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Let's talk about the Silmarillion and Tolkien's lesser-known work for a bit. Tolkien's writing can be split into two types, with the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings lying almost directly in between- his children's writing, where he wrote down the bedtime stories he told his children (The two Tom Bombadil poems in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil are children's writing that are also part of Middle-Earth), and his other writing, which largely extended from his linguistic work. In addition to Middle-Earth, this includes translations, comic fantasies, allegorical works, and poetry. The Silmarillion grew from his playing around with Welsh and Finnish to create two languages that he called "Gnomish" and "Qenya". While doing so, he ended up creating little stories to explain this word or that, and this eventually grew into the first versions of the Silmarillion in the 1910s and 1920s. This was envisioned as something between a fixup novel and an anthology- there would be a frame narrative with an Anglo-Saxon mariner, one Aelfwine, venturing to lost Fairy and receiving instruction on the lost past from the elves of Tol Eressea, which would come in the form of various poems and prose stories. The first three volumes of the History of Middle-Earth give the basic outline of how it would have gone. This version or something like it was advanced to Allen and Unwin after publication of the Hobbit but turned down for being too difficult. Tolkien doesn't seem to have continued much work on making the Silmarillion publishable after that. Instead, what happened is that materials were revised and added, with new material being added as necessary (HoME IV and V) to account for dwarves and Ents, to cover the gaps between the finished stories, and to incorporate Numenor. However, a number of aspects simply never received any updating, and Tolkien began to consider rewriting significant amounts of the material in the last decades of his life (HoME X and XI). When Tolkien died, his son Christopher started working on reconciling the mass of Silmarillion-related material together to create something coherent. He ended up failing and having to invent two chapters essentially out of whole cloth with Guy Gavriel Kay, a son of a family friend who would later start writing fantasy himself. These chapters are towards the end of the book, and cover the death of Thingol and the theft of the Nauglamir, as the material hadn't been rewritten since before Lord of the Rings. So the Silmarillion as seen in bookstores is without a central narrative and without much benefit of drafting and rewriting to make it consistent. It is instead basically a set of author's notes packaged into roughly narrative form. Bear that in mind while reading it- you're not reading anything that would have ever been seriously published were it not for the Tolkien craze of the time. It's also doubtful that Tolkien would have chosen to publish the Silmarillion in a recognizable form, for as he noted one of the critical elements of Lord of the Rings is the use of an assumed history, in which unexplained and mysterious elements create the semblance of life and draw the reader in with the desire to know more. The Silmarillion as originally conceived and eventually published lacks those elements almost entirely, though this is unsurprising. Literarily, the early Silmarillion especially owes the basic notion and form largely to Lord Dunsany's 1905 The Gods of Pegana, a collection of brief vignettes about the doings of a series of invented deities. It also owes a great deal to the epic and mythical poetry of Northern Europe (the Norse sagas, the Kalevala, Beowulf), which provides a great deal of the emotional qualities of the various characters- stoicism with moments of great emotion, futile but glorious deeds- but filtered through Tolkien's vision of Christianity (most especially in the story of Earendil). In addition to Tolkien's literary output, he wrote one essay that every student or fan of speculative fiction should read- "On Fairy-Stories". It outlines what Tolkien believed to be the purposes and capabilities special to stories of the unusual and impossible, and provides a way of understanding fantasy and science fiction that is still just as valid as it was when it was written. It's been anthologized a number of times, as well as being included in the Tolkien Reader Hatter106 posted:Been waiting for this thread, but too lazy to make it myself. Bravo! Children of Hurin was actually edited to make sense and flow, so you should definitely read it instead of the Turin chapters of the Silm.
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Feb 5, 2013 03:48
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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. Yes. It's annotated, like Unfinished Tales, and the goal was to make a more coherent narrative out of the original saga. It's interesting because Brynhild is significantly less passive than in the Volsungasaga (and the less said about the Nibelungenlied and women the better), Sigurd is made into more of a messianic figure, and the story cuts off with Gudrun's successful suicide over all the blood on her hands, rather than the additional vengeful generation of the original.
