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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Aha! Thanks for enlightening me. I read a summary and it made it seem there was a "clean full draft" but yes, it makes complete sense that the original manuscript is a mass of revisions, false starts, cuts etc. Well, especially since the Silmarillion is literally what you just described: a collection of scraps, notes, drafts, re-drafts, and nearly finished fair copies that he kept working on and reworking throughout his entire life. What really makes it remarkable is that he kept just about everything he ever wrote down, so when Christopher decided to put it all together (and in some cases, like the Tuor story, fill in the gaps on his own) he had like 60 years' worth of material and style tradition to draw on. And then enough raw ore to mine to pump out History of Middle-Earth volumes until his own bibliography was bigger than his dad's. E: ^^ Yes, that's true. If Christopher had his way they never would have sold the rights to LotR or the Hobbit in the first place, but JRRT was not a rich man and they needed money in the 70s.
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Jan 8, 2015 20:37
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I think it's a combination of a) in context of the universe, it actually is "post-apocalyptic" in the sense that the War of Wrath pretty well fits the bill; and b) people mixing it up with the Sword of Shannara or something.
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Jan 8, 2015 23:56
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Interstellar comes to mind.
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Jan 9, 2015 01:20
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He tried at one point, if I recall; but also he was worried that if he made a big show of looking for the Ring in the Gladden Fields, the others on the White Council would know what he was up to. This after he had gone to some lengths to convince them that he thought the Ring had been washed out to sea long before.
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Jan 31, 2015 01:05
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SirPhoebos posted:It's funny, the thing that bugs me the most about Tolkein's biases is how wolves are basically four-legged orcs in the books. I wasn't bugged by the wargs in the movie, but that was because those were clearly CGI monsters. Wolves are actual animals, and they were nearly driven to extinction in North America because of the mindset that they're innately evil. It was a fairy tale trope as old as Beowulf, and Tolkien was in no position to try to be Farley Mowat on top of everything else. He did at least have a pretty naked dogs-over-cats bias though 
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Feb 4, 2015 19:46
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Rosy-fingered dawn. Always with the rosy-fingered dawn
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Feb 5, 2015 16:59
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I always thought the film depiction of Anduin was really unsuitable. In my mind it was supposed to be Mississippi-wide, meandering through lowlands and fields. The film made it out to be more like a mountain stream. Part and parcel with taking whatever New Zealand gives you, I guess, and the Shire and Mt. Doom were great and all, but if there's one thing I would change about the movies it would be to use more appropriate landscapes for Anduin and Rohan and the Misty Mountains foothills.
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Feb 13, 2015 01:18
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Book series being taken over by others after the original author's death sometimes kindasorta work, usually don't, and almost never retain the same feel. Ruth Plumly Thompson amirite?
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Apr 5, 2015 05:30
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AnonSpore posted:Didn't someone basically write Lord of the Rings over, just changing the names and poo poo a little to avoid copyright issues? Terry Brooks?
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Apr 5, 2015 05:38
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You haven't read Tolkien until you've read it in the original Russian. 
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Apr 6, 2015 04:20
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Hogge Wild posted:For comparison the Finnish Hobbits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Koj0V7G46fs (it's about LotR) Show, don't tell.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:31
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Well, that's because Santa Cruz has been in the 60s since the 60s.
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Apr 12, 2015 03:05
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Dwarves who tell each other jokes about Baptists on bridges.
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May 3, 2015 01:43
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RIP Glorfindel II AND WHAT HAPPENED TO BOROMIR'S GIANT BEARD AND HORNED HELMET 
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May 4, 2015 12:45
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That's like how when I was a kid I thought "Super" literally meant "has a cape" E: also a cape was what conferred flying powers.
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May 5, 2015 12:46
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euphronius posted:Two things Three: JRRT was pretty transparently a dog person, if Lost Tales is anything to go by.
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May 11, 2015 01:53
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AnonSpore posted:I thought Iluvatar WAS the real God-with-a-capital-G? It always seemed fairly transparent to me that Tolkien wanted a Greek/Roman/Norse style pantheon for narrative purposes—because who doesn't love it when omnipotent gods fight like schoolchildren? —and at the same time to have the Judeo-Christian God in the mix as a figure who supersedes them all in importance and dignity but never actually gets involved in the story because he's boring. What's funny is that the result of that is an Ilúvatar who is closer in concept to the Calvinist/Protestant style of aloof, hands-off deity who only cares about faith and nothing else, rather than the "activist" God of Catholic tradition who rewards good works and is constantly showing up in tortillas and poo poo.
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May 22, 2015 12:00
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Yeah, do it all The Begun of Tigtone style.
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May 29, 2015 00:21
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Probably to underscore that the present day is the "fallen" world. Same deal with Men.
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Jun 2, 2015 00:51
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Man, I haven't read any Arthur since my last trip through Bulfinch. I should do something about that.
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Jun 3, 2015 05:14
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Eönwë was originally supposed to be the son of Manwë, but it seems Tolkien intentionally set about eliminating all references to Valar and Maiar directly reproducing sometime after he did his early work.
