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So I'm fairly familiar with LotR and the Hobbit, but I've just never been able to stomach the style of the Silmarillion, although I am fairly familiar with some of the stories, or at least the broad strokes therein. So what's all this about, then, that I have heard of there having been like literal APCs and missiled and ironclad battleships at Numenor and/or the Fall of Gondolin. If Sauron had these, then, why isn't he busting them out during the Ringwar or the Battle of the Last Alliance?
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Dec 20, 2014 16:48
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NikkolasKing posted:Well I know Manwe at least is stated to be pure goodness personified, which is why he never "understood" Melkor's evil. He's incapable of vice so vice naturally perplexes him. Of course, if Manwe is literally programmed to be good, he's not actually good at all. He has no choice in the matter. If you can't choose to be evil, if it is functionally impossible for you to be greedy or wrathful or prideful, then you are neutral like a robot and nothing more. The problem of a being being unable to be evil not really being good or even a moral actor in any sense of the term is a problem for Catholic theology in general, what with good being omnibenevolent. Like, I wouldn't say that the Silmarillion's morality and theology is something alien or from a bygone era, it's just intensely Catholic in some ways. And where it differs it tends to be more due to Tolkien's own beliefs/creativity than due to any sort of bygone era stuff. I mean, like, besides the above issue, there's also the issue of theodicy in Tolkien's work, just as there is in Catholic/Christian theology in general. If all that Melkor has done was, without his knowing, part of Eru's plan, then by what reasonable definition can we say that Eru is good? Basically I feel like when you get down to it, the morality and theology of the legendarium is so informed by Tolkien's own religious beliefs that it's quite impossible to really go in-depth with analysis and criticism of them withouot going in-depth on some general problems with Western religion, particularly Catholicism and Christianity.
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Aug 3, 2015 01:59
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Yes? But when you're talking about Eru/God it's kind of meaningless to talk that way because when someone is omnipotent and omniscient then literally everything that happens happens only by their will.
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Aug 3, 2015 13:48
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What was the Annatar scene?
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Jan 4, 2016 19:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:You can't adversely possess against the government, so Sauron, as Dark Lord of Middle-Earth, would ultimately win out there, yeah. I seem to recall, years ago, another thread having had the discussion on who legally owned the Ring. I believe the ultimate conclusion, and one I subscribe to, is that the Ring is not property but intelligent and that the final take-away is that the Ring kidnapped Bilbo and Frodo.
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Aug 1, 2017 07:57
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Ashcans posted:I suppose that Gandalf could have tried to get him to bury it in the back yard or something instead of holding on to it. Or just drop it in a loving hole. Worked for one of the Silmarils.
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Aug 5, 2017 16:17
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Arkenstone is that Silmaril but everyone is pretending it isn't because the political implications would cause too much strife Considering the Silmarils are like the platonic ideal of a MacGuffin and their only real power beyond glowing is 'everyone wants them' I don't think it would be possible to pretend a Silmaril was anything but. Like I always got the impression that they were at least as 'magnetic' as the Ring.
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Aug 5, 2017 17:01
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hannibal posted:I thought the Silmaril thing was that there's one in the earth, sea and sky in the end. Such was my take.
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Aug 5, 2017 21:52
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Akallabeth question, if y'all don't mind. So unless I'm grossly misremembering the timeline, Sauron creates the One Ring, and the others, *before* Ar-Pharazon is even king of Numenor. Doesn't this create a number of serious issues, both internal logic plot-wise, and thematically? -Thematically, it further diminishes the supposed stakes and premise of LoTR. The Last Alliance beat Sauron when he had the Ring, which always sat a little odd with me (it's hard to sell the stakes as 'if the bad guy gets the mcguffin he will be unbeatable!' when the story begins with a reminder that he was literally wearing the mcguffin the last time he got his rear end kicked) and now it turns out that so did Ar-Pharazon. -Plot-wise, where the gently caress was the Ring when Sauron was in Numenor? Why didn't Ar-Pharazon claim it? I mean 'making good decisions based on a clear understanding of the nature of the Enemy and their seductive powers' is clearly now one of his character traits. -And also, plot-wise, assuming Sauron just... left the Ring back in Mordor or wherever while he was off chilling in Numenor, why didn't the Elves back in Middle Earth try to unmake it? They already knew at this point that the Ring and Sauron were Bad News.
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Apr 18, 2018 17:07
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hackbunny posted:In Italy, there are two major literary associations related to Tolkien: the Società Tolkieniana Italiana ("Italian Tolkienian Society") and the Associazione Italiana di Studi Tolkieniani (Italian Association of Tolkienian Studies), that split off from the former when it filled with fascists... and the Tolkien estate has wisely sided with neither. You side with the side that isn't full of fascists, happy to help. There's a word for people who, when confronted with fascism, don't take a stand against it, and that word is not 'wise.'