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Feb 8, 2013 04:42
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xcheopis posted:Not at all. Cirdan is definitely older and Celeborn likely is as well. Probably quite a few of the Telari and Avari are older, actually and possibly some of the few remaining Noldor, e.g., Glorfindal. Treebeard claims to be the oldest living thing in Middle-Earth, and this may also be compatible with the Quendi waking up first- Cirdan may be from one of the later generations of Elves at Cuivienen, or Treebeard could have sprouted unconscious and been woken to sapience by the Quendi later. There's not a lot of reason to believe that there are many Elves that could be older than Cirdan, either. The notes on the Elvish "three cycles of life" suggests that Cirdan is oldest of all the Eldar shown in the books, since he's the only one who's passed into the third cycle. Of course, there could be Avari that are older, but it doesn't seem likely with the harshness of ME under the dominion of Morgoth (after all, the leader of the Nandor died before managing to cross into Beleriand), and in any case none have actually appeared in the books- there don't seem to be any Avari apart from nameless background figures in Lorien and Mirkwood, and in any case both of those have acculturated to the blend of Laiquendin and Sindarin culture present in those lands. euphronius posted:I read it as Gandalf talking him into it. Going further along this road, Aragorn mentions taking long journeys below the equator and far into the east in FOTR. It seems quite possible that these were essentially diplomatic missions to various neutral or anti-Sauron groups that would be in place to negotiate quick peace with Gondor once he took the throne.
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Feb 19, 2013 06:26
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The Dregs posted:Right. I was wondering what Galdalf meant when he said (and I can't quote it exactly right now, I don't have the book handy) that Frodo could end up something like clear glass with a light shining out. It sounded to me that Frodo would end up becoming very wraithlike regardless. Whitch is worse than pains. What Gandalf probably means is that Frodo's wound will either make him fade completely and become under the dominion of Sauron, or fade partially and become spiritual and ethereal, which does happen over the course of TT and culminates in "I do not think it will be my part to strike any blow again" at the beginning of ROTK. This creates an interesting contrast between him and Sam, who is able to shake the Ring off because of his concrete, physical nature- he knows that the Ring's visions are ridiculous, and between him and Faramir, who is able to shake the Ring off because of his high-mindedness. Of course, this also plays into the basic moral structure of LOTR. Frodo has to become pacifistic because the book is basically about weakness overcoming strength.
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Mar 29, 2013 17:53
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Data Graham posted:There are a few "from the villain's perspective" works about Middle-earth, aren't there? Lord knows there are enough Grendel books. There's a fanfic floating around, called Morlindale, which is somewhat more limited as a revision. There was also a Russian sequel/revision, The Last Ringbearer, which has a English translation freely available with the permission of the author and presents a more thematically oriented revision and commentary. Of course, neither really presents Mordor as villainous, but Tolkien's conception of evil makes it far too banal/joyless a thing for a faithful reproduction of Sauron to be anything other than tedious. Now, that being said, I'm not aware of anything that attempts to produce a Hegelian synthesis of the two notions, the natural point to go forward, but that's a level of nerdiness rarely achieved even in the world of fanfiction.
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Jun 16, 2013 04:45
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Data Graham posted:So I've been wondering something lately. The stuff from the Hobbit is largely taken from Norse mythology and folklore. The two important dragons of surviving Norse stories, the one that killed Beowulf and Fafnir, both slept on a hoard of gold and Fafnir had a weak underbelly. Trolls turn to stone in the sun in most traditional Scandinavian folklore. The Elves of the Hobbit are fairly distinct from the fairy-folk of British folklore, and the Norwegian folktale East of the Sun, West of the Moon has a man who can turn into a bear and back again.
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Feb 7, 2014 18:08
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bartlebyshop posted:Yes, the Noldor in Middle Earth were pardoned and had the option to go back, but many (Galadriel, Gil-Galad, and Celebrimbor probably the most obvious examples) didn't want to. Morgoth was gone, so their plan to run some sweet elf kingdoms could now go on without problems, right? Tolkien talks about this in one of his letters - the elves (especially the Noldor) wanted to stay in Middle Earth where they were at the top of the hirrarchy, rather than return to Aman where they'd be near the bottom. More specifically, the goal of the remaining Noldor, and Sauron initially, was to bring as much of the light of Aman and knowledge as they could to Middle-Earth, since they were convinced that they would never return to Aman. This is probably also why the Noldor on Tol Eressea, in a somewhat better exile, gave the Numenoreans palantiri, the Stone of Erech, and so on.
