Jack Law's Lord of the Rings Thread.

[Murphy]

it was the last book I read as a nipper pre-puberty which created such a potent sense of malevolence, a malevolence with real agency

it offered a world beneath your feet too, so much unseen compared to the mine nearby at Ollerton/Helm’s Deep, from the corrupted intentions of adults to the realities of political power reflecting back the entire world - eg The Troubles - through a framework you could get your head around

Nah.

Leastways I don't find her attractive in the films. I find her annoying. I'd like to dunk her head in the Anduin.

(RS is looking a bit fatigued here)

 

[Mr. Tea]

Definitely a christian undercurrent to the whole thing, what with Gandalf admonishing Frodo for wishing death on Gollum early on.


To me, knowing that Tolkien was a christian and was uncomfortable about the un-christian implications of the orcs, this begs the question—does GOD see all ends in this world? There's certainly a lot of talk of 'this was fated to happen' going on.

I was thinking last night after reading some of LOTR that it's an interesting concept, having the same God as Christians have but you're living on Andromeda 514 or wherever.

You're half-right: the hidden God in the world of the novel is the same God Tolkien believed in and worshipped, but it's not an alien planet. It's meant to be the real world in an unreal or semi-real, or more accurately mythological, past. A past that fades out just as recorded history starts to emerge from prehistory.

 

[Corpsey]

Does he explain what happened to all the e.g. elven buildings?

 

[Corpsey]

 

[Mr. Tea]

Does he explain what happened to all the e.g. elven buildings?

No more than he explained how the continent shown in the map at the back of the book is somehow supposed to have changed to look like Europe in a few thousand years. It's a mythological, not a literal, transition.

 

[sus]

I actually have been struck reading it this time by how moral it all is, that is - concerned with morality.

The idea that it's just a whimsical story about elves and wizards and dragons going whizz bang is very very very wrong.

In Tolkien's letters he talks about how Frodo tricking Gollum at the Forbidden Pool is one of the defining moments, how it leads directly to Shelob's Lair. They're connected, a cause and effect.

 

[sus]

Which is just to emphasize the moral logic, the way that narrative outcomes derive more from moral virtue than, say, a character's strategic cunning

 

[sus]

> Lewis is a hiker, whereas Chesterton is a walker. This is the key difference between the two men. Those readers who are hikers prefer Lewis; those readers who are walkers prefer Chesterton.

> Lewis and his brother Warnie went out for a hike with their good friends, J.R.R. Tolkien and George Sayer. The Lewis brothers liked to walk vigorously, covering lots of ground; Tolkien preferred to amble, stopping every few hundred yards to look at a flower or a tree. The brothers became increasingly frustrated with their lack of progress and increasingly impatient with Tolkien’s dilatory perambulations. They strode off ahead, leaving Tolkien and Sayer to meet them in the pub when they eventually arrived.

> This difference in approach to a country walk is evident in the difference between the respective writing styles of Lewis and Chesterton. Lewis goes from A to B as the crow flies, getting straight to his point and making it with succinct precision. Chesterton wanders off from the designated route, pursuing some secondary thought or path of reasoning; he takes his time, enjoying the walk at a leisurely pace and in no great hurry to reach his destination. Chesterton writes as Tolkien walks, stopping to look at a flower or tree, or to see the trees reflected upside-down in a puddle or pond.

 

[Slothrop]

And here's an example of that oddly whimsical stuff I mentioned before


Do we ultimately find out that Frodo wrote all this? Or is the identity of the 'author' kept a secret?

We find out that Frodo wrote down his and his friends' account of what had happened in a book called something very similar to The Lord of the Rings, but I don't think Tolkein explicitly frames his work as a direct translation of that. And as someone who worked extensively with translations and adaptations of old texts, that's something that he'd probably have been quite deliberate about.

With the whimsical stuff, he obviously wants to contrast the happy, bucolic shire with the big scary world outside, and part of that might be in the way that he writes about it.

