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Hatter106 posted:I want to read some scholastic study of Tolkien, and Tom Shippey's books seem to be a good start. But I can't decide which to read; The Road to Middle-Earth or the later JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century. Apparently he re-uses some material from the earlier book in Century, but the reviews seem pretty good otherwise. No, but Humphrey Carpenter's biography is a good beginning, though it's short. He wrote an "Inklings" (mostly Lewis and a bit of Charles Williams) one too, also worth reading.
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Feb 16, 2013 23:23
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Yeah, I think it's when Frodo claims the Ring; Sauron realises his mistake and scrambles the Ringwraiths. But it's hardly stream-of-Sauronic-consciousness.Vavrek posted:When I last reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (a year or two ago), I got the idea in my head that I could actually see details of the different authors of the Red Book of Westmarch. There and Back Again is referenced, by Bilbo, as the book he's writing in Rivendell. In The Hobbit, everything speaks and everything sings. In Fellowship, you see people going "Oh god it's Bilbo. Run, or we might get caught up listening to another one of his songs/poems." ... but who wrote Book I? Frodo and the rest show up in Elrond's house and Bilbo begins interrogating them for details, because now he has to write another book. I remember convincing myself that Bilbo wrote Book I, Frodo wrote the rest (and probably revised Bilbo's work) except the end, which Sam wrote. Or perhaps it was all edited together later... Either way the narrator isn't too interested in internal perspective, so it's not because he was being formal.
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Aug 9, 2014 10:17
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Better to reign in Middle-earth, eh? But it works out for the best in the long run. Imagine how screwed Middle-earth would have been without the elves.
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Oct 31, 2014 05:44
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bartlebyshop posted:Well, the Rings of Power wouldn't have been forged. That would have been a pretty good benefit. On the other hand, Sauron could have made his own rings, and he managed to dominate almost all of Middle-earth with the elves opposing him. On the third hand Númenor managed to defeat him anyway...
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Oct 31, 2014 07:11
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Those are the bits that were written in the trenches during the Battle of the Somme, right?Ynglaur posted:I wrote a paper in high school describing the point of view used throughout the novel. We see Smeagol's point of view that once; a fox's once; Legolas' once; and I think Gandalf once. Everything else is from a hobbit's point of view, at least in terms of reading the thoughts of a character. You just reminded me of the firework that's compared to a train, and the bit in Lórien which says Aragorn "never went there again as mortal man". The latter was presumably added by a scribe in Gondor, and so might the gloating over Sauron realising how he done hosed up, but what about the train?
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Jun 8, 2015 16:25
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SoggyBobcat posted:I think the implication may be that they originally came from Númenor? Not tea leaves  But yeah, it's an ideal Englishness thing rather than historically accurate.
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Jul 12, 2015 10:24
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That website thinks Sasquatch is more Jewish than Leopold Bloom
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Sep 7, 2016 02:47
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Here's a long, interesting, sympathetic, and finally negative LRB article about Tolkien, free thanks to the pandemic: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons-for-liking-tolkien - it does take its time stating the obvious, though. The Salon article it quotes but doesn't link to is here: https://www.salon.com/2001/06/06/tolkien2/
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Apr 24, 2020 16:00
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Tree Bucket posted:Hmm. That article makes a few good points and a few really awful ones. The idea that Tolkien's books were basically his coping mechanism and fairly secondarily things to be published has got something to it, hasn't it? The most successful art therapy ever. Turner doesn't have an issue with Tolkien's interests, or anything like that; but her point that his writing is basically all made-up stuff - not even allegory or satire, but "applicable" - rather than facing the real world is (I think) a good one. OctaviusBeaver posted:That's the opposite of what happens in the book though. It's the powerless hobbits that rescue the big people and the hobbits scour the Shire without any help. Maybe that's a problem with any non-Christian reading of The Lord of the Rings, though. The narrative of the powerless Christ triumphing over the Prince of the world is really difficult to get behind if you're an atheist; you're much more likely to think "eh, deus ex machina". I was incredibly disappointed with the only Charles Williams novel I've read, because the climax is basically "and then the hero does nothing"; I understand it now, but don't want to re-read it... Easy to describe the Scouring as a sop, besides the spectacle of the War of the Ring, too. Sarern posted:I think the surest sign that Tolkien will be appreciated for decades to come is the constant protest by joyless critics. This, though - well, it's all grist to the discussion mill, anyway.
