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MonsieurChoc posted:Nah, at the end of the Silmarillion, one of them is still alive, his hands burned by the Simaril he threw into the sea, and he wanders off out of the story. Yep. He had an amazing voice. No one ever saw him again, or if they did they didn't write of it, but it was rumored one could sometimes hear his sad singing by the Sea.
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Nov 7, 2015 22:35
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Fëanor is interesting to me because he makes clear that Melkor isn't the source of evil, and that Elves are urged to much greater evils than other intelligent creatures. Where a Dwarf's desire to accumulate beautiful things or a Man's desire for bodily immortality can be something that only harms themselves, the Elven desire to hold things in perfect stasis is inherently harmful to the world around them.
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Nov 8, 2015 02:14
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That gives me a new perspective on the theme of decay that's throughout lotr. Also: men led to the destruction of numenor, and dwarves led to the desolation of Smaug. But clearly not as devastating as what happened cause of the silmarils.
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Nov 8, 2015 03:26
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Of course, Numenor's Doom was ably aided along by the Vala, who left Melkr's right-hand free to do as he pleased. Also I'll never forget that, at one point, the Powers send an emissary to Numenor when the Numenoreans are losing faith, and the emissary's message amounts to "I know it's been eons and eons and eons beyond counting since you had any involvement with them but I assure you, THEY ARE right over there. You can't see them or interact with them though but you MUST obey them absolutely. Just take my word for it that they are immortal and wonderful and better than you and t hat you going there won't help anything." Worst. Diplomat. Ever. Of course, the whole Tale of Neumnor is uncomfortable as it's rife with Tolkien's Catholicism mixed in with ancient ideas and myths. The result is something that offends modern sensibilities in the extreme. Oh I love The Silmarillion to death but no matter how many times it tries to push forward its morality, I simply will not buy in to certain things. Like why Turin ultimately killed himself. Incest isn't that bad.... I believe the Pharaohs married brother to sister, didn't they?
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Nov 8, 2015 03:40
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NikkolasKing posted:Incest isn't that bad.... I believe the Pharaohs married brother to sister, didn't they? I smell a red text AV 
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Nov 8, 2015 03:48
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NikkolasKing posted:Of course, Numenor's Doom was ably aided along by the Vala, who left Melkr's right-hand free to do as he pleased. Also I'll never forget that, at one point, the Powers send an emissary to Numenor when the Numenoreans are losing faith, and the emissary's message amounts to "I know it's been eons and eons and eons beyond counting since you had any involvement with them but I assure you, THEY ARE right over there. You can't see them or interact with them though but you MUST obey them absolutely. Just take my word for it that they are immortal and wonderful and better than you and t hat you going there won't help anything." Númenor sank because Man was too proud. Pharaohs married their sisters, but Túrin's saga was based on Finnish Mythology and brother-sister loving wasn't allowed in Finland.
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Nov 8, 2015 03:56
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Ar Pharazon the Golden was cool for what he did.
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Nov 8, 2015 05:30
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I think it's well understood that the Valar hosed up at almost every turn with the inhabitants of Middle Earth. It always surprises me at how they do everything wrong.
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Nov 8, 2015 05:54
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MonsieurChoc posted:Ulmo is the bro-est Valar. Hmm, you mean strictly in the friendly sense of "bro"? I can see that, but I'm tempted to nominate Tulkas, the musclehead bare-knuckled always positive scenery-chewer (and specialist Morgoth puncher). Ulmo has always seemed to me as a taciturn but caring father figure, unlike remote and somewhat alien* Manwë *^^^A big flaw of the Valar seems to be the incapacity to put themselves in the mindset of the Children to understand them and their reactions.
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Nov 8, 2015 06:12
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HIJK posted:I think it's well understood that the Valar hosed up at almost every turn with the inhabitants of Middle Earth. It always surprises me at how they do everything wrong. It's well understood by us but where in the actual text is there any criticism of the Vala apart from Melkor and maybe Aule when he made the Dwarves? Their flaws are repeatedly stated to be virtues. Manwe is too stupid to understand Melkor so it means he's too "pure and good" to fathom him or what harm he will do. And while she's not a Valar, I'll never forget how Melian just fucks off and leaves her people exposed and helpless to Morgoth's forces. No criticism in the text, no "WTF what kind of queen are you?!" She just abandons them and that's that. I've heard that Tolkien originally envisioned the Valar as more like the Greek Gods or other highly fallible and petty pagan deities. But somewhere along the way he started to imagine them more as angels. Only he never changed the numerous fallible and stupid things they did. He just put in a lot of flowery language about how wise and bneevolent they were. It's a classic case of Telling, not Showing. The only real excuse is The Silmarillion is an in-universe text, written by highly biased elves.
