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Ashcans posted:The weirdest thing about that (I mean besides the obvious) is that he's claiming descent from the Kings of Wales, not England. So even if he could prove it, all he would be demonstrating is a claim to the theoretical crone of Wales, which hasn't existed since it was annexed by England. I mean he could return to Wales and claim his birthright and try to raise an army to seize independence or something, but nothing about his claim entitles him to the throne of England. Elendil wasn't King of Gondor, either.
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Mar 2, 2017 15:27
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Why would you go to all that trouble and not at least claim the right lineage?
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Ashcans posted:Elendil was High King of Gondar and Arnor? I feel like I'm misunderstanding something. Yeah, I was thinking Isildur, but now that I look at it he and Anarion were joint kings in Gondor while Elendil was alive, so that doesn't work either.
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Mar 2, 2017 19:09
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A while ago in this thread someone alluded to a post or article the argument of which was that the Silmarillion is a syncretic work blending the Numenorean demiurge Melkor into the polytheistic legends of the Gnomes and their war with the Orc-king Morgoth. Anyone have a link to that?
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Mar 2, 2017 21:49
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jivjov posted:I think we'd need a virgin sacrifice. Good thing we've got goons to spare. We shall burn like the heathen goons of old
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Mar 19, 2017 21:36
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Hogge Wild posted:Were the Uruk-Hai bred to be smarter than Orcs? Did Tolkien mention it anywhere? In "Morgoth's Ring" Tolkien says that Saruman bred "man-orcs large and cunning, and orc-men treacherous and vile". My suspicion would be that the former are the fighting Uruk-hai, and the latter are like the ruffians that help him take over the Shire, but Tolkien doesn't explicitly say this. In general though the Uruk-hai don't seem much smarter than regular Orcs so much as more professional -- and after all Orcs aren't necessarily very stupid to begin with. Nothing really suggests they're necessarily intellectually inferior to men, just without any intellectual culture or respect for intellectual pursuit.
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Jun 29, 2017 20:40
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Hogge Wild posted:Yeah, that has been my understanding of it, but for some reason (D&D?) most online sources say that Uruks are more intelligent. And after all Orcs were said to be great at constructing machines and for war and torture, so they can't have been stupid as such. Nah, Tolkien doesn't really deal in that kind of clear cut analogy. But orcs are, as written, the disposable soldiers of an expansionistic military-industrial dictatorship, which is certainly a type of western man that was not impossible to find in the 20th century. "Technology obsessed" is pushing it though, orcs like making pointy objects to shank people with and such, they're not about to discover the integrated circuit or something. The kind of mechanized/"technological" societies that Sauron and Saruman want to create stem from their own godlike desires and knowledge and not from anything to do with orcs.
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Jun 29, 2017 21:20
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Since when was Tolkien surprised by people reading that into it? His critique of industrial society is fairly explicit, it's not like some meta textual poo poo, all the industrial societies in the book are straight up bad things or at least deeply misguided. He made no secret of it being a major theme either ("Fall, mortality, and the Machine" being the main subjects of the book according to him).
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Jul 3, 2017 23:11
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EvilTaytoMan posted:Aren't hobbits also oddly technologically advanced for a race that claims not to like technology that much, at least in comparison to humans? That's the impression I got, maybe I'm wrong. Not especially, they like most western men don't have anything beyond wind and water power and completely lack organized industry or finance (though they do have coinage) or even an effectual governmental authority. Like most Men, they possessed things that we would consider forms of technology but were not a technological society.
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Jul 7, 2017 14:44
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The Moria sequence contains some of Tolkien's most effective action writing and sustained tension so I'd be surprised if podman can't make at least half a dozen episodes out of it. When he gets to it in mid-2019, I mean. But it's still good that he really picked over the Gildor scene because it's extremely important to understanding 1) Frodo as a character 2) the Noldor as a people and 3) the Quest as a quest, and also because the adaptations have systematically ignored it because nobody kills any orcs in it.
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Jul 22, 2017 02:01
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:That guy is gonna die of old age before he gets to the balrog but yeah I want to hear his opinion on balrog wings Napkin calculation says he should be finished with the trilogy in about five and a half years! Assuming he can keep up his present winged pace, of course.
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Jul 22, 2017 02:37
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The Hobbit movies are mediocre to complete poo poo. The worst thing I can say about them is that they have no life of their own at all. Lines, scenes and characters are ripped wholesale from Jackson's LOTR and jammed in seemingly just because they could do it and figured there was money in it. Jackson's LOTR is crappy adaptation in its own way and each movie has some big problems but it's obvious trolling to say that the excrescence of cinema called the Hobbit trilogy is any better.
