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all hobbits are a little fruity anyway
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Oct 13, 2023 20:55
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Ginette Reno posted:LOTR is so desexualized that it's tough for me to read much into any character's sexuality in it. There's only one love story in it that's not background noise (Faramir/Eowyn) and even that involves them holding hands and I think kissing once? And professing love? Aragorn/Arwen's marriage is treated more like a state event than a profession of true love. Given his military background the officer/batman relationship may be an even better match - bonding under fire and whatnot. It seems to agreepretty well with the way that relationship is shown in popular fiction of the time; you get a ton of the ex-Army-officer Bulldog Drummond types with their faithful ultra-capable batmen.
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Oct 13, 2023 22:40
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Very Holmes/Watson, I'm sure that can't have escaped his notice
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Oct 13, 2023 23:18
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Data Graham posted:Very Holmes/Watson, I'm sure that can't have escaped his notice Kiiind of, but Holmes and Watson are the same social class. The officer/batman relationship has mutual respect and recognition of each other's skills, but there's still a very definite the batman is a good servant who knows his place and calls his officer sir thing going on.
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Oct 13, 2023 23:29
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That feels blurry. Holmes always read to me as at least putting on airs if not actually upper class, what with his mahogany-lined library/snifters of brandy aesthetic and all. Watson being a Crimean War vet and Holmes being a slightly airheaded gadabout whose loose ends are always being picked up by dutiful Watson seems very much in keeping with the dynamic, even if the classes aren't strictly analogous to a lord/servant sort of deal. Of course I am far from a Holmes nerd and I could be drawing as much of these impressions from the Great Mouse Detective as from Doyle
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Oct 13, 2023 23:35
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Now I'm picturing a Hobbit version of Jeeves and Wooster and I'm sad that it doesn't exist.
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Oct 13, 2023 23:44
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More Jeeves and Wooster I think. Or actually, the PTSD angle Tolkien ends up taking, where the batman-turned-servant is the only one who really understands the poo poo his master has been through and can never express to polite society, reminds me more of Peter Wimsey and Bunter. Though apparently Tolkien hated the Wimsey books lol Even then though, Jeeves and Bunter are both “gentleman’s gentlemen”, their social conduct is perfect and they never look above their station in life. Sam is a gardener who ends up a gentleman.
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Oct 13, 2023 23:46
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Data Graham posted:That feels blurry. Holmes always read to me as at least putting on airs if not actually upper class, what with his mahogany-lined library/snifters of brandy aesthetic and all. Watson being a Crimean War vet and Holmes being a slightly airheaded gadabout whose loose ends are always being picked up by dutiful Watson seems very much in keeping with the dynamic, even if the classes aren't strictly analogous to a lord/servant sort of deal. Holmes is kind of artsy and bohemian and not-quite-respectable, but nobody in the stories takes him as anything other than a gentleman (except when he's In Disguise), and Watson is a respectable professional man, not subordinate in any way. The British class system is an absolute bugger to explain and I'm probably not doing a good job, but one type of partnership is accepted as equal by the standards of the day and the other isn't - you're never going to get a scene where the officer/subordinate pair are invited to dinner at the same table, for example; the subordinate's going to be down in the kitchen or in the pub on the corner until his boss wants the car, while no client has any problem dining with Holmes and Watson. You'll find a lot of examples in the Bulldog Drummond-type thriller - bored ex-army officer protagonists bashing the Hun etc, with their good-hearted faithful working-class sidekicks.
