|
SHISHKABOB posted:Its more like a magic spell. Cleric magic.
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2021 00:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 13:46 |
|
|
Yeah because magic is mechanical and evil. Frodo wouldn't do magic, the divine light of the gods trumps artifice.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2021 00:23
|
|
|
Gandalf for example uses magic all the time
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2021 00:25
|
|
|
‘Fling fuel on the fire!’ cried Gandalf to the hobbits. ‘Draw your blades, and stand back to back!’ In the leaping light, as the fresh wood blazed up, Frodo saw many grey shapes spring over the ring of stones. More and more followed. Through the throat of one huge leader Aragorn passed his sword with a thrust; with a great sweep Boromir hewed the head off another. Beside them Gimli stood with his stout legs apart, wielding his dwarf-axe. The bow of Legolas was singing. In the wavering firelight Gandalf seemed suddenly to grow: he rose up, a great menacing shape like the monument of some ancient king of stone set upon a hill. Stooping like a cloud, he lifted a burning branch and strode to meet the wolves. They gave back before him. High in the air he tossed the blazing brand. It flared with a sudden white radiance like lightning; and his voice rolled like thunder. ‘Naur an edraith ammen! Naur dan i ngaurhoth!’ he cried. There was a roar and a crackle, and the tree above him burst into a leaf and bloom of blinding flame. The fire leapt from tree-top to tree-top. The whole hill was crowned with dazzling light. The swords and knives of the defenders shone and flickered. The last arrow of Legolas kindled in the air as it flew, and plunged burning into the heart of a great wolf-chieftain. All the others fled.
|
|
#
?
Sep 6, 2021 00:28
|
|
|
Fellowship summary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgMnCLHQuqc
|
|
#
?
Sep 7, 2021 15:35
|
|
|
I found audiobook  today of Tolkien's translation of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' as read by Terry Jones of 'Monty Python' fame. I'm looking forward to listening to that.
|
|
#
?
Sep 7, 2021 23:20
|
|
|
Imagined posted:I found audiobook Was so good. One of those audiobooks you quickly realize is the definitive experience of a given book.
|
|
#
?
Sep 8, 2021 15:20
|
|
|
So this week I also read Terry Pratchett's 'A Slip of the Keyboard', which collects some of his nonfiction essays, several of which are about his Tolkien fandom. One thing he mentions that I hadn't thought about was how Tolkien's works were significant as one of the first popular fantasy novels that took place ENTIRELY in a self-contained fantasy world with no connection to our reality, as opposed to the previous 'portal' fantasies such as Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, etc.
|
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2021 16:36
|
|
|
Probably. Tolkiens first writings did have a portal too and a modern traveler as the protagonist (The Cottage of Lost Play) Even in LOTR there are portals to fearie as well, but not as you mention in that particular frame.
|
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2021 16:42
|
|
|
Tolkien’s world is our world (and this was much more explicit in the earlier stuff), no different from Howard’s and Smith’s fantastical proto-Iron Ages or Dunsany’s Pegana
|
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2021 16:46
|
|
|
I don't think it's as clear as that. I think that's a bit of JRRT's latter-day revisionary attempts to square the circle and make his works make sense as a backstory for the actual Earth. At other points in his life he very much refers to it as a 'sub-creation', i.e. a fictional place somebody (him) invented, and if it was part of the 'real' world, it was only in the sense that the act of creating it was product and imitation of the larger "true" creation. He does begin 'The Hobbit' talking about how 'hobbits these days have become scarce and shy of the big folk', etc, but I think that has more to do with its self-conscious tone of 'a story being read out loud to children' than how he thought about his world. You could just as easily reinterpret that in-universe as 'The Hobbit' being Bilbo's diary, and those bits being elderly Bilbo addressing contemporary and future readers in Middle Earth. Imagined fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Sep 10, 2021 |
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2021 22:22
|
|
|
The Book of Lost Tales stuff is much more open about being connected to the real world than anything published in his lifetime, to the point where it ends with Romans and then Saxons showing up on Tol Eressea and Kortirion is literally Warwick. The motivating factor for the post-LOTR heliocentric stuff is imo not that he had just now decided that Middle-earth was our world (this is entirely implicit in his choice of name)—it’s that his image of the elves had changed over the decades from something relatively “primitive” and fairy-like to something like an antique civilization with loremaster-scholars who could have known better than to conceptualize the universe in a geocentric way. It is interesting that LOTR places a good deal less stress on this identity of Middle-earth with our world than some of the other works, but the identity is absolutely still there. Witness his extremely dry joking in the preface about why it is the hobbits have tobacco, a new world plant.
|
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2021 22:40
|
|
|
The first edition of the hobbit was 100% not on earth or whatever. It was a fantasy land Edit I deserve the right to walk this comment back after thinking about it more
|
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2021 23:48
|
|
|
euphronius posted:The first edition of the hobbit was 100% not on earth or whatever. It was a fantasy land Golf, dude
|
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2021 23:50
|
|
|
Talking about middle earth being earth - I was listening to the recent Tolkien professor pod - and Mars !! Is on Lotr. I didn’t remember this line and I doubt anyone else does flight all the lesser stars. But low in the South one star shone red. Every night, as the Moon waned again, it shone brighter and brighter. Frodo could see it from his window, deep in the heavens, burning like a watchful eye that glared above the trees on the brink of the valley. No one remembers this.
