of the Rings without my prompting. Back in the 1980's if you ran into someone and they knew who Gollum was you knew you had met a new friend.
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Jan 16, 2019 14:34
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If anyone is going to write well, I hope it’s a philologist.
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Jan 16, 2019 14:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:And of course, even there, when Beagle says "explode into popularity almost overnight" -- my first copy of The Hobbit was bought for me from a grade-school library discard sale because nobody in my school was checking it out. It wasn't till high school that I ran into other people who had actually read the Lord of the Rings without my prompting. It's very easy for a lot of us like myself, who grew up after the 80s, to look at book/fantasy/etc fandom in the past through the lens of a post-Harry Potter, post-Star Wars/Trek, post-internet world where you could count on everybody to at least be aware of poo poo.
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Jan 16, 2019 17:35
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I read the Hobbit in 5th grade because I just randomly pulled it off the book shelf at my school. Pretty good choice imo.
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Jan 16, 2019 17:49
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Electric Bugaloo posted:It's very easy for a lot of us like myself, who grew up after the 80s, to look at book/fantasy/etc fandom in the past through the lens of a post-Harry Potter, post-Star Wars/Trek, post-internet world where you could count on everybody to at least be aware of poo poo. Even into the nineties this stuff was pretty cliquish. Even In my high school -- dating myself, but that was 1991-95 -- there were like ten or fifteen kids who were into "nerd poo poo" and we all played Dungeons and Dragons together. The Lord of the Rings films in the early 2000's were the watershed on it all going mainstream I think, at least for adults. Harry Potter probably did the same thing for kids -- it was first published in 97 but it didn't really start hitting it big until a few years later. Basically it all turned with the turn of the century. Before that "Frodo" was practically a password.
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Jan 16, 2019 18:05
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Frodo was a meme already in the 1960s and the book has been very popular after the release of the paperback version. It’s always been big and popular the movies tho obviously brought the story to People who don’t read.
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Jan 16, 2019 18:09
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I think that the enormous and famous popularity LOTR found in the 60s and 70s had mostly diffused into the general sci-fi/fantasy fandom by the 80s/90s and did not resurge as a phenomenon in its own right till the Jackson films
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Jan 16, 2019 18:16
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It was still huge in Usenet and hobbyist games (that could avoid copyright issues) through that time period. The forerunner to all modern ARPGs like diablo etc was a freeware game called Moria from .... 1983? Unix based of course. Of course also Dungeons and Dragons is heavily indebted to LOTR with changes made for copyright and so on. We read LOTR in high school in the 90s as well. It was still big. euphronius fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 18:22
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Growing up in the 90s there were multiple people I knew who had the Hobbit read to them as a bedtime story by their parents. It was a staple children's book at least among nerdier parents. LotR had a (deserved) reputation as being difficult to read and if you wanted more fantasy it was hardly the only choice.
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Jan 16, 2019 18:23
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skasion posted:I think that the enormous and famous popularity LOTR found in the 60s and 70s had mostly diffused into the general sci-fi/fantasy fandom by the 80s/90s and did not resurge as a phenomenon in its own right till the Jackson films euphronius posted:Frodo was a meme already in the 1960s and the book has been very popular after the release of the paperback version. There's popular and "popular" and memes in the 1960's were a very different thing from memes today. Popular in a niche is not popular in the mainstream. Sure, my high school had ten or fifteen kids who played Dungeons and Dragons and they had all read Lord of the Rings. But today you have the Stranger Things kids playing dungeons and dragons on television and it's a smash millions-of-viewers hit and I have random co-workers coming up to me and asking how to get started with D&D. In 1954, W.H. Auden reviewed the Lord of the Rings for the New York Times -- but in 2001 there were Elrond happy meal toys. When you're talking about "enormous popularity" of Lord of the Rings in the 1950's and 60's you're talking about popularity that was enormous within the context of the time, sure, but not popularity that even approached the scale or depth of modern fandoms. Like, Tom Wolfe notes in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test that Ken Kesey has a copy of the Lord of the Rings; Led Zeppelin has a couple of songs with references. Those were big deals . . . but at the time it was still the sort of thing that would be an allusion or a reference, not the sort of IP franchise we think of today when we think of "enormous popularity." I remember in high school a kid coming up and finding me because he needed to answer "what led zeppelin song mentions Gollum" for a prize quiz and I was the only kid he could think of who would know. On the one hand, it was a quiz question; on the other, it was a trivia quiz question, not general knowledge. Like, were there ever Lord of the Rings conventions in the way there were specific Star Trek / Star Wars conventions in the 70's and 80's? Maybe the annual meeting of the Tolkien Society would count but in inception it was an entirely different kind of animal. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 18:28
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I never said 50s It wasn’t until the later 60s when as I mentioned the paperback came out. Star Wars and Star Trek were tv shows and movies. As I mentioned of course popularity expanded with the movies because many people don’t read and in many ways cinema is probably the best medium available to us.
