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To some extent probably...the major characters are all men, women play a secondary role in everything even if they are given more attention than just "sit there and look pretty". I feel like his women characters are generally done alright but like I said none of them are really major players, even in the Silmarillion more of the notables are men. I guess it'd be more interesting and accurate to have a woman's opinion on it.
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Mar 28, 2014 21:53
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rypakal posted:Brian Herbert used his father's name to sell his lovely Dune fanfic. Which is why I'm glad Christopher Tolkien didn't license out his fathers work, I think a person is fooling themselves if they think letting other authors write stuff out of the Silmarillion would have turned out well.
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May 28, 2014 11:44
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Vavrek posted:That was the same breakdown I had come to. The first printings of The Hobbit were Bilbo's original drafts, the post-LotR editions of The Hobbit are Frodo's revised version, with the honest retelling of Riddles in the Dark... Is there actually a difference between the original edition of the Hobbit and post-LOTR editions? I thought he meant to go back and re-write it to fit more closely with his middle earth mythos but didn't really get around to it, but I'm not sure if that's true. IIRC it certainly didn't start out as part of middle earth but when it got such positive reactions and the publishers were asking for a sequel, he realized he could write a sequel that was "part" of the Silmarillion and so it all kind of became part of the same world and history.
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Sep 9, 2014 13:45
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It's more that the ring is semi-sentient and *somehow* basically finagled its way into being dropped. It knew its master was Sauron and was always trying to return to him. It's mentioned by Bilbo that sometimes the ring tended to "slip away" from him.
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Sep 9, 2014 15:53
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Nessus posted:He was definitely deeply steeped in actual Norse epics and literature and I think a fair bit of it echoes out. Meanwhile a lot of fantasy writers nowadays were steeped in... Tolkien! Maybe not even all the books either. This probably sounds dumb but Tolkien's work always feels to me like laying out or painting this world in a way that makes it feel more natural, while most modern fantasy writers are caught up in describing everything in detail so you know exactly how everything is supposed to look but not how it really feels
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Nov 14, 2014 15:40
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concerned mom posted:There's definitely a part where it's just Frodo and Sam isn't there? Nope, they all leave Bag End together (Frodo, Sam, and Pippin that is). The chapter is even called "Three is Company" e: unless you're talking about later in The Fellowship then yes Sam and Frodo take off on their own near the end of the book. I just started a re-read and yeah pretty much until they hit Bree it's kind of...well, not hitting its stride yet. It feels to me like Tolkien is settling into the story and it just doesn't really get going until Bree. At least in Rivendell there's a lot of info and new characters and all of that. e: it doesn't help that I think it takes a bit to get used to his writing so you have some very slow parts right at the beginning while you're doing so. Also I think his writing starts becoming a lot more interesting when he starts really introducing lore and elves and different languages and you start feeling the size and age of Middle Earth rather than just reading about how Hobbits fuckin' love to eat in somewhat stilted writing. Levitate fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 17:10
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HIJK posted:The Shire chapters are my favorite because they combine info dumping with setting characters. You get to know Frodo, you see Bilbo again, there are shenanigans with the Sackville-Bagginses, Gandalf shows up and threatens to blow up Frodo's front door. It's so comfy, I love it. Right, I don't really dislike them myself, I can just see why they put off first time readers. I think they do help establish the Hobbits as the sympathetic characters the reader can relate to as well (compared to the elves which obviously aren't meant to be relatable, and even other Men like Aragorn and Boramir, who come off as a...step above, or royalty (hah) to the common people that the Hobbits are, etc.)
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Dec 12, 2014 18:26
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The neat thing is that a lot of the stuff that's mentioned in passing (like the story of the Rangers and talking about the Witch King of Angmar, the old kingdoms and wars and all of that) actually has back story that's expanded on in the appendices of Return of the King and also in the Silmarillion, etc. It's not just bits of stuff thrown in to spice things up, it's actually referring to "real" history of the world that Tolkien wrote out.