|
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2021 23:52
|
|
|
I could and probably am wrong in how Tolkien intended it but the point being it isn't a portal fantasy. There's no magic potion or wardrobe or tornado or whatever, the audience surrogate isn't an isekai'd modern human but himself a fantasy creature, a native of that world, and the books themselves are explained as being his histories of their events. There's absolutely no 'wink-wink it's all make believe, you know, just pretend stories'. Instead it commits 100% to the conceit that this is a real place, these are real people, and these are things that actually happened to them there. It is in that respect that it seems like it was a uniquely early example, if not the first then almost certainly the popularizer of the form. Which is harder to grok having grown up in the culture that followed in its wake.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 00:11
|
|
|
I know I've always thought it must have been super avant-garde at the time for a fantasy book to show up in a world where readers are used to strapping Arthurian or Carolingian heroes going on quests to obtain magic talismans and swords and things, and instead being about some insignificant little gnome who is trying to get rid of a monstrously powerful magic talisman. Talk about subverting tropes.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 00:24
|
|
|
Imagined posted:I could and probably am wrong in how Tolkien intended it but the point being it isn't a portal fantasy. There's no magic potion or wardrobe or tornado or whatever, the audience surrogate isn't an isekai'd modern human but himself a fantasy creature, a native of that world, and the books themselves are explained as being his histories of their events. There's absolutely no 'wink-wink it's all make believe, you know, just pretend stories'. Instead it commits 100% to the conceit that this is a real place, these are real people, and these are things that actually happened to them there. It is in that respect that it seems like it was a uniquely early example, if not the first then almost certainly the popularizer of the form. Which is harder to grok having grown up in the culture that followed in its wake. I think it’s more instructive to look at Tolkien’s descendants than his ancestors here. As a direct result of his success it became totally normal, even obligatory, for a certain sort of fantasy novel to cadge his myth-historical framing. But this framing isn’t anything you can’t find in the American pulp fantasy tradition — it’s just less developed there because instead of being scholarly experts in myth, history and language, the authors ranged from being clueless about these topics to, at best, self taught. If you want you could probably trace it all the way back to William Morris’ barbarian novels, which are serious (to a fault) in their presentation as a myth-historical tradition.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 00:42
|
|
|
feedmyleg posted:Golf, dude Yeah and express train
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 00:48
|
|
|
Also the Hindu Kush and Gobi Desert, in the draft, but I guess that was too silly even for Hobbit-era JRRT
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 00:54
|
|
|
i know and understand the whole middle earth is our earth stuff and i wholeheartedly reject it
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 00:58
|
|
|
skasion posted:Also the Hindu Kush and Gobi Desert, in the draft, but I guess that was too silly even for Hobbit-era JRRT In the published Hobbit, Bilbo offers to go "to the East of East and fight the wild Were-worms in the Last Desert." In the first draft, it was "to [cancelled: Hindu Kush] the Great Desert of Gobi and fight the Wild Wire worm(s) of the Chinese." 
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 07:50
|
|
|
euphronius posted:Talking about middle earth being earth - I was listening to the recent Tolkien professor pod - and Mars !! Is on Lotr. I didn’t remember this line and I doubt anyone else does I do! There's other stuff about stars and constellations too, they are quite obviously intended to represent ones we have today. - the Sickle is Ursa Major - I think Remmirath is the Pleiades - Borgil is probably Betelgeuse - Menelvagor is Orion
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 10:10
|
|
|
Imagined posted:I could and probably am wrong in how Tolkien intended it but the point being it isn't a portal fantasy. There's no magic potion or wardrobe or tornado or whatever, the audience surrogate isn't an isekai'd modern human but himself a fantasy creature, a native of that world, and the books themselves are explained as being his histories of their events. There's absolutely no 'wink-wink it's all make believe, you know, just pretend stories'. Instead it commits 100% to the conceit that this is a real place, these are real people, and these are things that actually happened to them there. It is in that respect that it seems like it was a uniquely early example, if not the first then almost certainly the popularizer of the form. Which is harder to grok having grown up in the culture that followed in its wake. That wasn't anything new even then, though. The first 2 counterexamples I thought of were Macdonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), and even books like Hodgson's The Night Land or Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros keep their contemporary "narrators" to the first chapters; they act as an explanation of how the text "got here" rather than participating in the narrative isekai-style. Zopotantor posted:I do! There's other stuff about stars and constellations too, they are quite obviously intended to represent ones we have today. I think Antares is a tad more likely than Betelgeuse to be Borgil (assuming the Elves considered Betelgeuse a part of Orion), unless Tolkien said anything one way or the other.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 14:33
|
|
|
Runcible Cat posted:That wasn't anything new even then, though. The first 2 counterexamples I thought of were Macdonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), and even books like Hodgson's The Night Land or Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros keep their contemporary "narrators" to the first chapters; they act as an explanation of how the text "got here" rather than participating in the narrative isekai-style. This is a defensible reading based just on Worm, but the relationship between Lessingham and the "main event" of Worm is slightly more complex than that. Mistress of Mistresses and especially Fish Dinner in Memison make it clear that we should be seeing this as a kind of inverse Narnia setup