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Oct 31, 2014 15:04
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Baloogan posted:How far does the Tolkien world go? Are there events we know about 100+ years after the end of LOTR? 1000+? Not really, beyond the idea of the Second Music, and the brief prophecy of Dagor Dagorath, which Tolkien abandoned sometime in the 1950s/60s when he started working on the Silmarillion again. Data Graham posted:That New Shadow stuff is pretty fascinating in that it gives us a glimpse into Tolkien thinking like "just some author", juggling questions like "what genre are we working with" and "what's the major conflict" and "what are the stakes". I always tend to think of him as existing in this alternate universe 24 hours a day where he's just constantly cranking out these missives flowing from his fully-imagined elseworld existence. Having him talk about "Hmm, I guess I could do a whodunit thriller kind of thing", like a Bond movie screenwriter, is really bizarre and it's also kind of bizarre that I find it bizarre. I wonder if what really killed it (apart from simple age and the reasoning he gave) was that he couldn't reconcile having Borlas remember the War of the Ring with having Eldarion be an old man. There are at least a couple things he abandoned for similar reasons.
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Nov 14, 2014 03:03
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There are indications post-Book of Lost Tales that seem to reference Numenor having rockets and ironclads, mostly in Unfinished Tales and early Akallabeth drafts if I recall correctly. However, it's worth noting that the parts of Middle-Earth we see are post-apocalyptic three or four times over. There are no large-scale mining operations to get high-quality iron and coal for steam engines. There are, generously, six cities total in an area at least the size of Europe, and large tracts of land are either uninhabited or sparsely inhabited. Far to the east and south, there may well be urbanized societies, but there are none within immediate reach. Even though Sauron can probably build high-tech equipment, he doesn't have the infrastructure to expand it outside of what's in Barad-dur and possibly Minas Ithil. That said, he and Saruman do have capabilities that are well beyond any Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages polity could achieve historically, so they almost certainly have some industry going on. Of course, Tolkien viewed industry fairly negatively.
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Jan 5, 2015 17:34
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Nessus posted:I think Gondor was somewhat more thickly inhabited than most of the places the Fellowship wandered through - obviously they were trying to steer clear of areas with a lot of people. The area around the Lonely Mountain didn't seem completely empty, anyway. Keep in mind, though, that Gondor's main port of Pelargir is largely a harborage judging by Legolas and Gimli's descriptions (or, alternately, it's been burned down by the Corsairs by the time they get there). Even Gondor is sparse by medieval standards from what we see on-page.
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Jan 5, 2015 23:55
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:So if Mordor was a hellish ashy plain, what were the orcs eating for food? (You can't say each other.) What's the economy and infrastructure of an army-state in a wasteland without vegetation? You're not going to tell me they go out raiding local farms to feed the vast armies of darkness, are you? Volcanic dryland farming in its southern parts, but Sauron also has allies and vassals in the more fertile parts of the world and they may provide the majority of its food supplies. He may also rely largely on his undead servants when not building up for conquest (Barad-dur was besieged for seven years, so you do the math).
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Jan 6, 2015 00:15
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Nessus posted:It sounds like if Sauron hadn't put his mojo in the Ring, Galadriel could've just gone down to Mordor and killed his rear end. (The problem being getting to him, of course.) What was she doing during the Last Alliance? Late writings indicate that Galadriel was essentially Feanor's equal (worse in the arts and trades, better at fighting and lore), so in a one-on-one confrontation, she would probably have gone through Sauron like a hot knife through butter. During the Last Alliance, Lorien sent troops and Amdir, the king of Lothlorien, led them and died on the Dagorlad. She and Celeborn probably fought with them. She didn't face Sauron directly because Elendil and Gil-galad had precedence as King of Numenor in Exile and High King of the Noldor for the duel (and also, speculatively, because she didn't trust herself with the temptation of the One Ring). BatteredFeltFedora posted:They didn't go with him at the time, but it's not known whether they went West eventually or not. I think Gildor's band, Galadriel, and Rivendell may be the only Noldor left by the War of the Ring. There were a long 3000 years for the survivors to sail westward.
