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The Hobbit cartoon from 1977 packs more fun and soul into 90 minutes than the new trilogy does in, what, loving 8 hours? It's also a far more faithful adaptation. Hell, the 10-minute translation+adaptation I did for a group project in high school Japanese ( ) was more faithful to the source.
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Feb 10, 2018 17:16
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Nessus posted:I assume that if Aragorn or Galadriel had used the Ring it is possible that "Sauron" would have been gone, but the course of winning over the Ring and throwing Sauron through the Dunnish announcer's table would have made them essentially "Sauron-ish" - perhaps Galadriel would have covered Middle-Earth in titanic trees instead of howling wastelands, but it would have come to the same in the end. I mean yeah it's explicitly stated by several of those characters that this would be precisely the outcome. Galadriel probably would have been the worst option, I think he wrote that she specifically came to Middle-Earth because she wanted to rule her own lands, which I can't imagine would be great given god-like power.
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Feb 12, 2018 22:57
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skasion posted:Tolkien strongly suggests in the text and explicitly says in correspondence or somewhere that Gandalf as Ring-lord would have overthrown Sauron and been way worse, in his own way: instead of acting selfishly and amorally to advance his own interests, Gandalf would have continued to do what he considered good, but in a way necessarily made evil by the use of the ring’s power to dominate. He was wiser than Sauron and, at least as Gandalf the White, seems to have been less diminished from his original divine nature. A ring-wielding Gandalf would have been Real Bad: think like the Aspect Emperor from Prince of Nothing, but way more so because not merely human. I'd never heard of Prince of Nothing, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. This motherfucker just straight ripped off Tolkien's linguistic style. Those of you who haven't read the series, which of the following are from Bakker's books and which are from Tolkien?
Tolkien: Hildórien, Enelyë, Curunír, Aegnor, Fíriel
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Feb 12, 2018 23:43
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Marijuana posted:I recently finished up a reread of the Fellowship and about 25% of Two Towers (up to The Palantir). These books are so fun. I'm really struck by how much of a superior writer Tolkien was compared to the authors who followed in his footsteps. Dune, A Song of Ice and Fire, Malazan Book of the Fallen, Wheel of Time, etc. seem so trashy to me, now. Lord of the Rings is a concise, tight story compared to those multi-million word series. Don't group Dune in with the rest of those.
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Mar 16, 2018 19:41
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Nodosaur posted:When a book enters the public consciousness there’s gonna be variations. There’s going to be reinterpretation. There’s going to be different visions and a whole lot of crap. That’s how, for better or worse, stories grow and evolve into new stories. I admire Christopher Tolkien’s adherence to his father’s vision as far as it gets those works that came out after his death insofar as they allow those works to be realized as he would have published them, but these aren’t sacred texts. They deserve the same capacity for reimagination as anything else. every day we stray further from Eru's light
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Apr 12, 2018 17:41
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VanSandman posted:I remember a similar poll. Pratchett wrote about it, once - that the English may nod and agree that Mona Lisa is a great painting, that David is a great sculpture, but dammit LOTR is a worldbeater of a story and they’ll defend it. Book intended to be an "English myth" with 4 idealized English protagonists vs. impenetrable prose about Ireland by a fart-obsessed Irishman, hmmm.
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May 4, 2018 23:35
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skasion posted:
the barrow wights would have been cool too
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May 22, 2018 01:10
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, old wight. Tom kicks dick and his exclusion from every adaptation is as inexcusable as any number of skateboarding elves, if not more so.
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Here's a song that might be about Numenoreans sailing to Valinor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUhgCto_79Y But it's vague enough it might just be that the writer heard Valinor somewhere and liked the sound of it.