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Jul 23, 2017 22:26
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I agree, he is definitely not supposed to be old in the movies. The book harps on his age a bit so it's not like this was accidental either, it's a deliberate change like Frodo going from eldest to youngest of the hobbits. I don't think the movies capture the feel of The Hobbit at all, they are way too focused on spectacle and take their vision of the world more from cartoons than from fairy-stories. The less "realistic" feel is obviously intentional but it just winds up being bizarre and distracting from any similarity to the book that might exist (take a shot every time someone falls more than twenty feet without serious injury). Even disregarding that they have a consistent problem of backreading stuff in from LOTR that just isn't in The Hobbit, like Smeagol, the Ring being evil/corrupting influence, or the entire Dol Guldur plotline and everything to do with it. I guess another way to say it is that yeah, the LOTR movies have big problems as an adaptation of the books and yeah, they don't get half the flak for it that The Hobbit does, but that doesn't mean The Hobbit is a better adaptation, just that it was more obvious about it.
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Jul 24, 2017 13:26
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I watched this yesterday, it sucks in its own special way. It opens with a "60 years earlier..." subtitle despite the fact that since the prologue was cut, the scene isn't sixty years earlier than anything. This probably should have let me know what I was in for. I don't want to fault the guys effort since it obviously took a lot of time and effort to chop and change this together, but I found the result boring and the name pretty odd since the result isn't all that much closer to Tolkien than the original movies. If I had to pick one thing wrong about it that sums up all its problems, it cuts the "out of the frying pan into the fire" scene, complete with eagles (making their later arrival at the battle into nonsense), but doesn't at all cut the lines where Gandalf and Thorin straight up say "out of the frying pan into the fire".
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Jul 24, 2017 13:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The main problem with Jackson's Hobbit adaptation isnt just that it's absurdly overlong and "scraped over too much bread", it's that it fundamentally rewrites the core of the story. Fellowship has much bigger changes than just Arwen replacing Glorfindel, almost all of the Shire scenes are cut. There's no sense of Frodo's character or why Merry and Pippin are coming along with him, they just run into them and decide to walk off to god knows where! No Gildor, no Maggot, no Crickhollow, no Old Forest nor Bombadil, no barrows, in fact virtually the only thing that isn't cut between Bag End and Bree (six chapters, almost half of Book I) is the encounter on the road with the black rider.
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Jul 24, 2017 15:13
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euphronius posted:It's an adaption . I'm not saying I can't see why the changes were made, but they were made. The perception that the first movie is the most faithful isn't strictly accurate. It isn't very faithful and neither are any of the other Jackson movies.
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Jul 24, 2017 15:17
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Sometimes I think a series would be a decent way of adapting LOTR. It's not a super fast paced book and suffers for being crammed into 2 or even 3 hours, to say nothing of being interpreted as an action movie. Three seasons of ten hours each might be nicer.sassassin posted:I think we can all agree that the Tolkien estate is right to keep The Silmarillion etc. out of the hands of Hollywood. The truest truth.
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Jul 24, 2017 15:23
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euphronius posted:If you take out Eowyn there are 0 female characters in the first movie . I hear Cate Blanchett was in there somewhere
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Jul 24, 2017 19:41
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Ynglaur posted:Marrying Faramir off served the same purpose, while allowing him to marry (back) into the line of Noldorian kings. Reading as an adult, Aragorn was quite the canny politician, albeit a good-hearted and noble one. Indeed. I really enjoy the low-key consolidation of power that Aragorn is able to carry out. Tolkien doesn't approach it as an intrigue at all but it's quite remarkable how a pretender from a foreign country, his claim millennia old, with no wealth or army to speak of, is able to seize the throne based almost entirely on his personal relationships with the de jure ruler of Minas Tirith, the most powerful vassal lord in Gondor, and the nominally vassal king of Rohan.
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Jul 25, 2017 02:52
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Isn't this basically the angle that The Last Ringbearer uses to argue the whole trilog y is elf propaganda? I couldn't get through it but my understanding is that its Aragorn is a puppet of the elves. Which is certainly not without basis since Elrond does strongly back him, but the reason why he is able to make it good is because Eomer and Imrahil are on the spot with armies (Imrahil in particular takes the liberty of inviting him into the city) and Faramir doesn't resist his claim.
