While definitely vintage at this point, http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/theories/theories.htm this page may have some interesting fruit for discussion. In particular, here's their old theory about Tom Bombadil: He's the Witch-king of Angmar!! A text from the First Age of Usenet posted:1. We never hear of Tom at all during the whole of the First Age. The Nine Rings aren't forged until the Second Age. QED.
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# ¿ Feb 19, 2013 11:04 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:47 |
cultureulterior posted:I have. It is- wierd. The most compelling subplot I would say is that of Aragorn. It's a pity it changes so much of canon. I wonder how Tolkien reads in Russian, really. I know he had trouble with being translated, due to his stuff being so English-y. e: I was just thinking 'maybe he was working from the movies' but he couldn't have, this came out in '99.
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# ¿ Feb 20, 2013 15:55 |
Hieronymous Alloy posted:And, let's be fair, even in the most favorable possible reading, Tolkien is bourgeois as gently caress. You can mount a fairly valid reading of Bilbo Baggins as an idealized avatar of western class privilege. I can totally understand why a non-western, non-capitalist, non-english-speaking author might have a fairly radical reaction to the Lord of the Rings.
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# ¿ Feb 20, 2013 17:53 |
rypakal posted:He also pokes no small amount of fun at Bilbo's idealized English upper-class self. And a bit at Frodo. Sam is, I think, where Tolkien's true heart lay. But! Nonetheless, to a casual glance it's some durpy hobbit calling the upper class/upper middle class hobbit 'master' and spending most of the time doing all the poo poo-work. While I think even by the text alone it is clear that Sam is not Frodo's slave, he is certainly Frodo's servant, and is content with his role and loves his master. This is an idea that might well have very different freight in a social context where that reads 'lackey' or 'Stephen the house slave' more than 'oh he's Frodo's butler.'
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# ¿ Feb 21, 2013 02:23 |
Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think this is a really good way of framing the discussion, yeah. At the same time and in the same nation where Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, P.G. Wodehouse was achieving wild financial success with the Jeeves and Wooster stories, which basically portray the British upper class as total nincompoop incompetents utterly reliant on their "masterful" servants. Notice also how whenever they're rolling around in Gondor the locals all assume that Merry and Pippin must be lords in their country - and while Tolkien credits this to their speech not having the polite forms, it is also literally the case. Pippin is a Took and seems to be on close terms with the head Took, and I think Merry was in a similar position with the Brandybuck people. Had they never left the Shire they would have been pretty high on the totem pole, and their actions stack up pretty well to everyone else's; the two of them arguably defeated Saruman, and Merry (along with Eowyn of course) killed the witch-king. Frodo by contrast doesn't seem to do much other than "keep going." Even looking in other societies he presents, the text seems to imply that divisiveness is usually due to the Plot of the Bad Guys. This seems to be at least somewhat the case, although it does seem to be sort of back-handedly acknowledged that the Dunlendings had claim to the lands the Rohirrim were living on. However, the monarchical trappings seem to work largely because there actually is virtue involved; Aragorn may be the distant heir of Isildur but he didn't seem to lust after the kingship, and I remember dimly that in the Two Towers he says he had honestly been planning to guide Frodo into Mordor. Nessus fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Feb 21, 2013 |
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# ¿ Feb 21, 2013 04:59 |
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, that's a good catch; now that you mention it, but Merry and Pippin are "princelings" of the Hobbits. Bilbo's basically the top of the middle class; it's never really clear where his initial family money actually comes from, before the Smaug gold, but it's clear that Bag End is the nicest, best, most finely-appointed, best-located hobbit hole in all of Hobbiton, and Hobbiton is the most economically developed town in the Shire. He's the hobbit equivalent of a Vanderbilt descendant. Similarly, Aragorn and Boromir are broadly similar, but Boromir has a lot of bluff, hearty and pragmatic traits which leads to him trying to mug a hobbit and paying for it by having to fight a few dozen orcs on his own. Aragorn could have done what Boromir did, and would probably have been more successful at it, too -- but he didn't, because he's not an rear end in a top hat.
