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Speaking A Friend and Enter for the End of the World
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Dec 21, 2019 20:43
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Imagined posted:I was wondering what Tolkien actually imagined orcs looking like, because there are many passages where he describes people as looking almost like orcs, or being mistaken for orcs, etc. Even Treebeard thinks Merry and Pippin are little orcs until he hears their voices. Made me think that Tolkien was not imagining beings much different from ugly (foreign looking) people, not the slimy green monsters of Warhammer/Peter Jackson. ...they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types Letter 210 Not the professor's finest hour.
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Feb 17, 2020 17:54
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Tree Bucket posted:The Inklings was just an endless cycle of Lewis trolling Tolkien with overly-specific allegories, and Tolkien trolling Lewis with cruel remarks about not being able to come up with a five thousand year long backstory for his made-up character names. IIRC Tolkien also got salty about the fact that Lewis populated his world with monsters from all sorts of different mythologies willy-nilly. Like, "the lion is Jesus" was bad enough, but putting fauns and dwarves in the same world? *Pops monocle in Quenya*
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Feb 19, 2020 09:33
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skasion posted:This. They could have thrown it over Sauron’s defenses Y'all are thinking in the wrong direction. Dig a 300-mile tunnel from the walls of Minas Tirith straight to the roots of Mount Doom and come up from the bottom. Better yet, dig three tunnels to be safe, just in case the Uruk-hai find one. Maybe give them code names, too--Tom, Bert, and Bill, maybe. In fact, you might want to consult Treebeard and his folk, since they have much deep knowledge of roots digging deep in the earth. Sauron will never expect The Great Entscape
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May 5, 2020 15:07
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Pham Nuwen posted:He is good, although I think he just dives into the songs with no preparation and it gives me serious fremdschämen. I salute his enormous balls for recording these songs completely unaccompanied, though. He definitely did! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyse_kLOc-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haSiiaA5PgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mprH_47QvSM (This is the best one IMHO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zia4sWMQIgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oIjC-qHZ4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDDNHoJZA-0 (This is a close second) There are a bunch more on that YouTube channel, and they're all pretty fantastic. EDIT: How could I leave out Tolkien reading the Song of Beren and Luthien? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i917V3R76Uo EDIT2: Okay dammit, one more, Here's Tolkien actually singing Namárië. I'd heard recordings of him reciting it before, but never actually singing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHw6RQWDSTw GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 15:47 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 15:38
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Data Graham posted:I love how hastily he reads the Ent song It wasn't until I heard him read it that I realized just how much it really does have the cadence of a military march.
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May 27, 2020 16:15
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Data Graham posted:Well I'm talking about the text, particularly the bit between Bilbo and Lindir — Not only that, but doing all this with a poem whose subject is literally Elrond's dad.
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May 27, 2020 18:56
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ChubbyChecker posted:It's interesting how Tolkien's classism shows through: And honestly, unless those were loving huge sacks of potatoes, that's... not a lot. I've accidentally grown sackfuls of potatoes just by chucking a couple of sprouted ones into the dirt.
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May 28, 2020 13:52
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Also there are... not a ton, but a decent number of lesser Rings kicking around, IIRC it wasn't until he interrogated Gollum and saw the life-extending effects of the Ring that he began to suspect it was a Great Ring. (Or maybe it wasn't the longevity, I forget now, but there was definitely something that made him upgrade his assessment from "probably some elven princeling's Master's thesis, not worth worrying about much" to "um... poo poo."
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May 28, 2020 15:15
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Falathrim posted:All Elves are capable of "telepathic" communication (ósanwe). It is, however, much more difficult than verbal communication, which is why they developed spoken language in the first place. The one legit delightful scene I will defend to the death in the Hobbit movies is the White Council scene where Saruman is ranting about the peril of the Necromancer or some such and Gandalf and Galadriel completely tune him out to telepathically flirt with each other. Seriously, they literally duck the volume on Christopher Lee's monologue down to a barely-inaudible murmur in the background while G & G have a little telepathic meet-cute, it is delightful.