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Oct 14, 2023 00:01
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quote:
By the time of The Greek Interpreter, Holmes's station in life is clearly fixed; he's from a line of country squires, which appears to put him comfortably above Watson. They're still in the same general band of society; Watson consciously subordinates himself to Holmes on meritocratic rather than social grounds. However, I once read something, that of course I can't find again, which had a very interesting theory. The problem they were trying to solve was, how do we square Holmes's early portrayal as someone with single-minded focus on his profession to the exclusion of worldly general knowledge (particularly in A Study in Scarlet, when he claims not to know that the Earth goes round the Sun and then says he wants to forget it as soon as possible), with his later depiction of someone much more aware of the world around him, comfortable in making literary allusions, etc. The writer offered a simple Watsonian explanation, along the lines of, this was Holmes having a joke at his new flatmate's expense by pretending to be ignorant. They also offered the rather more interesting Doylist reading, which was that originally the author conceived Holmes as a lower-middle-class professional, someone from relatively humble origins and little education who makes his way in the world by *actually being good at his job* and who has insights and skills that the better-bred and educated Watson doesn't have. Then, they theorised, after Holmes became a hit, for some reason Conan Doyle improved his hero's origins through the short story era, particularly the Memoirs, finishing with The Greek Interpreter. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Oct 14, 2023 |
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Oct 14, 2023 00:39
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Holmes and Watson
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Ginette Reno posted:LOTR is so desexualized that it's tough for me to read much into any character's sexuality in it. There's only one love story in it that's not background noise (Faramir/Eowyn) and even that involves them holding hands and I think kissing once? And professing love? Aragorn/Arwen's marriage is treated more like a state event than a profession of true love. Did you read the polygon article linked above your post? It can’t go beyond, “we’ll never know for sure”, but it makes some good points. It at least opened me up to the possibility that Frodo and Sam’s relationship was not just platonic love between master and servant.
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Oct 14, 2023 01:47
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Heithinn Grasida posted:Did you read the polygon article linked above your post? It can’t go beyond, “we’ll never know for sure”, but it makes some good points. It at least opened me up to the possibility that Frodo and Sam’s relationship was not just platonic love between master and servant. I did. It's interesting for sure. I'm not sure it changed my reading of the books, but it's intriguing.
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Oct 14, 2023 05:17
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http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=210 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpjyNIoJ0V4
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Oct 14, 2023 07:20
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rip last page
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Oct 14, 2023 21:08
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skasion posted:There were at least two closeted Inklings (one being Hugo Dyson, the “oh God, not another elf” guy). Tolkien was also a big fan of Mary Renault (she had been his student), especially her ancient Greece books which are gay as hell. I gotta say, I think he knew exactly what he was writing when he makes the douchebag miller of Hobbiton sneer about Bag End being a queer place with queer folk and having the gaffer answer “if that’s queer to you, we could do with some more queer round these parts” The Miller (and Tolkien) are obviously using queer in the older sense there; as in strange or unusual. And the Gaffer is defending the Bagginses because they are generous employers. On the one hand an Englishman nearly a century ago would likely have witnessed/experienced some school chum silly buggers, but that wouldn't automatically make him what we would consider accepting or progressive. Same with having closeted peeps. And the other hand? Super  . I'm a cradle myself and unfortunately the bigotry runs very deep and wide in this church, and has for a long time. But there are of course exceptions, and it's not totally impossible Ronald was one.Not gonna read that polygon (the rich man's i09 lol) article even though it sounds like it has noble intentions. In any case it doesn't really matter what JR intended or not, as he was killed by Barthes along with all authors! It's cool and good to do queer readings, and LOTR especially supports one. And who doesn't love this classic: 
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Oct 16, 2023 16:42
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After all zero chance JRRT of all people could possibly be playing with a double meaning, he was famously incurious and dismissive of all kinds of wordplay, no value whatsoever in considering it I wouldn't say it's proven beyond a shadow of a doubt but the preponderance of evidence supports there being a barely-veiled homoromantic subtext, the only argument against it is "but JRRT probably wouldn't!" Which isn't nothing but, like I said, preponderance of evidence
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Oct 16, 2023 17:33
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FWIW I’m not saying the suggestion is that Bilbo and Frodo are actually gaying it up, nor that the gaffer is saying that we should all be gaying it up like Bilbo and Frodo. Nor even that the characters are necessarily saying that anyone involved is gay. in the broader context of the conversation the queerest thing about Bilbo and Frodo to their neighbors is not their sex lives but their associations with foreignness: Bilbo went off abroad to get rich, still travels sometimes, and hosts dwarves and wizards, and Frodo isn’t even properly from the Shire (a motif that comes up again with Lobelia fuming that he’s no real Baggins, but a Brandybuck). In the modern sense basically nobody uses queer to mean anything that doesn’t have an immediate sexual-identity implication, but in Tolkien’s time the sense of the word included all that and more besides: things are queer because they are somehow abnormal; what is queer about them is left to context. And I don’t think it’s an accident that he chose the word to be the common man’s description of a situation where a retiring confirmed bachelor adopts a younger confirmed bachelor and they move in together. These two keep themselves to themselves and host outlandish strangers, who knows what other queer poo poo they get up to on their own time, am I right? They could even be boating! It’s this kind of vaguely malicious speculation about private life, general bullying conformity with just a tinge of gay-bash, that Tolkien portrays. If you want to boil it down to a “queer reading” in an exclusively sexual sense, then I definitely don’t think Tolkien is cheering on the pride parade here, modern sexual politics no doubt would have upset him and we can all be grateful that he didn’t feel motivated to write a learned excursus on the linguistics of homoeroticism among the Noldor. What he has in mind here is a much more class-specific decorum-based tolerance, he’s saying basically as long as you do right by the broader community, then only nosy dickheads like Sandyman will care if you’re privately eccentric (for example, if you spend all your free time writing fairy stories).