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Jan 31, 2019 23:24
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I think the issue WRT race in Tolkien and the Numenoreans in particular comes down to a question of nuance - putting aside, for the moment, comments made by the author outside the text itself. The Numenoreans are obviously more than capable of being evil and morally depraved, but they are also shown to be good and virtuous, as well. The Numenoreans, like the white peoples of Middle Earth, are like real world people; some are good, some are evil, many are somewhere in between simply trying to live their lives. The issue comes up when that is contrasted against both the racial coding of the Orcs, and the fact that aside from a throw-away comment about a soldier, the non-white peoples of Middle Earth are always violent assholes and almost always in thrall to some Dark Lord or another. The issue isn't that his whites are always perfect and good, because they're not. It's that his non-whites are always either evil or nonexistant. skasion posted:e: since you brought him up I’ll add that it’s similar to how Lovecraft’s infamous racism chiefly takes the form of his (white, mentally unstable, unsociable and generally Lovecraft-like) protagonists and narrators sneering at the biological inferiority of the lesser races and preening themselves over the refined arts and culture and civilization of The White Man, before Lovecraft the author steps back to whisk the curtain away and reveal that white people actually aren’t worth the poo poo you scrape off your boot, they’re just mutant apes/food for fishmen/degenerate forms of hyper-Indian wizards beneath the Mojave/parasites adventitiously sprung up on a planet that exists to serve as a prison-tomb for ancient aliens/actual descendants through millions of years of bacterial ooze, and the only reason they think they are anything special is as a defense mechanism to keep their frail minds from collapsing into the meaningless crawling chaos of existence in a godless universe. Are you seriously arguing that Lovecraft wasn't racist? Racism isn't rational or logical. You can, and Lovecraft did, simultaneously hold and express the idea that Human civilization and all its achievements are meaningless and worthless, while also arguing that blacks are sub-human savages scarcely better than apes. I love Lovecraft's works, but seriously, no. Lovecraft was a racist, and his racism informs and characterizes much of his output.
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Feb 2, 2019 00:20
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Sorry for misunderstanding you. I thought you were arguing that Lovecraft was actually using his cosmic horror/cosmic nihilism to try and lampoon racism. Because, you know, in the hands of a skilled author and one without the racist bigotry of Lovecraft, I think you definitely could do something quite clever along those lines. So much of Lovecraftian horror is 'behold the folly of man' and showing our assumptions regarding science and sometimes morality to be laughable failings of primitive apes trying and failing to understand a universe too complex for them. You could easily do a deconstruction for racism along the same vein. Use the cosmic horrors to show the sheer absurdity in pretending that something as trivial as skin color or where your ancestors lived is a meaningful distinction.
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Feb 2, 2019 01:28
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skasion posted:Sauron isn’t like the “god of order” or something. This idea comes from Morgoth’s Ring, but the point JRRT is making there is just that Sauron wants to rule the world and make all its trains run on time, whereas Morgoth wants to annihilate it and everything in it. Which is really dumb because apparently Sauron remained loyal to Morgoth even after Morgoth’s defeat despite the fact their goals are mutually exclusive.
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Jul 6, 2020 15:13
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Are you suggesting Balrogs migrate?
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Jul 21, 2020 14:28
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Tree Bucket posted:Is that the one where Aragorn and Boromir get folded into one character and there is no Rohan? ...I can kind of see how you can salvage at least the abstract basic plot beats of the story without Rohan, but how in the hell can you possibly do the story while merging Boromir and Aragorn?
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Sep 13, 2020 01:18
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euphronius posted:Tolkien has evil elfs and evil dwar...ves and lots of evil “white” humans The issue with Tolkien is ultimately that while the text shows that white men can be bad, it never shows that men of color can be good. I agree that he does say that no men are innately evil, but the fact is that whatever implications or messages he thought he was communicating, we never see a character of color who isn't a literal Satan-worshiping bad guy. Combine this with other racialist bits of prose or turns of phrase, and his equation of the Uruk-Hai with Mongols, and yeah. So yeah, while it was white men who hosed up so hard the broke the world, we at least also get to see white men who are heroic, kind, and compassionate. The crimes of some random exotic easterner under Sauron may pale in comparison to those of a Numenorean, but they are also the only example of their race/culture we have and so it is implicitly a racist depiction. The implicit message, intentional or not (and I like to imagine the latter), is that while white men have the capacity for evil, men of color lack the capacity for good.
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Oct 5, 2020 12:06
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I thought in FR that most of the NotWhatever cultures are descended from transplants from Earth. Like the NotEgyptians are legit the descendants of real Egyptians, likewise the NotAztecs and so on and so forth.
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Oct 5, 2020 13:37
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Yep. I've always found Conan's racial politics rather interesting. My favorite angle is how the undying racial hatred that is older than civilization and has survived at least one apocalypse is... Scots vs Native Americans.