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May 29, 2020 15:58
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Tree Bucket posted:Do Balrogs have gender? Well you see, on page 197 Tolkien describes them as man-like, clearly implying a purely metaphorical gender, but on page 210...
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Jun 10, 2020 09:28
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Tree Bucket posted:YES, this is the kind of lore I'm here for. Off the top of my head, both Japanese and Norse mythology have sun goddesses and moon gods, and there are definitely more. It's not as uncommon as you might think.
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Jun 10, 2020 09:48
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Shibawanko posted:i mean frodo goes to valinor, while the other hobbits had to go back to the shire and hang out with fatty bolger Sam goes to Valinor too, just many decades later.
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Jun 27, 2020 09:35
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Runcible Cat posted:How'd it manage to fall down that teeny hole there in the first place with its wings? Balrogs are flightless birds, like dodos.
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Jul 21, 2020 12:12
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Shibawanko posted:didnt tolkien say something like "i picture a man, large but not gigantic in stature" about what sauron was supposed to look like? i always assumed he was just a big scary dude Yep, in one of his letters: JRR Tolkien, Letter 246 posted:'In any case a confrontation of Frodo and Sauron would soon have taken place, if the Ring was intact. Its result was inevitable. Frodo would have been utterly overthrown: crushed to dust, or preserved in torment as a gibbering slave. Sauron would not have feared the Ring! It was his own and under his will. Even from afar he had an effect upon it, to make it work for its return to himself. In his actual presence none but very few of equal stature could have hoped to withhold it from him. Of 'mortals' no one, not even Aragorn. In the contest with the Palantír Aragorn was the rightful owner. Also the contest took place at a distance, and in a tale which allows the incarnation of great spirits in a physical and destructible form their power must be far greater when actually physically present. Sauron should be thought of as very terrible. The form that he took was that of a man of more than human stature, but not gigantic. In his earlier incarnation he was able to veil his power (as Gandalf did) and could appear as a commanding figure of great strength of body and supremely royal demeanour and countenance. There's also this quote from another letter, on the general topic of Sauron's corporeality: JRR Tolkien, Letter 200 posted:It is mythologically supposed that when this shape was 'real', that is a physical actuality in the physical world and not a vision transferred from mind to mind, it took some time to build up. It was then destructible like other physical organisms. ... After the battle with Gilgalad and Elendil, Sauron took a long while to re-build, longer than he had done after the Downfall of Numenor (I suppose because each building-up used up some of the inherent energy of the spirit...) The Silmarillion is also pretty clear that, by the time he was driven out of Dol Guldur around the time of The Hobbit, Sauron had indeed reformed himself: "The Silmarillion, Of The Rings of Power and the Third Age posted:For coming out of the wastes of the East he (Sauron) took up his abode in the south of the forest, and slowly he grew & took shape again. That last is Gandalf speaking to Elrond after returning from Dol Guldur. And given that the term used for Sauron's defeat at Dol Guldur is pretty much always "driven out" rather than "vanquished" or "destroyed," I don't think we can take it as read that Gandalf, Saruman, et al destroyed his corporeal form in the time between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and in any event the quote from Letter 246 is pretty clearly saying Sauron had a physical form when Aragorn challenged him in the palantír.
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Sep 8, 2020 11:07
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Shibawanko posted:in the game battle for middle earth 2 you have a builder unit for the elves whos just an elf with a wheelbarrow Is that what you'd call a barrow white?
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Sep 9, 2020 14:33
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Alhazred posted:One stuntmann accidentaly chopped off Viggo's hand, but he just tied it back on and continued the shoot. The actual reason Viggo replaced Stuart Townsend as Aragorn? Killed by orcs on the first day of shooting.
