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andrew smash posted:IIRC they all had the option to go back after the war of wrath but she turned it down? I could be wrong on that point, i haven't read the sil in a while. 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.
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Oct 31, 2014 04:15
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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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House Louse posted: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. Well, the Rings of Power wouldn't have been forged. That would have been a pretty good benefit.
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Oct 31, 2014 06:10
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bartlebyshop posted:Well, the Rings of Power wouldn't have been forged. That would have been a pretty good benefit.
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Oct 31, 2014 06:17
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Nessus posted:Without the Noldor showing up, wouldn't Morgoth have likely been able to dominate Middle-earth entirely? I'm talking about after the War of Wrath, when Morgoth was already cast into the Void. After that happened they all had the option to go back to Valinor.
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Oct 31, 2014 06:25
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And he did dominate Middle-Earth after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears.
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Oct 31, 2014 06:35
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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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Elves are racist jerks.
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Oct 31, 2014 07:33
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Is Sauron pronounced "Sowron" or "Saron?"
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Oct 31, 2014 12:43
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Smoking Crow posted:Is Sauron pronounced "Sowron" or "Saron?" In the Note on Pronunciations in the Silmarillion: AU has the value of English ow in town; thus the first syllable of Aulë is like English owl, and the first syllable of Sauron is like English sour, not sore.
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Oct 31, 2014 14:13
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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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Smoking Crow posted:Is Sauron pronounced "Sowron" or "Saron?" Just use the Finnish pronounciation in everything  .
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Oct 31, 2014 21:08
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I posted this in another thread but I wanted to share with Tolkien nerds. The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings Deluxe Pocket box set arrived today! The books are gorgeous, and a really cute size. Text is quite tiny though. See album: http://imgur.com/a/IOkts They're leatherette, not leather, but still feel great. I'm pretty sure the pages are sewn, not glued. The text isn't the 50th anniversary text for some reason. More info: http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/1177-the-hobbit-and-the-lord-of-the-rings-deluxe-pocket-boxed-set.php
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Nov 3, 2014 06:53
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Hedrigall posted:I posted this in another thread but I wanted to share with Tolkien nerds. I saw that set while I was out at Target today...I was tempted to pick it up and now I'm rather sad that I didn't. They're so...tiny, and regal looking.
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Nov 3, 2014 08:41
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jivjov posted:I saw that set while I was out at Target today...I was tempted to pick it up and now I'm rather sad that I didn't. They're so...tiny, and regal looking. My dad got those. They are so loving cute. Get them just so you can hold a wee little Fellowship in your hand.
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Nov 3, 2014 13:08
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How far does the Tolkien world go? Are there events we know about 100+ years after the end of LOTR? 1000+?
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Nov 13, 2014 10:30
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You don't really find out much about the fourth age (events after LOTR). There's what happens to all the main characters in the appendices of LOTR; Legolas and Gimli visiting Fangorn and then Aglarond and eventually going over to the Undying lands, Aragorn reigning for a long time and then passing the throne to his son. I guess the only thing you really have is Tolkein started to write The New Shadow http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/The_New_Shadow but pretty quickly abandoned it. Best answer is a few thousand years after LOTR is now dummy, we live in Middle Earth.
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Nov 13, 2014 11:06
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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+? It goes on and on.
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Nov 13, 2014 11:17
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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.
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Nov 13, 2014 19:50
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I get what your saying. Despite being popular and written in popular genres, he has such a stylized way of writing that links it to classical epics that it feels different. But even that was a conscious choice.
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Nov 13, 2014 23:22
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100YrsofAttitude posted:I get what your saying. Despite being popular and written in popular genres, he has such a stylized way of writing that links it to classical epics that it feels different. But even that was a conscious choice. I wouldn't compare his writing to classical epics, because it's mostly prose. He isn't repeating phrases and epithets, and he isn't writing in dactyls. Smoking Crow fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Nov 13, 2014 |
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Nov 13, 2014 23:39
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I was thinking more in terms of language and tones. I'm by no means an expert, but I can't help but feel a level of grandeur when I read Tolkien compared to other fantasy.
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Nov 13, 2014 23:55
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100YrsofAttitude posted:I was thinking more in terms of language and tones. I'm by no means an expert, but I can't help but feel a level of grandeur when I read Tolkien compared to other fantasy.
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Nov 13, 2014 23:58
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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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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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Levitate posted: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 I don't think that's dumb at all. The funny thing about Tolkien is that according to all the classic rules of professional writers, he should be horrible; his imagery is all evocative and vague and nonspecific and the pacing is bizarrely stilted and the characters (appear) superficial and really his books should be a horrible mishmash-crash of bad. But instead of crashing they soar. His vague, evocative writing evokes, it commands an emotional response. His pacing isn't boring, it's meditative. His characters aren't wooden, they're archetypal. That's the mark of Tolkien's genius: in his hands, it all works, when it wouldn't in anyone else's. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 15:49
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I think many modern fantasy writers don't really understand fear. Tolkien understood very well that the most horrible things are beyond words, and words perhaps ought not be given to them. In the book we barely see the cave troll, and its more terrifying because of it. I enjoy Glen Cook for similar reasons: he describes only what is necessary to convey the story and some emotion, and leaves his readers to find their own specifics.
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Nov 14, 2014 17:24
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How I Defeated the Tolkien Estatequote:Translating the Red Book led to more than a few surprises. I discovered that the Tom Bombadil chapters weren’t original to the text at all, but had been inserted by a different author at a later date. They’re written in the Adûni dialect of Bree, not Sûzat, and judging by the sloppy handwriting, whoever wrote them was almost certainly drunk, a child, or both.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:27
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Pro-click. That was an enjoyable read.