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Oct 5, 2020 13:46
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OctaviusBeaver posted:He was living in a homogeneous European country in the 30-40s, he probably just wasn't as obsessed with race as the present day terminally online types are. That didn't kick into high gear until ~2012. Everyone he knew and interacted with was white and so was pretty much every character in the books, good or bad. I seriously doubt he foresaw that people could ever interpret things in that light, much less intend it as a message about the inherent superiority of white people. The Virtuous Pagan and other examples of the Good Foreigner are story tropes that date back to at least the middle ages. The Matter of France and Arthurian Romance both contain numerous examples of good Saracens.
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Oct 6, 2020 14:11
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SoggyBobcat posted:Bór and his three sons. Credit where it's due, you got me there. And I don't think the whole decadent orgiastic rites thing fits Numenor. Their whole vice and whatnot wasn't decadence in that sense, as I got it, but more just their crippling fear of death. I always envisioned the Numenorean elite as living their lives so worried and concerned with the looming specter of death that they never even bothered to really live. Death had claimed them as a people ages before it claimed them in a literal sense. Pharazon and others would simply be too busy moping, being stressed out, and worrying about death to ever bother really celebrating life and having the kind of excesses that Amazon seems to be going for. But I mean, hey, that was just my take. I only read the Silmarillion and not the other supplementary stuff so maybe there's a better picture of Numenor in those that shits on my headcanon/interpretation. But my mental image of Numenor was always sort of sombre decadence. A people who could have been wallowing in hedonism, but were too hung up on their own mortality to bother. Too depressed to ever be truly depraved.
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Oct 6, 2020 22:08
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Tom's always really bothered me because I feel like while him being unexplained and perhaps unexplainable is cool and fine, this coupled with his complete immunity to the ring - itself already a huge problem in my opinion - kind of is a big narrative problem that is made all the worse by how early in the story it comes up. The central premise and threat around which the narrative turns is the idea that the Ring is insurmountable as a temptation; no one no matter how pure or good can long resist its allure or wield it for good. Gandalf and Galadriel, powerful and good beings, would become monstrous tyrants were they to wield it. The Ring *must* be destroyed because no one could be trusted to keep it secret, keep it safe. Except we're barely out of Hobbiton and we've just run into some weirdo in the woods who is completely and utterly immune to the Ring. Literally the first guy we run into who isn't a Hobbit completely negates the central premise on which the conflict/story stands. And one could of course say/argue that Bombadil is unique and so looking around for another being like him to entrust the Ring to would be pointless, but that's not true because we can't say anything like that about Bombadil because literally nothing about him is ever explained. For all we know every forest in the world has a Bombadil if you look hard enough. Just because he is wildly irresponsible and would lose the Ring doesn't mean the next dancing jackass two forests down would. I mean, I still love the books, and the greater Legendarium, don't get me wrong, but I've just always felt that Bombadil, at least how he's handled and introduced, was a mistake. But in concept, he's cool and fun. Hey ho.
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Dec 17, 2020 19:38
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sweet geek swag posted:I think Tom Bombadil is more of a force or an idea than an actual person, which is why this doesn't bother me. He doesn't have a will to bend. He just is. And that sort of eternal 'is' is just something that is essentially indefinable and magical. Tom Bombadil isn't a person or even a thing. He is something else, something beyond description, and that sort of wonder is what makes the character work. This works for me. Like, again, really, my issue is just more the fact he's both unexplained AND immune to the Ring. I feel like either element would be fine on its own, but together is where the problematic implications arise. Hence why I don't really have much of a problem with like Ungoilant or the Lovecraftian horrors Gandalf implies lurk beneath the world.
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Dec 17, 2020 20:55
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NikkolasKing posted:Also by the time of the Third Age the old powers are pretty much waning and all but gone. Durin's Bane is the only other corrutped Maia we know of and it's stated Sauron knew of it but wasn't gonna try and mess with him or recruit him. Been a while since I read the books; where/when is it explicitly stated that Sauron was aware of Durin's Bane?
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May 9, 2021 11:40
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Bongo Bill posted:Y'all should think less scientifically and more animistically. Sauron poured his will and essence into the Ring when he forged it. It has a spirit, or at least a pretty capable fraction of one. It can influence events around it (in a metaphysical way rather than a physical one), and the influence it exerts is in accordance with its nature - that nature being Sauron's. I don't think Sauron would choose to spend a few centuries hanging out in a dark cave with a creature that may or may not be/have been a Hobbit.
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Jul 17, 2021 07:38
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The only way to do the music would be something like episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return
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Aug 5, 2021 01:37
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Falathrim posted:This is broadly correct. Physical matter does age slower in Aman. Huan, after all, was just a dog, and he lived for centuries. Nature of Middle-earth? JRR and Chris are now both putting out more books while dead than GRRM is while alive?
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Oct 15, 2021 20:10
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