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May 25, 2018 15:25
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cheetah7071 posted:Every tolkien character is a volcel so Pippin surely fucks
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Jul 1, 2018 19:44
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Data Graham posted:Tangentially — this may be a very dumb question and I'm likely forgetting something super obvious, but why did Sauron suddenly decide that now's the time to send out his armies and shadows and attempt to defeat the West once and for all? What's the catalyst of his attack? Forgive me if this isn't well-supported by the text, but: 1. Gollum goes to Mordor, gets tortured into revealing that he had possessed the Ring up until relatively recently 2. Sauron sends out the Ringwraiths to get the ring back from the Bagginses 3. Ringwraiths pursue Frodo to Rivendell 4. Sauron now knows the Ring is in Rivendell. By his nature, he expects his enemies will now attempt to use the ring to defeat him 5. (this is where I infer the most) He attacks Gondor, being the biggest threat and a sensible destination for the Ring, hoping to beat them before they can use the Ring to build up their own power. Edit: also, even if he thinks it goes to Lórien or stays in Rivendell with the Elves rather than sending it to Gondor, he wouldn't want to extend himself all the way up to attack them while leaving Gondor right there on his doorstep / on the flank of his armies Pham Nuwen fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jul 30, 2018 |
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Jul 30, 2018 23:53
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I realize this is the hot takes zone but I think Gandalf just punting Frodo into Mt Doom, 300-style, would be pretty out of character. Edit: funny though
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Aug 3, 2018 18:12
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Kassad posted:I read that as referring to "wraiths of fear and darkness". Aragorn had his own Nazgul for a time. Yes, almost certainly. I see no reason to bring the Ring into this particular situation given that:
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Aug 6, 2018 15:44
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sassassin posted:They were made of corn and we know how corn is processed. To assume the select caste of women that were made to produce them did it by singing lullabies betrays a misunderstanding of both Tolkien and of reality. In the English usage, "corn" refers to any cereal. Tolkien absolutely knew this and surely you know it to, but you're too enamored with making some weird point about lye-burned elfin proletariat running a loving tortilla factory.
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Sep 4, 2018 16:09
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cheetah7071 posted:Long lifespans seems to be the natural order of things in middle earth. If orcs are long lived then pretty much the only sub-century sentient beings are fallen humans (who, if their own oral folklore is to be believed, are being punished with said short lifespans) Weren't Numenoreans rewarded with long life, while regular men live Earth-typical lifespans? I found http://lotrproject.com/statistics/ through googling, it seems like non-Numenoreans averaged 80 years while Numenoreans and their descendants averaged 237 years, with a standard deviation of 88 years, a full normal-man lifespan. The numbers are apparently pulled from characters described in the books. In Middle Earth it seems like being extraordinary in any way tends to confer actual tangible benefits: a good king might live especially long and be strong until his death, a particularly evil beast will just get bigger and older. It's a world built on god-songs that's been reshaped from a flat plane to a sphere. Trees apparently grew/existed before there was any light but starlight.
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Sep 5, 2018 19:05
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sassassin posted:Sunlight is just starlight from less far away. But the sun's just a Maia in a sailboat carrying a big fruit. And the brightest / best stars are the ones made from the dew of the trees that produced the fruit and flower that are the Sun and Moon, respectively.
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Sep 5, 2018 21:53
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I'd expect Hobbits to recognize mead. Having apparently pretty well-developed agriculture, I'd be surprised if they didn't keep bees. The fact that they eat cakes indicates some form of sugar production, and honey is the most likely (sugar beet processing doesn't seem like Tolkien's bag). Given that they brew beer and wine, I'd expect them to also make mead. Tolkien may have been thinking about mead, though, but didn't want to explicitly call it that. He surely had his own views about what saying "mead" would invoke. The Rohirrim capital is called Meduseld, Mead-Hall, and they are the sort of noble barbarian that comes to mind when you think "mead". I don't think he wanted to put elves in that same sort of niche.
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Sep 11, 2018 21:36
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MadDogMike posted:As for the mead discussion, I know Beorn is called out specifically for all the bees he raises, doesn’t he serve mead in the Hobbit? If it’s called out as such then Bilbo obviously knows what mead is, which suggests it exists in the Shire. I just looked, Beorn explicitly served mead: quote:They sat long at the table with their wooden drinking-bowls filled with mead. quote:At last Gandalf pushed away his plate and jug – he had eaten two whole loaves (with masses of butter and honey and clotted cream) and drunk at least a quart of mead Can we be 100% sure Bilbo recognized the mead for what it is? The narrator of The Hobbit is basically a modern Englishman, talking about trains and other things Bilbo wouldn't have known, but I didn't see anything like "Bilbo asked what the hell this stuff they were drinking was"; no explicit sign that Bilbo wasn't familiar with mead already.