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Dec 9, 2014 11:08
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I've been thinking lately that Tolkien is every bit as important to modern culture as Marx, Freud, Einstein and Ford (or whatever stand-ins you want for those) because it's so normal now for fantasy authors to create worlds rather than just write a story, and the whole idea of creating a fake but plausible language and fake culture and massive numbers of footnotes seems to have been originated by Tolkien. Does that make sense? Earlier fantasy and fairy tales don't seem to need to convince you that there's a real system at play and while I suppose sci-fi and horror like Lovecraft had been doing something like it, it doesn't seem fully realized until we get LoTR.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:38
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Lord Dunsany did some of the same things in terms of creating his own mythologies, fantastic worlds, etc., but Tolkien made it mainstream.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:41
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I gotta agree there, especially with how overriding Tolkien's influence has been on all later conceptions. I've been reading William Blake lately, and I do a double take whenever Orc shows up: "Oh, right, the Zoa, spirit of revolution and violence and change, not the race of evil people... Well, sometimes, but not the green skinned ones." Come to think of it, I wonder if there've been any comparative studies of Blake and Tolkien? Vala vs. Valar, etc. No way was Tolkien not aware of him, at least, as a professor of English and a writer of fantasy literature.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:19
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Robert E. Howard created his own world as well, though like Tolkien he stated that it was our world, but just very long ago. Tolkien was not the first, but he was arguably the most thorough, and the most convincing.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:23
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Spoilers Below posted:I gotta agree there. I've been reading William Blake lately, and I do a double take whenever Orc shows up: "Oh, right, the Zoa, spirit of revolution and violence and change, not the race of evil people... Well, sometimes, but not the green skinned ones." The problem with doing a comparison of Tolkien's and Blake's cosmology is that Blake's fantasy worlds read a lot more like schizophrenic delusions than fictional artifice :P There's a reason everyone sticks with the Songs of Innocence and Experience. You start getting into things like the Book of Urizen and you're not that far away from The Story of the Vivian Girls. I realize I'm being kinda unfair to Blake here but I tried to read that stuff in college and just could not process it.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:24
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The problem with doing a comparison of Tolkien's and Blake's cosmology is that Blake's fantasy worlds read a lot more like schizophrenic delusions than fictional artifice :P There's a reason everyone sticks with the Songs of Innocence and Experience. You start getting into things like the Book of Urizen and you're not that far away from The Story of the Vivian Girls. I don't think you're wrong at all. Blake is genuinely weird in a way that most authors aren't, and terribly difficult to read if you don't have a guide book and/or don't enjoy piecing together a bunch of gigantic, self-contradictory free verse poems about the "true" history of the world and reincarnating god entities. But then the Silmarillion can be the same way, is what I was getting at, albeit with a lot more "God of Death" "God of the Hunt" "Heracles with the serial numbers filed off", rather than "Self-emanating force of pure creation which gives birth to the animating force in man and propagates its own sense of revolution, to stand in opposition to industrialization and fight off the crushing oppression of over rationality". Blake's gods are freaking complicated and his writing style doesn't help at all.
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Dec 9, 2014 22:24
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I've decided to give The Fellowship a read seeing as a I enjoy reading about Tolkien's lore of Middle-Earth. I chose this because I found it laying around one day and figured I'd go for it; but I'm wondering if maybe I should be reading The Hobbit or one of the books before set before that. I've never read any of Tolkien's books. What are you goonses thoughts?
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Dec 12, 2014 09:48
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UoI posted:I've decided to give The Fellowship a read seeing as a I enjoy reading about Tolkien's lore of Middle-Earth. I chose this because I found it laying around one day and figured I'd go for it; but I'm wondering if maybe I should be reading The Hobbit or one of the books before set before that. I've never read any of Tolkien's books. What are you goonses thoughts? The Hobbit is a great read and will fill you in on a lot of back-story, plus it's really quite short so yeah why not, go for it. The Lord of the Rings is a very different style though, although it might be nice to get a sense of that when reading it. I wouldn't read The Silmarilion or Unifnished Tails or anything like that until you've read (and enjoyed?) the trilogy because although they're prequels in a sense time-wise, they are not light reading.
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Dec 12, 2014 09:59
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UoI posted:I've decided to give The Fellowship a read seeing as a I enjoy reading about Tolkien's lore of Middle-Earth. I chose this because I found it laying around one day and figured I'd go for it; but I'm wondering if maybe I should be reading The Hobbit or one of the books before set before that. I've never read any of Tolkien's books. What are you goonses thoughts? The Hobbit is a short children's book so it won't be a chore, but The Fellowhip could be. Try Hobbit and if you don't like it, skip it, and if you don't like Fellowship, jump forward until you find something interesting. Many people think that the Shire part is really boring.
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Dec 12, 2014 09:59
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UoI posted:I've decided to give The Fellowship a read seeing as a I enjoy reading about Tolkien's lore of Middle-Earth. I chose this because I found it laying around one day and figured I'd go for it; but I'm wondering if maybe I should be reading The Hobbit or one of the books before set before that. I've never read any of Tolkien's books. What are you goonses thoughts?
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Dec 12, 2014 10:00
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Hogge Wild posted:The Hobbit is a short children's book so it won't be a chore, but The Fellowhip could be. Try Hobbit and if you don't like it, skip it, and if you don't like Fellowship, jump forward until you find something interesting. Many people think that the Shire part is really boring. YMMV, of course. The first part of The Fellowship of the Ring--excepting two chapters--remains my favorite part, even after many years.
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Dec 12, 2014 15:00
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