Tolkien 4.0 (A dark and hungry sea lion arises)

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

58 minutes ago, Ser Drewy said:

The Estate blocks 'JRR Token' cryptocurrency

Good.

[Lord Varys]

Just for the record and in light of my potential status as a 'Tolkien basher' or 'Tolkien hater':

Compared to Robert Jordan JRRT is a giant. And while LotR could have been made better if had made it even bigger, the prose is really great and Tolkien's talent as a storyteller is very much visible even in the quality of many of his early drafts as well as the fact that key passages of LotR were written quickly during key days of productivity.

I do have issues with a lot of things in his works, but, man, he could write!

[Derfel Cadarn]

CS Lewis describing his new book to Tolkein

 

[Zorral]

O that was wonderful!!  O my heart needed that so much on this day when we're all heading out to contract our Omicron infection.  O this made me laugh.  Those girls are magnificent players! Thank you, thank you, thank you so much!

[Derfel Cadarn]

14 hours ago, Zorral said:

O that was wonderful!!  O my heart needed that so much on this day when we're all heading out to contract our Omicron infection.  O this made me laugh.  Those girls are magnificent players! Thank you, thank you, thank you so much!

Thanks

and it’s the one woman (Eleanor Morton) who’s doing both.

[Zorral]

6 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

it’s the one woman (Eleanor Morton) who’s doing both.

Woo!  That shows just how good EM is!  I swear I saw 'Tolkien's pipe!' 

[Calibandar]

Has anyone read Nature of Middle Earth yet, whole or in parts?

[The Marquis de Leech]

1 minute ago, Calibandar said:

Has anyone read Nature of Middle Earth yet, whole or in parts?

I've read the thing (wound up doing an interview with a podcaster about it - not yet released). It's both interesting and immensely frustrating. The contortions that Tolkien went through in order to put everything on a coherent chronological footing are mental - Tolkien was literally pondering making Eol into a Noldo, just to make Maeglin's age fit. There is a sense of sadness that the author was spending his last decade in what amounted to a dead-end of world-building.

On the other hand, the Numenorean material is excellent, and really helps flesh out the island.

[Calibandar]

Any other parts that are worthwhile outside of the Numenorean section? The TOC indicates quite a bit of intriguing stuff in various sections.

[The Marquis de Leech]

11 minutes ago, Calibandar said:

Any other parts that are worthwhile outside of the Numenorean section? The TOC indicates quite a bit of intriguing stuff in various sections.

Essentially, we get a look at what Round World Arda would have meant, so far as the Elvish origin story goes. That is all greatly extended, and that mysterious origin story from The War of the Jewels get built upon. For instance, Ingwe, Finwe, and Elwe are all established as being quite far down the family tree - and both Finwe (Miriel could learn more) and Elwe (moving to Valinor is a temporary idea) have varying motivations.

Then there's the Eastern Orcs, who rejected Sauron's overlordship, and indeed mocked him for his Annatar disguises. And Feanor doing metal-prospecting in Beleriand before getting himself killed. It's really the strange little nuggets like these that make the book interesting.

My biggest criticism is that by trying to make everything so neat and tidy, Tolkien was taking the myth out of his own mythos.

[Calibandar]

Interesting stuff. Gotta start that soon. Its supposedly has the Osanwe Kenta too with some related musings, which I havent read in a long time.

[Ran]

27 minutes ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

My biggest criticism is that by trying to make everything so neat and tidy, Tolkien was taking the myth out of his own mythos.

I think I remember CT expressing something of the same opinion when he wrote about his father trying to make the mythos line up with science for some reason.

[Lord Varys]

14 hours ago, Calibandar said:

Has anyone read Nature of Middle Earth yet, whole or in parts?

I did, you can search for quite a few of my comments on the contents of the book in that thread.

14 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Essentially, we get a look at what Round World Arda would have meant, so far as the Elvish origin story goes. That is all greatly extended, and that mysterious origin story from The War of the Jewels get built upon. For instance, Ingwe, Finwe, and Elwe are all established as being quite far down the family tree - and both Finwe (Miriel could learn more) and Elwe (moving to Valinor is a temporary idea) have varying motivations.

I felt really vindicated that Tolkien couldn't help himself and had to turn Ingwe etc. into direct descendants of the original chieftains - because it was always clear to me that the original chieftains either are Ingwe etc. or their direct descendants. Anything wouldn't fit with Tolkien's concept of kingship.

Also, it is sweet to see how he abandoned the earlier 'the old leaders handed over the rule the Númenórean way' in 'later life' for a rather complex story which had the elders still in charge when the march began and having them stay behind for their own reasons.