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Jan 7, 2015 05:26
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Nessus posted:Can you elaborate on that? She's a fascinating character. (Like where does this come from, I'm guessing there is stuff in the Giant Tomes of Elf-Lore, royalties to Chris Tolkien) Specifically, I'm getting this from Unfinished Tales, which has a lengthy section on Galadriel and Celeborn as they develop and Galadriel is introduced into the Silmarillion. Tolkien mentions this in early drafts and doesn't explicitly contradict it in later ones, but in brief, his basic elements are that "Galadriel" is a Sindarinified form of Alatariel, which is Quenya for, roughly, "Blondie". This is Celeborn's pet name for her. Her birth names are Artanis ("noble woman") and Nerwen ("man-maiden"). She excelled in hunting, games, and lore in Valinor, and sought with her lover Celeborn (this use of "lover" contradicts some later Silmarillion stuff, which may be a misstatement or may be an interesting clue depending on whether Tolkien left any notes about his proposed changes for the second edition of LOTR) to prove her capabilities by going forth and enlightening the untutored of Arda. Feanor once asked for a strand of her hair and she told him to go to hell, but when he swore the Oath she went along with the vanguard of the Noldor, seeking a place to put her theories to work. At this point the narrative differs greatly depending on the draft, but overall it's suggested she and Celeborn left Beleriand well before the downfall of the Noldor states and lived in the Old Forest, or at the very least she removed herself before things got really ugly. From there, a ban was set on her return to Valinor, unlike the rest of the Noldor, until such a time as she atoned for her imperialistic behavior. She then ran a small fief under Gil-galad before founding Hollin, leaving that to her cousin once removed Celebrimbor, and deciding to live a pastoral life in the small Silvan kingdom of Lothlorien. When Amroth left with Nimrodel, she took over by default but refused to crown herself, leading eventually to her role in LOTR, after which she tears apart Dol Guldur and then heads south for her granddaughter's wedding. Then she passes westward.
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Jan 7, 2015 06:27
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SirPhoebos posted:Another movie question: did the Hobbit actually have Dune worms in it? There's a brief mention of the "Were-worms of the Last Desert" when Bilbo agrees to join Thorin. They have literally no other references anywhere in anything else Tolkien wrote (unlike giants, which appear in early drafts and outlines for LOTR) and people have speculated endlessly. Of course, given that "worm" is used fairly often to refer to dragons in Tolkien, Bilbo may have been saying "dragon-men" instead.
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Jan 7, 2015 16:30
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radlum posted:I just re watched The Two Towers and I was left wondering something. Why was Saruman powerless to stop the ents from attacking Isengard? I don't have my book with me so I can't check it out, and it seemed really odd that during the attack on Isengard in the movie all Christopher Lee has to do is look around with a weird expression on his face. He wasn't expecting the Ents to do anything, they waited until his army had left Isengard, Ents are incredibly strong and tough, and Treebeard was able to neutralize his defenses after he managed to kill one Ent.
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Jan 11, 2015 17:45
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SirPhoebos posted:There are pretty detailed explanations as to the origin of Elves, Men, Dwarves and Orcs, but do we get an explanation to how Hobbits got created? Hobbits are just a different kind of Man, is the impression I got from the Letters. Radio! posted:Sauron immediately knows where Frodo is when he puts the ring on in Mount Doom because Frodo claims the ring then. I guess Sauron and the ring are so interconnected that as soon as someone else claims the ring's power, he's instantly aware of it/its location. When Sam wore the ring, he wasn't claiming it, and wasn't technically within the borders of Mordor yet, which apparently made it more difficult for Sauron to sense the ring's location as well. Sauron can still draw upon the power in the One, though less of it and without the special powers of the One, so long as it remains unmastered by anyone else. So someone laying claim to it would be immediately detected because they're attempting to tear a large part of Sauron's spirit out psychically. If anyone succeeded at this task, then Sauron would be in the same position as if it were destroyed, and would be dispersed to the ends of Arda and remain a voice on the wind until One thing that also is probably important is that Sam rejects the One directly and so probably drew on much less of its power than Frodo did (the invisibility effect was built into all of the Rings, since it's a byproduct of forcing the person into the spiritual realm when they put it on).
