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Look those are just the guy's name in quenya, it's not like he invented the language or anything
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Mar 2, 2024 00:56
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Data Graham posted:Funny story about that, lol finegolfing
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Mar 2, 2024 18:02
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I don't know how controversial this is but the first half of the TT and RoTK are, to me, so much more interesting and engaging than the Frodo/Sam stuff. I guess the rules of publishing and editing were different back then, but I can't believe that his publisher let him publish the stories separately instead of alternating between one and the other chapter-by-chapter.
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Mar 7, 2024 19:47
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zoux posted:I don't know how controversial this is but the first half of the TT and RoTK are, to me, so much more interesting and engaging than the Frodo/Sam stuff. I guess the rules of publishing and editing were different back then, but I can't believe that his publisher let him publish the stories separately instead of alternating between one and the other chapter-by-chapter. my GF always skips the Frodo/Sam stuff, she thinks it's mega boring lol
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Mar 7, 2024 20:30
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When I was a kid I loved all of fellowship and I pretty much just skipped books 3/5 because I was only really engaged in the Frodo/Sam story. I've since flipped and now find the Mordor chapters a bit of a slog, especially in the two towers.
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Mar 7, 2024 20:33
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I always remember them as a slog and think about skipping but I always end up engaged and enjoying then anyway.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:08
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The only chapter I ever skipped as a kid was the Tom Bombadil one.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:33
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webmeister posted:The only chapter I ever skipped as a kid was the Tom Bombadil one.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:55
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DACK FAYDEN posted:did you try flushing it down the toilet? because I hear he comes back even from that His poop is brown and his pee is yellow.
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Mar 8, 2024 04:48
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GodFish posted:I always remember them as a slog and think about skipping but I always end up engaged and enjoying then anyway.
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Mar 8, 2024 04:52
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That whole sequence is probably my most rewatched clip of the movie. That and the Council of Elrond. Anything involving Gandalf owns, he’s the best part of LotR and every one of its adaptations. The Sam and Frodo stuff suffers because whenever Gandalf isn’t in the page the reader is thinking “where is Gandalf? I wonder what Gandalf is doing right now?”
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Mar 8, 2024 05:54
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zoux posted:Anything involving Gandalf owns, he’s the best part of LotR and every one of its adaptations. Agreed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo8apVpcrIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STnUggab0ic
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Mar 8, 2024 06:05
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When I was a kid I was so hyped up when Sam beats shelob by getting her to slam down on Sting I cried with joy. I told my mom and she made fun of me lol
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Mar 8, 2024 06:40
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Any time Gandalf isn't on the page, the other characters should be saying, "Tell me, where is Gandalf? For I much desire to speak with him."
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Mar 8, 2024 07:03
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One, Gandalf needs to be whiter, angrier, and have access to a magic horse. Two, whenever Gandalf’s not on the page, all the other characters should be asking 'Where’s Gandalf?'
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Mar 8, 2024 07:18
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grey > white
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Mar 8, 2024 09:20
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ChubbyChecker posted:grey > white Agreed. White cloth may dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.
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Mar 8, 2024 09:31
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Bongo Bill posted:Any time Gandalf isn't on the page, the other characters should be saying, "Tell me, where is Gandalf? For I much desire to speak with him." It's a shame this is too long for a thread title That said the slog through mordor is the heart and soul of the trilogy
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Mar 8, 2024 11:07
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's a shame this is too long for a thread title that's just the plot the real heart and soul of the trilogy is the great game about bilbo's spoons
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Mar 8, 2024 11:26
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The true heart and soul is Bilbo burning everyone as he fucks off out of the Shire
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Mar 8, 2024 14:43
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It's definitely true that the whole first act of the story up to Rivendell really shows the effects of having gone through so many painful revisions and evolutions from the "Hobbit sequel" it started as. All whimsical sidequests and songs and droll hobbit repartee From about Bree on is when he'd finally more or less figured out what the Ringwraiths were and where they hell they were going on the quest and it all turned into something very different from the twee fairytale adventure he set out to write. It's such a weird and idiosyncratic style of narrative, full of inexplicable fossils of the earlier drafts, that I'm sometimes stunned that the tone shift between the first stage of the journey and the later stuff seems to hook more people than it repels.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:53
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Data Graham posted:It's definitely true that the whole first act of the story up to Rivendell really shows the effects of having gone through so many painful revisions and evolutions from the "Hobbit sequel" it started as. All whimsical sidequests and songs and droll hobbit repartee It works in part because the journey the Hobbits go through is the same as the narrative. And since they're our pov, it feels extremely natural as you read along. It's only when you step back you can see how big a change it is.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:59
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It helps the new reader who just read the Hobbit transition into the new feel.
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Mar 8, 2024 15:22
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I kind of hated Book 1 in high school but I love it now as an adult. I could use more shire and songs in my life. Then the (very long) Council of Elrond does like five big reveals and we're off to the races!
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Mar 8, 2024 16:31
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Cavelcade posted:It works in part because the journey the Hobbits go through is the same as the narrative. And since they're our pov, it feels extremely natural as you read along. It's only when you step back you can see how big a change it is. its really funny how this works out because i do not think at all this was his original intent and is instead a byproduct of his insane method of writing where he would write until he got into a corner and no longer liked it, and then started entirely over. Same way the pace quickens and more keeps happening as the story nears its climax, but that is also from him just not re-writing those story beats 20 times.
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Mar 8, 2024 16:44
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Tom Smykowski posted:The true heart and soul is Bilbo burning everyone as he fucks off out of the Shire His birthday presents to everyone are so catty, I love it. Real Housewives of Hobbiton when?