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Jun 19, 2015 16:18
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Nice Steven Universe fanfiction. 
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Jun 19, 2015 16:57
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You're probably conflating that with the description of Dior having the qualities of Elves, Men, and Maiar in his face.
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Jun 20, 2015 02:39
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Quibble about Fingolfin: he didn't get smashed with Grond, he loving tripped and Morgoth stepped on him. I think that regrettably loses him some metal points (which is probably why the author elided that bit).
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Jun 25, 2015 12:44
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Speaking of, thanks for reminding me to check: Better Myths has more silmarillion updates http://bettermyths.com/category/mythos/silmarillion/ Aaawwwwww yeeeeeeeeaaaahhh
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Jun 25, 2015 12:55
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Also I don't think he's quite right in characterizing the movie's treatment of the Sauron/Isildur confrontation as being materially different from the text. My reading was that Sauron killed both Gil-galad and Elendil, and Elendil broke Narsil under him; but Isildur picked up the shards and cut the Ring off Sauron, and that act was what destroyed Sauron's physical form. I had always pictured somehow that Isildur had fought Sauron to his knees and he cut the Ring off him forcibly; but the movie's interpretation immediately made me go "Oh! That makes a lot more sense." But in either case saying Elendil got stripped of his kill by Peter Jackson sounds wrong.
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Jun 25, 2015 15:30
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Smoking Crow posted:Time for the yearly "Smoking Crow tries to read the Lord of the Rings and probably fails" challenge How far do you usually get?
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Jul 21, 2015 23:23
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Just as it's one of the most cartoonishly overwrought scenes in the movie.
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Jul 23, 2015 02:21
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The "Samwise the Strong" bit would have helped in that regard. It's just a passing moment in the book, but it could have made for a great and memorable sequence of visuals that really drove home what it was that had put Boromir over the edge and nearly consumed Frodo. It's curious that the Bakshi cartoon Return of the King included that element but Jackson skipped it.
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Jul 23, 2015 12:38
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If I recall, Samwise the Strong happened (both in the book and in Bakshi) when Sam just took hold of the Ring, and fantasized about wearing it; he didn't actually put it on at that time. Or am I misremembering?
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Jul 23, 2015 20:08
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Ollu posted:Minor Nit-pick, but Return of the King was a Rankin/Bass cartoon. Ah poo poo. Can't believe I did that. You know what I meant.
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Jul 24, 2015 12:49
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I would love a Google Middle-Earth.
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Jul 25, 2015 03:37
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Stronger than ever relative to any rivals present or potential, and beyond any doubting of his own superiority. Tolkien likes to use "doubt" in the now-kinda-idiosyncratic sense of "wariness".
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Jul 26, 2015 04:30
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What, "Farmer Maggot" was too much for you?
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Jul 29, 2015 18:57
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Mr. Neutron posted:More precisely: It's worth noting that the proper spelling is "Middle-earth" and not "Middle Earth" or anything else like that. Like, it's not "Earth" in the sense of a planet or world at all; it's more like "ground". Fun fact, geard in Old/Middle English evolved into yard rather than earth (which has a separate derivation from OE eorthe). So really a better translation would be "Middle-yard". I think Tolkien was just following an existing tradition of Norse literature scholars when he picked out the name.
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Aug 2, 2015 17:51
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Pff. Minas Tirith would look loving stupid sitting on the knee of a giant rocky mountain that doesn't exist anywhere within about 500 miles.
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Aug 15, 2015 02:41
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I've got it, it's decent. It sticks close to the text rather than trying to turn it into a play. I wish they hadn't tried to sing though.
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Aug 16, 2015 03:52
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Ynglaur posted:I listened to it years ago, and thought it quite good. Andy Serkis changed my view of what Gollum could sound like well before PJ's films. Wait, Serkis? I thought Peter Woodthorpe was Gollum in the BBC production. (Same guy who played him all effete-like in the Bakshi movie)
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Aug 16, 2015 21:39
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spiderbot posted:Some of the songs are kinda cheesy (I always cringe at the 'sing all ye people' one just before Aragorn is crowned), but I think they did a really good job of integrating the music with the story. In particular I love the way they combined singing and normal voice acting for the Pelennor fields and the death of Theoden. True, those aren't bad, but in my opinion the way they cast them to music sort of obscured the structure of the poetry. Those songs were Tolkien nerding out doing straight-up Beowulf-style Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, and trying to make it sound like a "song" the way we understand it feels like they just didn't really realize what they were working with.
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Aug 25, 2015 21:51
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Yeah, and what I'm saying is that it's always seemed to me like however poems like Beowulf were meant to be sung, it can't have had much bearing on the kind of construction we normally think of as a "song" today, whether pop music on the radio or a faux-archaic performance in a BBC drama. For the alliteration to come through as the dominant feature of the verses (rather than, say, rhyming and consistent meter) would have meant a very different kind of delivery from what we're used to. Oh who am I kidding, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about
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Aug 26, 2015 01:43
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