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I really enjoy the Martin Shaw audiobook of the Silmarillion, for what it's worth. This is even better though.
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Mar 25, 2013 15:00
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There are a few "from the villain's perspective" works about Middle-earth, aren't there? Lord knows there are enough Grendel books.
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Jun 14, 2013 13:55
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You read the Silmarillion before LotR? That's an unusual path to take. But cool! Fëanor is a hell of a character. On balance you have to regard him as a villain and everything he and his family does as catastrophic, but then again without him/them there'd be no heroism and no tragedy to relate to on the protagonistic side either.
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Jul 6, 2013 03:33
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I'm also a little confused as to where you say Saruman was redeemed and admitted he was wrong to Gandalf. In my recollection he was unrepentant right up to the end; he was defiant at the window of Orthanc, he was bitter and wretched wandering in the wilderness with Wormtongue, and he was a snide rear end in a top hat when Frodo kicked him out of Bag End. Only once he's actually been killed and is gazing into the West as a wisp of "I done hosed up y'all" shaped smoke does he give any inkling of repentance, much good though it does him.
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Jul 6, 2013 13:44
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What always gets me is how gradually the tone of the dialogue ramps up its archaic texture until by the climax of RotK it's all "lo, forsooth" and nobody notices when it started.
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Jul 9, 2013 01:10
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Well, also because they literally are leftovers from old bedtime stories he used to tell Christopher, that he stuck into the Middle-earth universe just to get a chuckle out of the kid.
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Jul 10, 2013 01:51
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So you can read about Nazgûl from the comfort of your cold tent in the trackless wild, huh?
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Jul 10, 2013 16:49
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Pretty funny how in just the first couple of pages he bends over backwards several times to avoid splitting infinitives, but then leaves a sentence with a flagrantly dangling preposition ("that I have referred to"). 
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Oct 27, 2013 05:19
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If LotR isn't literature, then Beowulf isn't literature.
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Oct 27, 2013 14:10
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Whether you'll enjoy the Silmarillion depends a lot on how much patience you have for its style. Some people (myself included) are bonkers for it. Others can't get past page 10. If you find yourself bogging down at all, try interspersing chapters of the Silmarillion proper with the Better Myths version of it. http://bettermyths.com/category/mythos/silmarillion/
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Nov 9, 2013 20:57
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I've been trying for a while to get a handle on how different fictional universes make themselves available to fanfiction writers and Extended Universe type stuff. With Tolkien there seems to be hardly any room to imagine anything from scratch, is there? It's just about all been carefully laid out, year by year, race by race, map by map, so the only things a fan can add to it would be picking a specific well-established time and place and spending some effort fleshing out the details (I've always thought the story of Arvedui might make a good standalone novel). But you compare it to something like, say, Star Wars, which seems like it's at the far opposite end of the spectrum. Not much is specified about it, and what there is is pretty loosely interpretable, yet hints at a much vaster universe than any one movie or trilogy could cover—so you end up with endless novelizations and comics and video games and TV series and so on, much of which contradicts other stuff in the same category. You feel like you could cough wrong and accidentally find a Star Wars fanfic on your desk. I think of these two examples as extremes on a scale. If you think about just about any other fictional universe, like Star Trek or Narnia or Sonic the Hedgehog or The Lion King, they all fit somewhere along that line, and the amount of fanfic they spawn is a good measure of how far toward one end or the other they go.
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Jan 1, 2014 08:03
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concerned mom posted:I don't agree, I think there's so so many ways people could go. I mean the universe spans tens of thousands of years, or even hundreds of thousands of years if you look at the years of the pillars/trees. You could, as someone said above, have a story with Bilbo's mom. If that's a bit close to home you could cover the two blue wizards; if that's still a bit too close to home you could just make up some early human in the house of Hador or something going on an adventure. You could have a Dwarf looking to see if there's a heart of the mountain somewhere other than Erebor. You could have some adventurous Numenorean sailing through the Gates of the Sun to see what lies beyond. You could have a Hobbit who gets lost on the wrong side of the hedge. The possibilities are endless. That may be so, but how much fanwork of Tolkien's stuff is there? I honestly don't know; I haven't looked. But I know I haven't stumbled across any aside from art, whereas other properties are just lousy with it. You don't usually have to dig very hard.
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Jan 1, 2014 14:43
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Oh, I hope there's one Nazgûl who's kind of a spaz and the others put up with him because of fraternal duty or Sauron's orders or something, but secretly despise him and make fun of him behind his back. Mûn Mûn 
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Jan 11, 2014 02:58
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So I've been wondering something lately. Every time I read The Silmarillion or other Tolkien works, I vaguely notice the various fairy-tale tropes that show up in them, curl my lip a little in appreciation, and promptly forget about them for the purpose of forming any kind of observable pattern. It really seems sometimes like Tolkien was consciously trying not only to create a synthetic mythic history of England, but also to provide a tie-in for a great many of the fantastical legends that we take for granted through Grimm and others. Has anyone ever compiled them properly? Because I feel like I've noticed a lot more than just the following, and have just forgotten them as soon as they get eclipsed by various other narrative elements: * Rapunzel and her hair being used to escape from a tall tower—used in Beren and Lúthien * This legend of Richard I I'm sure Tolkien would have been familiar with: quote:Around the middle of the 13th century, various legends developed that, after Richard's capture, his minstrel Blondel travelled Europe from castle to castle, loudly singing a song known only to the two of them (they had composed it together).[124] Eventually, he came to the place where Richard was being held, and Richard heard the song and answered with the appropriate refrain, thus revealing where the king was incarcerated. The story was the basis of André Ernest Modeste Grétry's opera Richard Coeur-de-Lion and seems to be the inspiration for the opening to Richard Thorpe's film version of Ivanhoe. It seems unconnected to the real Jean 'Blondel' de Nesle, an aristocratic trouvère. It also does not correspond to the historical reality, since the king's jailers did not hide the fact; on the contrary, they publicised it. Used, again, in Beren and Lúthien. * The tale of Túrin is full of more or less openly acknowledged references to The Kalevala, including the talking sword. And then a bunch from The Hobbit, to which I'm not sure what to attribute them, but which I'm sure predated Tolkien: * Trolls turning to stone in the sunlight * Dragon sleeping on a pile of gold (with a critical vulnerability) * Mischievous elves in the woods * Beorn Any others? I feel like there's references to everything from Cinderella to Paul Bunyan in there, and someone will probably be able to explain convincingly how Snow White is the clear predecessor to the band of dwarves in The Hobbit.
