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I'm reading Beren and Luthien now after just discovering it existed (the story is by no means new to me, I read the Silmarillion and the entire HoME years ago, but it's the first time in a while). One thing I'm having a bit of trouble with in the poetry version is following the meter on certain lines. Whenever a sentence ends mid-line my brain just loses the meter and I have to read the line another two or three times to get it back. Is this just Tolkien being worse at poetry than he is at prose, or is this normal for this meter?
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Apr 20, 2018 03:13
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 04:58 |
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The best character in the story is Huan though no question I also kinda liked Tevildo prince of cats even if Thu is better
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Apr 20, 2018 17:31
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Can someone who remembers HoME better tell me whether Sauron was always Thu, or if the connection was only made later? Second age Sauron has the same shapeshifting, but doesn't have the connections to wolves and bats. Personally, extrapolating from second and third age Sauron and guessing what he'd have been up to in the first age without reference to what we actually know, I'd have expected him to be Morgoth's engineer or smith, not one of his battle captains. It would have been cool if Sauron had been the one who designed Grond, or maybe even forged the crown that held the silmarils.
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Apr 20, 2018 20:43
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I more meant, when the Akallabeth and LotR were first being written, was the Sauron that appeared there always supposed to be the same as Thu? It sounds like the answer is no for second-age Sauron, but yes for third-age Sauron (who then got equated when work on LotR began?)
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Apr 20, 2018 21:15
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Thanks for the detailed write up
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Apr 20, 2018 22:01
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Weren't there a few previous attempts at the movies that petered out because the corporate will to make multiple movies wasn't there and early writing made it very clear one movie wouldn't work?
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May 4, 2018 18:54
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HIJK posted:I think around the time the movie trilogy was first released some university in the UK did a survey to find out what people considered to be the best book of the 20th century. There were many worthy contenders but the surveyors were shocked to discover that the UK at large considered The Lord of the Rings to be the best book of the 20th century especially when a group of professors kept saying "But what about Ulysses?" One of the frustrations I had in English classes in college was that the kinds of people who teach English classes care about prose quality almost to the exclusion of the quality of what those words are communicating when evaluating fiction. Lotr's prose is good but not best-in-a-century good. The story and world plausibly are The Silmarillion goes even further down this path imo. 90% of the actual language is somewhere between mediocre and bad (with a few notable exceptions, mostly but not entirely sections that were copy-pasted in from works he wrote later in life) but the things it's communicating are loving brilliant. e: actually I'm gonna walk this back a bit. The Silmarillion has some poorly-written sections but it isn't 90%. It's way more than lotr though. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 22:26 on May 4, 2018 |
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May 4, 2018 22:17
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I just reread the chapter and I don't think it's possible to read Treebeard's lines without smiling
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May 5, 2018 07:29
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Do Tolkien's drafts that eventually became The Children of Hurin appear anywhere other than Unfinished Tales? In particular, I want to know whether the chapter name of chapter 15, "Nienor in Brethil", and the opening line "But as for Nienor" were JRR's words or Christopher's. Basically, I'm trying to solve the mystery behind this passage: quote:"Is not that a jest?" he [Turin] cried. "O the fair Nienor! So she ran from Doriath to the Dragon, and from the Dragon to me. What a sweet grace of fortune! Brown as a berry she was, dark was her hair; small and slim as an Elf-Child, none could mistake her!" My very first though was that Turin was describing someone other than Niniel, but my first thoughts, his first sister Urwen and Nargothrond's princess Finduilas, are both described as blonde. Niniel herself is never described as far as I can tell. My next thought is that Turin is describing Nienor as he imagined her, never having met her (or so he thought). This is the easiest reconciliation of the text of Children of Hurin. But if "But as for Nienor" was added by Christopher as a bridge to make the text less abrupt, and they aren't JRR's words, then the best explanation I can come up with is that Niniel isn't Nienor, but some other poor amnesiac girl who Glaurung cast a spell on as he lay dying, tricking her into thinking she was Nienor to try to hurt Turin one last time. Alternatively, under the supposition that this tale was composed by some later elvish bard and everything that wasn't directly witnessed is supposition by the storyteller, then nothing from the beginning of "Nienor in Brethil" even "really" happened and again the easiest reading of the text is that Niniel isn't Nienor. e: to clarify, "But as for Nienor" is in Unfinished Tales but both that work and Children of Hurin aim for readability over accuracy, so I'm hoping it's somewhere in HoME too. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 04:40 on May 8, 2018 |
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May 8, 2018 04:35
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Nienor being Niniel was the surface reading going all the way back to Book of Lost Tales so I was mostly just hoping for a literary easter egg more than it being the intended only answer. The fact that the text identifying the two is so sparse gave me hope. Even then we do have a bit where Nienor throws herself naked on an unnamed green mound and then later Turin finds a naked lady on the Haudh-en-Elledh but it'd take a real stretch to try to read a discontinuity there
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May 8, 2018 18:54
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The PJ movies were good at identifying the weak points of the books (e.g. everything goes right for merry and pippin in TT once they meet Treebeard, with no dramatic tension) but their solutions usually sucked
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May 21, 2018 14:27
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Faramir's stuff in the book is boring. Giving him an arc where he rejects the ring at the end at least means something happens at all during it other than Tolkien masturbating over how good and noble Faramir is. I would have supported the movies vastly reducing his role. Too bad what they did instead was irredeemably stupid. Treebeard and Bombadil have basically the same problem. I enjoy reading Treebeard though so I don't mind it there.
