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HopperUK posted:
I have a version similar to this, except it's black and the picture is smaller. Like this:  My LOTR book is just all three in one with a scene from the Battle of Helm's Deep from the movie as a cover.
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Jan 22, 2020 17:11
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If I was to pick a scene from that battle for a book cover, it'd be Gandalf on Shadowfax about to break the picket line of orcs.
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Jan 22, 2020 23:57
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Or his coming at first light where it's Gandalf alone backlit by the sun. One thing that I rarely see talked about with the films is how it has kind of a screwed up sense of direction in the literal sense. Which way they're going isn't always clear in the visual language. It's not so bad in Fellowship where the visual consensus is "go frame left to frame right to imply traveling east" but in Two Towers they travel southwest to Helm's Deep but still travel frame left to frame right and you have to remind yourself that the Hornburg faces north from its spot in the mountain range. Then Return of the King defies physics by having the sun rise in the North rather than the East so that it can light up the Rohirrim before they charge and suddenly all sense of direction is lost.
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Jan 23, 2020 00:07
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Duodecimal posted:If I was to pick a scene from that battle for a book cover, it'd be Gandalf on Shadowfax about to break the picket line of orcs. Mine was this, which I don't think is a particularly great looking cover: 
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Jan 23, 2020 23:24
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EvilTaytoMan posted:Mine was this, which I don't think is a particularly great looking cover: I've got that one but it's absolutely destroyed, it wasn't bound very well in the first place, I don't think.
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Jan 23, 2020 23:26
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Same. But mine got wet so I assumed it was because of that.
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Jan 23, 2020 23:27
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My omnibus version looks like this (and despite it being Alan Lee art, is just ugly as gently caress and so blah):
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Jan 23, 2020 23:52
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My first ever copy of The Hobbit was an ancient paperback with a really cartoony Smaug lying on a giant pile of gold. Because I was 8 years old and apparently a not very attentive reader, I got through most of chapter 1 picturing Bilbo as that dragon from the front cover, pottering about the kitchen and making tea. Eventually I realised my mind's image made no sense and re-read the chapter much more carefully. It was this cover: 
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Jan 24, 2020 00:24
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just saw last week's news,  to a real onenow put the dang legendarium in the public domain, subsequent heirs!
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Jan 24, 2020 00:30
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webmeister posted:My first ever copy of The Hobbit was an ancient paperback with a really cartoony Smaug lying on a giant pile of gold. Because I was 8 years old and apparently a not very attentive reader, I got through most of chapter 1 picturing Bilbo as that dragon from the front cover, pottering about the kitchen and making tea. Eventually I realised my mind's image made no sense and re-read the chapter much more carefully. That cartoony Smaug is drawn by Tolkien himself! http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/1016-Conversation-with-Smaug-Bodleian-exhibition.php
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Jan 24, 2020 01:10
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Radio! posted:That cartoony Smaug is drawn by Tolkien himself! Gotta love how  he looks.
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Jan 24, 2020 01:19
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These are the ones I had as a kid 
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Jan 24, 2020 02:36
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webmeister posted:My first ever copy of The Hobbit was an ancient paperback with a really cartoony Smaug lying on a giant pile of gold. Because I was 8 years old and apparently a not very attentive reader, I got through most of chapter 1 picturing Bilbo as that dragon from the front cover, pottering about the kitchen and making tea. Eventually I realised my mind's image made no sense and re-read the chapter much more carefully. bilbo as a dragon under the hill owns
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Jan 24, 2020 03:19
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In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means vast mounds of glittering treasure and the scattered bones of thieves.
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Jan 24, 2020 04:09
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Unless I've missed it, did nobody else have this edition? My parents had a much older first or maybe second edition that was falling apart, so I bought this when I was a kid and first reading it. It was maybe a year or two before the movies came out, so I fortunately missed out on all the crappy movie themed covers.
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Jan 24, 2020 09:06
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cheetah7071 posted:I grew up with these terrible covers  Though my favorite cover is definitely De Hobbit’s from this post a few pages ago: Look how goddamn cute Bilbo is in his big ol’ cloak! 
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Jan 24, 2020 15:55
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webmeister posted:My first ever copy of The Hobbit was an ancient paperback with a really cartoony Smaug lying on a giant pile of gold. Because I was 8 years old and apparently a not very attentive reader, I got through most of chapter 1 picturing Bilbo as that dragon from the front cover, pottering about the kitchen and making tea. Eventually I realised my mind's image made no sense and re-read the chapter much more carefully. That's probably the first edition my mother bought, this is what I grew up with: 
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Jan 24, 2020 18:50
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https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-51311739quote:Police were inundated with Lord of the Rings jokes after posting an appeal looking for the owner of a "precious" piece of jewellery.
