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Tolkien wrote more scenes with believable and sympathetic female characters than Robert Jordan.
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Aug 19, 2014 04:55
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Nessus posted:Tolkien fought at the battle of the Somme and lost many of his friends in WWI so if they're comparing military service dicks I'd say they're at least equal. Yeah, Tolkien literally wrote some of the earlier stories in the legendarium while in The Trenches.
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Aug 19, 2014 05:52
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my favorite fantasy author saw more people die than yours
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Aug 19, 2014 06:59
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Data Graham posted:Greetings Tolkienailures, does anyone have the requisite experience to advise me on how to deflect a friend's well-meaning and persistent recommendation to read The Wheel of Time? He's one of those "Tolkien's fine and all, but Robert Jordan was a real soldier and really understood how battles worked Just tell him to suck yo dilz. rypakal posted:Tolkien wrote more scenes with believable and sympathetic female characters than Robert Jordan. ahahaha, this Hogge Wild fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 09:27
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" types. I've tried to give it a halfhearted go once or twice, but it's always struck me as some kind of Dune/Narn i Hîn Hurin mishmash with lots of gratuitous sex, but then again I haven't exactly been fair or gone about it in good faith.
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Yeah, I'm liking that one. I just wanted to be sure it was true. 
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Aug 19, 2014 18:22
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Data Graham posted:Greetings Tolkienailures, does anyone have the requisite experience to advise me on how to deflect a friend's well-meaning and persistent recommendation to read The Wheel of Time? He's one of those "Tolkien's fine and all, but Robert Jordan was a real soldier and really understood how battles worked A more charitable response to the Wheel of Time would be that the Lord of the Rings was a fantasy response to the World Wars (one and two) written by an Oxford professor of ancient Anglo-Saxon literature, while the Wheel of Time is a fantasy response to Vietnam written by an American nuclear engineer. WoT is a good series in its own way but it's not Tolkien and not for everyone. Both LotR and WoT are, to some extent at least, about the experience of going to war and how that changes you. Anyone who claims WoT is better than LotR is dumb though. WoT is good in its own way -- if you like sinking yourself into a gratuitously huge series, it's great for that. It's very American in the same way that LotR is very English. TO illustrate with an example on the specific topic of battle scenes, both Jordan and Tolkien tend to use soldier's eye level narratives. Tolkien uses a more traditional style -- Big Event, Big Event, Big Event -- while Jordan tends to use sharp jumps between different points of view none of which fully understand what's going on at the time, followed up by flashback reconstructions until you get a full picture of what happened (again, compare, say, WW 2 cinema and Vietnam-era war cinema). You can tell both authors have seen real combat but Tolkien's style is more traditional and Jordan's more modern. Compare either of them to a modern writer who hasn't seen combat -- say, Brandon Sanderson -- and you can really see the difference. My guess is your friend more easily recognizes Jordan's writing as "real combat" because Jordan's more chaotic, snapshot-image style is more in tune with modern-era war movies. It's the other side of the coin with people who think Tolkien was bad at writing characters because they lack the literary background to recognize that he was deliberately writing saga archetypes most of the time. Anyway, all that said, I'd say give the first book a try and if you like it keep reading until you stop liking it; if you don't like it after you finish the first book the series isn't for you. The first few hundred pages of the first book deliberately echo Tolkien and after that it opens out a bit and gets more original. Books seven through ten are painfully boring and slow and people tend to quit the series then, but it gets good again with book 11. All that said, where are you finding the gratuitous sex in WoT? It's positively prudish by modern fantasay standards, especially the first couple books. I'm pretty sure all the main characters are virgins through to the third book or so at least, and it's somewhat vague for a while even after that for most of them. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 19:20
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rypakal posted:Tolkien wrote more scenes with believable and sympathetic female characters than Robert Jordan. It would be hard to write less than zero. (Disclaimer: I never finished the series. I lost interest after the thousanth repeated scene in Book 6 or 7 or whatever.)
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Aug 19, 2014 22:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:All that said, where are you finding the gratuitous sex in WoT? It's positively prudish by modern fantasay standards, especially the first couple books. I'm pretty sure all the main characters are virgins through to the third book or so at least, and it's somewhat vague for a while even after that for most of them. I was probably getting it confused with Game of Thrones. I know "braid-pulling" is a thing though.