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Oct 16, 2023 17:48
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I'm on episode 7 of Rings of Power, and goddamn. Durin is the best loving character.  He's just a great depiction of Tolkien Dwarves. I was always a little miffed how much they played Gimli as comedic relief in the movies.
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Oct 23, 2023 00:10
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The dwarves are far and away the best part of the show. If they just said gently caress it and did Just Dwarves I would not even complain. 2 of the best actors, best interactions with elrond, best costumes and set design.
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Oct 23, 2023 00:19
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Durin and Elrond were what got me to stick with the show to the end despite everything. Hell, they were so good that I'll probably even watch season 2.
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Oct 23, 2023 00:56
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I still don't understand what they were trying with the Sauron <-> Gandalf fake-out. I mean...I guess they could change even more going forward, but even within the bounds of the show + movies, the timeline wouldn't have made sense. 
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Oct 23, 2023 02:01
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WoodrowSkillson posted:If they just said gently caress it and did Just Dwarves I would not even complain. And since not nearly as much was written about the Dwarves, there would be less to gently caress up... Like which order the rings were created in.
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Oct 23, 2023 02:02
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AlternateNu posted:I still don't understand what they were trying with the Sauron <-> Gandalf fake-out. I mean...I guess they could change even more going forward, but even within the bounds of the show + movies, the timeline wouldn't have made sense. Just remember that it isn't for you, it's for people who've never touched a Tolkien book or even watched a film except maybe the theatrical cuts when they were released. Any weird dumb choice made in that show is to try and pander to a genera audience.
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Oct 23, 2023 04:29
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keep punching joe posted:Just remember that it isn't for you, it's for people who've never touched a Tolkien book or even watched a film except maybe the theatrical cuts when they were released. Any weird dumb choice made in that show is to try and pander to a genera audience. Jokes on them then since the general audience didn’t like it either.
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Oct 23, 2023 20:47
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can't be arsed to check, is it correct: 
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Oct 23, 2023 21:37
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If it belonged to Legolas, why was it in the mountain hoard and not the elf-king’s halls? For that matter, would the greedy rear end elf-king really be willing or able to get his kid a mithril shirt? He’s just gonna grow out of it in a couple decades anyway
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Oct 23, 2023 21:45
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ChubbyChecker posted:can't be arsed to check, is it correct: I don't think the character of Legolas existed when Tolkien wrote The Hobbit so I doubt that Tolkien had a specific Elf prince in mind who had once worn that chain shirt. It's a neat idea though
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Oct 23, 2023 21:47
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ChubbyChecker posted:can't be arsed to check, is it correct: Also, Thorin doesn't say it was made for an elf prince, the narrator does, and that it was made for an elf prince "long ago". It easily could have been made prior to the 3rd age in Moria for some elf in Eregion and got moved to Erebor later. It could be for one of Elrond's kids and just never got delivered for whatever reason. E2: I actually can't find a birth date for Legolas. He might not even have been born after Erebor's founding either. E3: the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the mithril shirt was made in Moria. I'm not sure Erebor was capable of making/mining mithril, but we know Moria can, obviously. And putting it in Moria means it can plausibly have been for some elf kid in a lot more elven enclaves. Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 21:50
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I forgot that the mithril shirt and Sting weren't both from the same source, without really thinking about it, and I'd assumed they had both belonged to young Earendel before the fall of Gondolin.
