Lord of the Rings

nb the clown there is jackson, i dig viggo

Ha, I got that, trust me.

Zeal of a convert---from ILB's Speculative etc thread:
I finally read The Lord of the Rings--finally, that is, after putting it down in early high school--thee appointed tyme of maximum susceptibility--upon realizing that I was expected to go epically Questing with a hero who had furry toes. Apparently a lot of detractors don't get past the first forty pages, or the first sentence, about Bilbo's elevetny-first birthday, but the whole point is the pull from light to dark and back again, and the way they get mingled---leaders on all levels, incl. drafted patrol leader Frodo, are subject to temptation, corruption (in the sense of physical and psychic wounds, some of them permanent/recurring--plus of course effects on Middle-earth, "the circles of the world," as mentioned briefly, in an end in one of the Appendices of this 1990s one-vol edition: circles, like the Ring, which must have their own kind of end, limits, be something, some thing, however elusively so, 'til the reader can peer through them, as Tom Bombadil does, and see something beyond. He does it and laughs, it's all nonsense to him, seeing his unchanged turf, but he knows it's real enough to others, with real enough, inescapable consequences for all, even a victorious Quest/Anti-Quest means the Grail/Anti-Grail will both save the world and destroy it, in terms of sucking the magic out of it (no spoiler, Gandalf tells Frodo that right off, when he drafts him for the destruction of the precious, corrupting Ring, cos magic's gone as far as it can go; time for the cycles continue by secular means, and slow down the death spiral, anyway)
One limitation: we're told the significance of most things as they happen---which is better than being swamped by codes, as can happen with Gene Wolfe--but an enjoyable exception is being allowed to ponder the fate of Sauron. I think (aside from his own obsessive psycylcling through Ages) seeing though his stone has intensified his focus on the Ring---stones don't lie, but their views, the contexts they create/intensify, given the viewer's own anxieties, antagonisms, hopes and dreads, have a lasting and sometimes entrapping affect on several characters. So yeah, I disagree with those who claim Tolkien doesn't do psychology--and the effect of the stone is not so far from science fictional concerns (note also the networking of stones).
And when the ship sails, it sails, buddy. Not that it doesn't leave some real nice (and not-at-all nice) stuff behind. "There's a feeling I get/When I look the West." Eh, guess I better go listen to some more of those folk-death-or-doom-metal promos (in recent years, Wino's way ahead of the pack). Also, now I need to check out the ancient albums of Cirith Ungol. But book-wise, should I read more Tolkien, beyond The Hobbit?
PS: search "Tolkien" on The New Yorker site, get lots of good results, especially Auden, Gopnik, and Anthony Lane.

― dow, Sunday, May 4, 2014 10:54 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also the stress of leadership on all levels is a big part of the fateful psychology.

― dow, Sunday, May 4, 2014 11:05 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Still awaiting advice on other Tolkien books.

But it’s true that the first script was better organised

To be fair, it was also a simpler story. One party is easier to follow than three parties. But I completely agree that it was the best of the movies.

Dow: well that's a lot to unpack! Mark S is the one who I think would lock into your read most readily and would be able to advise, so take what I'm about to say with grains of salt: If you want to read the Silmarillion as the book that some characters in LOTR would read themselves (which is how it's intended) then that'll help. If anything it'll play up the idea of cycles -- Tolkien himself went through some major revisions of Middle-earth as conceit in the last ten years of his life so if anything the final three manuscript collections -- Morgoth's Ring, The War of the Jewels and to a degree The Peoples of Middle Earth -- might be of particular interest, though I'd say you'd want to read them only after having read The Silmarillion first. The Children of Hurin expands one key tale from there in full.

Beyond that: Unfinished Tales has some of my favorite writing of his, especially 'Aldarion and Erendis,' which is as close as he ever got to a domestic drama. And of the many shorter works, Farmer Giles of Ham is a goofy-ass lark, but Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle are complementary tales on the same idea of creativity and its worth, the latter story in an explicitly Catholic context.

what Ned said.

