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If I recall, the elves knew when Sauron was about to pull this poo poo and enslave them and took off their rings, and it does not seem unreasonable that they suddenly heard that Annatar dude saying "THREE RINGS FOR ELF ETC." and someone wrote it down. It is even possible they took a minute to realize what was going on and get their rings off.
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Dec 12, 2020 04:30
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Right I think tho it’s pretty clear it’s Gandalf’s translation into Westron
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Dec 12, 2020 04:32
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Nessus posted:If I recall, the elves knew when Sauron was about to pull this poo poo and enslave them and took off their rings, and it does not seem unreasonable that they suddenly heard that Annatar dude saying "THREE RINGS FOR ELF ETC." and someone wrote it down. It is even possible they took a minute to realize what was going on and get their rings off. Gandalf the Grey posted:Out of the Black Years come the words that the Smiths of Eregion heard, and knew that they had been betrayed So yeah, they heard. "Hey, Annatar's doing something new with Rings, wonder wh- OH gently caress ME!"
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Dec 12, 2020 10:46
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Nessus posted:If I recall, the elves knew when Sauron was about to pull this poo poo and enslave them and took off their rings, and it does not seem unreasonable that they suddenly heard that Annatar dude saying "THREE RINGS FOR ELF ETC." and someone wrote it down. It is even possible they took a minute to realize what was going on and get their rings off. The "Three rings for the Elven-kings" verse cannot pre-date the creation of the One, nor can it have been part of the spell of the One's creation, because the whole point of Sauron's ring project was to use the rings he'd taught them to make to create a backdoor into the minds of the Elves. His plan was that all the rings would belong to elves. Humans and dwarves didn't come onto his radar until after that plan had failed, and Sauron had slaughtered the ring-makers and recovered the 16 rings made with his direct input.
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Dec 12, 2020 10:55
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Anshu posted:The "Three rings for the Elven-kings" verse cannot pre-date the creation of the One, nor can it have been part of the spell of the One's creation, because the whole point of Sauron's ring project was to use the rings he'd taught them to make to create a backdoor into the minds of the Elves. His plan was that all the rings would belong to elves. Humans and dwarves didn't come onto his radar until after that plan had failed, and Sauron had slaughtered the ring-makers and recovered the 16 rings made with his direct input. Wait. Where are you getting this information?
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Dec 12, 2020 11:36
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I am re-reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time in about 20 years, and having a good time of it. A lot of my memory has been scrambled by the films and it's fun to take it on its own terms. I'd forgotten that this book is about 30% landscape descriptions. You often end up with a clearer picture of where the characters are walking through than the characters themselves. I also appreciate how differentiated the hobbits personalities are, especially near the beginning - Pippin is a young idiot, but Merry is extremely practical and helpful, at least through the old forest. Again, the movies had sort of merged them into a hobbity blob in my brain. Was Galadriel a pre-existing character, or did Tolkien back-port her into the Silmarillion after he wrote Lord of the Rings? I also wonder what it was like to read this book before the Silmarillion was published. (Or let alone having internet wikis to look everything up on). There's a lot in the appendices, but I'm still not sure how anyone could figure out who Elbereth is short of writing JRRT himself a letter.
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Dec 12, 2020 15:38
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Galadriel was created not only specifically for Lord of the Rings, but specifically for the fellowship’s arrival at Lothlorien. Hence her lack of an appearance or even mention at the council of Elrond.