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Aug 19, 2014 23:05
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Aug 19, 2014 23:14
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Ynglaur posted:It would be hard to write less than zero. (Disclaimer: I never finished the series. I lost interest after the thousanth repeated scene in Book 6 or 7 or whatever.) The gif above said it better than I did. Yes, he wrote less than zero. e: Actually the female characters are the best ones in the series with most intersting stories. Until they start thinking about, talking about, or being around men. rypakal fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Aug 20, 2014 |
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Aug 20, 2014 15:09
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Data Graham posted:I was probably getting it confused with Game of Thrones. I know "braid-pulling" is a thing though. Oh boy is it. WoT has a lot of verbal tics like that which get really annoying over a million words of text. In a short novel they'd be fine but by about book six or seven they have you . . pulling your hair out  Game of Thrones is Wheel of Time meets Glen Cook and "historical realism." That means lots of gratuitous sex, all the characters act like assholes, and if anyone does anything heroic they're gonna get brutally murdered within ten pages. (This is as unfair, but unfortunately somewhat accurate, a summary of GoT as the above quips were of WoT). The more charitable take is that where authors like Jordan are drawing on things like Dune and Norse mythology, Martin is drawing a lot more heavily on historical sources like the Wars of the Roses. Martin's also following the modern trend of turning the sex and violence dial up to 11. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Aug 20, 2014 |
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Aug 20, 2014 15:35
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Game of Thrones is Wheel of Time meets Glen Cook and "historical realism." That means lots of gratuitous sex, all the characters act like assholes, and if anyone does anything heroic they're gonna get brutally murdered within ten pages. To follow the earlier topic of how the authors experience of war influenced the tone of their writing about combat Glen Cook was a Navy Forward Observer with USMC Force Recon in Vietnam (i.e. special forces type deep recon and direct action). Which I think shows itself very clearly in the way his characters converse with each other (gallows humor) and the way they interact with the world (us vs everyone) as well as his descriptions of combat. I.e. "A lot of poo poo just happened very fast, a lot of people died and what the hell is going on?" Martin, I think, is just a pervert who can occasionally write some really nice prose.
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Aug 21, 2014 20:54
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Murgos posted:To follow the earlier topic of how the authors experience of war influenced the tone of their writing about combat Glen Cook was a Navy Forward Observer with USMC Force Recon in Vietnam (i.e. special forces type deep recon and direct action). Which I think shows itself very clearly in the way his characters converse with each other (gallows humor) and the way they interact with the world (us vs everyone) as well as his descriptions of combat. I.e. "A lot of poo poo just happened very fast, a lot of people died and what the hell is going on?" Oh, that's really interesting. I should've known Glen Cook had a military background (I knew his son was in the military) but I'd never pieced that together. I wasn't really being fair to Glen Cook with that comparison; I'm not a huge fan of lots of his stuff (I always give up on his Garrett series and go read Nero Wolfe instead) but the first three Black Company books, at least, are genre classics. I pretty much concur with your assessment of Martin :P
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Aug 21, 2014 21:00
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Data Graham posted:I was probably getting it confused with Game of Thrones. I know "braid-pulling" is a thing though. Can't be any worse than jape, japing and japery.
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Aug 22, 2014 12:25
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From the TG pictures thread:atomicgeek posted:This article has Soviet-era Russian illustrations of Lord of the Rings in sort of Byzantine style. More galleries here, too. Neat stuff
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Sep 7, 2014 23:18
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That's not the usual "holy poo poo look how bizarrely those Russians managed to miss the point" like I was expecting; that's more like "drat, that's some dope-rear end trope-twisting inside baseball right there". Who was the audience? There's no Cyrillic to be seen.
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Sep 8, 2014 01:18
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Those are pretty cool. It's interesting that they visually show all of the non-mortals with halos. I find this rather appropriate, all things considered.
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Sep 8, 2014 08:33
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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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Levitate posted: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. My understanding is that yes the original version of the riddle-game at least is substantially different, and he made changes to the story to make it better fit in with the LotR. I could be wrong though, I don't exactly have a first edition Hobbit at hand to check.
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Sep 9, 2014 13:50
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The first edition has Gollum willingly betting his magic ring on the riddle game, while the revised edition has Gollum being aggressive and cagey about the ring and Bilbo finding it by chance. He started a new version of The Hobbit to try and better line everything up with Lord of the Rings but he gave up because it just didn't feel like The Hobbit anymore. pixelbaron fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 14:33
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Frankly from a narrative standpoint having the ring just be lying on the ground feels like a bit of a contrivance, and the fact that it's a retcon makes a lot of sense. After Tolkien established that the Ring isn't something that someone in its power would ever choose to offer up, even in bad faith, that became an unfeasible story point—but then Gollum just losing track of it (he kept it in a pouch around his waist until it "galled" him?) and leaving it lying on the floor of a rocky cave where he can't be sure of where it is or that it's safe at all times doesn't ring very true either.
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Sep 9, 2014 15:40
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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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He didn't leave it, he lost it. Its established the ring is sentient and trying to get back to its master and it left Gollum of its own accord (fell out of his pocket or what have you). Its also why later Frodo wears it on a chain, because Bilbo tells him it has a disconcerting habit of changing size and falling off and that's why he put it on a chain in the first place. edit: beaten like Gollum in a riddle contest
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Sep 9, 2014 15:53
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Data Graham posted:Frankly from a narrative standpoint having the ring just be lying on the ground feels like a bit of a contrivance, and the fact that it's a retcon makes a lot of sense. I think it's actually a subtle and chilling detail to consider, especially when it comes up in relation to Isildur too.