Silmarillion = tolkein's Kalevala basically

Great, thanks so much, guys! All those appendices in the edition I read were helpful too. Extended entries in the online Science Fiction Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia of Fantasy were what convinced me to try again: knowing what would happen just whetted my appetite for seeing how he would manage all that.
My local library has a lot of Tolkien and related material, like the mostly excellent Tales Before Tolkien, in which Douglas Anderson rounds up stories by authors JRR praised, and/or was evidently influenced by, others he might well have read, plus some cool ringers. Will indeed consult with Mark.

Yeah, the appendices were Tolkien's way of getting the then-unpublished Silmarillion material out there a bit, but even then it was only a very swift redaction. Definitely piqued my interest for sure first time through! Anyway, enjoy the further reading!

lots of great arcane lore to enjoy in 'the simarillion' and 'unfinished tales', like about gandalf and the istari etc. wish there were ten times as much

http://s5775.p9.sites.pressdns.com/istari-2/

Everyone otm nice post dow

Thanks. Wondering about his recently published version of Beowulf too.

Not quite out yet, I think! A few more weeks? Been meaning to catch up with that and the other translations/scattered efforts that Christopher T. has overseen.

dow otm. reminds me that i started rereading LOTR last year then got distracted by a move, need to get back on that.

http://dubs.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/lord-of-the-rings-completely-screwed-over-is-back-3/

just watched this rectnly

Meantime, this is really fascinating stuff to learn: a recording from the only fan event of its kind Tolkien ever seems to have attended, from 1958 in Rotterdam, has surfaced:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noble-smith/jrr-tolkien-reveals-the-t_b_5373529.html

wow, that's really awesome!

photo of tolkien there is absolutely wonderful, too.

Yeah it's great. Almost one of a kind, much like the event.

Awesome! Ready for the whole thing. Auden, one of Tolkien's students, attended a groovy Middle-Earth event in 1966: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/12/w-h-audens-defense-of-the-lord-of-the-rings.html

I'd heard about that. Amazing to imagine what that was like.

But the circling strings --> staccato stabs --> mournful theme of the main title music haunted my childhood.

in my head since I woke up

Shore's 'history of the ring' right? Awesome piece. The Rosenman stuff for bakshi also rules tho

no! the BBC theme from the 1981 radio version.

but yeah I like shores.

if Jackman took on the silmarillion in the style of the precis of the history of the ring from the movies I'd be OK with that I guess.

Hugh Jackman, definitely meant him.

he BBC theme from the 1981 radio version.

― nakh is the wintour of our diss content (darraghmac)

Great theme!

Also like Shore, probably the best of the current heroic movie composers.

reading fellowship again with my children and it becomes clear to me - and them - that despite his status as like the dirk pitt of middle earth, strider manages to fuck up just about every part of the journey from bree to rivendell

hes kinda dropped in it and admits as much many times

And whose idea was it to take the Caradhras Pass, eh?

that sense of being hunted and lost, the "behind enemy lines" vibe of the first book through rivendell is so great.

i think strider being somewhat obscure in his abilities- capable, trusted by gandalf, sure, but unsure, imperfect, certainly not up to taking on the forces hes up against and knows it- is critical to the shift from hobbit-sized danger to a story that becomes a young adult/adult touchstone.

ppl will refer to lotr as a work that birthed every cliche going but there's something quite striking in how useless direct confrontation is with a powerful enemy is, and how *badly* it turns out time and time again.

only second tier characters want to fight, gandalf and strider are the most powerful respectively in magic and arms of the fellowship and they spend large parts of the story avoiding having to demonstrate this and the story makes a point of demonstrating why, imo

of course, the movie glorying in special moves like a final fantasy cut scene gets this utterly wrong also.

might read it again with this new-sprung take tbh

'What will happen?' said Merry. 'Will they attack the inn?'