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# ¿ Feb 21, 2013 05:17 |
Seaside Loafer posted:See I dont think the Maiar who teamed up with Melkor were 'corrupted', they joined his side of thier own free will during the creation songs. A bunch of Maiar went with Melkor at first because he was pretty cool and had sick bass in his car. After the Valar kicked Melkor's teeth in the first time, a lot of these guys rejoined the Valar, no harm no foul, and lived on as normal. Many of them did not, and many of them took physical form. The way it seems to work is that a Maia (the Valar are really just the biggest of the Maia) can take physical form but if he gets too hosed up or killed or does certain tricks, he locks himself in - there's definitely a recurring theme that there are some things you can only do once, and which can't be undone or redone. Different Maia also vary in strength. So when Joe Maia becomes a Balrog he may eventually be unable to STOP being a Balrog, even if he's still a badass Balrog. It's not a decision he can take back. This system continues throughout most of the Silmarillion stuff. Sauron starts out as a Maia and a very powerful one, and rolls around turning into werewolves and poo poo. It is noted when he gets into a dog fight with Huan that he bails out rather than get killed hard enough to become a sort of unpleasant shadow, which appears to be what happens when a Maia is for-real killed. He wanders off to sulk after Melkor gets owned, but retains his ability to alter his form freely. Somewhere around here he makes the Ring. After the Numenorians run off his Orcs and sundry other dudes, he goes to Numenor and (to his great surprise) is nearly caught up in the downfall of the island. He manages to get away but is 'hurt' sufficiently that he can no longer assume pleasant forms. The only thing that seems to really break this rule is Gandalf. However, Gandalf 'incarnated' for a specific assigned mission and this may not operate the same way as it would if he had, say, decided to become an old hobbit-fancier on his own account. He didn't come back, he was SENT back, and it also sounded more like he died of exhaustion rather than being ripped into wizard chunks; perhaps this is a factor, who can say. He also was perhaps thinking of others and doing something good for the world by dealing with the Balrog, while (say) Saruman seems to have largely hosed up in the course of becoming Sauron Junior, and after Gandalf tells him to go gently caress himself, he deliberately continues his campaign of being an rear end in a top hat to people. The moral of this story is that if you're a Maia, don't be an rear end in a top hat, or you're going to end your exciting career of seeing the world made and coming into everything in it by getting stabbed by some dude in Hobbiton. Here's a question: was Smaug a Maia? On the one hand it seems dimly implied that dragons did reproduce and were living things, if horrible ones; on the other hand, Melkor 'made' them and most of his 'made' supermonsters seemed to be Maia in death-metal forms, not actual 'created' animals, with the exception of the orcs.
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# ¿ Feb 21, 2013 16:40 |
sassassin posted:That's the article I was talking about.
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# ¿ Feb 22, 2013 06:04 |
Hogge Wild posted:For a long time I couldn't get why a tough guy like Sam fawned over Frodo and took orders from him even after they left the Shire and Sam wasn't Frodo's gardener anymore. Then I read that Tolkien made Samwise act like the batmen did in the Great War. He himself served as a communications officer and had a batman of his own like the rest of the British officers. German World War 1 veteran and author Ernst Jünger compared his batman to a medieval squire. It makes a lot more sense if you think their relationship as an officer and a soldier or as a knight and a squire.
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# ¿ Feb 22, 2013 12:31 |
SHISHKABOB posted:I'm not so sure about pride being the thing that Tolkien is making out to be the "bad thing". I say this because I seem to remember a lot of situations where characters or groups of people are described to be "proud", but I never felt like it was necessarily in a bad way. Like I'm pretty sure that the Men of Gondor are in general described to be a proud people, and maybe also the Rohirrim. As for my memory, I use it for many things, only some of them hobbit-related. For a bit more content, I read in the reviews of that fellow who did the 'Tolkien was the greatest author of the 20th century' book that said he said, essentially, that Middle-Earth is a bit less monotheistic and catholic than JRRT may have wanted to think. Can anyone say what his argument's thrust is? I intend to order the book with my next paycheck, but that's a while away. Nessus fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Feb 23, 2013 |
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# ¿ Feb 23, 2013 08:57 |
If someone was going to do some side story material, I'd say Galadriel would be a good figure for that. Seems like she had an interesting life.