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Jan 15, 2015 03:27
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I believe that in the Silmarillion dragons are, at least by implication, Maiar / "spirits" of an order similar to the Balrogs; they aren't just pure animals, they're Maiar that Melkor shaped into a particular form, or maybe the progeny of maiar and beasts. This would fit in with the medieval lore and legends that Tolkien was drawing on -- in the modern era we tend to think of dragons as a particularly fancy kind of animal, but Tolkien's dragons aren't just animals with fire breath, they're living intelligences. That's part of why no other modern author has done a dragon as well as Smaug; everyone writing dragons today tries to just make them a fancy animal, and that's not terrifying. Eh, Tolkien is one of the first Western authors to make dragons obviously intelligent in and of themselves. Fafnir took on a dragon's shape, the dragon Beowulf fought didn't talk, the dragon Jason killed was animalistic, the dragon St. George killed is of variable intelligence depending on the telling. Gandalf also implicitly endorses the Maiar origin in that passage by suggesting that dragon's fire weakens as they grow older, just like all Maiar weaken as they spend more time embodied and especially in a single form.
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Jan 16, 2015 00:24
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Spoilers Below posted:Absolutely. Of course, seeking rulership or domination of the wills of others is the greatest evil possible within Tolkien's moral universe, beyond the external elements. This is why Aragorn has to be badgered into reviving the Dunedain kingdoms by Gandalf and Elrond, and why Sam then becomes ruler of the Shire. (And also why Galadriel and Celeborn aren't queen and king of Lorien.) The strongly Christian messages in LOTR tend to form along the lines of Tolkien's personal politics, which are a fascinating, genuinely right-wing anarchism.
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Jan 16, 2015 20:10
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Levitate posted:I always got the impression that half elves were for all intents and purposes elves if they chose to be without any real practical distinction. There's a distinction. Elladan and Elrohir are unlike Legolas in certain interesting ways- they fear the Dead unlike Legolas, nor can they spot the winged Nazgul like he can. But it's a fine line. SirPhoebos posted:So why did the Valar finally decide to take down Morgoth at the end of the First Age? I kinda get they were sick of his b/s, but what prompted them to launch their attack then and not like a century earlier? Morgoth had poured his spirit into Arda like Sauron with the Ring. It was only after the long series of events that began with Dagor Bragollach that one of the Silmarils was taken from him, and he was both weak enough and the situation of Atani, Quendi, and Khazad desperate enough for the Valar to intervene and kill him without destroying Arda. Also, the Doom of Mandos had been fulfilled. The Noldor had destroyed themselves and their valiance came to naught, especially compared to Men and unenlightened Elves. Effectronica fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 01:29
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Bendigeidfran posted:As a related question, how did Dwarves get their food? I can't see any of the bigger dwarf settlements like Moria or Nogrod getting everything from trade, because they'd all die out if human farms didn't have a huge surplus/got killed by Orcs. Presumably, Dwarven settlements are either dependent on nearby Men/Elves/Orcs who will trade food for manufactured goods, or Moria at its height had its own farms, somewhere around the West-gate (and so Nogrod and Belegost and the Iron Hills and so on). Dwarves don't just do things with stone and metal either. They all had musical instruments when they came to hire a burglar, and the rejuvenated Kingdom of Erebor exports things you'd need wood to make. So even though they don't seem to use many wooden supports (or the areas that needed supports collapsed after 2000 years without substantial maintenance) and could just use coal for fuel, they still need wood, though not quite at the same prodigious rate the Numenoreans did.
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Jan 23, 2015 06:10
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SirPhoebos posted:I went ahead and ordered the Atlas of Middle Earth from Amazon. I should get Saturday. Meanwhile I got two questions. I'm guessing it has to do with the Roman/fascist salute given Saruman's ambitions.
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Mar 14, 2015 01:09
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UoI posted:I have been wondering this for years and I have no idea why I haven't Googled or asked this question. They also have sex rarely enough that they can date conception with accuracy, which is, uh, interesting.