 

[Slothrop]

Which is just to emphasize the moral logic, the way that narrative outcomes derive more from moral virtue than, say, a character's strategic cunning

Brett Devereux is a military historian who's written some quite interesting stuff about Tolkien / other fantasy fiction.

He's good here on the contrast between how Peter Jackson views war and how Tolkien sees it:

For Jackson, the siege of Minas Tirith and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is in many ways an alternating contest of tactics, machines and weapon systems. Orcs, towers and catapults against men, walls and different, better catapults. Like a game of rock-paper-scissors, orcs beat Minas Tirith, but the Rohirrim beat orcs and elephants beat the Rohirrim, before Aragorn finally cheats, calls out ‘dynamite’ which (as we all know from being kids) beats everything and wins the game. The army of the dead is simply a superior weapon-system.
[...]
Tolkien’s vision of war is more nuanced, shaped by personal experience. War machines matter, but chiefly as a means of degrading the will of the enemy. The great contest is not between engines or weapons, but between the dread of Mordor and the courage of men. Catapults, towers and rams are merely the means that Mordor uses to deliver its terror.

 

[Corpsey]

I hate the army of the dead in the films

 

[Corpsey]

Wow, just read what the army of the dead do (or more importantly DON'T do) in the books

I suppose Jackson jettisoned the Aragorn mustering the armies of men storyline because he didn't want ROTK to be 6 hours long, but you've got to have Aragorn's hero moment

 

[versh]

 

[Mr. Tea]

@Corpsey

 

[Corpsey]

I've read up to them reaching Bree now. Very slow going indeed.

I was actually quite impressed this time around by the creepiness of the barrows bit, the stone they sit against that's cold in the hot sun which they don't notice.

And YES I HAVE TO SAY IT I found tom bombadil actually tolerable, nay even interesting, this time around. Some of the writing about whatshername is terrible (her dress making noises like the grass in the wind or whatever) but I like how bombdaillest is able to induce psychedelic visionary States merely by talking.

Also that his speech is basically always song, quite a neat trick.

And yes I see the pattern now of head out to explore>peril>rescue>bath, meal, booze, fluffy mattress

The thing I like most is the sense of a deeper history that's only hinted at and often not explained. Like the barrow wights, you get hints of what's going on but it isn't spelled out. (Merry wakes up thinking he's a soldier from a long dead army.)

 

[Corpsey]

Also as suspended said somewhere I think it's quite impressive when tom bombadil is given the ring and starts playing around with it, using it as a cock ring etc.

Does beg the question of why they don't just give him the ring but I'm sure a million Reddit threads have addressed this

 

[versh]

The thing I like most is the sense of a deeper history that's only hinted at and often not explained. Like the barrow wights, you get hints of what's going on but it isn't spelled out. (Merry wakes up thinking he's a soldier from a long dead army.)

I read a comment the other day where someone was moaning about how "world-building" and "lore" has ruined a lot of contemporary genre storytelling because this fixation on explaining everything sucks the life out of any world you might build.

One of the examples given was the weight of history on the characters in the first Star Wars trilogy. You had things like the Clone Wars mentioned in passing and left to your imagination then Hollywood spent the next 40+ years trying to squeeze the juice out of every throwaway line of dialogue.

 

[Corpsey]

Actually, to bring Ulysses up again, it's an effective thing Joyce does of referring to stuff that he doesn't explain, but that the characters know about, which makes large swathes of it incomprehensible without notes, but heightens this sense that this is a huge, unfathomably complicated world that you're only getting a partial insight into

 

[versh]

The benchmark for me in terms of things best left unsaid is Alien. I didn't mind Prometheus, but it didn't need to be made and the mystery of the derelict and the alien and the space jockey was infinitely richer than Ridley and co.'s attempt at explaining it all. You can't compete with the mystery.

 

[woops]

The benchmark for me in terms of things best left unsaid is Alien. I didn't mind Prometheus, but it didn't need to be made and the mystery of the derelict and the alien and the space jockey was infinitely richer than Ridley and co.'s attempt at explaining it all. You can't compete with the mystery.

that's one of the most powerful images in the film i reckon