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# ¿ Jan 30, 2014 00:57 |
Canemacar posted:Earlier, it was mentioned in the thread how the Ainulindale chapter of the Silmarilion can be interpreted as an older religious pantheon absorbed into the belief system that was current at the time of it's writing.
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# ¿ Apr 19, 2014 21:57 |
Catsplosion posted:I felt pity for melkor from the beginning of reading the creation of arda, I don't see him as evil in the beginning and you could say the way he became after was because of how he was treated and separated in a way from his fellow valar. If anything it was not that he was evil but that eru had made a mistake in creating a being so similar to himself.
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# ¿ Jul 7, 2014 21:47 |
Catsplosion posted:All true but he was created as most intelligent of all valar amongst over characteristics. Was it not a fault by eru to have created him that way and not his own?
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# ¿ Jul 7, 2014 22:19 |
SHISHKABOB posted:Yes but why did he become an rear end in a top hat.
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# ¿ Jul 8, 2014 00:24 |
I don't wholly subscribe to the Silmarillion's take on morality either, though to be honest it seems to get across its actual moral lessons more clearly than the Bible.NikkolasKing posted:My personal thought about why Melkor turned to evil though is exactly what Tolkien said - he went mad with longing. Is it not the son's most natural inclination to emulate the father? Or even to surpass said father? Melkor is Eru's "son" as it were and he wanted desperately to be his own master just like his dad. But it was impossible. Eventually he just came to resent everything. When the Vala first come to Arda they try to build stuff and Melkor just wrecks all of it out of spite. His quest for creation had turned to a quest for annihilation.
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# ¿ Jul 9, 2014 00:58 |
concerned mom posted:I always just think that Eru is God and like any being he he aspects of pride, arrogance, intellect, beauty, etc within himself. We can see with the other lesser gods in the pantheon that they all have distinct personalities and typical behaviours. Sadly for Morgoth his was for the most part emotions and sentiments we deem as bad. Am I oversimplifying it? One of the aspects of Tolkien's stuff that I think breaks from the strict tradition of most theological stuff is that it focuses on the inherent worth and value of the little things. The Shire is the obvious example in LOTR, and while I think his rosy view of Merry England was a lot of that, the greater creative point is that this place with all its fussy little rituals and social dynamics, while perhaps in need of improvement, had value in its own right. Yavanna talks to Eru (or was it Manwe?) about her concern for the creatures and plants of Middle-Earth and gets told "these things have worth in themselves even if there were no intelligent beings to come." From this perspective I guess Melkor's flaw was that he did not bother to even try to understand the greater part of the music, nor did he start going rogue after exhaustively examining every aspect of things; he wanted the power to create from nothing, but did not have much regard for what would be created (even if he could). Compare Aule to the Dwarfs with Melkor and the Orcs.
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# ¿ Jul 10, 2014 19:45 |
Ynglaur posted:I can't speak to Buddhism, Hindu, or many pre-Christian Western religions, but the concept of the inherent worth of even small things is found in Roman Catholicism, which makes perfect sense given Tolkien's upbringing and morality. While the powerful and wise are great in worldly things, they are often the most tempted by worldly things, and thus must strive harder for holiness (i.e. being like God (or Eru)). Those who are humble and small are thus closer to holiness, and thus in their way are greater than those who are greater in stature. You see this in Catholicism in the parable of the widow who gave her last 2 coins to the Temple; or in Mother Teresa's opinion that the face of Jesus is in that of a leper.
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# ¿ Jul 11, 2014 01:03 |
rypakal posted:The person I was replying to said Melkor did bad things because Varda rejected him. I was applauding her ability to read Melkor's jerkface intentions and disgusted by even the notion that his actions would be laid at her feet.
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# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 20:27 |
JohnnyDangerously posted:Is this off-topic? I hope not.
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 01:34 |
BatteredFeltFedora posted:When is this?
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2014 04:45 |
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 " 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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# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 03:50 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
UoI posted:If people don't mind reading about my horrible opinions on fantasy, sure!