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Apr 25, 2020 16:01
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Tree Bucket posted:What's that CS Lewis quote again? Something like, anyone who can confuse romance for friendship has clearly never experienced either. Speaking as someone who doesn't think much of C. S. Lewis, I'd be interested to know when he said this. quote:I'm not sure what you mean by this. Tolkien's stuff absolutely did face the real world- or at least, the real world of an Oxford don born in the late 1800s! The first bit of Tolkien's career was spent scurrying around sorting out military communication lines, and the second part, translating/teaching/researching ancient languages. And so LotR is an odd blend of linguistics and logistics. I'm talking about this bit from the article: quote:Here is a list of some of the things you learn about when you read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: LA punk, Jacobean revenge tragedy, early computers, radical politics of the 1960s, the Pony Express. Out your mind darts, searching the world for information. In it comes again, digging back with its goodies into the text. Here are some of the things you learn about while reading The Lord of the Rings: hobbit-lore, the two branches of Elvish, the annals of the Númenórean kings. Spot the difference? That’s right: the second lot is entirely fictional, and doesn’t involve even the shortest trip from your chair. The lore is self-referential, centripetal, an occult system. As astrology is to physics or conspiracy theory to history, so Middle Earth is to literature and learning. It’s a closed space, finite and self-supporting, fixated on its own nostalgia, quietly running down.
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Apr 26, 2020 05:43
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If you think about it, a V2 is really just a Ring-powered catapult.
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May 5, 2020 14:55
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The evening of March 22nd, 1916, I would guess.
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May 8, 2020 16:26
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blackshreds posted:Hello everyone! I didn’t post very much but this was truly one of my favorite threads on SA. If the worst happens to the site, can I get a recommendation of a site or another forum where I can get my Tolkien discussion fix? Reddit maybe? I’ve been so insular with SA for so many years I’m really not sure where to go for decent discussion anymore. Book Barn discord: https://discord.gg/jgBDB25
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Jun 24, 2020 16:23
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Did Tolkien ever discuss apartheid?
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Jun 27, 2020 09:16
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Cheers. He would have been about 56 by the time the Nationalists were elected; just wondering because I saw something on Twitter mentioning it, but a quick google didn't turn up anything relevant.
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Jun 27, 2020 09:49
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Gandalf should have just tossed it in the fire as soon as he realised there was something funny about it. Even if it was a totally mundane ring, that wouldn't have damaged it.
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Jul 10, 2020 03:22
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webmeister posted:Maybe it's the presence of Narya that causes the Balrog to ignite I suspect balrogs are more like Diesel fuel, in that they can ignite spontaneously.
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Jul 20, 2020 12:31
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ChubbyChecker posted:maybe sauron had given him the right to use the s-word Maybe, but why? He's a herald, not a fighter.
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Sep 22, 2020 03:24
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Did Tolkien ever talk about why the timespan of the Middle-earth stories is so vast, or how it came about? Did he sit down one day and think "Yeah, 3000 years sounds good, or was it a gradual thing?