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Jul 25, 2017 04:13
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euphronius posted:Aragorn is the only one with the right to summon the Dead men of dunharrow which is a big deal. I wouldn't say he is replaceable. Yeah I think the latter bit is especially important. Without Aragorn there is no hope for any political order in Eriador going forward. The rangers, or those few of them that survived the Pelennor, would be leaderless and far from home. The elves of Rivendell and Lindon are on their way out. That essentially makes the Thain the most important political figure west of the Misty Mountains! Even as Tolkien writes it, it's a little difficult to see how Aragorn reestablished a north-kingdom. One shudders to think how it could have been done without him.
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Jul 25, 2017 13:08
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euphronius posted:Arnor was reestablished and the capital was rebuilt This much is clear, but Tolkien doesn't really say whether it was a functional state or more of a northern vacation spot for the King. The north kingdom doesn't ever seem to have been very populous or well founded: it doesn't seem to have had any major population centers besides Annuminas and later Fornost, which is more a fortification than a town (contrast Gondor with its major city and two large heartland castle towns, as well as the major port cities of Pelargir and Umbar and another fortified town at Dol Amroth). The fact that Annuminas was abandoned either before or at the same time as the partition of Arnor suggests that the kingdom, or certainly the successor principalities, had no especial use for it; possibly its construction was never more than a boondoggle on Elendil's part. e: now that I dig at it I see Tolkien alludes to Rohirric settlers in Enedwaith during the fourth age, which does hint at a larger effort to revitalize and repopulate Eriador under the King. skasion fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jul 25, 2017 |
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Jul 25, 2017 17:40
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Oracle posted:I don't remember where I read it but supposedly Tolkien was setting all this in a post-plague era, which is why you have such sparsely populated once-settled and civilized now returned to nature feel about the lands they travel through. There was a very severe plague around the seventeenth century of the third age, which devastated the lands east of the misty mountains and wiped out the Dunedain of Cardolan, but doesn't seem to have affected Rhudaur (then ruled by Angmar, which makes sense since the plague was probably sent forth by Sauron) or Arthedain (furthest from the plague's source). This definitely brought about serious mortality in Eriador, as did the continuing wars between Arthedain and Angmar. So the road to Rivendell explicitly passes through depopulated country that has not held much but ruins for centuries. That said, it also seems to me like Tolkien never intended for the north kingdom to have major population centers to the same extent as the south, it's got a harsher climate and terrain, mostly forested with not much coastline.
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Jul 25, 2017 20:11
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Ynglaur posted:Didn't he attack Ulnar decades before the War of the Ring, while under a pseudonym working for the Steward of Gondor? Yeah. He made a major raid there, burned the fleet, and killed the Captain of Umbar. Of course if he hadn't they would have made a much more serious threat in the War of the Ring, but even knowing what he knew at the time it was a sound idea. Essentially the conquest or at least containment of Umbar is a necessity for the long-term survival of Gondor. If it is hostile it's a constant threat to Pelargir and the southern fiefs. If it can control the sea it can control Anduin and essentially reduce Gondor to Minas Tirith and Anorien. It's also probably somewhat important to Elessar's personal role as king of all the Dunedain that he control it, since it's a Numenorean colonial port originally.
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Jul 26, 2017 18:22
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sassassin posted:The history of Gondor is a history of subjugation of the southern coastlands. Yeah basically. Numenoreans are of colonial origin and have never lost the sense of supremacy and (at best) the West Man's Burden that goes with it. Aborigines like the Dunlendings/Bree-men and the Druedain are on a certain level portrayed more sympathetically than the half-human westerners. That said, the southerners aren't wholly innocent of this either: the Umbarites ARE Numenoreans and share their ideology of manifest destiny, they're just on the satanic end of the Numenorean religious schism.
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Jul 26, 2017 19:05
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euphronius posted:I skip the mmo field trips hahahah. Yeah this. Episodes are already super long without spending 35 minutes at the end listening to some poo poo about LOTRO
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Jul 27, 2017 12:48
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Podcast dude's LOTR close read definitely isn't super insightful most of the time and tends to get insanely bogged down in minutiae. I don't think he is benefiting from having an unlimited amount of time to go through the text, he is lacking structure and economy. His series on the History of Middle-earth is a bit better because he can't spend more than a couple months on any individual book and has to focus on what is important instead of waffling about how much he likes a single verse of poetry for two hours followed by an hour of wandering around an MMO. His Dune series is poo poo though. Really complete garbage.