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May 21, 2018 18:35
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Yeah the ents ruled despite the lack of dramatic tension and the movies made them much worse. I was complaining about Faramir, in both books and movies but for different reasons
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May 21, 2018 18:44
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All they've actually confirmed is that season one will follow Aragorn so it's plausible each season will tackle a different section of the appendices. Personally I'm hoping for Helm in a later season
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May 21, 2018 22:10
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Fellowship is by far my favorite of the three movies. It's the only one where I'd entertain the notion that it, on balance, improves from the book
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May 22, 2018 00:19
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euphronius posted:I mean they are different mediums. A movie is a bad book and a book is a bad movie. Personal enjoyment is my rigorous criteria. My enjoyment of Fellowship the book and Fellowship the movie are close to equal and it's possible the movie edges it out. The other two aren't even close.
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May 22, 2018 00:23
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Bombadil is my least favorite part of Fellowship by a huge margin. Old forest and barrow wights are good though
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May 22, 2018 00:36
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VanSandman posted:Yeah the wights are cool and I love that they are barely explained as old kings that can’t stop haunting poo poo. Actually there's an easily missable line saying the wights were sent to the barrows by the witch king in ages past. They aren't the spirits of the dead buried there. Which makes them even scarier imo
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May 22, 2018 01:33
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elise the great posted:poo poo like this is why Thranduil gets a bad rap. Sure he was a dick to the Company and sure he doesn’t wanna help his neighbors even when their houses are literally on fire, but does HE get a big scene where he realizes that everything he’s built depends on the continued well-being of evil in the world? No, because he doesn’t even have a ring. And Sauron lives in his frickin back yard. And he’s STILL a powerful elvenking. The first hobbit movie was by far the best so good call
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May 23, 2018 16:53
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's warhammer-novel bad, yes. Read the book to your kids rather than using either movie version imo.
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May 23, 2018 19:36
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Personally I always found act three (lake town and Smaug) to be the weakest part of the book. Not weak in an absolute sense, but I have much stronger and fonder memories of the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, and the trolls.
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May 26, 2018 02:17
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andrew smash posted:With regard to the elven rings, it’s been a really long time since i actually read the trilogy but I thought I remembered something, somewhere about how Celebrimbor hid the three away during their creation so that they weren’t under the dominion of the One. Did I just make that poo poo up? The three were under the dominion of the one. They weren't made with Sauron's direct help but they were made using knowledge he imparted so they still had his intended security vulnerability. When Sauron first put on the One the elves realized what was up and immediately took their rings off. e: one interesting tidbit is I can't find any passage indicating Sauron gained any benefit other than dominion over the other 19 rings from wearing the One (compared to his pre-ring self). Other people gain the power Sauron put into it (provided they have enough power themselves to use it) but Sauron just regains the power he already had natively, plus dominion over the other rings. It's possible I'm missing a passage saying that he was stronger post-ring than pre-ring though. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 03:39 on May 26, 2018 |
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May 26, 2018 03:35
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Shibawanko posted:The Mayor of Hobbiton isn't exactly the sexiest, most powerful position in the world. I don't think it would even get you laid. Every tolkien character is a volcel so
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Jul 1, 2018 19:43
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Pham Nuwen posted:Pippin surely fucks Pippin isn't even an adult as Hobbits count it
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Jul 1, 2018 19:57
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Tolkien was big irl on the idea that serving was good spiritually/psychologically for the servant (and bad for the one being served). In theory people at the top were supposed to get this benefit by serving god
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Jul 2, 2018 22:02
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sassassin posted:I'm not shocked that people are reading and discussing their favourite books in this, the SA books subforum. especially shocking in the thread specifically for those books
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Jul 3, 2018 01:01
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Honestly one Tolkien fact that I don't think gets enough focus is the fact that he redefined the face of a genre as a hobby, in the downtime from his real job.
