Tolkien 4.0 (A dark and hungry sea lion arises)

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I have a silly question… did the One Ring have to be destroyed in Orodruin… or would any volcano have worked?

[SuperHans]

On 8/20/2022 at 6:06 PM, One-Winged Balrog said:

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

This has always tickled me.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, SuperHans said:

This has always tickled me.

 

No… he didn’t.  The destruction of Numenor was accomplished by the “bending of the world” and removing Valinor from the world except for the “straight way” left for the Elves to return.

[Ser Drewy]

11 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I have a silly question… did the One Ring have to be destroyed in Orodruin… or would any volcano have worked?

Gandalf seems to suggest so:

Quote

‘Your small fire, of course, would not melt even ordinary gold. This Ring has already passed through it unscathed, and even unheated. But there is no smith’s forge in this Shire that could change it at all. Not even the anvils and furnaces of the Dwarves could do that. It has been said that dragon-fire could melt and consume the Rings of Power, but there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough; nor was there ever any dragon, not even Ancalagon the Black, who could have harmed the One Ring, the Ruling Ring, for that was made by Sauron himself. ‘There is only one way: to find the Cracks of Doom in the depths of Orodruin, the Fire-mountain, and cast the Ring in there, wish to destroy it, to put it beyond the grasp of the Enemy for ever.’ 

 

[The Marquis de Leech]

Dwarven forge fires would be hotter than Orodruin. This wasn't a matter of heat, but rather of magic - the One Ring was created there, so it could only be destroyed there.

In other news, I have just finished a re-read of the Finnish Kalevala, and have some thoughts on its role in influencing Tolkien: Kalevala Comments: Tolkien Influences and the Translations. 

[slant]

On 9/16/2022 at 3:36 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I have a silly question… did the One Ring have to be destroyed in Orodruin… or would any volcano have worked?

It has to be Mount Doom, because that is where it was forged. 

[Lord Varys]

Quick question:

Do you guys remember when you first read Tolkien and/or when children you know first read him?

I gave 'The Hobbit' to my eight-year-old niece this week and am kind of wondering when exactly LotR would make sense. She is already devouring bigger books than 'The Hobbit', it is more about the scary parts of the story.

[baxus]

I was in the 7th grade (13 years old). I would've read it earlier but couldn't find a copy. Due to specific economic situation in Serbia (Yugoslavia at the time), publishing was not that active and there were no copies to be bought, so you could only get older editions from a friend or from a library and it was always checked out. It took me half a year or so to finally get it.

[Zorral]

I was a freshman.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I was 10 when I read LotR the first time.    

[A wilding]

11 when I first read LotR (and before I read The Hobbit), But some of it went over my head at the time. I also was already reading widely at that age, including many adult books that I did not always really appreciate at the time.

One of my friends who read it at the same age was terrified by the Eye of Sauron in Galadriel's mirror and abandoned the book at that point. (They did go on to read it all some years later I think.)

[Farerb]

Does anyone plan to get 'The Fall of Númenor: And Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth'?

Will it have new information or just material from previous books?

[LynnS]

1 hour ago, farerb said:

Does anyone plan to get 'The Fall of Númenor: And Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth'?

Will it have new information or just material from previous books?

I just ordered J.R.R. Tolkein's letters.  There seems to be a lot of surprising stuff in them - at least to me that is.

[LynnS]

On 10/13/2022 at 9:41 AM, Lord Varys said:

Quick question:

Do you guys remember when you first read Tolkien and/or when children you know first read him?

I gave 'The Hobbit' to my eight-year-old niece this week and am kind of wondering when exactly LotR would make sense. She is already devouring bigger books than 'The Hobbit', it is more about the scary parts of the story.

I gave my niece The Hobbit when she was ten and she loved it.  I don't think 8 is too young.  I didn't know about LOTR until high school when I read it for the first time.

I wish I could get my nephew interested but so far he's not a reader and struggles a bit.  I ordered Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novel for him for Christmas.  Hopefully this will interest him.  He enjoys Stranger Things so I don't it's out of his range.

Harriet the Spy is a good book for someone her age as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_the_Spy

[Calibandar]

3 hours ago, LynnS said:

I just ordered J.R.R. Tolkein's letters.  There seems to be a lot of surprising stuff in them - at least to me that is.

There are many very interesting nuggets in it. Depending on what interests you, some letters will be full of good stuff, and others not, that was the case for me. But there is quite a bit of lore/background about the books and middle Earth itself, which I really liked.

4 hours ago, farerb said:

Does anyone plan to get 'The Fall of Númenor: And Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth'?

Will it have new information or just material from previous books?

Definitely getting it, the special deluxe edition in fact. I do think it will have some new material in the sense that its one coherent narrative in about 300 pages, which we definitely have not seen yet and which I expect to be quite enlightening.

[HexMachina]

On 10/13/2022 at 2:41 PM, Lord Varys said:

Quick question:

Do you guys remember when you first read Tolkien and/or when children you know first read him?

I gave 'The Hobbit' to my eight-year-old niece this week and am kind of wondering when exactly LotR would make sense. She is already devouring bigger books than 'The Hobbit', it is more about the scary parts of the story.

I believe 11/12 for the LOTR. She will get more out of them if she rereads when she is older but will likely at least enjoy the basic story at that age.

[Jussi]

Three sample spreads from The Fall of Númenor:

 

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/aplus-media-library-service-media/8b6ce1a7-4e0d-4be5-a207-81aba6fc6223.png

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91RmOz6kSRL.jpg

https://edel-images.azureedge.net/ea/LCQ/images/illustrations/original/9780008537838_06_fa81d.JPG

[Le Cygne]

Ah so this is where the Tolkien fans are hanging out. Did anyone get turned on to Tolkien thanks to Led Zeppelin?

Seriously, I don't know if they led me to it or just enhanced the experience. I remember the friends who were reading it were convinced pipe weed was another kind of weed.

When did I first read it, I think maybe 13. I still enjoy The Hobbit, I never thought of it as a kid's story, just as something written more like a fairy tale. Ramble On!

[Farerb]

1 hour ago, Le Cygne said:

When did I first read it, I think maybe 13. I still enjoy The Hobbit, I never thought of it as a kid's story, just as something written more like a fairy tale.

I agree. It feels very much the same as classic stories like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan or Pinocchio.

[Zorral]

The Fall of Númenor by JRR Tolkien review – masterful world-building from the father of fantasy

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/23/the-fall-of-numenor-by-jrr-tolkien-review-masterful-world-building-from-the-father-of-fantasy

Quote

 

.... The book marshals material hitherto scattered through many posthumous publications from 1977’s The Silmarillion onwards. In this, it broadly follows recent editions by Tolkien’s son Christopher, who died in 2020. Editor Brian Sibley made the superb 1981 BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and knows his Tolkien. Ending long before that story of questing hobbits, the Second Age runs from the end of the mythological Silmarillion and the defeat of primal dark lord Morgoth to the epochal but temporary defeat of his successor Sauron. That’s three-and-a-half millennia.

So The Fall of Númenor is not a single story. Mostly it interweaves complex events and motives into what Tolkien called “feigned history”. Immortals such as Sauron and the elf-queen Galadriel crop up throughout, but most of the mortal players rise and return to dust in a page or two. Yet this is a literary strength, because mortality itself is the undertow drawing Númenor slowly but inexorably towards disaster. ....