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Sep 12, 2018 18:07
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Wonder what the original plan for Arda was, without Melkor's loving it up. A symmetrical, flat world with men and elves living together (no dwarves), lit by the lamps, men not afraid of death / don't distrust the elves. Possibly with the Ainur just wandering around hanging out and making trees, that sort of thing. Like, what was the plan for how long the world should remain, what changes were expected, etc. One might ask similar questions as to what God intended with Adam, Eve, and Eden before the fall. (The answer in both cases is probably 'boring, pleasant life, forever')
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Sep 13, 2018 23:21
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cheetah7071 posted:The plan was always for Melkor to gently caress everything up. Iluvatar had complete control over his design after all. The Valar's plan didn't really have an end goal besides "make a nice place to live" because, on a fundamental level, they didn't understand the children of Iluvatar The Ainur didn't know they were actually making Arda until it was done, right? I thought they all got together and sang a big song, then Iluvatar said "Check this out, this is what you were making the whole time guys" and showed them the world.
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Sep 13, 2018 23:45
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euphronius posted:There is a whole LOTR mmo that was apparently pretty faithful. It was pretty faithful to the map and descriptions of things, but at the end of the day it's hard to extract MMO classes from what we see in the books, especially when there's an expectation of for-real magic users but the closest we get in the books is Gandalf, a literal angel, lighting pinecones on fire to throw at wolves and generally making bright lights. When you take Gandalf's ability to inspire hope in his allies and reduce it to hitting '2' to give your allies a 15% boost to hit rate, some of the feeling is going to get lost. I played the game quite a bit and I did enjoy the atmosphere, but I was still going out into the swamp to kill 20 Neeker-breekers or collecting 7 barrow-wight femurs.
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Sep 21, 2018 23:23
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I'd play the hell out of a Dying Earth game, MMO or otherwise
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Sep 21, 2018 23:35
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Sil is really good.
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Sep 22, 2018 15:58
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Octy posted:Throwback to the discussion on Orc immortality. I thought it was fairly obvious by this line from The Silmarillion: 'For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Iluvatar'. The only thing that line seems to support is that the Orcs were made from corrupted Elves or Men, since only Iluvatar can create "true" life (possessing of free will?) per the story of the creation of the Dwarves. pre-emptive response against sassassin's usual response about "evil corrupted orcs" being Elven propaganda against noble Melkor: maybe the elves were actually little talking mice, and Sauron was John F Kennedy with a time machine, and hobbits were just invented by a mischievous Gondorian scribe, but I prefer to speculate based on things that actually appear in the texts
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Sep 24, 2018 23:33
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Nessus posted:Isn't "tobacco" ultimately a term from a Native American language? So is "potato" but it's at least at one remove and Tolkien would no doubt be less familiar with South American trivia. Speculation: "tobacco" didn't meet Tolkien's aesthetic preferences, while "pipe-weed" is exactly the sort of Germanic compound word he would like, especially since both components appear to have been in Old English.
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Sep 26, 2018 21:32
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Ginette Reno posted:The Witch King also holds up his hand to tell Frodo to shut the gently caress up at the ford of Bruinen and Frodo's tongue cleaves to his mouth as though he's struck dumb. Though whether he's able to do that because of his power or because Frodo is nearly a wraith at that point is uncertain I guess. And of course the blade the Witch King uses is practically sentient (even when it breaks after stabbing Frodo the splinter of it steadily works towards his heart) and has the ability to turn people into wraiths. Regarding mortal sorcerers, didn't the Numenoreans (before their island went all Atlantis) do poo poo closer to the traditional view of "magic" than most of what the Elves do? I certainly remember mention of sacrifices and potions, some (most?) intended to extend life but because they were evil & Iluvatar wasn't into immortality for men it didn't work.
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Oct 5, 2018 15:45
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Lewd Mangabey posted:In my opinion, one reason Frodo gets short shrift is that the themes of his personality (decency, self-sacrifice, strength in the face of adversity) are the same as the themes of the book overall, and so he tends to get subsumed into being a vehicle of the overall plot. Also because goons prefer the themes of irony, selfishness, and whining in the face of adversity.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:32
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I'll take even the most heavy-handed Tolkien references just as a refreshing change from "<X> is Voldemort!!!!!!"