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Jan 31, 2020 23:52
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The people who insist that the LotR was allegorical or symbolic of WW1 or WW2, or of Tolkien's idealized childhood, generally drive me nuts. That being said, there are definitely some points in the books where I felt like his background as a combat veteran comes out. In particular, the passages in the 'The Two Towers' where the orcs are talking to each other about the progress of the war struck me as something Tolkien might have lifted nearly verbatim from his fellow soldiers during the war. quote:‘No, I don’t know,’ said Gorbag’s voice. ‘The messages go through quicker than anything could fly, as a rule. But I don’t enquire how it’s done. Safest not to. Grr! Those Nazgûl give me the creeps. And they skin the body off you as soon as look at you, and leave you all cold in the dark on the other side. But He likes ’em; they’re His favourites nowadays, so it’s no use grumbling. I tell you, it’s no game serving down in the city.’ And we know from other passages and from his letters that Tolkien associated orcs and goblins with modern day warmongers and profiteers.
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Feb 16, 2020 04:17
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Imagined posted:his background as a combat veteran I would just like to caution people about reading too much into this, because he was a signals officer. He did go into the trenches with his men and was present on the multiple occasions when his battalion was ordered to attack something, but his job was to sit in a dugout and send and receive messages. Never went over the top, never had to repel an enemy attack, never saw a German except as prisoners, never fired his weapon in anger. In fact, come to think of it - can anyone remember a fight scene in LotR that attempts to capture the feeling of doing violence oneself? Off the top of my head, it seems like all the fights and battles are presented at a remove; when it's time to get physical, the narrator mostly takes a step back out of people's heads and into bald descriptions of their actions. We're only in people's heads as they anticipate something coming, or breathe out after it's done.
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Feb 16, 2020 09:11
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I dunno about experience with violence (though I don't know that detachment is an unrealistic portrayal of reacting to it), but the bits about the effects of the One Ring on the bearer ("he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness") and how Frodo wound up afterwards seem like pretty strong hints he knew about depression all too well. May not have fought personally but he was certainly a veteran at watching other people he knew die  .
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Feb 16, 2020 09:26
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Imagined posted:The people who insist that the LotR was allegorical or symbolic of WW1 or WW2, or of Tolkien's idealized childhood, generally drive me nuts. That being said, there are definitely some points in the books where I felt like his background as a combat veteran comes out. In particular, the passages in the 'The Two Towers' where the orcs are talking to each other about the progress of the war struck me as something Tolkien might have lifted nearly verbatim from his fellow soldiers during the war. There's nothing contradictory about an author claiming his work wasn't deliberate allegory and people reading it as being massively informed by his life experiences.
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Feb 16, 2020 21:20
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sassassin posted:There's nothing contradictory about an author claiming his work wasn't deliberate allegory and people reading it as being massively informed by his life experiences.  Letter 131 posted:I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairy tale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more 'life' a story has the more readily it will be susceptible to allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story).
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Feb 16, 2020 21:30
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sassassin posted:There's nothing contradictory about an author claiming his work wasn't deliberate allegory and people reading it as being massively informed by his life experiences. Is that not exactly what I said?
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Feb 16, 2020 21:47
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On the subject of covers, Barbara Remington, who did the covers for the 1965 paperback version, has passed. quote:Ms. Remington, who designed other book covers for Ballantine as well, was asked to illustrate the 1965 editions of “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” on a tight deadline.
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Feb 17, 2020 00:40
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Imagined posted:The people who insist that the LotR was allegorical or symbolic of WW1 or WW2, or of Tolkien's idealized childhood, generally drive me nuts. That being said, there are definitely some points in the books where I felt like his background as a combat veteran comes out. In particular, the passages in the 'The Two Towers' where the orcs are talking to each other about the progress of the war struck me as something Tolkien might have lifted nearly verbatim from his fellow soldiers during the war. It's parts like this that make me hate the way orcs are depicted in the movies. Movie orcs could never have a conversation like that. Just another example of the movies sanding down all the subtleties of the books.
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Feb 17, 2020 15:28
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1d4chan is definitely more inclined to talk about Warhammer than Lord of the Rings but they do have a good article about the development of Orcs in the pop culture and how reactions and evolutions of the warrior race archetype change and influence stuff over time. They have a good talk about Tolkien orcs and then how the ubiquity of the Warhammer Fantasy Orc altered public perception of what an Orc actually is. Peter Jackson Orcs owe a lot to Games Workshop in their nastiness and blunt nature
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Feb 17, 2020 15:33
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Jackson's dwarves are heavily warhammer inspired also, especially in the Hobbit films.