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Sep 24, 2020 08:13
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System Metternich posted:Reading Tolkien in the original has definitely opened up a register of English to me (a non-native speaker) that I hadn't been exposed to at all previously and I believe that my knowledge and understanding of the language have been strongly enriched by it. It helped me a lot when I moved to Sweden and started trying to learn Swedish, funnily enough. A lot of Tolkien's archaic English grammar and vocabulary derives from a time when English was much closer structurally to the other Germanic languages. So while a lot of my fellow American expats were struggling with Swedish sentence structure, I was like "oh, you just talk like Theoden, no problem, got it."
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Dec 9, 2020 19:58
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skasion posted:I mean, I love Bakshi’s movie for what it is, but no way would it have been better than John Boorman filming a scene where they bury Gimli alive and beat him My personal favorite  moment in that script is when Merry uses the magic of Lembas to fantasize about performing oral sex on Galadriel.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:06
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Gats Akimbo posted:The bit where they're leaving Bag End and Frodo overhears the Gaffer talking to a Rider always amuses me. The dread Nazgul, a king of Men, accursed and doomed by a Ring of Power given by a fallen angel, asking for a hobbit's forwarding address and being told to mind his own business. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=watch?Cr-wOQSUWQk
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Feb 10, 2021 09:42
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I, for one, am still wondering who among the Fellowship had a comb on them. Given how "iron age Germanic" the overall culture of Middle-earth is, and how important good hair and beard grooming was in those cultures, I'm sure most of the Fellowship carried one. At the bare minimum Boromir, being an aristocrat, almost certainly had a grooming kit in his baggage.
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Mar 2, 2021 09:09
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ChubbyChecker posted:sam and gandalf were the only non-aristos in the group You are, of course, correct--I was discounting the Hobbits because they're very much an exception to the "Germanic Iron Age" cultural motifs I was talking about (being more 19th-century English country gentlemen), Aragorn because kind of his whole thing is hiding his aristocracy until it's time to reveal himself and otherwise looking like a scruffy hobo, and Legolas because he's a goddamn Elf and clearly needs no grooming products to look fabulous at all times. But I should amend that statement to "bare minimum Boromir and Gimli probably had grooming kits in their baggage."
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Mar 2, 2021 11:42
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Can't look like a king without fabulous hair. May not have had a comb, but had something that could work as one in a pinch. Aragorn strikes me as the kind of dude who never packs his own toiletries and just uses the disposable courtesy combs from the concierge of the Sheraton Caras Galadhon, TBH.
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Mar 2, 2021 13:05
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Arcsquad12 posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M8Ks0xiaxM I love listening to Tolkien read any of his work, but this one is probably my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mprH_47QvSM That said, drat he plows through some of those sentences at speed, I have to imagine being in one of his lectures required 100% constant attention.
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Mar 24, 2021 14:06
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I'm the note scribbled in the margin that says "There should not be supposed more than say 3 or at most 7 sweet geek swags ever existed.'
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Apr 3, 2021 19:05
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ChubbyChecker posted:i thought that catholics believed that the fair browed philosophers were freed in the harrowing of hell IIRC that was just the Biblical patriarchs, yeah.
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Apr 11, 2021 12:10
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Okay, I know the "let's post YouTube videos of Tolkien reading his own work" was a few pages back but I was just looking at the image of the record sleeve in this video and damned if it isn't the most adorable story: George Sayer had borrowed the only typescript of the Lord of the Rings in 1952, when Tolkien was struggling to find a publisher and was generally very depressed about its prospects and despairing over whether it was in fact any good. Sayer asked when Tolkien would be at home so he could return it, since you do not trust the only extant copy of your friend's magnum opus to the Royal Mail, to which Tolkien replied that he would be on his own "and perhaps even rather lonely" that August--so Sayer invited him out to his home in Malvern for a little vacation. While Tolkien was there, Sayer brought out an early personal tape recorder--which Tolkien had apparently never seen such a thing before--and Tolkien promptly decided, jokingly, to exorcise the thing by reciting the Lord's Prayer in Gothic at it. Apparently delighted to hear it played back, Tolkien asked if he could record some snippets from Rings to hear how they sounded to other people. Hearing his own work played back for him actually restored Tolkien's confidence in the quality of the work, and at Sayer's suggestion he decided to give publishing one last try by sending the book to an old student of his who happened to now work in publishing. That student was Rayner Unwin, and the rest is history. 
