Tolkien 4.0 (A dark and hungry sea lion arises)

[The Marquis de Leech]

I must say, if that star is Eärendil, he's really wanting to get away from his wife this time...

Anyway, I can report another look at in-universe text authorship. This time trying to make sense of the mess that is The Grey Annals (HOME XI), one of the foundational pillars of the published Silmarillion:

Sourcing the Sources: Who Wrote the Grey Annals?

[The Marquis de Leech]

2 hours ago, Crazy Old Guy said:

I'm going to read The Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings for the first time.

Suggestions?

Best of luck. The Hobbit is a quick, easy read. The Lord of the Rings starts in a similar vein, but gets heavier as time goes on. I'm guessing you've seen the films, so you might notice various discrepancies.

Then have a go at the Lord of the Rings appendices. That will be a key source for the upcoming Amazon series, while also being a good test of whether you want to try The Silmarillion at some point.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Crazy Old Guy said:

Do the "appendices" come with most versions of the book?

They’re fully half of the text of Return of the King.  I’ve never seen an edition without the appendices.

Edited April 8, 2022 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[dog-days]

The optimal way to read Lord of the Rings for the first time is as three dog-eared paperbacks (Unwin, 1981) with dodgy spines which you borrowed from your parents' bookshelves. You have to interrupt The Two Towers periodically to put the pages back in the right order after they've fallen out. 

But since optimal conditions aren't always possible, digital editions would at least spare the wrists. Hope you enjoy them! 

Edited April 8, 2022 by dog-days

[polishgenius]

On 4/8/2022 at 7:33 PM, dog-days said:

The optimal way to read Lord of the Rings for the first time is as three dog-eared paperbacks (Unwin, 1981) with dodgy spines which you borrowed from your parents' bookshelves. You have to interrupt The Two Towers periodically to put the pages back in the right order after they've fallen out. 

 

lol that is literally my experience. 

[Rhom]

On 4/9/2022 at 2:30 PM, polishgenius said:

 

lol that is literally my experience. 

Pretty close to mine as well!  I was reading TTT on a family trip to Washington DC in 1991 and I left it in the hot car while at the zoo.  The glue melted and multiple sections of the book fell out.

[The Marquis de Leech]

A look at character suicide in Tolkien

[SpaceChampion]

 

[Zorral]

Tom Shippey reviews The Dragon in the West: From Ancient Myth to Modern Legend by Daniel Ogden for the LRB.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n11/tom-shippey/don-t-lie-on-your-gold

Quote

 

.... In the Middle Ages the dragon underwent a transformation. One influence was the ketos, or sea monster, like the one Poseidon sends to devour Andromeda. The other was biblical, taking in Satan, Leviathan and the seven-headed beast of Revelation. Satan seems to have made dragons a bit more humanoid, leading to the figure of the wyvern: serpentine, but with two legs and two wings. The image was still far from uniform. Some of Ogden’s illustrations from the period show coils and wings. One dragon has wings but only two legs; another has a straight body, four legs and four wings. His analysis of some seventy images of St Margaret of Antioch produced between 900 and 1500 shows that her dragon-enemies remained two-legged until the late 14th century, when the four-legged version appeared; it soon became dominant. There was further uncertainty about where to put the wings: on the neck, for instance?

It’s at this point that Ogden’s survey approach starts to get out of hand. Dragons abound in medieval lives of the saints, and Ogden catalogues some two hundred ‘hagiographical dragon fights’ (he expresses his regret that so many more remain uncatalogued and unpublished). Hagiographers made a number of claims: that dragons control or poison springs; that their victims are revived by prayer and the power of the saint. In some accounts they threaten to ravish virgins rather than just eat them (Umiliana dei Cerchi tied her legs together for safety); elsewhere they are subdued by force or virtue. But the authors were more interested in saints than in dragons, which remained rather indistinct.

The hagiographical tradition did, however, popularise two enduring tropes. One is the dragon’s taste for the flesh of virgins. The other is the image of St George as a knight on a rearing horse, trampling a dragon and spearing it with his lance. In the Miracula Sancti Georgii, a twelfth-century Latin version of a lost Greek text, George finds a maiden tied up as a sacrifice for a dragon; he defeats the dragon, tames it and leashes it with the maiden’s girdle before executing it in public with a sword (rather unsportingly). Images of him riding the dragon down, however, date from as early as 850, probably influenced by late-antique images of Bellerophon riding Pegasus to slay the Chimaera.

The most important development in Ogden’s account of the Middle Ages, however, is the emergence of the ‘Germanic dragon’, as seen in the final part of Beowulf, and the story of Fáfnir in The Elder Edda (later incorporated into the Nibelung legend). The roots of the Germanic concept were probably not very different from those of the Greco-Roman. The word in Old Norse is dreki, most likely borrowed from Latin draco, but ormr (‘worm’ or ‘snake’) is also used. The Miðgarðsormr, or Midgard Serpent, so long that it coils around the world, is not recorded as being winged, and Fáfnir is crawling down to the water when Sigurd stabs him from below. Nevertheless dragons were associated with flight in the Germanic tradition. In the Old English Finnsburg Fragment, a watchman who sees a bright light is told that it’s not fire ‘nor a dragon flying’.

