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Tolkien 3.0


SeanF

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On 10/24/2019 at 11:49 AM, The Marquis de Leech said:

I re-read The Silmarillon last week, which allowed me to savor the flipping of each character depicted in the article. It's well done, but regarding the result (credible or not?), it depends on if we keep the traditional mevieval society (thus flipping gender leads to non-credible situations) or if we reverse mindsets as well (going into war would be the normal role for a woman, and flipping gender becomes suddenly credible -and somehow less fun).

A have a question for you, the experts :-)

When Morgoth in defeated during the War of Wrath, it is said that his feet are cut. But normally he has already lost one foot during a previous fight with a guy I can't recall his name... So what? Do we have an explanation somewhere in the late notes gathered by Christopher Tolkien?

 

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On 10/10/2019 at 10:54 AM, The hairy bear said:

As SeanF says, it was only the radical elements within the republican side that targeted Catholic priests.

The Republican government was weak, a coalition composed of many parties with diverging interests. The fact that there were anarchists in the government is telling enough. Once the military had rebelled, the government's actual control of the country crumbled, and each zone was in command of a different faction. This was one of the main reasons why the republican side lost the war. While the fascists focused their efforts under a single command, the republicans were a bunch of factions that often fought among them for primacy. In Barcelona, the communists and the anarchists openly engaged in street battles, and once the communists had won, the Stalinists purged the Trotskyst faction and murdered their leaders. All this in the midst of the war and while the enemy armies were advancing.

As to why the most radical groups targeted priests, the Catholic church hierarchy had been a vocal opponent of the Republican government. Not only because they were natural adversaries with the communist and anarchist parties of the government, but also because the government took some controversial anti-Catholic measures (such as forbidding clerics to engage in teaching activities). Once the war started, some Catholic bishops from the fascist-controlled zones openly supported them, with dire consequences for the priests living in areas under Republican control that were seen by some as an hostile group.

I picked up George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.  It's my first foray into literature from the Spanish Civil War.  

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12 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I picked up George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.  It's my first foray into literature from the Spanish Civil War.  

Have to read that one of these days, too. Orwell's experiences in Spain essentially are the foundation and background for both 'Animal Farm' and '1984', and both novels are texts about how Stalism can and did fuck up Leftist revolutions.

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On 10/29/2019 at 7:55 AM, Yet another Arya ! said:

When Morgoth in defeated during the War of Wrath, it is said that his feet are cut. But normally he has already lost one foot during a previous fight with a guy I can't recall his name... So what? Do we have an explanation somewhere in the late notes gathered by Christopher Tolkien?

The line is "his feet were hewn from under him." Which, to my mind, means he was knocked off his feet, not that he had his feet dismembered.

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6 minutes ago, Yet another Arya ! said:

@The Grey Wolf and Blood-sucking Aristocrat: thank you so much! So far I have read only the French version which is awful: Fingolfin severed ("trancha") Morgoth's left foot and the Valars cut both ("trancha les pieds"). We could conclude that Morgoth had three feet... It is definitly time for me to read it in English!

As I only read in English I always wonder what I’m missing when I read translated classics.

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@Ser Scot A Ellison, whatever the original language, we always miss something when it's translated, even if the translator did a great job. I read a lot of books both in French and English, and the original versions (so the English ones) always were the best, because the closest to the author mind (especially if this mind is complex and seeks to describe moments inspired from drugs experiences -see Brave New World!). And some puns are less fun once translated (in Harry Potter for instance).

Even a "simple" book like ASOIAF was more interesting in English. I tried it in French but I gave up at page 24: the translation was really ugly and flat. So I can't imagine what I missed in LOTR and the Silmarillon...

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21 hours ago, Lord Invictus said:

I am very concerned the Amazon show will muck up the Second Age, in fact I am near certain of it.

 

Since we know so little about the show (other than the fact its set during the Second Age, four reported (but not confirmed by Amazon) actors and the creative time behind it, including the director for the first two episodes), I have basically no expectations at present, whether positive or negative. 

We haven't had any indications as to plot, other than leaked audition scripts (which were likely written specifically for the auditions) for four roles with presumably fake place-holder names. Amazon is running a remarkably tight ship.

So, I'm keeping 'mum' about it at the moment - and withholding judgment until we at least get a scintilla of information. 

On the plus side, the writers room is stacked with great talent. On the negative, the showrunners themselves are rookies (the writers, such as Gennifer Hutchison from Breaking Bad, are leagues more experienced than them. Which seems, somehow, topsy-turvy).

It will be hard, I think, to capture Tolkien's unique mytho-poetic style (in the way Jackson/Boyens/Walsh did so well in the LotR movies but so poorly in the Hobbit) without much in the way of extensive source material from him. 