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Mar 21, 2015 15:27
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euphronius posted:Feanor's obsession with the silmarils causes the strife, not some catholic family law drama. Without his daddy/mommy/brother issues and nothing else changed, Feanor doesn't burn the ships and has the whole host of the Noldor to face Morgoth in the Second Battle (and doesn't murder one of his own children, going by the last Silmarillion material!) Most likely, though, he never makes the Silmarils without that strife and the Trees survive, so in that sense there would have never been that unique beauty without the strife. There is nothing anyone can do in Middle-Earth that does not redound to the greater glory of Eru.
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Mar 22, 2015 05:40
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euphronius posted:Like I was interpreting your use of short sighted to be in the context of the lives of men, not like the scope of Arda. Well, Sauron assumed that they'd try to use the Ring against him, rather than hand it to a hobbit on a suicide mission, so he was still shortsighted in that regard. You could also make an argument that his whole shtick on Numenor was pretty shortsighted, depending on what you view his main goals to be.
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Mar 26, 2015 03:21
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euphronius posted:Well he never thought someone would destroy the ring and he was right. Eh, I don't want to turn this into a boring quotefest, but Tolkien specifically says "in that situation" because Sam could have tossed the Ring in if he had had it and with nothing else changed. So could Faramir. The issue is that Frodo used the Ring to force Gollum to submit, which is why he wasn't able to do it- he refused to reject the Ring completely. Of course, in order for Sam to get to the point of having the Ring in his hand at Orodruin, he would have had to do or experience things that would have broken his ability to resist it, and the same for Faramir. Sauron is shortsighted in that unless his only goal in going to Numenor was to troll the Valar, he hosed up really bad there. Granted, you could argue that by choosing the path of dominion rather than service he condemned himself to increasingly evil acts, and you could even suggest that as late as the making of the lesser rings he hadn't completed his fall. It's an interesting interpretation, but not one you're likely to see too much of. Hieronymous Alloy posted:The first question, yeah, I think Gandalf is referring to the Secret Fire of Eru, i.e., the primal divine spark. "Anor" is the sun, so the Flame of the Sun would be the Light of the Sun, i.e., the Light of the Trees, the divine light of the Valar. Gandalf is saying he is a servant of God and a wielder of the power of the Angels. Udun is Morgoth's fortress in the first age, I think? So the Balrog weilds flame of a kind too, but the wrong kind. Udun is "hell" according to the map, and Sindarin dictionaries offer nothing but the possibility it means "evil-west". If we go by the Encyclopedia of Arda's claim that it's the Sindarin form of Q Utumno, Q dictionaries tell us that tumna means "deep, low-lying" and u- is a negative prefix. So I guess it means "evil deep", but the Q dictionaries claim that Angamandu "Iron-prison" is the translation of English "hell". Of course, iron is associated with torment and suffering in Q, so I guess Angamandu would be understood as a literal translation of hell as a place of suffering, with Utumno being hell-as-an-evil-place-underground.
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Mar 26, 2015 04:00
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Right, but it's also an alternate name for Utumno, Morgoth's fortress *before* the first age (I had to go look that up: http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Utumno). Yeah, I'm speculating on what Utumno means.
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Mar 26, 2015 04:06
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Balrogs have at least two wings because they're referred to in plural, and if you have two wings, they must attach to a body, otherwise yeah, they'd be all one megawing quote:"But I am still at a loss for one thing," Lestrade declared. "How on earth did the man think to escape from the grounds? The area is completely sealed off, and the army would have kept it up for a year, if need be, on the express instructions of the War Office."
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Mar 26, 2015 04:12
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euphronius posted:The shadow of the Moria balrog is poeticlly described as wings. thats it. In no other description of Balrogs do they have wings. If they had wings why did they need to ride dragons over mountains to get to Gondalin. Gondolin's surface-to-air missiles.