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Feb 17, 2020 16:27
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I was wondering what Tolkien actually imagined orcs looking like, because there are many passages where he describes people as looking almost like orcs, or being mistaken for orcs, etc. Even Treebeard thinks Merry and Pippin are little orcs until he hears their voices. Made me think that Tolkien was not imagining beings much different from ugly (foreign looking) people, not the slimy green monsters of Warhammer/Peter Jackson.
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Feb 17, 2020 17:04
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Tolkien absolutely thought of orcs as being ugly, weird, distorted types of foreign people and not green monsters with tusks or giant pig men or whatever. He was probably drawing on late antique descriptions of the Huns (filtered through Morris’ Roots of the Mountains).
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Feb 17, 2020 17:38
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Imagined posted:I was wondering what Tolkien actually imagined orcs looking like, because there are many passages where he describes people as looking almost like orcs, or being mistaken for orcs, etc. Even Treebeard thinks Merry and Pippin are little orcs until he hears their voices. Made me think that Tolkien was not imagining beings much different from ugly (foreign looking) people, not the slimy green monsters of Warhammer/Peter Jackson. ...they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types Letter 210 Not the professor's finest hour.
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Feb 17, 2020 17:54
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That letter, incidentally, is the one to Forrest Ackerman in which he shits all over Zimmerman’s 1958 script for a LOTR movie; he only brings up that orcs look like gross caricatures of mongoloids because the script gave them “beaks and feathers”.
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Feb 17, 2020 18:09
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GimpInBlack posted:...they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types Though he then uses animalistic imagery to describe various other orcs though, including fangs, primate like arm proportions, and decribing their hands as either claws themselves or having claws. I think Jackson's orcs are far closer than say, Warhammer orcs. There are some collected quotes here, including the above racist one. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92632/what-do-orcs-and-trolls-actually-look-like-or-rather-how-did-tolkien-imagine-th
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Feb 17, 2020 18:12
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I'm talking more in demeanor than in appearance for Jackson Orcs. The orcs in Tolkien's writing are cruel and enjoy violence but they're also more articulate and nuanced than Jackson Orcs which are a lot closer in attitude to the homicidal maniacs that are Warhammer orcs.
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Feb 17, 2020 18:51
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Imagined posted:I was wondering what Tolkien actually imagined orcs looking like, because there are many passages where he describes people as looking almost like orcs, or being mistaken for orcs, etc. Even Treebeard thinks Merry and Pippin are little orcs until he hears their voices. All non-plant based lifeforms probably look the same to Treebeard.
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Feb 17, 2020 19:04
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I think making them inarticulate goo monsters was just Peter Jackson saying he didn't think the audience would be smart enough to know who the bad guys are otherwise and that pisses me off.
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Feb 17, 2020 21:20
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I thought it was more that Peter Jackson loves inarticulate goo monsters.
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Feb 17, 2020 23:22
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Gothmog looked ridiculous obviously, but what else was wrong with the way the movie orcs looked? They looked like goblins to me.
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Feb 17, 2020 23:31
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I think making them inarticulate goo monsters was just Peter Jackson saying he didn't think the audience would be smart enough to know who the bad guys are otherwise and that pisses me off. I m not sure where you are getting that from. The scene where the uruks and orcs argue amongst themselves in front of merry and pippen is basically faithful to the book, as is the scene where frodo is captured and the orcs again squabble. It's clear the orcs can think and talk. They simplified it for the movie and removed nuance, but that's inevitable in a transition from book to movie.
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Feb 17, 2020 23:41
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Again I think people are getting hung up on the visual appearance of the orcs and are missing the point that the movie orcs have had a personality shift from a cruel antagonist to an outright psychotic one that cannot function in a non-conflict situation. Everything about the behaviour of orcs in the films is built around military action and wanton violence. They don't behave like a species that can do anything more than fight. Tolkien might not go in depth with his orcs but he does give them hints of what life is like beyond armed campaigns for the Dark Lord. I don't have an issue with their visual appearance. In fact I think that the Orcs look fantastic in the films and their spawning pools, while not to my liking, do evoke the clay of the earth origin stories. It's the simplified nature of the films that strips the orcs and the other societies of nuance. Orcs go from an antagonistic force with brief moments of context beyond their military life to a straightforward Legion of Evil who only live for combat. The Rohirrim having their own language and customs gets distilled down to "horse Saxons with some flavour titles." Gondor goes from a politically divided and overstretched nation to a bunch of sad sacks hiding behind a big castle with a hilariously squished geography. The elves lose a lot of their respect for other races and all of them act like arrogant Noldorian douchebags all the time. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Feb 18, 2020 |
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Feb 18, 2020 00:31
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