#first time reading lotr

[green-character]

So yesterday as I was peacefully reading before sleep ( LOTR : two towers, a 1st time read for me ) I had to stop mid chapter, switch on my phone and tweet ( actually I posted on bluesky ) what I was reading because... WHAT DO YOU MEAN I READ SAMWISE BEING AWFULLY IN LOVE WITH FRODO, from his own pov, BRO IS DOWN BAD FR

I wish I had the orignal version because I want to know how Tolkien wrote that scene ( I read it in french ) basically it went like this : Sam watching frodo sleep, Sam describing frodo, Sam saying he's beautiful, Sam saying there's a light kindoff emanating from frodo, Sam saying it's strange that we can see the light, but he do love him, no master what ( not sure this is the ring translation from the translation im reading )

I did not recover from this, the love was so blatant

Attached the part where he's saying he love him

[margyymargarett]

It’s time!

[cottagecorefroggyfairy]

Got to the point where the Hobbits reached Rivendell and I feel so stupid cuz i've never realised that Galadriel was like Arwen grandma fuck my life

[minacoleta]

Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king’s head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. ‘Look, Sam!’ he cried, startled into speech. ‘Look! The king has got a crown again!’

[marzipanladyart]

fluffy Gigolas inspired by @perplexingly's ART AHHHHHH

[vampiresinthedaylight]

some bits from the books I really like... I think they move each other <3

[chechula]

I did not have time to draw creatures for last goblin week, but I have time now. So, here are orcs of Moria and drums in the darkness ♥

[phantasymistart]

some first attempts at drawing lotr characters

[youdontknowhowtodiequietly]

fucking hilarious that it was bilbo that made up that rhyme about aragorn. like, in the movies its made to believe it's some long fore-told prophecy about aragorn but it was just bilbo's admiration of his friend

[vorbarrsultana]

unfortunately you can't convince me that t//rop gil-galad is a good adaptation of tolkien's gil-galad. he wasn't a politician with no qualms about concealing important information from his subjects and allies. he was a warrior king who grew up during the most devastating war middle-earth has ever seen. he was the elven ideal of knightly valour, the second verse of a lay about him has a description of his lance, and sword, and silver shield with countless stars of heaven's field. he was called gil-galad, the star of radiance, because of the starlight caught in his silver hair and it's bright reflection in his eyes. he was also called ereinion, the scion of kings, and artanaro, the noble flame, and finellach, the last spark of finwë's line on mortal shores. he was courageous, and wise, and unflinchingly honest with friends and enemies alike. he was the one who found out about the evil stirring beyond the sea of rhûn & warned the númenoreans about sauron's growing might more than 300 years before annatar even came to eriador, and had foresight to prepare for war in time of false peace.

tv series gil-galad is not fiery enough, not brave enough, not wise enough, not noble enough, simply not enough to be a good adaptation of the book character. and he wears the ugliest shade of gold for some reason, when his signature color is silver

[greenerteacups]

What do you think of jkr as a writer? I for one has always felt like she didn’t treat her female characters well. It felt strange, being critical of her when she was god queen of the earth, and also being 10

I think most of the problems in her books can be chalked up to genre hopping. Books 1-3 are perfectly good and serviceable children's books — great children's books, even! They have compelling, relatable characters and juicy mystery plots. They have problems, sure, but for the first three books someone's ever written — especially someone with little or no background in creative writing — they're really fucking good. So: there's her flowers.

The last four books pivot sharply into much more emotionally complicated and sociopolitically loaded territory, because they're describing a war. And it's hard to write children's books about war. I would venture you can't really do it, at least without dramatically misrepresenting what war is! And so Rowling makes the executive decision somewhere during the writing of Book 4 that she's not going to flinch away from that, she's going to go for dramatic realism, and she kills Cedric Diggory to let us know. People had died in Harry Potter before, of course — Quirrell gets sent to the fucking shadow realm, for example. But children haven't. (It also gives parents who are reading these books with their children a warning shot: shit is about to get significantly more real, think twice before you buy the next one of these for your 10-year-old.) After that, Rowling starts leaning much more into dramatic realism, and the fast-paced mystery-novel plotting of the first few books is replaced by a slow, simmering political conflict that unfurls over the course of about a million words.

The problem — besides the fact that she's picking one of the hardest things to write about, like, in all of literature, war is really insanely complicated and emotionally intense and hard to portray well — is that she's now trying to use characters, plot points, and technologies she developed for a children's series to enact a sprawling war drama among teenagers and adults. So Hermione, who was a reasonably precocious snobby eleven-year-old, becomes this sort of encyclopedic all-knowing savant of the wizarding world, who somehow remains functional and mostly even-headed despite her identity being the chief target of a prolifically murderous terrorist group. Draco Malfoy, a schoolyard bully whose primary tools included 1. namecalling and 2. telling teacher, JOINS said terrorist group (and admittedly does react reasonably, i.e., has a total crashout and takes to sobbing in a girls' bathroom whenever he gets a free minute). Dumbledore, who starts out as "whimsical friendly winky-wink trustworthy grandfather type", ends up being Magical Winston Churchill in a violent game of spycraft and espionage, eventually revealing he's only been keeping Harry at all these seven years because he wants to KILL him! And like, maybe really good technical writing could smooth out these transitions and make the first-order dramatic choices seem more natural, but Rowling is like, a Fine Writer, technically speaking. meaning she's reasonably consistent in characterization, her plotting is well-paced and believable, she has a clear authorial voice, and her prose is readable. personally, that's not enough to get me to buy into some of the changes that happen in the later books, and because she stuffs these things so full with new elements every installment, a lot of stuff ends up getting glossed over.

And like, I still love the books. I think they're wonderful, and they taught me how to read. but i can say that and also say that Rowling probably did herself a disservice by trying to write four giant war novels as sequels to her first three mystery children's books.

[gramnel]

[butadailovehim]

reading lotr books and aragorn and legolas have such work besties energy you know? those bffs that go everywhere together, do everything together and you can treat them as a One Unit because telling something to the bestie no.1 equals to telling it to bestie no.2. im not kidding, no one can look galadriel in the eyes EXCEPT aragorn and legolas. okaayy WE WILL let the dwarf in but aragorn and legolas YOU'RE responsible for it. watch it in case it's gonna steal something or axes someone. like they get stuck on a project together because everybody knows they would do it together anyway.

[rookamell]

I've been seeing a lot of criticism of lotr on booktok by various people and I would just like to say I don't want to hear it. Are there problems with the books? Sure. Is Tolkien's writing a little flowery? Sure. Is it a little slow at the beginning? Sure. Is it a little complicated and hard to connect with the characters on the first read? Maybe that's a problem people can have, I can see it. Is the worldbuilding very intense and perhaps overwhelming? Could be, especially if you're going into it with expectations from the movies. Do I want to hear any of this? Absolutely not. I don't care. I love the characters I love the world I love the plot I love the women I love the elves I love the hobbits I love the heart it has I love what it is trying to say I love that a man came out of the trenches of ww1 which most people agree was hell on earth and lost friends and wrote a story about love and friendship and kindness being the most important things in the entire world and how you don't have to be perfect to make a difference you can just try your very best and ask for help I love that up until recently it was (and by most still is) considered the best fantasy book ever written because it is!!!!!!

[foxbloggr]

fireworks will serve as stars at the end of this day

[the---hermit]

Currently rereading lotr and i had completly forgot that on my parent's copy of the book from the 80s they translated trolls as "vagabonds". what the fuck.