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Nov 8, 2015 06:22
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Effectronica posted:Fëanor is interesting to me because he makes clear that Melkor isn't the source of evil, and that Elves are urged to much greater evils than other intelligent creatures. Where a Dwarf's desire to accumulate beautiful things or a Man's desire for bodily immortality can be something that only harms themselves, the Elven desire to hold things in perfect stasis is inherently harmful to the world around them. Although one could argue that Feanor's actions are an echo of Melkor's song.
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Nov 8, 2015 07:23
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NikkolasKing posted:It's well understood by us but where in the actual text is there any criticism of the Vala apart from Melkor and maybe Aule when he made the Dwarves? Their flaws are repeatedly stated to be virtues. Manwe is too stupid to understand Melkor so it means he's too "pure and good" to fathom him or what harm he will do. As for Manwe I think it's fairly clear, actually, that Manwe's inability to really "get" bad people is actually a weakness, presumably compensated for by his vast angelic powers to manage the wind and weather and so forth. Tolkien is at least pretty consistent that good sense and the ability to resist the blandishments of evil, in whatever form, have basically nothing to do with how important or supernaturally portentious you are. Gandalf and Galadriel are abundantly aware that they would get rapidly overtaken by the power of the Ring; Sam is able to immediately go "nah, that ain't me" and take it off despite being a working class tiny Hobbit. Saruman pretty much warmly swallows Sauron's bullshit despite being a bigger wizard than Gandalf; Dain the dwarf-king immediately sees through Sauron's horseshit.
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Nov 8, 2015 08:29
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HIJK posted:I think it's well understood that the Valar hosed up at almost every turn with the inhabitants of Middle Earth. It always surprises me at how they do everything wrong. I mean, it can't have been hard to send out Ulmo or one of his happy destructive underlings to scatter the fleet; I get the whole pride/original sin analogy but it all comes out rather silly. The divinities misunderstading the Children is a pretty good point too; far as I can tell, the only two Maiar who ever bothered to learn how to work with them were Gandalf and, ironically, Sauron. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Nov 8, 2015 |
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Nov 8, 2015 08:33
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The whole Akallabeth thing was shoehorned into the mythology, and Tolkien never really managed to fit it in. I think if he had managed to put together the Notion Club Papers as a novel, he'd have significantly revised the Gift of Man and/or used the nascent notion in some of his notes that Ar-Phârazon's army and Numenor were preserved rather than being destroyed. Manwe's actions make more sense if you consider him as being of the opinion that bringing the Eldar to Valinor was a mistake, morally not so distant from Melkor making Orcs and Trolls and Wargs and they probably shouldn't make any more mistakes like that.
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Nov 8, 2015 08:46
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ecureuilmatrix posted:Hmm, you mean strictly in the friendly sense of "bro"? I can see that, but I'm tempted to nominate Tulkas, the musclehead bare-knuckled always positive scenery-chewer (and specialist Morgoth puncher). Ulmo has always seemed to me as a taciturn but caring father figure, unlike remote and somewhat alien* Manwë Ulmo's the only one who kept helping the Children while all the Valars holed themselves up in Valinor, though.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:48
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NikkolasKing posted:It's well understood by us but where in the actual text is there any criticism of the Vala apart from Melkor and maybe Aule when he made the Dwarves? Their flaws are repeatedly stated to be virtues. Manwe is too stupid to understand Melkor so it means he's too "pure and good" to fathom him or what harm he will do. My take on it was always that whereas stories like LotR are constructed as modern novels, with highly personal narratives illustrating characters' arcs (showing rather than telling), the Silmarillion is deliberately constructed more like scripture. Biblical text tends to be all about horrific acts committed against individuals and whole peoples alike, and it's all presented as virtuous; if you tried to read it like a narrative you'd be horrified at its callousness and its lack of self-awareness, but you're supposed to see it more like a series of inscrutable mysteries that paint a larger picture of the nature of God and man and so on. You're supposed to use it to defeat your own sense of personal right and wrong and absorb a new externally imposed one. The Silmarillion is the same way—the more it uses descriptions of the awful and stupid things the perfect and infallible Valar do, the more the reader wants to double down on the inherent illogic of it all with the idea that it's all alluding to a larger form of morality that we mortals are not equipped to understand, and are expected only to follow blindly. Or something like that.