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Sep 9, 2014 18:41
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Nessus posted:Doesn't RING true, eh? That's one detail I really liked how they handled in the movies. They managed to convey the sense that the ring was a character in it's own right, with it's own agenda. Like, compelling Frodo to put in on while hiding from the ringwraith by the side of the road, or possibly angling itself to slip onto his finger when Frodo fell in the Prancing Pony inn. You can also see it drastically change in size immediately after Isildur cuts it from Sauron's hand and picks it up.
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Sep 10, 2014 20:52
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I just reread one of my favorite parts of the Unfinished Tales, Aldarion and Erendis - less dumb elves, more Men. Possibly a dumb question, but did Tolkien ever establish how long the regular Númenóreans live? The kings seem to live 400 to 500 years before they abandoned the Valar, but the lifespan of non-royals like Erendis seems to be all over the place (from 200 to "five times the length of normal men").
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Oct 9, 2014 15:16
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Roark posted:I just reread one of my favorite parts of the Unfinished Tales, Aldarion and Erendis - less dumb elves, more Men. Possibly a dumb question, but did Tolkien ever establish how long the regular Númenóreans live? The kings seem to live 400 to 500 years before they abandoned the Valar, but the lifespan of non-royals like Erendis seems to be all over the place (from 200 to "five times the length of normal men").
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Oct 9, 2014 22:17
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Hey, this thread is going on 5 years, which is defined as "way too loving long." Would it be ok for me to make a new thread?
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Oct 30, 2014 16:13
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Smoking Crow posted:Hey, this thread is going on 5 years, which is defined as "way too loving long." Would it be ok for me to make a new thread? Why, has Tolkien written anything new?
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Oct 30, 2014 16:46
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Smoking Crow posted:going on 5 years
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Oct 30, 2014 17:01
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Pioneer42 posted:Nice try, Sauron. Ah, on the awful app, the first post's date was 2009.
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Oct 30, 2014 17:02
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We can start a new thread when the number of posts equals the number of years between the crowning of Elessar and the Two Trees being killed.
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Oct 30, 2014 21:36
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Were there any elves specifically stated to have been born after the first age? I never really thought about it before but i've been listening on and off to the LOTR audiobooks and one of the segments discussing elrond's sons went by when i realized they're probably the youngest elves i can think of and they were probably born in beleriand. I can't remember if thranduil was born in the first age in Doriath or if he awoke with the rest of the first elves, by cuivienen. I'm pretty sure legolas was born in Doriath.
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Oct 30, 2014 21:54
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andrew smash posted:Were there any elves specifically stated to have been born after the first age? I never really thought about it before but i've been listening on and off to the LOTR audiobooks and one of the segments discussing elrond's sons went by when i realized they're probably the youngest elves i can think of and they were probably born in beleriand. I can't remember if thranduil was born in the first age in Doriath or if he awoke with the rest of the first elves, by cuivienen. I'm pretty sure legolas was born in Doriath. Arwen was born in the early Third Age, apparently.
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Oct 30, 2014 22:00
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Nessus posted:I think Thranduil was one of the first elves, he just never actually got off his tree-loving rear end past the Misty Mountains. No, thranduil was totally a sindar of Thingol's people, he just went back east and ruled over the greenwood elves once he got there. Neither he or legolas were originally from greenwood.
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Oct 30, 2014 22:01
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andrew smash posted:No, thranduil was totally a sindar of Thingol's people, he just went back east and ruled over the greenwood elves once he got there. Neither he or legolas were originally from greenwood.
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Oct 30, 2014 22:03
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Eh, pretty much, it's strongly "hinted" that galadriel's primary character flaw that she overcame in the instant she turned down the ring was her desire to rule her own realm, it's what led her to forsake valinor at the end of the third age and establish lorien. Same could be true of thranduil roughly, he just isn't as important as she is and doesn't get as much screen time.
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Oct 30, 2014 22:08
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andrew smash posted:Eh, pretty much, it's strongly "hinted" that galadriel's primary character flaw that she overcame in the instant she turned down the ring was her desire to rule her own realm, it's what led her to forsake valinor at the end of the third age and establish lorien. Same could be true of thranduil roughly, he just isn't as important as she is and doesn't get as much screen time. Galadriel also forsaking Valinor is because she's one of Feanor's people who are kind of banished/shamed from Valinor but her actions in helping destroy the ring validated her back in to the deserving elf camp.
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Oct 30, 2014 23:00
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concerned mom posted:Galadriel also forsaking Valinor is because she's one of Feanor's people who are kind of banished/shamed from Valinor but her actions in helping destroy the ring validated her back in to the deserving elf camp. 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.
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Oct 31, 2014 00:15
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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.
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Oct 31, 2014 00:41
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