'No, I think not,' said Strider.

but two grafs later Butterbur is telling Nob to bar the doors and the hobbits not to go to their rooms - and the next morning they find their appointed beds to have been knifed in the night

which attack strider avoided

this is a witch hunt

they make for Weathertop even though the Riders 'are likely to make for Weathertop themselves'. even though they tramp 5 days through the Midgewater Marshes to avoid the Riders they're now heading straight for the place the Riders probably are too!

he allows Sam and Pippin to trample the ground of the dell behind this key staging post, essentially wiping its browser history, and says 'I wish I had waited and explored the ground down here myself'

of standing on the actual tippy top of Weathertop itself, he says he was 'too careless on the hill-top. ... It was a mistake for three of us to go up and stand there so long.'

as they build a campfire, scared out of their minds, Strider says 'there is little shelter or defense here' - thanks, Strider - 'but fire shall serve for both.'

the Riders promptly attack them anyway.

'Is this troll country?'

'No!' said Strider.

two days later they find a door built into the rock of a hillside. Strider: 'It is certainly a troll-hole.'

all i'm saying is, teach the controversy

in a terrible scenario its very ilxy of you to focus all your judgement of the guy on your side trying to do something to avoid almost inevitable disaster who is already too hard on himself for the imperfections inherent in the attempt

imo

xp no im enjoying it

fresh lotr takes are good. the book is quite vague in a lot of aspects!

lol i'm not mad at strider. it's just that as a kid i'd imagined him as kind of impossibly competent - the quiet hero who could follow any trail, who could suss out any danger. and now i'm reading it and just see him making all kinds of bad calls! just straight up wrong about stuff.

Strider is running up against the limit of the usefulness of the guidance he received when he was captain of a stolen Nazi U-Boat and his master chief advised him “Don’t ever say ‘I don’t know!’ Those words will kill a crew, dead as a depth charge!”

Now Strider finds himself on land, in charge of completely untrained amateurs, he realizes he still can’t say “I don’t know,” even though he really absolutely does not know. Except about which fights they are guaranteed to lose.

There's a deep cut.

Anyway thank you for potentially contributing a subject to a future episode of the podcast hey did I mention I have a Tolkien podcast thanks great you're all wonderful people.

the quiet hero who could follow any trail, who could suss out any danger.

i think tolkien in LOTR is big on even these guys being fuck all use against a cohort of witch kings who know where you are going while you are carrying four gravy babies who think they are on a daytrip to bath.

also fwiw and iirc strider is v much aware that hes heading where hed rather not go but its gandalf fucked that up

its all good general/sergeant comment on how it is once the feet hit the ground

ofc silmarillion and legends in lotr and elsewhere are full of the heroes that just did it and were legends (obv) or even whose failures were grand, decisive simple events

imo thats him being a bit meta about nature of legends and distilled tales and what they are used for vs "oh fuck we're here now and its not beowulf its wilfred owen oh fuck oh fuck ohfuck"

dulcimar et decorum est pro patria moria, as i shall title the essay on the topic

nb none of my apologies for strider should be taken as discouraging the continued attacking tracer, this court martial is v invigorating imo

pippin is for the fuckin noose if we're going to be consistent, mind

I hope that these are new versions of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings

LOTRCU

If we get movies about the fall of Gondolin, Beren and Luthien, and Ungoliant and the distruction of the trees of Valinor that'd be cool

that article isn't clear at all on what these are, I certainly hope they are not remakes.

LOTRCU

Ha, made the same joke to my cohosts. (We are not sanguine.)

Here's the key part here:

Freemode, a division of Embracer Group, made the adaptive rights deal for books including “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.” The pact will be billed under the name Middle-earth Enterprises.