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Mar 26, 2015 04:15
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Bendigeidfran posted:What do y'all think of The Final Battle (Dagor Dagorath)? Personally, I never thought it fit very well with the Third Age stuff. Lord of The Rings is all about how magic and divine intervention are fading, the smallest people can make their own fates, we live in the shadow of giants, etc. Ending things in a huge Norse/Old Testament style showdown just seems dissonant. Tolkien discarded Dagor Dagorath after LOTR was published, but he never wrote anything to fill in what happens and how the world is finally redeemed, so Chris just used Dagor Dagorath in the published Silmarillion. There are some pretty big holes, because originally Dagor Dagorath was the War of Wrath, before the Drowning of Anadune and LOTR entered the mythology. The world has to be destroyed and remade so long as Melkor refuses to repent, because he put his essence into the world and corrupted it (thus the title of HOME X, Morgoth's Ring). If he were to genuinely repent of the works of his hands and seek forgiveness, then there would be no need for an apocalypse, for the essence of Melko would turn to good and the paradise of Valinor would spread across all of Arda, and even be surpassed. So it all comes down to whether you believe that everyone can repent or not, and Tolkien was generally of the former opinion. Thus Dagor Dagorath was cut out.
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Mar 26, 2015 16:21
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SirPhoebos posted:This might be a dumb question, but how do Gandalf et al. KNOW know that they can't take command of The One Ring without turning into an evil jerk themselves? It's not like anyone other than Sauron ever uses it to its full potential. Because the Ring's purpose is to control people. You can't use it ethically, except via the unintentional side-effect of being thrust into the spirit world.
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Mar 26, 2015 18:58
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SirPhoebos posted:Also, why do all the Rohanim seem mystified by Aragorn igoing down the Paths of the Dead when he explicitly says why he's going there? Because the Rohirrim have much less sense and knowledge of history than most of Middle-Earth (even random mountain orcs have collective memory of the First Age). Anything from before Eorl is somewhere between legend and myth. So what they know of the Paths of the Dead is that it killed Baldor, who was as far away from them as Elizabeth the First is to us, and that it's some serious bad poo poo that's as old as the hills.
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Apr 1, 2015 04:39
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Thunder Moose posted:Does anyone have additional information on what Tolkein wanted to write about post ROTK? Obviously it never happened but there has been some information on what might have been. HOME XII has the first chapters of the planned sequel and a planned story set in the Second Age involving Numenorean exploration, both of which were abandoned shortly after he wrote the drafts as far as we can tell. HOME IX has a large section based on his second, post-LOTR attempt to write The Lost Road and make the downfall of Numenor into an actual novel. But he spent a lot of his later years attempting to rewrite the Silmarillion.
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Apr 4, 2015 01:33
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Athaboros posted:I was actually just re-reading the Hobbit, and it does seem to have some kind of inner light. Bilbo can see it in the pitch black of the dwarves' hall, and when he approaches it (with only a torch for light), it has a white inner glow. Dunno what that means about its origin or anything like that, though. The Arkenstone is an example of Dwarven "magic"- their subtle understanding of the material world, which they use to make the mithril coats and the toys for Bilbo's birthday party and so on. Though they are less learned than Feanor or the golden age of the Noldor (or arguably the height of Moria depending on how we interpret Gimli's song), they nevertheless have some ability to bring out the inner light of gems.
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Apr 10, 2015 04:43
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Making a single Silm movie would be a waste of time (even doing it as a ten, eleven-hour arthouse picture would run headlong into the story stopping and restarting multiple times), and there's no chance in hell you could make a good series of Silmarillion films as long as Chris Tolkien or anyone with his inclinations holds the film rights to the material. Because Tolkien never wrote more than fragments of some of the critical stories (the exile of the Noldor, the story of Tuor), you'd have to make a whole lot up. It's simply too overstuffed with detail- you need to go into a lot of depth even to make a miniseries or whatever showing off the decline and fall of the Feanorians, which otherwise could be a fairly tight and powerful story.
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May 2, 2015 07:57
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The copyright will inevitably expire at some point. It's what, Author's death plus 75 years in the US? And Tolkien died in 1977 I think? The Silm will enter the public domain in Europe in 2043 with the LOTR and Hobbit, but all derivative works are protected by trademarks held by the Tolkien Estate Ltd and trademarks can be renewed indefinitely so long as they continue to use it.
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May 2, 2015 15:13
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I think the Lay of Leithian would be better served as two films, with the first one covering everything up to the aftermath of Tol-in-Gaurhoth and the second one going up to the return of Beren and Luthien from Valinor.