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Dec 12, 2014 21:39
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Data Graham posted:And not stuff that he wrote later to fill in the blanks; stuff that he'd written years and decades before, but never really intended to publish unless he could get it perfect (he didn't). Right, it's actually pretty drat interesting to read how the whole history of Middle Earth and the Hobbit and the LotR's came about. Tolkien's life work was really the Silmarillion and he worked long and hard on that but it was never quite to his satisfaction. Then one day he sat down and wrote "In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit". He didn't know what a Hobbit was, or if it even related to Middle Earth, but he started from there and wrote a book. Suddenly that book became a success and people were clamoring for a sequel, and he realized he could join this all together with his work on the Silmarillion. The Ring became something more than it was originally intended and things took off and suddenly the Lord of the Rings is known as his major achievement, while he's still really trying to get the Silmarillion just right. It's some ways sad he never really finished that but he was such a perfectionist that maybe it never would have happened without some real kind of outside pressure. We at least still got a pretty detailed history of Middle Earth, albeit with some uncertainty about some things, but sometimes that makes it a bit more real UoI posted:If people don't mind reading about my horrible opinions on fantasy, sure! Meh even if you dont' like it, whatever. In some ways it's not the best writing and all of that and if you come into reading Tolkien's stuff after being used to all of the fantasy cliches and archetypes that came out of it, then it might feel like "orcs and wizards? this is some lame d&d poo poo!", but on the other hand all that d&d poo poo basically came out of his writings and I still am amazed at how real his world feels while at the same time feeling like some amazing high myth that really stimulates your imagination
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Dec 13, 2014 04:56
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Data Graham posted:poo poo, dude, spoilers. At the end of the book the King Returns 
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Dec 14, 2014 20:21
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Gandalf also trusted Saruman at that time, and Saruman was held in regard as the authority on Sauron and his works. Sarumon was vehemently insisting at that point that the Ring was lost forever at the bottom of the ocean (swept down the river into the ocean when Isildur died ), so that played a large role in Gandalf being slow to put the pieces together.
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Dec 18, 2014 19:21
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I think you also get into the good=forces of light and they wear white hats, and evil=forces of darkness and wear black hats thing which is a very old and yet still persistent way of dividing protagonists and antagonists (at least for white dominated cultures) that may very well be rooted in racism (or also going back to the darkness of night being dangerous and scary) but in some ways is so ingrained that people don't think about it. The elves are fair and pure and full of light and the greatest works ever created were the Silmarils which are shining jewels of light, while various incarnations of the enemy (Morgoth, Sauron) dwell in the darkness and dungeons and want to destroy the light. It's a very easy jump to describing everything evil in your story as dark and "black" without intentionally meaning "dark skinned races are bad and evil and light skinned races are good and this applies directly to the real world as well". Which is really just me saying yes it's a complex matter that involves influences from methods of storytelling as well as cultural biases of the time (racism, classism) as well as the fact that Tolkien's world was written as a kind of mythology for a predominantly white group of people so of course the main characters are going to be white and all of that...I don't think we'd expect myths and legends of darker skinned groups of people to be a multi cultural affair either. Being aware of the faults and reasons (good or bad) why a work is the way it is is a good thing to explore but probably shouldn't stop at a surface level "he was racist" if someone wants to discuss it. And hey there's no reason to feel bad about liking Tolkien and people who say "yeah but he's racist and that means you're bad for liking it" are dumb  Data Graham posted:Right, and the Legolas/Gimli relationship and the Frodo/Sam one both have overtones of things like the relationship between Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim, her Indian valet. Nobody at the time would have considered Indians the "equals" of white English people in any meaningful sense, but Victoria regarded him as her closest and most valued personal companion until she died. "One of the good ones," I'll bet a number of people said. I'm not sure I agree with the comparison there. Elves and dwarves may not like each other but one was certainly not a servant or subordinate, and that power dynamic vastly changes the comparison. If the elves are saying "oh Gimli is one of the good ones" then it's just as likely the dwarves are saying "oh Legolas is one of the good ones". The missing dynamic of master and servant makes that comparison fall down quite a bit in my opinion. As for Sam and Frodo, you do have the master and servant dynamic but it's muddied a bit as the hobbits are the same race and I don't particularly get any feeling that there's a class or group of hobbits that are treated as inferior (besides hobbits in Hobbiton thinking the Bucklanders are weird and all of them thinking the ones in Bree are crazy, which just reads as "those people in that other town I don't ever visit sure are outsiders and weirdos"). It certainly does feel weird to have Sam calling Frodo "master" and acting like his sole