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Jul 28, 2017 22:24
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:You're not going to ruin the gritty fanfiction novel I write set decades after the main LOTR books where a hard-drinking private detective on the streets of Minas Tirith is asked to investigate a strange murder and he slowly finds all these mysterious ties between the murdered man and shadowy figures/organizations based in Ithilien and it turns out there's this huge conspiracy to bring Faramir's son back to the city and crown him King of Gondor. This is probably exactly where The New Shadow was going before Tolkien decided it was so stupid he would rather rejigger the entire mythology, gutting material he hadn't touched for over thirty years, to render elven cosmology non-geocentric.
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Aug 3, 2017 01:33
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Monglo posted:I never had the impression that the Ring was sentient reading the book. It doesn't have a concrete personality, it gives a person immense power, and tempts to indulge in the temptation to use it, which could be argued to come naturally from the wielder. Why wouldn't you do something about the world if you had the capability to? Most of us would do it, right? Hobbits are just too lazy and dumb! I don't think "sentience" is a reasonable term to use of the Ring but we are told outright it has agency, it tries to do things, it looks after itself, and it is totally capable of acting without its bearer's consent, even directly against its will. You don't need any knowledge of the immense power of the ring for it to work upon you; indeed, you don't need to know that it has any power at all. Smeagol wanted the ring for its beauty, enough that he was willing to murder his kin for it, even though he didn't have the slightest idea that it was anything other than a pretty trinket. Bilbo is made invisible by the ring without even realizing it! So clearly it isn't just the bearer projecting their own feelings into the Ring. I don't even think there's an ambiguity like how you could interpret Gurthang's speech to Turin as the crazed Turin projecting a personality onto his sword because he can't stand the responsibility for what he has done. The Ring has a will and can take independent action; whether it has an internal monologue or knows what it is, or that it is, is not ultimately relevant because we can see its behavior. At the same time, bearers don't always seem to perceive its influence on them directly: rather they experience a sense that part of them wants to use and keep the Ring, and with long use of the Ring that part of them begins to completely dominate their personalities.
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Aug 3, 2017 02:58
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SHISHKABOB posted:He feels real bad about using Frodo as the ring bearer. He should feel bad, he ditched the ring on Frodo for the better part of twenty years while he knew that it was a ring of power at the very least. He stopped in a couple times to make sure that Frodo hadn't spontaneously degenerated into a light-fearing ghoul, which was nice of him I guess, but even Frodo gives him a little poo poo about it when he finally fesses up.
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Aug 3, 2017 19:08
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Bongo Bill posted:It's "let's you and him fight" backed up by three thousand years of religious dogma. The descendants of the kings of Numenor always seem to be susceptible to foreign prophets. It's a cultural trait, they're descended from primitives whose reaction to meeting loving immortal warlords fighting an suicidal war against a god was "sweet, what can these guys teach us? Also, can we have sex with their women?"
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Aug 4, 2017 12:28
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hannibal posted:They actually discuss this during the meeting in Rivendell - something about throwing it into the ocean. But someone (Gandalf maybe) says no, they have to solve it here for all time, not punt it down the road for future generations, because they know the Ring will find a way to turn up again like it did after it was lost in the Gladden Fields. Glorfindel suggests it, Gandalf shoots him down. It's right after they've floated a bunch of alternative solutions -- giving it to Bombadil (he doesn't care enough about it), sending it to Valinor (the gods wouldn't let you, according to Elrond), or hiding it away in Rivendell or Lorien or the Havens (they aren't strong enough to defy Sauron). Gandalf brings up that the lands and seas may change in the future and the ring be brought to light again, which is a pretty fair point honestly. They also make an argument against trying to send it overseas because that's what Sauron will expect them to do (?) and he will try and seize the Ring on the way to the Havens -- not really clear how since the Nazgul don't seem to be about again yet. Then right after that Boromir wonders why all they can talk about is "hiding and destroying", etc. My point/joke was not that Gandalf had so many better options because he obviously didn't, but that he left Frodo in a desperately risky situation without even letting him know what was going on. Frodo is understandably pretty upset when he figures out what was going on. In "Shadow of the Past", when Gandalf lets on that Bilbo's ring was a Ring of Power, Frodo asks him how long he's known, and if Bilbo knew. Gandalf evades the first question and answers the second, exonerates Bilbo of blame. Frodo asks again how long he has known about the Ring, and Gandalf gets kind of testy with him: quote:‘Known?’ said Gandalf. ‘I have known much that only the Wise know, Frodo. But if you mean “known about this ring”, well, I still do not know, one might say. There is a last test to make. But I no longer doubt my guess. In other words, he has been at least suspicious about the Ring, and felt certain it was a ring of power, for longer than Frodo has been alive. He goes on to explain to Frodo a bit about the history of the Ring, how Sauron lost it, Gollum, etc. Frodo is still kind of worried that Gandalf is jerking him around here: quote:“But how have you learned all this about the Ring, and about Gollum? Do you really know it all, or are you just guessing still?’ Gandalf is feeling a bit needled here. Frodo's overriding concern seems to be whether Gandalf was aware that he was leaving Frodo ignorantly in keeping of a deadly powerful magical artifact that destroys its owner, or whether he was himself negligent and ignorant about a deadly powerful magical artifact. It seems that there's a bit of both, which doesn't exactly reassure Frodo. Later in their conversation Gandalf tries to give a better accounting of his behavior: quote:“All the same,’ said Frodo, ‘even if Bilbo could not kill Gollum, I wish he had not kept the Ring. I wish he had never found it, and that I had not got it! Why did you let me keep it? Why didn’t you make me throw it away, or destroy it?’ This still doesn't console Frodo very much. He doesn't blame Gandalf for anything because the situation is obviously not Gandalf's fault, and because without him he would still be completely clueless, and because going forward Gandalf's advice is really all he has to go on. But in the course of the conversation it's clear he feels kind of hard done by.