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Dec 12, 2020 15:44
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Omnomnomnivore posted:I am re-reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time in about 20 years, and having a good time of it. A lot of my memory has been scrambled by the films and it's fun to take it on its own terms. I'd forgotten that this book is about 30% landscape descriptions. You often end up with a clearer picture of where the characters are walking through than the characters themselves. the old forest is the best part especially because it feels intimate and like a bunch of friends going on an adventure instead of something epic with noble brows and fair hands and getting hewn, et cetera the black riders work really well as sort of a vague background threat, they never actually appear during this part but you feel like they still might or at least that there's a pressure on the boys to try to keep hidden, which puts you very close to them as you're reading
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Dec 12, 2020 16:38
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Omnomnomnivore posted:I am re-reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time in about 20 years, and having a good time of it. A lot of my memory has been scrambled by the films and it's fun to take it on its own terms. I'd forgotten that this book is about 30% landscape descriptions. You often end up with a clearer picture of where the characters are walking through than the characters themselves. This criticism always makes me like  because it seems like such a strange thing to get hung up on (like we don't criticize movies for spending time on nice establishing shots, plus what, would you rather have pages and pages about what someone's dress looks like); but in light of the Old Forest chapter post above it really takes some work to properly picture the kind of landscape features he's describing, and how they force the plot forward. Those big diagonal gullies that seem to be positioned directly across their direction of travel, forcing them to climb painfully up and down embankments and then get stuck in river bottoms, and then eventually taking the easy route following the stream bed right into Old Man Willow's trap, and so on. But (at least in this case) it's not so much that the landscape description is there just to fill space or be indulgent, it's turning the land and the forest into a character in its own right, with its own motivations and agency. Plus you (as a reader) have to be pretty familiar with walking in the woods — not just following hiking trails, but bushwacking through the wilderness — to really appreciate the difficulty of what's being described. I wonder if that whole style is part of a writing tradition that Tolkien was kind of a vestigial relic of at the time, and nobody bothers to do it like that anymore just because it seems so alien (as evidenced by how many readers find it so weird and remarkable as to be off-putting).
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Dec 12, 2020 17:34
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Data Graham posted:This criticism always makes me like The Old Forest chapter really struck me on my last read-through for precisely these reasons. I'd been spending a lot of time bushwhacking through the mountains of New Mexico, where at any given time you might come across a 200 ft deep gully and have to take a huge elevation drop, or just run into impassible brush or a godawful scree slope. The landscape descriptions popped out at me, but in a good way.
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Dec 12, 2020 17:57
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yeah i often go on long distance hikes through forest and stuff and the old forest bit really feels like that my least favorite part is probably rohan i guess, because it feels least like it makes sense in the overall world, theyre just a bunch of standard viking/saxon type of people randomly dropped into the story so that there can be Epic Battles and soldiers and horses and so on, i prefer the frodo/sam bit because, again, it's intimate again and has a general lack of men Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Dec 12, 2020 |
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Dec 12, 2020 18:03
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Omnomnomnivore posted:I also wonder what it was like to read this book before the Silmarillion was published. (Or let alone having internet wikis to look everything up on). There's a lot in the appendices, but I'm still not sure how anyone could figure out who Elbereth is short of writing JRRT himself a letter. Or figure out why the ram built to break Minas Tirith's gate was called Grond. I'm pretty sure I squeaked out loud with delight at that.