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Nov 9, 2015 07:08
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The message seems to be more like "Do the best that you can and have faith that in the long run, even awful outcomes now will turn in time to the good. On the other hand, actively seeking to hurt and dominate others will eventually gently caress you up." Bringing the dudes to Valinor meant that eventually, yeah, the Trees die, but also that Feanor and co. go back to Middle-earth and gently caress up Morgoth enough that he doesn't get to wipe out or enslave all of the humans, etc. It seems like the big limits on the Valar doing heavy poo poo is that when they do it levels continents or reshapes the world.
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Nov 9, 2015 08:18
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Nessus posted:The message seems to be more like "Do the best that you can and have faith that in the long run, even awful outcomes now will turn in time to the good. On the other hand, actively seeking to hurt and dominate others will eventually gently caress you up." The Trees dying also lead to the Sun and the Moon and light for all of Arda. But the Valar aren't meant to be read as perfect beings, anyways. Tolkien didn't think like that. (This would probably be clearer if Makar and Mëasse survived into post-LotR material.)
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Nov 9, 2015 08:44
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ecureuilmatrix posted:A big flaw of the Valar seems to be the incapacity to put themselves in the mindset of the Children to understand them and their reactions. Sounds like most parents / previous generation. Pretty fitting really.
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Nov 9, 2015 12:03
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I actually really like Akallabeth. I've always felt it was the best fleshed-out part of the Silmarillion, possibly because it has the most "real" feeling of the stories and most similar in prose to LOTR. I reckon you could make a pretty good movie out of it, especially if you got a really charismatic actor to play Sauron.
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Nov 10, 2015 01:45
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I wish http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Aldarion_and_Erendis:_The_Mariner's_Wife had been finished.
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Nov 10, 2015 03:33
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Why does Tolkien have all these unfinished stories? Did he just forget to finish them?
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Nov 10, 2015 17:10
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He was a busy underpaid professor with a wife and four children. He was also constantly editing and revising his drafts. The Unfinished Tales are essentially all of the multiple versions he wrote about every story you can think of. Going back and changing things was his biggest hindrance to getting published. Tolkien also tended to be rather forgetful, so it wouldn't surprise me if he finished plenty of things but then buried them in philology papers.
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Nov 10, 2015 17:28
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Yeah he basically could not wrote during the school term so if he didn't finish something by the time holiday ended it might never get finished because he'd lose it or the interest would leave him.
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Nov 10, 2015 17:37
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Smoking Crow posted:Why does Tolkien have all these unfinished stories? Did he just forget to finish them? It's really more that for Lord of the Rings he had an impetus continually pushing him forward, which didn't really exist for most of his other stories. "Thriller" or not, if he had agreed to write a sequel to LotR, only death would have left The New Shadow unfinished. For most of his other stuff, it seems to have been plain dilettantry, in a way. Ninja edit: For example, The Notion Club Papers is a reworking of The Lost Road, the Ælfwine story keeps popping back up in various writings up till the last ones known... Effectronica fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Nov 10, 2015 |
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Nov 10, 2015 21:48
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Where did dragons come from? We are led to believe Eru (and rarely, those who follow him, like Aule) can alone create life. Case in point Morgoth did not make orcs but rather corrupted elves. So how did he make dragons?
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Nov 11, 2015 03:13
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No one knows: http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Origins_of_Dragons
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Nov 11, 2015 03:23
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The orcs from elves story is also of questionable truth.
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Nov 11, 2015 03:24
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euphronius posted:The orcs from elves story is also of questionable truth. Yeah I mean no one can CONFIRM their origins but what alternative is there?
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Nov 12, 2015 02:04
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Thunder Moose posted:Yeah I mean no one can CONFIRM their origins but what alternative is there? There is no explicit 100% in universe origin story and the Tolkien had no idea.