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Nov 29, 2018 16:08
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The animated hobbit movie is actually a pretty reasonable attempt and captures the feel of a children's book better than the recent trilogy, qtiyd Also I appreciate that they gave the elvenking a non-English accent
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Dec 12, 2018 07:05
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Shibawanko posted:I'm listening to the audiobook, i had to take a 12 hour flight and nothing is more soothing and sleep inducing than hearing Tolkien drone on about mist and landforms. whoa wait JRRT did an audiobook? I don't usually do audiobooks but hearing the man himself might change my mind
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Dec 16, 2018 04:43
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Ginette Reno posted:He's twitchin' because he's got my axe in his nervous system! Did they actually say "nervous system" in the movie? A linguistic anachronism like that would probably make Tolkien roll over in his grave more than some of the other changes.
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Jan 2, 2019 17:41
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Data Graham posted:The Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie was pretty common children's fare in the 80s as I recall. Kids who would never willingly read a fantasy book were reasonably likely still to have seen that weird cartoon with the froggy guy in the cave and the magic ring. One of the English teachers in my middle school taught The Hobbit to his 7th grade class but I was unfortunately not in that class but the one next door. After finishing the book he would show them the movie and we could hear the goblin songs coming through the wall. He was also the cross country coach and would sing FIFTEEN BIRDS IN FIVE FIR TREES from time to time. There were only a couple kids in high school who read LotR although more tried because the movies were coming out. A friend of mine was convinced that 'Nazgul' referred to the flying creatures the Ringwraiths rode and nothing I could say would dissuade him. His main argument was based on this quote which must have made it into the movie because I know he never finished the books: quote:A cold voice answered: ‘Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.’ He took this as the Witch-King referring to his mount rather than talking about himself in the third person.
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Jan 16, 2019 22:20
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cheetah7071 posted:I thought Nazgul referred to the mounts too as a kid because the word gets used much more commonly in second half, after they start flying. In the first half ring-wraith is used more often. My first read through I'm not sure how much I really understood, especially of books 3 and 5. My first attempt was in the 8th grade while I was home sick with the flu, and when I got into Two Towers my fevered brain couldn't keep Sauron and Saruman straight, so I quit.
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Jan 16, 2019 22:27
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skasion posted:What gives you the impression that Elrond cares so deeply about the weapons of a place he has never been and never will go to? Elrond is not a grasping individual; he’s the kind of guy who despite being directly descended from the last High King of the Noldor in Beleriand would be content to remain a courtier to another king and wouldn’t even put himself forward to replace said king when he died. Yeah I mean we're talking about a 6,000 year old being whose father was turned into a star after saving the entire world. Demanding a sword because it was made in his great-grandfather's long-lost kingdom seems out of character. And, as you've pointed out, he's had plenty of opportunity to contemplate what happens when Elves get too attached to things, like that time Feanor's kids tried to kill his mom over a jewel (she turned into a bird tho and went to hang out with her husband, in space)
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Feb 6, 2019 23:07
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euphonium or whatever his username is should feel honored: his posts were so dumb that Hogge Wild spent his sole inter-probation post on them.
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Feb 8, 2019 21:40
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Stupid sexy Shagrat!
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Feb 13, 2019 18:34
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I’m going to call a major Haradrim character.
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Feb 19, 2019 16:32
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It also sort of reads like one of those plates people get because they've never heard of the phonetic alphabet and think "CBCDCE" is just impossible to properly read out over a radio.
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Feb 21, 2019 02:24
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Oh, we know what kind. Ar-Pharazon the Golden the piss scroll is real Shibawanko posted:It looks like it'll fit perfectly in the post-brexit world war 1/2 obsession and like they'll present the war as a straight up allegory... ah yes, Britain has only been obsessed with WW1/2 after Brexit.
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Mar 7, 2019 18:09
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10 Ways Black Cirdan Is More Important Than Ever In Trump's America Edit: I don't give a single solitary gently caress what color elves are, I would just love it if they didn't give EVERYONE some form of English accent. I actually really liked how the 1977 Hobbit gave the Elf-king some weird Nordic accent. Pham Nuwen fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Mar 7, 2019 |
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Mar 7, 2019 19:55
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skasion posted:Indeed, it is too far south (should be around the latitude of the bay of Belfalas) and too small (it’s about 750 miles across, so should be about twice the length of the distance from Bree to Rivendell — on the map they’re about the same). 
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Mar 7, 2019 20:01
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