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Jul 3, 2018 01:07
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I'll admit I'm not very well read on pre-Tolkien fantasy but what came after feels much more lotr-ish than things like the Wizard of Oz or the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
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Jul 3, 2018 01:14
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Making an older more mythological type of story popular again counts as redefining in my book even if none of the elements are truly novel. I won't die on that hill if you point out some 1930s stories in an lotr-ish vein I've never heard of He did more or less invent our modern conception of elves if nothing else though. Older depictions are more like Keebler elves or Santa's elves typically
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Jul 3, 2018 01:24
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Christopher Tolkien makes a convincing argument in one of the HoME volumes that the publishers only read and conclusively rejected the Lay of Leithian and that they probably never read the Silmarillion, just assuming it was more epic poetry they were uninterested in publishing. That said, the Silmarillion is itself a really weird book. It reads like a nonfiction history book more than a novel, by design, since it was supposed to be a broad overview of events that get fuller treatment elsewhere (elsewhere in-universe at least; I'm not sure Tolkien ever really even considered writing full forms of anything but Beren, Turin, and Gondolin).
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Jul 3, 2018 17:55
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Morgoth-worship being something Men repeatedly fall to is a very Christian theme (well, Abrahamic theme, really) so I get why it keeps coming up but I personally find it to be an extremely boring story element so I'm pretty okay with the lotr sequel that was going to focus on it not going anywhere
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Jul 3, 2018 18:32
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Tolkien himself denied any and all direct allegory in his works, right there in the foreword. He especially denied any connection to WW2. As a human he was of course influenced by the world around him but he didn't put in direct intentional analogies to specific real-world events.
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Jul 10, 2018 04:39
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Well maybe I'm misunderstanding your question. Here's the possible closely-related interpretations of what you're asking I can think of: --Did he intentionally make Denethor a reference to Hitler? No, not unless he was lying in his foreword --Did Hitler's end inspire his storytelling instinct the way any influence might? Maybe. I dunno how you'd prove or disprove it --Is Denethor's end similar to Hitler's? I'm not particularly familiar with Hitler's last moments but your argument sounds fairly convincing Basically, if authorial intent is your question then the answer is no (unless he was lying or forgot). If the question is just whether similarity exists, then it seems there is similarity, and it's possible that similarity isn't a coincidence.
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Jul 10, 2018 04:46
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sassassin posted:Well if the author said something then it must be true. I mean the question as I misunderstood it was whether Denethor was an intentional Hitler reference, and if intentionality is in play hours words on the subject do matter
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Jul 10, 2018 18:27
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One thing I noticed in a recent reread is that, once you've read the Silmarillion, the much-vaunted depth to Middle-Earth in Lord of the Rings shrinks down massively. There were multiple points where I found myself asking if anything that wasn't in the Silmarillion ever happened in Middle-Earth. Like, were there any heroes at all in between Earendil and Frodo? One of the perils of pulling back the curtain, I guess.
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Jul 27, 2018 21:53
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It's explicit in the books that Aragorn planned to follow Boromir to Minas Tirith originally. When Gandalf died he was conflicted about what to do.
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Jul 27, 2018 23:59
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I think it's that he was spiritully weak after having his body killed at the end of the second age, and took a long long time to recover. Once he was recovered enough to start being active again, he took residence in Dol Guldur and started working on his plans to gather armies, rebuild Barad-Dur and reinhabit Mordor. The white council attacking Dol Guldur provided the timing to finally make the move.
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Jul 30, 2018 23:53
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I think he was always planning to attack soon, but to an immortal being waiting an extra century to get a half dozen more armies on his side isn't a big deal. Once he realizes the ring has been found he updates his time table appropriately, and when he realizes that gandalf and elrond know about it, that means that the time to attack is now. Capturing Gollum gave him the kick in the butt to be ready to go at any time.
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Jul 31, 2018 00:06
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I don't think it's explicit but your inference that his original plan was to find the ring and then attack (and in the meantime just build up his armies) seems like a good one, and the calculus only changed from that when he inferred that the ring was in enemy hands (as opposed to Bilbo's essentially-neutral hands)
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Jul 31, 2018 00:25
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I think the orcs there explicitly theorize it's Gollum leading someone to their doom (which isn't wrong)
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Aug 3, 2018 00:05
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