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Nov 12, 2015 02:09
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Thunder Moose posted:Where did dragons come from? We are led to believe Eru (and rarely, those who follow him, like Aule) can alone create life. Case in point Morgoth did not make orcs but rather corrupted elves. So how did he make dragons? While there isn't a Certain Answer (insofar as anything is 100% certain in Tolkien's work), Glaurung being the "Father of Dragons", their growth cycle, and their distinct inability to change form suggests that they're more animal than spirit. Gandalf also never suggests that they're like him or Sauron, and in all their dialogues I don't think the dragons ever mention being anything other than, well, big fire-breathing reptiles. Glaurung himself is probably some creature that Morgoth found and twisted into a huge force of nature. Everything afterwards was just selective breeding; Morgoth never creates life from scratch, but he can manipulate existing patterns of life to his own ends.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:10
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Given their sheer power - these are the things that were Morgoth's only hope against the Host of the Valar - it's reasonable to assume that they were born from Morgoth's essence. Morgoth's great flaw was that, for all his power, he was not infinite, like Eru. Thus, to make things he always had to break himself down. It seems fair to suggest that Morgoth, who was even weaker than subordinate Sauron by the end of the First Age, squandered even more of himself by creating his great trump card.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:16
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NikkolasKing posted:Given their sheer power - these are the things that were Morgoth's only hope against the Host of the Valar - it's reasonable to assume that they were born from Morgoth's essence. Morgoth's great flaw was that, for all his power, he was not infinite, like Eru. Thus, to make things he always had to break himself down. It seems fair to suggest that Morgoth, who was even weaker than subordinate Sauron by the end of the First Age, squandered even more of himself by creating his great trump card. From where have you read about their power levels?
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Nov 12, 2015 17:18
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If you want an answer that mostly makes sense Melkor bred them from maiar and ancient beasts and gave them a little bit of his soul.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:19
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Hogge Wild posted:From where have you read about their power levels? http://fair-use.org/j-r-r-tolkien/notes-on-motives-in-the-silmarillion/ quote:Sauron was "greater", effectively, in the Second Age than Morgoth at the end of the First. Why? Because, though he was far smaller by natural stature, he had not yet fallen so low. Eventually he also squandered his power (of being) in the endeavour to gain control of others. But he was not obliged to expend so much of himself. To gain domination over Arda, Morgoth had let most of his being pass into the physical constituents of the Earth — hence all things that were born on Earth, and lived on and by it, beasts or plants or incarnate spirits, were liable to be "stained". Morgoth at the time of the War of the Jewels had become permanently "incarnate"; for this reason he was afraid, and waged the war almost entirely by means of devices, or of subordinates and dominated creatures. The essay as a whole is a fascinating examination of the Dark Lords' psyches. I've always found it of particular note that Sauron actually understood more of the Music than Melkor.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:23
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Interesting stuff, I think I have read it before, but I didn't remember Morgoth being so weak.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:32
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Well you have to figure it came after an entire Age and the time before where he was waging nonstop war by spreading his power into things. This is another relevant quote. This is actually after the Battle of the Powers when Morgoth ruled Utumno and all the Valar fought him: quote:Both are amazed: Manwë to perceive the decrease in Melkor as a person; Melkor to perceive this also from his own point of view: he has now less personal force than Manwë, and can no longer daunt him with his gaze. Melkor used to be the single greatest created being in Ea. Naturally it took him a long time to be brought down to something more manageable. Even then, the Valar warn Feanor - who is basically the best elf ever - that he could never defeat Morgoth, even if Feanor was three times stronger.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:44
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I don't think Tolkien would even want there to be concrete answer w.r.t. Dragon: Origins. I just came across the origin of fell-beasts and it's like:good ol' JRRT posted:And behold! It was a winged creature: if bird, then greater than all other birds, and it was naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear...and it stank. A creature of an older world maybe it was, whose kind, lingering in forgotten mountains cold beneath the Moon, outstayed their day, and in hideous eyrie bred this last untimely brood, apt to evil. And the Dark Lord took it, and nursed it with fell meats, until it grew beyond the measure of all other things that fly Where did it come from? Who knows, the storyteller doesn't know, it's there and it's terrifying. Funnily enough, the description can also imply they're Middle-Earth's version of Pterosaurs.
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Nov 12, 2015 19:55
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Fingolfin was able to wound Morgoth even and he could never heal.
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Nov 12, 2015 20:36
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euphronius posted:Fingolfin was able to wound Morgoth even and he could never heal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aB6CPyO0Ww 
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Nov 14, 2015 16:55
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