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Feb 7, 2014 16:05
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Of course, Atlantis. See what I mean, it's the obvious ones I keep forgetting.
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Feb 8, 2014 03:20
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Yeah. The mound that became Tol Morwen was right next to the ravine of a wildly energetic river, so you know there were huge elevation changes all around that region, and the tomb would have by no means been the tallest thing even in the immediate area.
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Mar 9, 2014 22:34
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It wouldn't be that one, because that's the one that Eärendil inherited and which we now see in the sky as Venus. It would have been the one that Maedhros threw into a lava pit (though how it migrated from Beleriand to the east end of Rhovanion is a mystery).
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Mar 24, 2014 03:08
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What's more, there's very little reason for that scene to even be written that way other than to establish that backstory. The primary narrative goal was of course to convey to Sam that Frodo was alive; but there's like a billion other ways their conversation could have gone, all of which would have been way more natural, if Tolkien weren't taking the opportunity to explicitly worldbuild some immortal orcs. Given that one of the biggest twists-on-reality at the heart of the Silmarillion was that Death was a "gift" that deathless races might envy, and on top of that a special invention that Eru granted to Men, it probably makes sense that Orcs being immortal was just a "default" state and it never occurred to Morgoth to make them otherwise. Dwarves and Hobbits and animals all sort of muddle this up though.
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Mar 27, 2014 12:54
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Hobbits are Maiar
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Mar 27, 2014 14:32
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He'd make one of those Fletcher capstan tables out of it. Oh I know, someone should buy the wood and make it into a wardrobe. Just to gently caress with everybody.
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Jul 31, 2014 19:56
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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  " 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.Should I try harder at it, or anyone have any witty rejoinders I can use in defending my willful ignorance?
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Aug 19, 2014 03:12
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It's so crazy it just might work. Oh wait, no it won't, not unless I can convince him I read all 39,000 pages or whatever
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Aug 19, 2014 03:47
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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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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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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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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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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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Read Bored of the Rings first.
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Dec 12, 2014 15:39
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Levitate posted:until they hit Bree it's kind of...well, not hitting its stride yet. That's quite a pun if intentional.
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Dec 12, 2014 17:24
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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).
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Dec 12, 2014 22:38
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Seriously there's not many better things for a thread like this than a first-time reader's road-trip impressions. I'm sure everybody else here is so familiar with the material as to be able to recite large chunks of it, but newbie impressions are diamonds in the rough.
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Dec 13, 2014 21:27
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poo poo, dude, spoilers.
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Dec 14, 2014 16:10
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HIJK posted:Ahhh, good progress It's also one of those things that doesn't translate to actual live performance very well. Serkis interpreted it as a kind of hacking cough. Brother Theodore made it out like a weird muttering nonsense word he liked to say to himself when nobody was around. Peter Woodthorpe just said "gollum" as fruitily as possible, I guess making the best of it. I could never figure out from years of reading and re-reading the text exactly what Tolkien had in his mind when he came up with it. The best I could figure, he invented "Gollum" as a name first and then back-justified it as being derived from a noise he made, but then he never really tried to explain how the noise itself made sense as described (if he "gurgled in his throat" surely it would have been transliterated as something else, like "glglggllgl", and in any case why would he start making that noise out of all the noises to choose from?).
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Dec 17, 2014 19:02
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The movies do leave the origins of that tick ambiguous I agree.
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Still doesn't make a huge amount of sense. I don't get why a naturally-occurring swallowing noise would involve bilabials. If that's how he wants to describe it, fine, but it still sounds to me like he just liked the name and came up with the noise thing as a post-hoc justification.
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Dec 18, 2014 05:26
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I was inwardly amused when people started referring to pre-teen kids as "tweens".
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Dec 18, 2014 06:06
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HIJK posted:I always thought that too. There are lots of hobbits like Sam who have dark skin. I like to take those passages and point them out to people who try to tell me that Tolkien hated brown people. Every person I've shown it to got really mad. Evidently there's a difference between that and "swarthy", though.
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Dec 18, 2014 21:31
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Tolkien being Tolkien, I always read that as that he was just fascinated with how Semitic languages work and wanted to have an excuse to make one up.
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Dec 19, 2014 05:48
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:And did you miss that part about it being a celebrated friendship because it was a rare example of individuals from races with mutual animosity overcoming their natures and civilisations to combine on a common enterprise? It is perfectly possible to suggest individuals should overcome such division while at the same time maintaining explicitly and often that such divisions are real and do exist and do determine the course of history. 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.
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Dec 19, 2014 14:45
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One more complicating thing to note on the Frodo/Sam master/servant dynamic is that, to my recollection, Frodo never ordered Sam to do anything (aside from the highly dramatic moment of telling him to go home). In fact I can hardly think of him even asking a favor in a "be a good fellow and" kind of way.
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Dec 19, 2014 23:22
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Unless you're Nerdanel
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Jan 7, 2015 20:06
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