His obsession with the life cycle of the Elves - which is actually not part of any of the published material so far - really reads like old age catching up with him and him failing to realize what was important or how things could be resolved more easily.

Say, as I suggested, by adding centuries or millenia to the FA (of the Sun), taking place between Feanor's death and the start of the Siege of Angband and the first appearance of Men in Beleriand.

There is no narrative reason why the FA has to be as short as it is compared to the SA and TA, since the Men who are closely related only show up with Beren, Húrin, and Huor, etc. Then events have to unfold in only a couple of generations, but not before.

In fact, the building of Nargothrond and Gondolin definitely would have been more believable if more centuries had passed.

Not to mention that his whole 'Elves have only children in peace times' could also have worked better if Beleriand had known, say, 1000-2000 years of peace where the younger generations of Elves were born.

13 hours ago, Ran said:

I think I remember CT expressing something of the same opinion when he wrote about his father trying to make the mythos line up with science for some reason.

I think it is pretty clear why he would have done that. This whole thing wasn't 'fantasy literature' to him but something he eventually took very seriously. And he was painstakingly aware how, well, childish a mythology it was at its roots. Not only is it Young Earth Creationism but it has a flat earth as well a mythos about the sun, moon, and stars that no educated person in the 20th century would take seriously.

You can practically see how he may have feared that many of the readers who praised LotR would have ridiculed him for the idea that the sun and the moon are actually big fruits dragged around 'the heavens' by two wagons.

And the way he set up his world and his Elves makes it impossible that the Elven myths are 'false' ... meaning to make sense the cosmology has to be changed.

But of course - what even 'meaning' his mythology had earlier would have been destroyed/changed if he had gone through with the cosmological changes.

And I must say - if you look for any genuine mythological inventions Tolkien may have come up with, then I'd say that his light mythos, especially the role of the Two Trees as sources of the 'original divine light' - with sun and moon only pale and inferior copies or 'descendants' - are that. There he shows his ingenuity and creativity, in no small part also in connection with LotR when you process what exactly the White Tree is and what it means.

There is pretty much no way to save the meaning of the light mythos while changing the cosmology.

Hostetter's idea to use the Fall of Númenor as way to *explain* changes in the cosmology (fruits of trees become proper heavenly bodies) is something I also entertained for a brief time - until I realized that in context it would make absolutely no sense for Eru to do all that when he was actually just destroying Númenor and cutting Aman out of the physical reality of Arda.

Edited January 1, 2022 by Lord Varys

[The Marquis de Leech]

Extending the Siege of Angband would have indeed resolved so many difficulties, and it is truly bizarre that it never occurred to Tolkien that that might have been preferable to, say, Noldorin Eol.

(Oh, and I'd like to take this opportunity to complain that Hostetter's appendices really shouldn't have been appended to an "official" book).

[Ser Drewy]

BBC Archive uploaded a bit of an interview with Tolkien: 

 

[The Marquis de Leech]

Putting Eöl on trial, and acting as his defence lawyer:

Sinda's Advocate: Defending Eol

It's an intellectual exercise, but Dear Eru, I feel dirty afterwards.

[The Grey Wolf Strikes Back]

1 hour ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Putting Eöl on trial, and acting as his defence lawyer:

Sinda's Advocate: Defending Eol

It's an intellectual exercise, but Dear Eru, I feel dirty afterwards.

That sounds like pure torture to me. (Still not as bad as listening to Vogon poetry though.)

[The Marquis de Leech]

The podcast of my review of The Nature of Middle-earth is now out. Unfortunately the audio is pretty terrible at my end:

Reading Tolkien: The Nature of Middle-earth

[One-Winged Balrog]

Was the significance of exact timing in the denouement of The Lord of the Rings plot discussed somewhere? Perhaps by Tolkien himself in letters somewhere?

I'm talking about Frodo and Sam arriving at mount Doom precisely as the Host of the West engaged the army of Sauron in an unwinnable battle.

Were Frodo and Sam to arrive a day later, and Gandalf, Aragon, Éomer, Gimli, Legolas and Peregrin would all be dead. Eagles would also be either dead of dispersed, and assuming the ring still gets destroyed, Frodo and Sam would also perish.

Were Frodo and Sam to arrive a day early, there would be no climactic confrontation at the Black Gate... but assuming the ring gets destroyed, Frodo and Sam would still perish, because the Eagles are nowhere near.

Edited January 11, 2022 by One-Winged Balrog

[A wilding]

The whole of LotR is full of miraculous exact timings. This has been argued as evidence that Iluvatar was quietly managing events in a manner distinctly reminiscent of a Christian god.