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Dec 12, 2020 18:04
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Omnomnomnivore posted:I am re-reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time in about 20 years, and having a good time of it. A lot of my memory has been scrambled by the films and it's fun to take it on its own terms. I'd forgotten that this book is about 30% landscape descriptions. You often end up with a clearer picture of where the characters are walking through than the characters themselves. This has been discussed several times in the past, in summary: 1) The landscape descriptions are actually fairly succinct and beautifully written. I think 30% is overdoing it big time if you actually ran an analysis post FotR 2) The setting is 'low magic' so everyone is going around on foot or steed rather than jumping through portals as a convenient device 3) The book is about the world just as much as the characters 4) Open up any acclaimed fantasy series like ASoIAF and you'll find equally long and more mundane landscape descriptions, except often without the justification they're often character-driven stories
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Dec 12, 2020 18:42
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Data Graham posted:This criticism always makes me like perc2 posted:This has been discussed several times in the past, in summary: I didn't mean to come across as critical of the landscape descriptions! They are very pleasant to read and make the book very distinctive. Just noting that I don't recall it appearing to this degree in much else that I've read, and doesn't appear to have been copied by Tolkien's many, many imitators. Perhaps there's some older vein of travelogue literature I'm not familiar with. Shibawanko posted:my least favorite part is probably rohan i guess, because it feels least like it makes sense in the overall world, theyre just a bunch of standard viking/saxon type of people randomly dropped into the story so that there can be Epic Battles and soldiers and horses and so on, i prefer the frodo/sam bit because, again, it's intimate again and has a general lack of men I like Rohan, but Book III does mark a pretty noticeable shift in tone. Some of it is just leaving the hobbit perspective, but also Professor T letting his Anglo-Saxon freak flag fly (and combing them with steppe riders). Just these gangs of dudes that want nothing more than to ride into battle and die a glorious death. You could almost excerpt Book III as as standalone story about a group of warriors who help a kingdom defend itself from an evil wizard. Come to think of it, that's not too far off from what Jackson did in the second movie. Other random thoughts - there is a lot suggesting that the world is bigger and more complicated than the Valar/Maiar/Elf/Ent/Dwarf/Man/Hobbit/Orc taxonomy (like Treebeard's lists) that appears to describe the world on the surface. Bombadil, of course, but also Gandalf talking about nameless things underneath Moria that even Sauron doesn't know about. Constantly teasing bigger things just outside the frame is a trick he pulls over and over, but dang is he good at it. Gimli strikes me as a guy who's never been outside the dwarf-kingdoms before, or met many non-dwarves. He's tough and smart but also has as narrow a perspective on things as the hobbits do in his way. At least until Lorien where he starts to open up. Anyway, I finished Book III today. I'm going to have limited reading time coming up but I'm looking forward to Frodo/Sam/Gollum, and in particular if I'll love Sam as much as I remember. He has a pretty minimal presence in Fellowship.
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Dec 12, 2020 18:48
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Very well, "criticism, if criticism you call it" 
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Dec 12, 2020 18:54
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The old forest is in fact a character so the landscape is important I mean landscapes in lotr are always important but even more so there
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Dec 12, 2020 18:58
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VanSandman posted:Wait. Where are you getting this information? The Silmarillion, "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age": quote:Seeing the desolation of the world, Sauron said in his heart that the Valar,
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Dec 12, 2020 21:46
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Omnomnomnivore posted:I didn't mean to come across as critical of the landscape descriptions! They are very pleasant to read and make the book very distinctive. Just noting that I don't recall it appearing to this degree in much else that I've read, and doesn't appear to have been copied by Tolkien's many, many imitators. Perhaps there's some older vein of travelogue literature I'm not familiar with. No worries, apologies if I got too defensive! There are some other shifts in tone I notice, I think Weathertop or there abouts the narration takes on a much graver/poetic tone than The Hobbit-esque affectation of the start. I honestly don't know if this was Tolkien realising as he wrote that the scope of the book should be more grandiose; certainly by the end of RotK it's comprable to Silmarillion's prose. I think there was a bit of a retcon about "shift in who's writing the book" as a cover throughout but can't remember the exact points.
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Dec 12, 2020 22:20
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Olsen makes a big deal about “oh well you see all the forsoothly parts are where it’s being written by Findegil, King’s Writer”, but really how seriously can you take that
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Dec 12, 2020 22:55
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Data Graham posted:Olsen makes a big deal about “oh well you see all the forsoothly parts are where it’s being written by Findegil, King’s Writer”, but really how seriously can you take that It's how I read it. I'm not familiar with Olsen but I did come to the conclusion that the conceit of the narrative being assembled from disparate sources was strong - hobbit focused sections are very different from ones with Aragorn as the main character, for example.