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Aug 4, 2017 21:14
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SHISHKABOB posted:How long did it take them to get back to running around Before that Legolas shoots one of their beasts over the eastern bank of Anduin at Sarn Gebir (23 February). Frodo crosses Bruinen on 20 October so it's four months at most. When they're still at Rivendell (Nov/Dec) Elrond sends out scouts including his sons to check for any sign of the Nazgul; they find their horses drowned downstream of the ford and Gandalf concludes that they have fled back to Mordor and that, if they leave now, the Riders will need to track back to Rivendell before they can pick up any trail to follow the Fellowship.
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Aug 4, 2017 23:06
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Or just drop it in a loving hole. Worked for one of the Silmarils. Tbh I never understood this bit: okay it's probably hard to get things out of fiery chasms in the earth even if you're a god, but why couldn't Ulmo just fish out the one that got thrown into the sea? The gods weren't obviously resigned to losing the Silmarils before they got thrown down there, they were actively trying to bring them back to Valinor when Maedhros and Maglor stole them, so why did they just let them sit down at the bottom of the world after the fact? Were they just too dispirited to even bother?
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Aug 5, 2017 16:33
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When The Hobbit was first written and not yet coherently linked to the myths of Beleriand & the Noldor, the Arkenstone was basically a repurposed Silmaril, in the same way as the elvenking of Mirkwood was basically a repurposed Thingol (or the Necromancer a repurposed Thu, or Elrond a repurposed Elrond). When rendering myths from this era into Old English Tolkien even rendered "silmaril" as "eorcanstan" so it's pretty obvious.
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Aug 5, 2017 17:13
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Radio! posted:Okay this is actually super cool. Where did you learn that? It's somewhere in the early books of History of Middle Earth, Lays of Beleriand maybe? e: real talk though, the Arkenstone isn't consistent with the Silmarils as Tolkien eventually conceived of them. Probably the most obvious magical power of the Silmarils, that they were enchanted by Varda to burn those who try to possess them undeservingly, is totally incompatible with Bilbo blithely stealing one. skasion fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Aug 5, 2017 |
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Aug 5, 2017 17:43
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It was fragrant wild herb. It isn't clear that the Numenoreans cultivated it.
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Aug 10, 2017 12:01
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You know they'd have wanted it, if they hadn't had it.
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Aug 11, 2017 02:45
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Numenoreans clearly vaped
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Aug 11, 2017 03:43
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PMush Perfect posted:Actual legit question: What kind of livestock do hobbits keep? They must have access to some kind of dairy animal. Goats? Sheep? Can you milk sheep? Of course you can, have you never had like manchego or anything? We know hobbits keep ponies for pack-animals and occasionally riding. Given that they have a nonsense-rhyme about the cow jumping over the moon, I presume they keep cattle, and if cattle then why not any other sort of livestock?
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Aug 13, 2017 16:50
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I can't recall the exact quote but part of the Shirrifs' duties were wrangling and returning strayed farm animals. So they did keep some livestock, but I don't think the species is ever noted. quote:The Shirriffs was the name that the Hobbits gave to their police, or the nearest equivalent that they possessed. They had, of course, no uniforms (such things being quite unknown), only a feather in their caps; and they were in practice rather haywards than policemen, more concerned with the strayings of beasts than of people.
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Aug 13, 2017 17:47
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