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Apr 12, 2021 15:10
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CommonShore posted:
It's Brittonic, but I'm not sure the exact translation--a quick google turns up mostly a bunch of "baby name meaning" websites which... I doubt their etymological research. Tolkien Gateway says it means "Great Lord," but a couple of the other unsourced sites gave translations "head of the sea" or... "Sea Brow." I think we all know which one is correct. (Really, though, in Merry's case, Tolkien just wanted a name that sounded appropriately Hobbitish but could be shortened to a nickname suggesting his cheerful, happy-go-lucky demeanor.)
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Apr 14, 2021 16:07
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I heard this on an etymology podcast in the last day or two: it's basically "crosses" + "acres" and it's closely cognate with "Pilgrim."
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Gats Akimbo posted:It certainly seems to be picking up that there's something powerful coming through; whether that's "Maia hidden in meat casing" or "Maia power forged into artefact" or both is probably up for argument. We know Gandalf passed through Moria prior to Fellowship, but I don't remember if a particular date was ever established for that journey--I want to say maybe it was during the hunt for Gollum? In any event, the context strongly implies that it was after Durin's Bane was wakened and that Gandalf didn't face it then, so I think it's safe to assume it was probably drawn to the Ring.
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May 10, 2021 13:38
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Trin Tragula posted:From the start of A Journey in the Dark, after they retreat from Caradhras. Thanks for the cite--I was 99% sure it wasn't some weird edge case where Gandalf went to Moria in like the 16th century and hung out with the Dwarves, but I couldn't remember the exact reference and wikis were failing me.
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May 10, 2021 17:05
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Runcible Cat posted:He may just have made himself extra toasty for battle; he doesn't seem to have burned through chairs and whatnot in Numenor. But yeah. And it's extra odd because he has non-fire-related aspects too - Lord of Werewolves and the whole necromancy thing. He was also a Maia of Aulë the Smith before his fall, and Smith > Forges > Fiery Heat is a pretty straight symbolic path.
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Aug 31, 2021 19:41
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CommonShore posted:Weirdly enough I have trouble reading that specific coding as racial (not denying that it is a racial coding - just noting my response). For some reason I always read "squint-eyed" there as a facial expression/attitude and not as a characteristic of the man's eye shape, evocative of perhaps an old, sun-burned farmer who is always looking side-eyed at everyone who gets to close to his corn. I.e. that the man is a southerner, and his particular expression is "squint-eyed." Phrases relating to squinting or squinty eyes have been slurs directed at Asian people for a long time, and it's extra worth noting that Tolkien often uses "squinty eyes" as a hint that a character has some Orc blood (in faqct, IIRC when Sam learns about rumors of half-Orcs being a thing, he immediately thinks of this very same Southerner as possibly being one), and in his Letters Tolkien explicitly likened his image of Orcs to the "least lovely (to European eyes) Mongol types."
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Oct 14, 2021 15:34
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 10:40 |
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Christopher Tolkien had this to say about the topic:Christopher Tolkien posted:Just what my father meant to convey by the 'squint-eyed Southerner' at Bree I'm not sure. I don't think that he can possibly have meant that the man had 'slit-eyes' (goblin-like). He may have meant that he actually had a squint (optical disorder), but that seems unnecessarily particular. So the likeliest meaning, I think, is that the man didn't look straight, but obliquely, watchfully, sideways, suggesting craftiness and crookedness. It's not clear to me whether Chris is using "slit-eyes" here in a very unfortunate description of eyes with epicanthic folds or if he's implying that goblins had slitted pupils like, say, a cat--either way, I'm not sure I agree with his assessment that his father wasn't trying to connect the Southerner to Orcs, given that he explicitly does so elsewhere in the text.
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Oct 14, 2021 15:42
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