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Dec 12, 2020 23:04
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Fun fantasy book youtuber guy Daniel Greene does a tier list of Tolkien covers. Thought I'd share because there's some neat ones on there I've never seen before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjvu33Qjy-Y
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Dec 12, 2020 23:38
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skasion posted:Galadriel was created not only specifically for Lord of the Rings, but specifically for the fellowship’s arrival at Lothlorien. Hence her lack of an appearance or even mention at the council of Elrond. I can imagine JRRT chuckling Oxfordishly at the oldest character in the book also being the newest character in the book. Data Graham posted:Olsen makes a big deal about “oh well you see all the forsoothly parts are where it’s being written by Findegil, King’s Writer”, but really how seriously can you take that "Forsoothly" is an excellent word (not quite hewn-tier though.)
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Dec 13, 2020 02:56
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Can’t take credit for it unfortunately, I attribute it to a friend who was making these arguments to me in the 90s
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Dec 13, 2020 04:16
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He likes "fell" a lot too.
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Dec 13, 2020 05:11
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OctaviusBeaver posted:He likes "fell" a lot too. "...and nursed it with fell meats"
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Dec 13, 2020 06:12
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Fell meats are the tastiest
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Dec 13, 2020 06:14
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I prefer medium-fell personally, fell is just a bit too overcooked
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Dec 13, 2020 06:36
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“Fell meats” = steak with ketchup
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Dec 13, 2020 14:12
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There's a cool list of uncommon words he used here also: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Uncommon_words. I've always been a fan of "dwimmer" as it has a really interesting history as a word and finds its way into interesting places but 99% of people would not recognise it, even if they played Elder Scrolls games. Other cool words: "fain", "gorcrow", "tarry", "wold"
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Dec 13, 2020 14:48
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Also got me thinking about how he uses "doom" to mean fate or prophecy more than just the modern interpretation as "demise"
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Dec 13, 2020 14:51
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perc2 posted:There's a cool list of uncommon words he used here also: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Uncommon_words. I've always been a fan of "dwimmer" as it has a really interesting history as a word and finds its way into interesting places but 99% of people would not recognise it, even if they played Elder Scrolls games. Other cool words: "fain", "gorcrow", "tarry", "wold" This list looks kinda funny to me, I'm guessing because I'm from the UK. 'abide'? 'aghast'? 'amiss'? 'assuage'? Are those words weird in the US?
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Dec 13, 2020 15:09
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The list is up to personal interpretation. There will be words in there that seem natural to you, especially as a Tolkien fan, yeah.
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Dec 13, 2020 15:30
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I always thought a great companion while you read Tolkien (especially first timers) would be a visual guide of landscape features. It’s probably why so many people struggle with his in-depth landscape descriptions. If you don’t know what a dell is, or downs, or a gully or whatever, it is hard to picture.
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Dec 13, 2020 16:00
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Mahoning posted:I always thought a great companion while you read Tolkien (especially first timers) would be a visual guide of landscape features. It’s probably why so many people struggle with his in-depth landscape descriptions. If you don’t know what a dell is, or downs, or a gully or whatever, it is hard to picture. Older British fantasists have a particular boner for this kind of thing. Ever seen a ghyll? How about an ings or an heugh?
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Dec 13, 2020 16:22
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Posting from my windy tumulus rn
perc2 fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 16:29
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perc2 posted:Also got me thinking about how he uses "doom" to mean fate or prophecy more than just the modern interpretation as "demise" I think that he used it more in the original meaning of the word, ie. 'judgement'.
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Dec 13, 2020 16:46
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Tree Bucket posted:"...and nursed it with fell meats" Meat that has fallen on the floor of a kebab shop.
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Dec 13, 2020 16:47
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"fell meats" = boiled ribs
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Dec 13, 2020 18:45
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I love how between: fell, adj: eldritch, uncanny fell, n: hill fell, n: costume, disguise modern (American) readers get an infinity of meanings from Tolkien that they've never heard of before, for an otherwise super common word
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Dec 13, 2020 19:48
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I'm positive I've never heard fell used to mean costume.
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Dec 13, 2020 19:50
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