There is good Second Age dialogue in Unfinished Tales and the Akallabeth (which they probably won't have the rights to, I imagine?) but its threadbare compared with even a single chapter of LotR. The largest amount of dialogue is found in Aldarion and Erendis, an unfinished but rather lengthy prose story, which we don't know if they will be using. Most of the placeholder names from the auditions seem to be for Elven characters (at least three of five are seemingly Elves), so that might suggest Eregion and preclude Aldarion's era. Or it might be that these are simply the only auditions that have been leaked. Who knows, all guesswork.

All we know is that a heck of a lot of money is being poured into this. As its set to be their flagship fantasy show, alongside WoT, one has to hope that it will at least look good, visually, apart from anything else.

I'm not sure anything could be worse than the Hobbit trilogy, so the bar has been set pretty low from the ultimate and unattainable high of the original LotR trilogy. It would have to really suck to be as bad as Jackson's The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies.

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To be honest, I am not overly bothered by the dialogue (within reason) - I'm more interested in the characterisation. We're dealing with a story where the TV writers only have very broad strokes to work with, and as such, the resulting characters will, to a large extent, be original creations with a Tolkienian name attached. Basically, fanfiction.

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An interesting interview which looks at the influence on later fantasy writers in England of Tolkien's and Lewis's re-worked curriculum for undergrad English at Oxford; not to mention the colonialist and rather sexist outlook on the part of both Tolkien and Lewis, at least to a degree, which is mentioned here, though in a rather round-about manner.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/12/childrens-fantasy-literature-oxford-school-tolkien-lewis.html

 

Quote

 

Maria Sachiko Cecire: I started out by realizing that a number of children’s fantasy authors who were British citizens had all studied undergraduate English at Oxford. I started to do some digging into what the relationship was between these people, and the curriculum they were studying. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, of course, as many people know, were friends and colleagues, but they were actually working to reform the English curriculum at Oxford, in addition to writing their own fantasy.

They were the architects of this curriculum, which went into effect in 1931. And they really had an enormous role to play in the kinds of questions that were set in examinations, the texts that were required for undergrads to read; then this had this kind of huge knock-on effect in terms of what people were studying for the next nearly 40 years at Oxford. There’s still some vestiges of that curriculum in the Oxford education today. Then the younger authors I was looking at were Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones, and Philip Pullman. They all studied this curriculum and got their degrees between 1956 and 1968.

This curriculum at Oxford was really heavy on medieval literature, just at the moment when most other universities were going in the direction of modernism and the kinds of writing that we now associate with literary fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. At Oxford they were doubling down on medieval literature and also looking at it not just as examples for linguistic analysis—which was how it had been primarily studied in the 19th century under philology—but really looking at it as literature. Really seriously asking students to meditate on both the English medieval past and also this idea of magic and enchantment.

And Tolkien and Lewis had a sense that this kind of literature would be good for students, not just their minds but their morals as young men—I guess I’m assuming they meant young men!

Yes, that’s the word they used—even though English, interestingly, was a field that attracted a lot of female students, and also notably attracted a lot of students from the colonies, because English has a history as a source of cultural capital for people who have been excluded from it. 

But yeah, Tolkien and Lewis wanted their English curriculum to be something that was treated with the same respect as a field like classics, and they saw early English literature as having the same kind of level of difficulty, and the added benefit of having this kind of patriotic function. Tolkien wanted to develop a profound sense of national identity and heritage.

 

 

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FFS.

The curriculum was being put together in the 1930s. At that point, you were much more likely to find imperialist and nationalistic sentiments in 'modern' literature than in the older stuff favoured by Tolkien and Lewis. The literature Tolkien favoured (i.e. anything pre-Chaucer) pre-dated the Empire altogether, and his literary speciality (Beowulf) is not about England at all.

(I'd actually like to know what, exactly, was on this evil curriculum).

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11 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

FFS.

The curriculum was being put together in the 1930s. At that point, you were much more likely to find imperialist and nationalistic sentiments in 'modern' literature than in the older stuff favoured by Tolkien and Lewis. The literature Tolkien favoured (i.e. anything pre-Chaucer) pre-dated the Empire altogether, and his literary speciality (Beowulf) is not about England at all.

(I'd actually like to know what, exactly, was on this evil curriculum).

The interview tells you.

You seem to have missed the points being made re colonialist -- the idea of the curriculum was to teach others what real Englishness is based in, morality and fitting behavior and outlook and all that which is supposedly brought to real English by this romanticized past.

And already in the changing to the modern curriculum in the English departments in the 30"s and 40's one sees some questioning of the assumption that anyone not English wants to learn to be English and looks to literature for the model of how to be.  When one looks one really does see a great deal of push-back -- which also came from the objects of the colonialist outlook.  One really sees it in the literature created by African and African American writer then, as well as those beginning to find their way in the Caribbean and India.

Proletarian literature was also very strong in the 30's, 40's and even 50's, as well as the Nativist literary movements in all these parts of the empire.

Gotta stop thinking only 'white' here when it comes to writers of the era, yah?

 

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