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May 2, 2015 15:21
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One thing that struck me when I was rereading The Fall of Gondolin recently is that, given that it was inspired by Tolkien's experiences at the Somme, it casts the British as the bad guys. The Somme was where the British first used the tank, and Melko's forces notoriously use tanks. Glorfindel kills his Balrog with a headbutt from his spiked helmet- a pickelhaube. It's fascinating, along with the War of Wrath as an exaggerated Western Front where the host of the Valar takes a week to advance a mile.
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May 2, 2015 21:56
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Oracle posted:Yeah she could've taken him but not without risking putting herself up in his place because she'd have had to actively use her ring to do it. Passive use of the rings (e.g. keeping Lorien ageless) doesn't seem to trigger the 'Sauron gonna get you' condition but active use... Galadriel could, going by Tolkien's later thoughts on her, have wiped the floor with Sauron in a duel, as she was a greater warrior than Feanor and his equal in everything else except technology. But Tolkien's world isn't one where one-man or one-woman armies can happen. She would have to have an army that could go through all his orcs and wraiths and trolls and worse things (she only sings down Dol Guldur after Sauron dies and his servants are freed from his psychic domination), and that just doesn't exist in western Middle-Earth by the time he reappears. Assembling one would, in the end, require psychic domination through the One (or the Nine). Which would drat her completely and allow her imperialistic urges to shine through. Nenya doesn't appear to have any real offensive use, but its power probably underlies Lothlorien's cloaks and defenses. The issue with using the One is not that it magically corrupts you into becoming a tyrant. What it does is form a compulsion in your mind to hold onto it, and inform you of its power when it's fully active. The corruption comes from its passive ability to draw the powers of evil (this is speculation but fairly likely given texts like Disaster of the Gladden Fields) and from the knowledge that you could use its power to noble ends. Sam and Faramir manage to avoid corruption by refusing to do so. Isildur also refused it, but too late to save himself (arguably the same thing is repeated by his distant nephew Boromir). Frodo's failure comes when he uses the Ring to enslave Gollum, especially the second time he does so. Bombadil, according to Tolkien, has a purely scientific mind that has no interest in power and so the Ring can't even tempt him. Gandalf lays out why he can't be trusted with the ring in two separate passages, one indirectly, and Galadriel's exact reasoning is laid out in Unfinished Tales and the material published in HOME XII. I think that basically covers everyone besides Saruman, whose motivations beyond the ones he lays out are fairly difficult to discern.
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May 13, 2015 05:07
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I think we're meant to infer that the Watcher in the Water is one of them, but apart from that they seem to be deliberate mysteries/Dunsany references. Re: Tolkien reading Lovecraft- Lovecraft wasn't available in the UK until the Arkham House collections AFAIK, so Tolkien couldn't have read him until after LOTR was mostly finished. He did, however, definitely read and enjoy Asimov.
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May 22, 2015 00:00
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Gologle posted:How much of the world do Maia have a grasp on anyway? I mean, being angels serving under certain powers (Olorin learned from Nienna, and from that he gained an understanding of empathy/Sauron and Saruman both learned from Aule and gained the power to craft), they have some knowledge, but I'm talking about the vision of the world that Eru showed all of his angels in the Music. From what I remember, Manwe held the deepest comprehension, but I was always uncertain of how much anybody else knew. Maiar, it seems, got fairly limited perception of the Music, because they are consistently described as learning from the Valar. What seems to be the case is that each particular Valar, in shaping the world, garnered a deep understanding of it. Manwe has the broadest comprehension, but all other Valar know more about something than he does (except the air and the winds). Melkor, meanwhile, understands the Children the greatest of all the Ainur, not only because they are Fallen (and while Eldar and Atani are Fallen, it's just possible Avari and Khazad and Onodrim are unFallen) but because Melkor has associated himself with changes and reshaping, and the Children, who change, are thus closest to him in nature. Melkor's Maiar, though, are not endowed with this understanding in particular. This has some particularly interesting resonances with Iluvatar's statements that there is nothing Melkor or anyone can do that will in the end prove evil, and with the malevolent nature of trying to hold things permanent.
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May 23, 2015 02:25
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