When Germanic dragons aren’t flying, they lie on their gold. The Old English poem Maxims II puts it concisely: ‘dragon must be in mound, old, proud of treasures,’ and that’s what the Beowulf dragon was doing until disturbed and robbed. The connection with mounds and treasures is unsettling, because both are closely associated with the dead. Are dragons in fact men transformed by the gold with which they’ve been buried? Two Old Norse sagas of times past insist that men can turn into flugdrekar, ‘flying dragons’, in the caves where they keep their gold, and when in his own saga Gold-Thorir succeeds in robbing them, ‘he becomes a dragon himself and lies down on his treasure chests’. This idea was taken up by C.S. Lewis in the third of his Narnia novels, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which eleven-year-old Eustace turns into a dragon under the influence not only of the dragon’s gold, but also his own dragonish and miserly thoughts. The Saga of the Jomsvikings likewise claims that Broad-Búi, the hero defeated in battle at Hjörungavágr, tucked a treasure chest under each arm and jumped overboard, after which he was believed to have ‘turned into a worm [ormr] and lay on his gold’. Lying on your gold is dangerous, as Tolkien understood. His poem ‘The Hoard’ follows successive owners from elf to dwarf to dragon to young warrior to old miser, all poisoned by their greed. In The Hobbit he calls avarice ‘dragon-sickness’: you catch it from the gold itself. ....

 

 

[dog-days]

Thanks for the extract, Zorral. 

A George-and-the-dragon reference makes it as good a time as any to link to Not My Best Side by UA Fanthorpe. 

[Zorral]

9 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Thanks for the extract, Zorral. 

A George-and-the-dragon reference makes it as good a time as any to link to Not My Best Side by UA Fanthorpe. 

[Werthead]

I'm starting to think the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. Just repackage Unfinished Tales if you're going to start doing stuff like this.

 

[Proudfeet]

Maybe they're just selling Alan Lee's art?

Speaking of which, I haven't started on my copy of Beren and Luthien. Not sure if I ever bought Fall of Gondolin.

[Calibandar]

Unless there is new material somehow, it just seems this has been covered in the Silmarillion's Akallabeth.

There's some more stuff in UT but I doubt the timeline listed there is suddenly going to be published as a narrative.

[Valandil]

I'll still buy it though. I'm a sucker for Tolkien based Alan Lee cover hardback. It's a condition.

[Werthead]

20 hours ago, Calibandar said:

Unless there is new material somehow, it just seems this has been covered in the Silmarillion's Akallabeth.

There's some more stuff in UT but I doubt the timeline listed there is suddenly going to be published as a narrative.

It's 350 pages long and the Akallabeth is not (it's about 30), so they have to be bringing in other material as well.

UT has "A Description of the Island of Numenor," "Aldarion and Erendis", "The Line of Elros: Kings of Numenor" and "The History of Celeborn and Galadriel" (which also goes back to the First Age and forwards to the Third but is mainly focused on the Second). If you combined all of those with Akallabeth and the Second Age material in the LotR appendices, you might get to 350-400 pages.

The description does say it's a narrative history, though, which makes me wonder if this is more Sibley creating his own narrative history out of those source materials and not reprinting them verbatim. Which is fine up to a point, but then I think this should have been marketed and presented like his earlier "guide to" books for the LotR movie trilogy and the Hobbit movies, not as part of the HarperCollins "JRR Tolkien" collection, which implies the books are all Tolkien-originated material, with just editorials and commentary by other people.

[Calibandar]

Some more info from Brian Sibley about Fall of Numenor, which is looking more interesting now.

Quote

 

And there was more confirmation that this is a single narrative, so youre looking at a Children of Hurin style book.

Interesting that he does not mention Unfinished Tales in that list as you would expect a fair bit from this book to be pulled from that. Also interesting that content from Letters is used.

[Corvinus85]

Re-reading The Silmarillion after many years. Since Tolkien seems to be attributed so often with being the inspiration of other works, how much is he to blame for the existence of The Flat Earth Society? 

I do wish he had gone with the round world idea instead of listening to his editor (or publisher) and focusing on the flat world idea. Some of it is difficult to digest. 

[One-Winged Balrog]

On 8/16/2022 at 11:57 PM, Corvinus85 said:

Re-reading The Silmarillion after many years. Since Tolkien seems to be attributed so often with being the inspiration of other works, how much is he to blame for the existence of The Flat Earth Society? 

I do wish he had gone with the round world idea instead of listening to his editor (or publisher) and focusing on the flat world idea. Some of it is difficult to digest. 

But Tolkien had clearly stated that the world became round at the end of the Second Age.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 hours ago, One-Winged Balrog said:

But Tolkien had clearly stated that the world became round at the end of the Second Age.

Not the end of the Second Age.  With the destruction of Numenor.  That was more than a century before the end of the second age.