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Feb 9, 2023 09:41
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skasion posted:Tough question to answer. It was gradual and it’s hard to say what motivated it exactly. In earlier stages of the writing of LOTR it definitely wasn’t 3000 years. In early drafting there is no established timeline at all and dates are all relative and sometimes very vague. [...] But it’s only after LOTR is complete, when the appendices are being prepared, that how much longer—the familiar chronology of 6000+ years with king lists to prove it—is firmly established. Thanks for your excellent post. It's a bit frustrating that he seems to not have talked about the why of it, though. At first glance it makes sense to have thousands of years of myth shading into history, but thinking more, the Greek heroic age was only a few generations, I think, and the Bible is usually quite restrained in scale - often it's just one family, and even its timescale is much shorter than Tolkien's. (Creation 6,000 years ago, yes; but most of the first 2,000 years is glossed over until Abraham, and the main narrative of Exodus-Israel-conquest-return takes place over a few centuries.) Data Graham posted:And the whole impetus for those oldest stories was to create a "mythological history for England", or (since that itself is kind of a later characterization of it) a fresh reimagining of Celtic and Brittonic faerie myths and a place for him to play around with his constructed languages, and that meant building a runway for which those old stories could coexist in the same universe as our human world. A timeline long enough for Elves and Men to have lived together, and for Men to have forgotten what Elves were except in dim and garbled fancies, meant that his stories had to have taken place hundreds of years ago at the very latest — long enough for the Elves to be visited by a Man from the age of pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain and to hear their much-older stories. And as he reworked those ideas the timescale got longer and longer, as he incorporated concepts like Atlantis, the Flood, Creation itself, and the separate fates of Elves and Men who by necessity needed to have even longer apart in order for that mythical past to be far enough away from us to have fully forgotten it. CommonShore posted:From a reception perspective rather than a production point of view, there seems to be an accretion of layers of antiquity - As the Anglo-Saxons were to Tolkien, the Romans were to the Anglo Saxons and then backward through a succession of other legendary figures and ages in a similar logic - Alexander, Achilles, Judea, Moses, Egypt, Noah, and even into Antediluvian time and Prelapsarian time/ Things like this make sense, but sometimes the fairly static history makes the opposite effect. If Gondor is 3,000 years old, it looks more like he's just throwing big numbers around. It's odd that Elrond looks at Sting, supposedly from Gondolin 6,000 years old, and lets Bilbo waltz off with it. The changing of empires you see in real history isn't there and it creates shallowness that he's really good at avoiding elsewhere. Vague ideas of "a few generations" gradually stretching makes sense. On the other hand, I suppose it's a blessing he didn't get carried away with that as well.
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Feb 10, 2023 07:31
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Heithinn Grasida posted:I don’t entirely disagree with other parts of your post, though I don’t completely agree either. But this here is, like, the whole point of the books. The whole point is that nice poo poo is nice, but you let it go freely and don’t try and take other people’s nice poo poo. Being obsessed with who has the right to the shinies is pretty much the most the best paved road to perdition in the legendarium. I meant more along the lines of "this is a priceless historical artefact that belongs in a museum" (like the mithril-shirt) than "give me my stuff!" But Data Graham's post is a better interpretation than mine. WoodrowSkillson posted:So to me, oil and coal don't exist (i think coal gets referenced like once in The Hobbit), and saltpeter has not had time to leech out of cave walls in large amounts. So fossil fuels and gunpowder are off the table. That of course only explains a portion of the stagnation, and to me the rest of it is due to the fact that both elves and men were dependent on the Valar, at least initially, to be taught everything. They were shown what the Valar decided to teach them, and in general that was only taught to a portion of those people. The moraquendi receiving far less than the calaquendi for instance. This would lead to a lot of ritualization of that knowledge, and in the real world we can find examples of peoples abandoning prior technologies or not adopting some that were used very close by. It is not a huge stretch to me that both Elves and Men would exalt any knowledge gained from the Valar as sacrosanct and "improving" it being a dangerous road to go down. Obviously Feanor did it, and look what happened to him! Same for the Numenoreans, Eol, etc. Being literally taught by the gods is the most cultural cringe possible. No wonder it's all downhill... Tolkien's thoughts on decline are difficult to get to grips with though because we think about it too literally. He sees technological development (and modernity, really) as evil, and decline as inevitable. Most people see these as decline and development as opposed, and from a literal point of view they are - fewer children, weaker economy, etc. Gondor is in decline because it's underpopulated and has forgotten old techniques... but there's always more orcs, and Saruman is discovering new technology. Good seems passive, Evil active, and from this perspective almost negentropic - easier to identify with. It reminds me of reading Charles Williams' War in Heaven, which has a climax of the hero trusting in God, Who protects him and deals with the villain. I couldn't stand it, and it bored me until I got it - but that point's rather alien to most people (I still don't like the Williams). Actually worrying about the verisimilitude of history or the empty map is silly, even if it bothers me.
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Feb 11, 2023 17:08
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So she gave them a ring?
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Nov 5, 2023 05:42
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This is obvious, but I haven't seen it before: maybe eagles are always saving people in Middle-earth as an allusion to the Exodus. Exodus 19:4 posted:Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself. Context is God telling Moses what to say to the Israelites.
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Mar 19, 2024 06:15
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