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 14:41
|
|
|
Runcible Cat posted:I think Antares is a tad more likely than Betelgeuse to be Borgil (assuming the Elves considered Betelgeuse a part of Orion), unless Tolkien said anything one way or the other. Antares is quite far away from Orion in the sky, though. Three is Company posted:Away high in the East swung Remmirath, the Netted Stars, and slowly above the mists red Borgil rose, glowing like a jewel of fire. Then by some shift of airs all the mist was drawn away like a veil, and there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 14:42
|
|
|
skasion posted:This is a defensible reading based just on Worm, but the relationship between Lessingham and the "main event" of Worm is slightly more complex than that. Mistress of Mistresses and especially Fish Dinner in Memison make it clear that we should be seeing this as a kind of inverse Narnia setup Fair point, it's a long while since I read the Zimiamvia books and I forgot they had contemporary framing too. But the central argument that there were plenty of self-contained fantasies before The Hobbit still stands. (Can't quite decide if Milne's Once on a Time counts; it's a self-contained fantasy/fairytale world that Milne claims to have found histories of that he thinks are biased.) Zopotantor posted:Antares is quite far away from Orion in the sky, though. It's in Scorpio, which in the Greek constellation mythology is supposed to be chasing Orion/about to sting him in the heel, so the connection's there. Tolkien's phrasing could be read as Borgil being part of Menelvagor or just being nearby - I incline to the latter, obviously.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 14:59
|
|
|
The Beatles can tell you all about how it doesn't matter who actually did a thing first. What matters is who most people first saw doing it. I knew while writing that that some very knowledgeable goon could not possibly resist citing earlier, more obscure counterexamples, which is why I also snuck in some very important weasel words to qualify my comment. Imagined posted:if not the first then almost certainly the popularizer of the form
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 15:07
|
|
|
Runcible Cat posted:It's in Scorpio, which in the Greek constellation mythology is supposed to be chasing Orion/about to sting him in the heel, so the connection's there. Tolkien's phrasing could be read as Borgil being part of Menelvagor or just being nearby - I incline to the latter, obviously. You're of course entitled to your opinion. I have to point out though that Scorpius isn't visible in the northern sky after mid-September, and the scene in question takes place on the night of the 24th/25th. Based on the description it has to be quite a while after midnight, since Orion rises around six hours after sunset at that time of year. Yes, I am pedant enough that I looked this up. Tolkien was a stickler for details, I'm quite certain he made sure that the hobbits would have seen the actual sky as it appears on that date.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 20:55
|
|
|
Didn't he have to rework a whole timeline around the fact that he'd described the moon in the wrong phase at one point?
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 21:00
|
|
|
Zopotantor posted:You're of course entitled to your opinion. I have to point out though that Scorpius isn't visible in the northern sky after mid-September, and the scene in question takes place on the night of the 24th/25th. Based on the description it has to be quite a while after midnight, since Orion rises around six hours after sunset at that time of year. What about the precession of the equinoxes though? It was theoretically thousands of years ago. To make an accurate prediction of what sky they were looking at you'd need to have a rough estimate of when it happened on our calendar scale.
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 21:03
|
|
|
Zopotantor posted:You're of course entitled to your opinion. I have to point out though that Scorpius isn't visible in the northern sky after mid-September, and the scene in question takes place on the night of the 24th/25th. Based on the description it has to be quite a while after midnight, since Orion rises around six hours after sunset at that time of year. I bow to the greater pedant!
|
|
#
?
Sep 11, 2021 21:13
|
|
|
William Bear posted:In the published Hobbit, Bilbo offers to go "to the East of East and fight the wild Were-worms in the Last Desert." Fun fact, these are a real cryptid/legendary creature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_death_worm
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2021 11:28
|
|
|
A Dune connection to Tolkien is not what I expected to wake up to today
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2021 14:01
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2021 15:02
|
|
|
This thing I saw on Quora was kinda amusing:
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2021 12:13
|
|
|
is Aman totally free of Morgoth's taint (or Melkor's gooch, if you want to get technical)? I thought all of Arda was tainted from the very beginning. Or did Aman become untainted when it became separate and (mostly) inaccessible after the downfall of Númenor?
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2021 12:34
|
|
|
The Algorithm recommended this to me the other day: The Lord of the Rings: Rise to War https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_7pBJquQ8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wup5XoxNDgg
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2021 12:38
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:This thing I saw on Quora was kinda amusing: Oh so they turn into the crew of the Flying Dutchman, good to know
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2021 18:52
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 13:46 |
|
|
It's Hobbit Day. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2021 18:50
|
|