purpose in life is to serve Frodo but it seems to be more a relationship between the two of them rather than there being a subclass of hobbits that are kept as servants because of their skin color. I think there's stuff there to explore but I'm not quite on board with comparing it to that situation. Levitate fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2014 14:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, that's the thing and why I think the "Sam was Ethnic" theory above has a little weight; I'm not sure we can just dismiss it as American misinterpretation. Class and race aren't entirely separate notions in Tolkien's world -- the upper-class hobbits all seem to be Fallohide, with correspondingly fair hair, etc. And that view of inherited social class, "blood," was part of Tolkien's worldview and (let's face it) part of his contemporary English worldview for that matter (probably stretching all the way back to the divide between the Normans and Saxons, if not before). That is a good point. While I didn't get the impression that there was a straight up servant class of hobbits, you're right that there is some class/race separation there. I don't' particularly want to come off like I'm just dismissing those ideas
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Dec 19, 2014 15:07
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The Eagles were just assholes
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Dec 19, 2014 17:11
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Nessus posted:Well, does the king have a right to ask for creepy little trophies of you? Some would say yes but I think the idea there is 'no he does not,' which is probably about what ancient Norse would have said too. There wasn't really a ton of dwarf/elf angst for the most part...they were just like "it's been a long time since we were allies and the dwarfs awoke the balrog so we're kinda miffed at them for that" I think people's perceptions about dwarf and elf relations, at least in lotr, are a bit colored by the movie where they played it up a ton. Gimli and legolas never argued about who should take the ring or about trusting one another etc.
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Jan 8, 2015 02:37
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Nessus posted:I think it's heavily magnified from D&D and that argument in the council of elrond, mostly. Pong Daddy posted:Well, there was the whole Sack of Doriath thing too, some elves may have still held grudges about that. And weren't dwarves a little pissed nobody else helped them out when they cleared out all those orc fortresses to avenge Thror(or Thrain, I forget which) Right, I'm not saying there was no tension at all, just that it was vastly magnified in the movies. There really wasn't even much of an argument at all at the council of elrond, least of all between Legs and Gims.
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Jan 9, 2015 22:06
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Nessus posted:I thought that scene where Saruman just sounds so reasonable and persuasive and everyone's sort of drooping and figuring now he's going to go plot with Gandalf and maybe Aragorn and they'll all just sit tight until they get instructions was quite on point. It reminded me of the discouragement people feel nowadays about politics, though unfortunately we are short on Gandalfs to dispel things. I don't think it was Gandalf that did a whole lot, it was Theoden who looked like he was being persuaded and then said "what the gently caress you've waged war on us and killed our people gently caress you" and then Saruman flipped his poo poo at that and that kind of broke the spell e: actually a little of both. Theoden resisted Saruman himself and that surprised his people and Saruman's reaction at the refusal also kind of alienated them, but then Saruman put all his effort into charming Gandalf and everyone else was thinking like what you said until Gandalf laughed at him. Levitate fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Jan 12, 2015 |
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Jan 12, 2015 13:28
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Well, Merry and Pippin helped out a bit That scene is always kind of funny in a way. After Merry helps destroy Sauron's top captain and nearly immortal ring wraith, Pippin saves Faramir and helps protect Gondor from an invading horde, together they helped bring down Saruman, and Sam loving walked into Mordor itself and helped destroy the One Ring, they go back to the shire and are like "what the gently caress is this bullshit you really expect me to think this is some hot poo poo after what I've just been through? gently caress off and get out" Levitate fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 19:04
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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.
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Jan 17, 2015 00:44
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Hogge Wild posted:Most people in the films are just caricatures of what they were in the books. Especially Boromir and Denethor. And Gimli What they did with Denethor was just so ham fisted, and they even had a good actor playing him so they could have played up the nuances with him a lot better. Instead of a noble man tormented by visions of overwhelming forces arrayed against him leading to despair, he's just a giant self righteous shithead who hates his second son for no reason (I know he favored Boramir and was more critical of Faramir in the book as well but the movies took it into ridiculousness) SirPhoebos posted:Gollum first picks up the Fellowship's trail in Moria, right? So how does he follow them after Gandalf destroys the Bridge? I think it's assumed he knows more secret ways out of Moria. I mean, the orcs also followed the Fellowship out as well so there obviously some other exits.
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Feb 5, 2015 17:36
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, my favourite character. He's just a comic sidekick.