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# ¿ Dec 13, 2014 04:49 |
Data Graham posted: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. Didn't Tolkien once give a super stirring reading of Beowulf out of nowhere in one of his classes.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 05:36 |
SirPhoebos posted:I saw the third Hobbit movie last night, and I just remembered something that's bugged me since I read the novels:
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 19:14 |
100YrsofAttitude posted:The 3rd movie if anything reminded me : of how badass and extremely powerful ie. old Galadriel really is. Out of all of them she is the only one with a clear memory of the Undying lands, assuming that Gandalf's and Saruman's incarnations on Middle earth made their memories fuzzy. Gandalf, Saruman and Radagast also have orders to not be too overt in their intervention, which even Saruman has to take a long time to get round to breaking. Galadriel has none of that. She wasn't sent back to Middle-earth, she walked over icebergs. It totally makes sense that Frodo would offer her the Ring; it isn't her witchcraft or anything, she is just logically the person most likely to know what to do with it.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 22:54 |
100YrsofAttitude posted:You're right it's just I often forget that.
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# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 23:22 |
Lord Hydronium posted:I mean, it's not exactly wrong. It's somewhat reductive to take the rather complicated mix of racial attitudes in Tolkien's writings and sum it up as just "dude was racist", but he definitely had racist attitudes that are expressed in his works. Just look at how often "swarthy" is used as an indicator of a character being evil or untrustworthy, for example. The fact that he also wrote that passage about Sam sympathizing with the dead Southron, or the famous letter where he told the Nazis to gently caress off, while commendable, don't mean the racist stuff doesn't exist too. It all just makes Tolkien, well...human. He had bad attitudes and good ones. Pain in the rear end. I'm not saying it isn't there, but so are other things.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 02:29 |
End Of Worlds posted:Seriously, I've never understood this need to argue that works which are problematic (like LotR or Lovecraft) are not actually problematic. Yes, they are. It doesn't make you bad for liking them. The drive to defend them and insist that the half-orc swarthy men from the east with their lolling red tongues and grotesque dark skin - that, however, is pretty questionable. To give an example, and with another aspect of the orcs, I gather Tolkien based a lot of his details on the behavior of the orcs (as opposed to the goblins in Goblintown and so forth) on his experience in the trenches in WWI. Are there any other places people can spot the influence of his trench experience? Saruman appeared to have some kind of gunpowder bomb (in practice if not actuality), although it didn't seem to be as decisive as one might have expected. What is a little interesting is that despite this experience, there doesn't seem to be any situation that is directly analogous to that mode of fighting - and of course he was avoiding allegory, but you would think he would have worked that in. This might be more of a factor of the setting, because all the middle-earth fighters and armies are basically medieval, with infantry and cavalry and perhaps a Nazgul or a king to terrify/hearten the former.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 05:04 |
End Of Worlds posted:Yeah that's totally valid; there' worlds more to talk about Tolkien than the social issues. My experience has actually been far more of the opposite in that I've seen a lot more of this: When I first read the books (age 10) I could pick up that Sam was not of the same background as Pippin, Merry and Frodo but he seemed more like Frodo's house manager who got recruited by Gandalf (and good thing, too) rather than being fraught with the concepts of servitude.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 05:21 |
I agree that the Dwarves are totally drawn heavily from the Jews, but they're very philo-semitic for the period, where I think even the more progressive sorts tended to sneer at Jews a little. I know there's that letter where Tolkien politely tells the Nazi German book people who are asking how aryan he was to go gently caress themselves.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 05:29 |
End Of Worlds posted:I totally agree with this. I love the Lord of the Rings, and additionally I'm really not sure that there's any way to synthesize Norse mythology and Anglo-Saxon culture in an early-20th century environment without ending up with some major areas of questionable content. I just get super irritated when I see people defensively insist that there's no racism in LotR, none at all! Past a certain point it's silly to hold these books up to a 21st century morality, not to mention anachronistic, but it's still a thing to talk about. e: to be clear I'm contrasting "racism the cultural construction" vs. "racism the overt or not-very-covert expression of racial prejudice." Nessus fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 05:48 |
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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:47 |
End Of Worlds posted:I always just assumed that a) Eagles are really conspicuous and flying the Ring into Mordor would sabotage the whole stealth angle, b) the Eagles play a thematic role as divine grace: the unhoped-for intervention of God at the moment of greatest need, when one has expanded the fullness of one's strength in the cause of righteousness and can no longer go on, and c) that would kill the plot.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 18:44 |