thinkinginquenya

[thinkinginquenya]

My understanding of Tolkien's writings on fiction is that he's fine with people seeing his works as metaphorical, as long as it is understood that *you* are bringing the metaphor to the table, and he has simply given you the tools to make a metaphor applicable to your own concerns.

J. R. R. Tolkien: no, my books aren't about the war I experienced. It's just a story

J. R. R. Tolkien's works: you cannot go home, war ends entire bloodlines, you are mourning the death of your brother alone, you dug into the earth and permanently scored the land, you cannot explain what you have been through, you cannot go home, "that wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life", leaving the women behind does not save them, the young die first, you cannot go home, the parent will bury their child, you have lost the wives and you will never connect with them again, "how shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?", you are not the same, you cannot go home, you can never go home, your father will only side with those he sees as worthy bloodlines and you cannot change his mind, it is more meaningful Not to kill, sometimes your sacrifice accomplishes nothing, you cannot go home

[thinkinginquenya]

What he actually said was(paraphrasing): "I had no hidden messages in mind when I wrote the book, people are bad at guessing what an author's intentions are, and to those people who keep telling me the story is about the horrors of WWII: I fought in WWI, dummies."

Actual quotes from the foreword of LotR that I was paraphrasing:

"As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none."

"The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted."

"The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron."

"An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous."

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."

J. R. R. Tolkien: no, my books aren't about the war I experienced. It's just a story

J. R. R. Tolkien's works: you cannot go home, war ends entire bloodlines, you are mourning the death of your brother alone, you dug into the earth and permanently scored the land, you cannot explain what you have been through, you cannot go home, "that wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life", leaving the women behind does not save them, the young die first, you cannot go home, the parent will bury their child, you have lost the wives and you will never connect with them again, "how shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?", you are not the same, you cannot go home, you can never go home, your father will only side with those he sees as worthy bloodlines and you cannot change his mind, it is more meaningful Not to kill, sometimes your sacrifice accomplishes nothing, you cannot go home

[thinkinginquenya]

🪶 Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,

Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow!

[thinkinginquenya]

Request drawing: Gollum ♥ Being tortured by Mirkwood elves. Brutal creatures.

[thinkinginquenya]

[thinkinginquenya]

Lord of the Rings was published in the fifties, and largely written in the forties. Tolkien’s opinions on society and morality and technology are at some points genuinely more conservative than what I’m comfortable with. And yet, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that Tolkien actually deconstructs most of the clichéd fantasy tropes he supposedly originates. Some examples.

The long-lost heir is not the hero, he’s a side character who deliberately uses himself as a decoy.

The real hero actually fails in his quest, his goodness and determination and willpower utterly fail in the face of evil, and the world is saved by a series seemingly unrelated good deeds.

The central conflict is not between destroying the world and preserving it. An age of the world will come to an end, and many great and beautiful things will perish, whether the heroes win or lose. The past may have been glorious, but preserving it is impossible, and returning to it is impossible, time has passed and the world has moved on. The king returns, but the elves are gone and magic fades from the very substance of Middle Earth. The goal is not to preserve the status quo, the goal is the chance to rebuild something on the ruins.

Killing the main villain seems to instantly solve the problem, eradicate all enemies and fix the world, except it doesn’t, not wholly, since the scouring of the Shire still has to happen.

Also, the hero gets no real reward, and what he gets, he cannot really enjoy. He is hurt by his ordeal, and never fully recovers.

There is a team of heroes, a classic adventuring party, except the Fellowship is together for less one sixth of the series. The Fellowship is intact from the Council of Elrond to Gandalf’s death, four chapters. The remaining eight are together until Boromir’s death, an additional six chapters. This is nothing compared to LOTR’s length of sixty-one chapters, if I count correctly.

Tolkien is not classic high fantasy. If you actually think about it, there is very little magic. The hobbits’ stealth is not magical, most elven wonders are not unambigously magical, wizards are extremely rare, and even Gandalf hardly uses magic if you compare him to the average DnD wizard. Most magic is indistinguishable from craft, there is no clear difference between a magic armor and a very good armor, between magic bread and very good bread, between magical healing and competent first-aid plus a few kind words.

TLDR: Stop praising recent fantasy for deconstructing Tolkien if they’re “deconstructing” something Tolkien has never actually constructed.

[thinkinginquenya]

[thinkinginquenya]

I think it's more like "Stuff made by Elves is when people go 'I think this should be art nouveau'" and "Stuff made by Dwarves is when people go 'I think this should be art deco'" which is fun, but I actually think Tolkien-inspired Elves would love straight lines and repeating geometric, sharp-angled things too, and you KNOW Tolkien-inspired Dwarves would LOVE carving minutely detailed, lifelike tree and foliage shapes into rockfaces with delicate but deliberate organic lines that feel alive in how deftly they have been carved.

math checks

[thinkinginquenya]

I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

*electric guitar riff*

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

[thinkinginquenya]

i'm a writer irl (can't say who because my agent would rightfully put me into a blender and press the button if i go and out myself as "balrogballs") and honestly the funniest and most humiliating incident of my life was the time my finished manuscript triggered a plagiarism flag with the publisher for two lines of prose in my literary fiction novel...

.... which was word for word similar to a paragraph in a certain explicit work on FFN starring elrond and his batsman from the hobbit films, aka that one elf that looked like he ate panic attacks for breakfast (i forget his name but it's Figwit II) where the lord of imladris bends said twink over his writing desk and gives him the battering ram treatment.

and if you think i had to sit in front of one if the biggest publishing companies in the world and admit that it was, in fact, me who wrote the fic where the lord of imladris bends said twink over his writing desk and gives him the battering ram treatment in order to avoid being wrongly flagged for plagiarism, you would be absolutely correct.