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Ynglaur posted:I felt the same way about Galadriel's rejection of the Ring in the movie. If you strip out the special effects, Cate Blanchet delivered a fantastic piece of acting, with very challenging dialogue. Instead we get a bunch of garbled effects that overpower the acting entirely. It was a real shame, as it could have been one of the finest moments in the first movie. I think that's a tough scene to do either way. It is described in the book somewhat similarly as what they do in the movie but I think it's one of those effects that's hard to do...I always felt like it was describing how it looked to Frodo so it's kind of a mental trick rather than an actual visual effect, but that's easier to envision in your head than to put on the screen. That said, they could have probably done a bit better job with it
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Feb 6, 2015 20:18
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Thunder Moose posted:As others have pointed out - Tolkien held to the old adage that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Which is why virtuous characters such as Gandalf, Galadriel, Tom Bombadil, etc - did "not desire mastery, but rather understanding." Does that mean Eru is horribly corrupt 
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Mar 27, 2015 15:56
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You couldn't do the whole Silmarillion as a movie or series of movies, it's just not cohesive enough. It's a history that includes stories and legends in it, not something with a narrative linking everything together. A long TV series might be really cool though if it was done well
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Apr 21, 2015 15:30
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I really didn't like the style of those comics but that's just me
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Apr 21, 2015 20:42
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The first Hobbit movie at least seems like it couldn't find a balance between the comedic moments, the dramatic moments, and everything else. Even though Gimili, Merry, and Pippin were pretty much treated as comedy relief in the LOTR movies, it at least fit in pretty well with everything else that was going on. The Hobbit never seemed to quite fit together. Also the dwarves look too much like handsome humans with beards (well, some of them anyways...I know they're supposed to be young but they didn't really look like what we think of as Middle Earth dwarves IMO)
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May 4, 2015 14:07
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computer parts posted:In the extended edition of TT they have a whole scene where they kill a dude who's just working for Sauron and isn't an orc. They don't actually show up in battle until Return of the King though. Yeah they also have that scene where some people swear allegiance to Saruman but I don't think you ever see them fighting. I should remember who those guys are supposed to be...not the wild men I don't think? Maybe I'm wrong The Belgian posted:Oh, I didn't mean the movies were bad. The last few times I read lotR in its entirety I was quite young and it was around the same time the movies came out. I didn't notice all this stuff then so I guess back then the movies were definitely influencing my image of what I read and I was too young to notice all the thematic stuff. Plus having read the Silm a few times sinc ethen definitely influences my reading now. The worst thing about the movies to me is how they've definitely influenced some of the ways I remember the details of the story. Just easier to remember things visually and occasionally when I re-read I'm surprised by something that I remembered differently.
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May 7, 2015 14:23
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Nessus posted:I imagine you mean the Dunlendings as opposed to like, the wild hill-cave-neanderthal dudes who give Theoden a shortcut. Yes. I knew they were different groups, just couldn't remember what they were called
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May 8, 2015 13:42
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Watching the second hobbit for the first time and it's a pretty decent movie if you take out everything related to elves That they made another entire movie about the battle of five armies is nuts And dwarves really don't believe in handrails do they
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May 12, 2015 01:07
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euphronius posted:You get Sauron's POV once as well. Man I love Tolkien's writing, it just feels epic compared to the standard fantasy writing. I get that it can feel a bit dry and all at times but dang
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Jun 2, 2015 18:28
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The "orcs used to be elves" angle is also somewhat speculation too isn't it? Like, Tolkien never really decided and left it as a guess in his works as well
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Jun 12, 2015 14:29
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NikkolasKing posted:Tolkien does say this in Myths Transformed Well yeah, he would have destroyed his own "empire" but only after destroying everyone else...or is that your point, I can't really tell. It reads like you're saying if the Noldor hadn't distracted him, that Morgoth would have just eventually offed himself and everyone else would have got on with living, which I don't believe Tolkien is saying in that quote.
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Aug 4, 2015 03:49
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The movies did a great job on like 90% of the imagery IMO probably because they pulled a lot of inspiration from previous art. I don't think Rohan looked how I envisioned it though and the river scene is definetely not as described but eh
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Dec 29, 2015 17:08
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potatoes
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Jan 11, 2016 16:18
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we could also probably enjoy some dope rear end books and not jerk off about the few anachronisms the author left in them (though I'm sure this thread is down with that)
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Jan 13, 2016 01:03
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SHISHKABOB posted:What is with this attitude? it's cool I'm just making fun of the people who legit get upset at Tolkien for those lines
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Jan 13, 2016 02:46
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