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Oct 23, 2023 22:02
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I always assumed it was a gift to some Eregion elf
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Oct 23, 2023 23:08
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euphronius posted:I always assumed it was a gift to some Eregion elf This. The Dwarves of Khazad-dûm and the Noldor of Eregion were tight, it makes sense that they'd craft something like that as a gift, but never get the chance to hand it over due to the whole War of the Elves and Sauron thing where Eregion was laid waste. It probably got put away somewhere until the Balrog awoke and the survivors evacuated Khazad-dûm. Kind of a "throw whatever you can grab into the boxes and load the wagons, we've got to go!" thing. The mithril-coat made it, lots of other stuff didn't.
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Oct 23, 2023 23:59
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd5Ag33xAlY
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Oct 24, 2023 00:56
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Oh, for a last thing, Tolkien does not use "prince" to literally mean "son of the king". It's used very broadly and very casually all over the place, to the point where "elf prince" could mean just about any elf who distinguishes themselves, or at least any Noldo of any kind of note. It certainly doesn't mean you're stuck looking at just the sons of Celeborn, Thranduil, and Elrond, but could plausibly be any elf pseudo-noble. And I think Tolkien uses "princes" to describe a group of, essentially, notables, heroes or exemplars. He does also occasionally use it for a generic term for leaders, I think, and there are a few titles Princes (Imrahil and later Faramir). For that matter, I don't think Legolas is ever called a prince, despite being the son of a king, because Tolkien isn't using "prince" in that way. For another example, Gwindor is described as a prince, and his father was Guilin, which isn't in any of the lineages I can see. So yeah, meme wrong, or at least, not right. Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Oct 24, 2023 |
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Oct 24, 2023 01:45
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Technically “prince” is just the title for a ruler of a principality, and it acquired its usual meaning of “son of a king or emperor” in English because the monarch’s children would customarily be given lordship over principalities like Wales that had been subordinated to a kingdom.
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Oct 24, 2023 04:51
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All the Elves of note are princes anyway.
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Oct 24, 2023 07:13
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YaketySass posted:All the Elves of note are princes anyway. This feels like a line from an Introduction to Logic class. Are all princes elves of note??
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Oct 24, 2023 08:31
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It also could have been commissioned by Gil galad I think any male noldor would be a prince
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Oct 24, 2023 13:41
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could someone post examples where tolkien used 'prince'
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Oct 24, 2023 13:46
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ChubbyChecker posted:could someone post examples where tolkien used 'prince' All instances of 'prince' in Fellowship quote:‘I thought that I saw a white figure that shone and did not grow dim like the others. Was that Glorfindel then?’ quote:Thereupon Elrond paused a while and sighed. ‘I remember well the splendour of their banners,’ he said. ‘It recalled to me the glory of the Elder Days and the hosts of Beleriand, so many great princes and captains were assembled. And yet not so many, nor so fair, as when Thangorodrim was broken, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so.’ quote:‘Look, my friends!’ he called. ‘Here’s a pretty hobbit-skin to wrap an elven-princeling in! If it were known that hobbits had such hides, all the hunters of Middle-earth would be riding to the Shire.’ It's used twice it The Two Towers, to describe Shadowfax as a Price of all Horses, and Borimir as Prince of the city of Elendil. Also multiple instances in Return of the King but they're all simping for Imrahil. In the Silmarillion, the word 'princes' is mainly followed either by 'of the Noldor' or 'of the Elves'. keep punching joe fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Oct 24, 2023 |
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Oct 24, 2023 13:52
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It's also used a bunch in the Silmarillion, to basically describe any leader of the Noldor.
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Oct 24, 2023 14:04
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| # ? Jun 12, 2024 23:03 |
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I know there's a phrase in general medieval parlance that's on the tip of my tongue about how certain things are "for princes" or apply "to princes" and it's obviously intended to refer to any members of the royal family, with the implication that a king or a queen or an heir-apparent are all types of princes.
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Oct 24, 2023 14:05
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