(yes they published the book)

[thinkinginquenya]

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1978) dir. Ralph Bakshi THE LORD OF THE RINGS (2001 - 2003) dir. Peter Jackson

[thinkinginquenya]

To largely agree with and expand upon @ciceronian 's points: There are indeed two tiers of Ainur, though it's important to note that the two tiers are not power tiers, strictly, but tiers of authority, kind of. The Valar + Morgoth start out with greater responsibility and authority over Arda (authority which Morgoth loses through his attempts at total domination, though he remains powerful) and the Maiar start out with less authority over the world, but this doesn't mean that they are necessarily less strong/powerful than any particular Vala at any particular thing.

And that's an important point because this means that Ungoliant could have easily been one of the Maiar despite being apparently powerful enough to be a danger to Morgoth and the Valar. However, it's never explained in the text that she is one of the Maiar gone bad, and some of Tolkien's draughts indicate that she was originally going to have been a malevolent spirit unrelated to the Ainur, so there's some wiggle room as to what she is. (I tend to think the simplest explanation is that she is Maia because she does have power over things in the world, which contrasts with me thinking that Tom Bombadil is a visitor from another narrative/universe because Tom ONLY has power over that small domain that he occupies near the Shire, he does not have any power beyond his borders.)

I will disagree with you slightly: the Ainur are angelic beings yes, but I would argue that they also count as (lower case g) gods in themselves. I have become convinced that the divine hierarchy in Tolkien's work roughly resembles the way that Plato laid out the relationship between the creator of the world and the Greek pantheon (in the Timaeus, possibly? i forget), and resembles it enough that while Tolkien's strict Catholicism means there is still only 1 God, the resemblance of the Ainur to gods was intentional enough that they are technically angelic beings but functionally a pantheon of gods.

I'm really interested though as to how the person in the reblogs above arrived at that explanation of events. All of the details are just slightly off, like a knockoff toy range based on the Silmarillion.

Thinking of the larger context of LOTR and like, the fellowship swapping old war stories and shit and Sam just says “Yeah I killed a huge spider…Shelob, I think?”

And Gandalf just blinks and is like, “You what now?”

“Yeah, killed it. Had to save Frodo”

Gandalf elects not to tell Sam that he killed the spawn of a primordial demon.

[thinkinginquenya]

"Do not take me for some conjuror of cheap tricks!" says man who spent the last several hours providing the fireworks show for a birthday party

[thinkinginquenya]

nobody knows where i came from i just showed up one day and started doing my thing and god was like who the hell is that i didn't invite them

[thinkinginquenya]

As every inktober, I am going to draw series of Middle-earth landscapes ♥ This Himring is little bit too fancy, since I was feeling low last day and needed to escape somewhere. Well, it is afterall castle of the fairy prince. ♥ Previous years: Hobbit The Fellowship of the Ring The Two Towers The Return of the King Silmarillion Silmarillion II Childern of Húrin Song of Dúrin

[thinkinginquenya]

Me, reading “On Faerie-Stories”: Star Wars is a faerie-story.

Of course, it’s been called ‘science fantasy’ or ‘space opera’, but that doesn’t entirely get at the same thing. Tolkien may be the source of the popularizing of the fantasy genre as we know it today, but much of fantasy is arguably not faerie-stories. (Which is not to say that they are bad! Only that they are doing something different than a faerie-story as Tolkien describes it.)

But Star Wars (the original trilogy) is. It feeds the imagination, the desire for the strange and wonderful and terrible. It gives us not only shining swords and magic, but strange worlds, cities in the clouds, and ogres in forms like Jabba the Hutt. It is concerned with Good and Evil, with the overthrow of a usurping tyrant and the return of the rightful form of government.

And it has eucatastrophe in in the same way that Tolkien does. The key moment on which Return of the Jedi and the entire trilogy turns is the renunciation of power, the moment when Luke throws away his lightsaber and refuses the temptations of power that are offered by evil. And then it takes us up to the very edge, the expectation that this renunciation will lead to nothing but a horrible, torturous death – and it says no. It says that clinging to Good against all hope can give it the power to reach into the very heart of Evil and draw out goodness from it, and in that moral power rather than physical power lies victory. It is not inevitable and it does not always happen – in the words of Tolkien “eucatastrophe does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance” – but it can happen and the heart of Star Wars is that it does.

[thinkinginquenya]

Boromir had a long sword, in fashion like Anduril but of less lineage and he bore also a shield and his war-horn. 'Loud and clear it sounds in the valleys of the hills,' he said, `and then let all the foes of Gondor flee!' Putting it to his lips he blew a blast, and the echoes leapt from rock to rock, and all that heard that voice in Rivendell sprang to their feet. 'Slow should you be to wind that horn again, Boromir,' said Elrond. 'until you stand once more on the borders of your land, and dire need is on you.' `Maybe,' said Boromir.

this is funnier every time i read it

the way this is written there is no impetus for boromir to describe and blow the horn. i am picturing that 'off-screen' so to speak, maybe pippin or somebody pointed to the horn of gondor and said 'hey whats that' and the answer was OH ITS SUPER LOUD ITS TOTALLY SICK LET ME SHOW YOU FWEET FWEEEEEEEEET but maybe that didn't happen and boromir really did this with zero provocation.

everyone in rivendell freaked out

'friendo, do not blow that thing again until you are back in your own country, and even then, it had better be dire'

'Maybe,' said Boromir