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Mar 8, 2024 16:49
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"This tale grew in the telling" lol you ain't whistling dixie The dynamic seemed like "OK so I've changed my mind about a whole lot of things in the process of getting to point B, so I have to go back and start over from point A to try to reincorporate all these things I've come up with in the process". And then he changes his mind about a bunch of new things on his way to point B again, and the process repeats. But layered on top of that is his even more bizarre (if endearing) tendency to treat whatever he has already written as "received text", like just something he stumbled upon and is trying to decipher, rather than something he created himself and has total life-and-death power over. Like he's piecing together fragments of a manuscript from the Venerable Bede or something. So he'll take whole bits of dialogue and move them wholesale from one character to another, or move a conversation bodily from one chapter to another, often completely changing its meaning without changing any of the words, just by putting it in a different context. I keep thinking it's a side effect of him trying to save paper during wartime rationing or something, like why he keeps making fair copies and typescripts by writing over the top of his previous draft on the same piece of paper, but that only partly explains it.
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Mar 8, 2024 16:58
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Yeah the Hobbits in the first 5 or so chapters are all "woop de do, going on an adventure, lets steal some mushrooms off that dumbass maggot dude" until suddenly its "oh poo poo we're actually carrying the essence of all evil with us and being hunted relentlessly by its servants and oh gently caress I want to go home but thats no longer possible". It's a great shift in tone.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:11
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Data Graham posted:" Reflexive creative humility coupled with genuinely enjoying his process. Dude was a historical academic of ancient texts cosplaying as a historical academic of ancient texts in his free time.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:32
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It's interesting all the ways that LotR violates the "rules" of fiction writing they teach you in creative writing classes. Yet it's still a towering accomplishment beloved by millions of people worldwide which I guess goes to show the masters don't follow your stupid rules.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:38
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There are no rules in fiction lol. Just get a pen and paper and start lying.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:40
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You know for years I had Joesph Campbell mixed up with Joesph Conrad so I thought the whole heroes journey thing was written by the guy who did Heart of Darkness. I was like, that book doesn't follow any of his own rules
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Mar 8, 2024 17:42
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zoux posted:You know for years I had Joesph Campbell mixed up with Joesph Conrad so I thought the whole heroes journey thing was written by the guy who did Heart of Darkness. I was like, that book doesn't follow any of his own rules I was the same with Campbell and John W. Campbell. zoux posted:It's interesting all the ways that LotR violates the "rules" of fiction writing they teach you in creative writing classes. How do you mean?
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Mar 8, 2024 17:47
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Well, the pacing is terrible, for one. Large blocks of poetry and song, digressions, I already mentioned the structure, the multiple endings. Like setting basically an entire short story's worth of content after the main denouement. Tom Bombadil! Don't get me wrong I love it, I love the ways that it is very much not a piece of modern fiction, and how it intersects with older literary traditions. But book tok would probably throw it in the trash after the "trope reveal" I'm a guy in his forties who can take joy in just the way that Tolkien might turn a phrase, when I was much younger and didn't know about all the deep backstory and the ways in which JRRT's own scholarship informed the text, and what he was trying to do and the farthest I ever got was the end of Book V, it wasn't until I knew about all that stuff and could appreciate what it was going for that I fully fell in love with it. zoux fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 17:51
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The Lord of the Rings isnt a work of fiction however, it is merely a translation into English of the Westron adaptation of the Red Book of Westmarch.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:54
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zoux posted:It's interesting all the ways that LotR violates the "rules" of fiction writing they teach you in creative writing classes. Yet it's still a towering accomplishment beloved by millions of people worldwide which I guess goes to show the masters don't follow your stupid rules. It does, however, quite often follow the rules of much older forms of writing (e.g., sagas). Tolkien isn't so much just doing his own random thing as he is very deliberately rejecting a thousand years or so of literary development and recapitulating it along different lines. Like, much of what happens in Hobbiton (before the Scouring anyway) is familiar if you read edwardian fiction, or for that matter have watched enough Frasier (those Sackville-Bagginses!!!!). The rohirrim follow the rules for Anglo Saxon epic. Etc. Aragon may seem like a flat character but he's straight out of sagas. I'm sure tolkien stole the Beorn meeting from somewhere but I haven't found where yet. Modern writing classes focus on a much narrower set of genres and styles.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:54
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Book 1 is terrific and has its own vibe. I'm not a big fan of The Council of Elrond at the start of Book 2. It's a massive and necessary information dump and I like the way it expands the context beyond happy Hobbit adventures but I find it pretty tedious to read through. I like when they first get to Rivendell and Bilbo and the Elves keep sassing each other over his poetry.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:57
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Probably the simplest way to explain it is look at the changes made in the Jackson adaptation (like the immediacy of the threat of the Ring rather than dicking around the shire for 50 years) for how a modern writer would be edited if trying to write LotR today.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:59
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I don't know if this was posted here, but there's some fun analysis around the 20 min mark on the origins/inspiration of the Eowyn character (the whole vid is a fun watch though). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBHe5I98nwg
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Mar 8, 2024 17:59
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zoux posted:Probably the simplest way to explain it is look at the changes made in the Jackson adaptation (like the immediacy of the threat of the Ring rather than dicking around the shire for 50 years) for how a modern writer would be edited if trying to write LotR today. Only applies to the theatrical cut of fellowship By RotK director's cut we have like ten minutes of Aragorn Sings and forty five minutes of hugathon at the end
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Mar 8, 2024 18:01
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