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Jan 16, 2019 18:30
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Like, were there ever Lord of the Rings conventions in the way there were specific Star Trek / Star Wars conventions in the 70's and 80's? Maybe the annual meeting of the Tolkien Society would count but in inception it was an entirely different kind of animal. Yeah, in addition to Tolkien Society there was also Mythcon which started up in the early 70s. I don’t think Tolkien fandom ever had the sex appeal of sci-fi/fantasy fandom more broadly so it is no surprise to me that it did not exactly hit the big time the way mass media fandoms like Trek did. I think there is evidence of broad public enthusiasm for LOTR in the specific period of the 60s and 70s that is not so readily in evidence in the 80s and 90s. Led Zep and Rush were huge bands in their day, they had enormous followings. Who are the guys making music about elves and wizards in the decades after that? They are weirdo metalheads recording in basements. Hell they still kind of are today, one interesting thing about the resurgence of interest in Tolkien’s work in context of its hugely marketable franchise is that it does not seem to have had the same sense of relevance. People treat it as just a good piece of media to consume where the first outgrowth of its fandom was surprisingly political and productive in unusual ways (even disregarding the enormous influence LOTR had on the development of paperback fantasy fiction as a market — I cannot imagine what Tolkien thought if he heard people, however sarcastically, promote Gandalf as president of the United States; much less what he would make of Led Zeppelin randomly bunging allusions to Gollum into an otherwise lyrically unremarkable song about Jimmy Page’s lifelong quest for pussy). People thought this book was saying something profoundly important to their daily lives and the way the world worked, and that’s pretty remarkable because it’s about elves and wizards and poo poo. You don’t quite see that today, at least not to any greater degree than you see it with any other hugely marketable franchise.
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Jan 16, 2019 19:00
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skasion posted:Yeah, in addition to Tolkien Society there was also Mythcon which started up in the early 70s. I don’t think Tolkien fandom ever had the sex appeal of sci-fi/fantasy fandom more broadly so it is no surprise to me that it did not exactly hit the big time the way mass media fandoms like Trek did. I think there is evidence of broad public enthusiasm for LOTR in the specific period of the 60s and 70s that is not so readily in evidence in the 80s and 90s. . . . .People thought this book was saying something profoundly important to their daily lives and the way the world worked, and that’s pretty remarkable because it’s about elves and wizards and poo poo. You don’t quite see that today, at least not to any greater degree than you see it with any other hugely marketable franchise. Yeah, that's a good point, and I would have missed that since the 60's and 70's were before my time. I'd still argue it was broad appeal within the counterculture rather than within the mainstream, but still, yeah, all the cultures were more monolithic then. It's hard for me to wrap my brain around the 1950's "mainstream" culture, even with parents shaped by it, when my main points of access to it are Back to the Future and MST3k shorts. It freaked me out watching Stranger Things and realizing that the 1980's now are to kids today as the 1950's were to me watching Back to the Future in 1984.
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Jan 16, 2019 19:06
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The Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie was pretty common children's fare in the 80s as I recall. Kids who would never willingly read a fantasy book were reasonably likely still to have seen that weird cartoon with the froggy guy in the cave and the magic ring. LotR though, that was a deep cut and I always liked the idea that I was probably one of maybe five people in my high school who had read it, and I could always whip out Silmarillion trivia and pronunciation rules from the Appendices if I wanted to lord it over them like the supercilious shithead I was
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Jan 16, 2019 21:52
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Data Graham posted:The Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie was pretty common children's fare in the 80s as I recall. Kids who would never willingly read a fantasy book were reasonably likely still to have seen that weird cartoon with the froggy guy in the cave and the magic ring. One of the English teachers in my middle school taught The Hobbit to his 7th grade class but I was unfortunately not in that class but the one next door. After finishing the book he would show them the movie and we could hear the goblin songs coming through the wall. He was also the cross country coach and would sing FIFTEEN BIRDS IN FIVE FIR TREES from time to time. There were only a couple kids in high school who read LotR although more tried because the movies were coming out. A friend of mine was convinced that 'Nazgul' referred to the flying creatures the Ringwraiths rode and nothing I could say would dissuade him. His main argument was based on this quote which must have made it into the movie because I know he never finished the books: quote:A cold voice answered: ‘Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.’ He took this as the Witch-King referring to his mount rather than talking about himself in the third person.
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Jan 16, 2019 22:20
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I thought Nazgul referred to the mounts too as a kid because the word gets used much more commonly in second half, after they start flying. In the first half ring-wraith is used more often. My first read through I'm not sure how much I really understood, especially of books 3 and 5.
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Jan 16, 2019 22:25
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cheetah7071 posted:I thought Nazgul referred to the mounts too as a kid because the word gets used much more commonly in second half, after they start flying. In the first half ring-wraith is used more often. My first read through I'm not sure how much I really understood, especially of books 3 and 5. My first attempt was in the 8th grade while I was home sick with the flu, and when I got into Two Towers my fevered brain couldn't keep Sauron and Saruman straight, so I quit.
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Jan 16, 2019 22:27
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I first read the book a year or two before the movies came out, my parents had fellowship in their bookcase but I don't think they ever actually read it
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Jan 16, 2019 22:32
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