Embracer, who have been hoovering up a LOT of things, took over the rights from the 'original' as such Middle-earth Enterprises, who cashed out about a year back after holding onto them for fifty years -- that was the company that Saul Zaentz organized when he got the Hobbit/LOTR film rights in the early 70s, after they were briefly held by UA directly. Everything you've seen since on a cinematic or staging front, plus various other merchandising things that fall under that general umbrella, ultimately were controlled/licensed from the Zaentz team, first as Tolkien Enterprises and then as Middle-earth Enterprises as noted, a name this new venture is now incorporating. (The Rankin-Bass adaptations were the weird stepchildren that fell into an unclear rights void.) Anyway, by this I mean Bakshi's film, the two Jackson trilogies, even the stage musical from the 2000s.

akm is correct on what these are or aren't supposed to be. They could, if they wanted to, go for remakes. They could do works derived from Hobbit/LOTR. Embracer made noises about doing separate films based on characters a while back. That they've partnered with Warner Bros rather than doing something separate does make a certain sense; WB would like to hold on to their franchise opportunities and Embracer doesn't have to build from the ground up. In ways, this is just a recalibration of the original Zaentz situation when it came to dealing with studios/producers interested in developing things.

If you're wondering about how the Amazon show exactly fits into all this: Amazon used a carveout in the rights specifically regarding TV. They can do whatever they want within the scope of that deal, but it applies strictly to Hobbit/LOTR material, nothing more, which is why so much of the first season was, in essence, invented nonsense.

It's worth further noting that all this is due to Tolkien himself agreeing to a rights deal back in the late 60s, which specifically only covered the two key works published at the time, Hobbit and LOTR. Everything else published since is the estate's to deal with, and Christopher Tolkien absolutely refused any further licensing or rights deals. His own son Simon is now the de facto head of the estate and they were willing to do the Amazon setup precisely because it gave them some space for negotiation themselves, as far as we can tell, but that was it, and none of the posthumous publications have had their rights sold, from The Silmarillion on. Until or unless that changes, anything further developed in this new deal has to essentially be, much like the Amazon series, invented fanfic, with vague head-nods towards canon as such.

BTW, the Mike De Luca mentioned in the Variety piece has his own history with New Line and WB. Frankly I'm not thrilled to see his name back here, per this 2011 piece. I remember when he was originally fired from New Line:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/confessions-mike-de-luca-161111/

And a bit of further context to keep in mind -- there already is this film due next year, which was started some time back; this deal had nothing to do with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_War_of_the_Rohirrim

even the stage musical from the 2000s

the what now?

Enjoy our episode about it!

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/16

Plenty of links and more info in the show notes there.

Anyway here's a concise overall rights explainer:

https://gizmodo.com/lord-of-the-rings-rights-explained-amazon-warner-bros-1850157744

this time they can get some important things RIGHT

* more bombadil
* eagles carry the ring
• "one does not simply walk into mordor" (three-seat tandem)
• turning back roald dahl-style to the uncensored early texts, galadriel is a GNOME

New episode doncha know

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/48

Plus news of our first live episode...

Recording episode 49 this weekend -- but here's where to find us for episode 50!

https://www.megaphonic.fm/live-2023

Basically if you can make it to Portland on April 22...

So for our annual April Fool's as such, and even more appropriate given the day, we tackled a truly terrible knockoff:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/61

i made my kid read the mere description for The Sword of Shannara and he was absolutely appalled.

i think the "Soon a Skull Bearer, dread minion of Evil, flew into the Vale, seeking to destroy Shea. To save the Vale, Shea fled, drawing the Skull Bearer after him...." actually angered him.

Such poetic language.

Have enjoyed this twitter discussion this weekend
https://i.postimg.cc/zfFGD39T/IMG-9206.png

Keeping it to the Fellowship only, I agree with the main analysis that Frodo and Aragorn should swap; Frodo hasn’t got the arm for right field and you can hide him in left. I don’t think a hobbit should be shortstop, frankly, that should be Legolas.

Someone was saying “You can’t have a hobbit play second” to which someone responded “the Astros run out Altuve at second every day”. The hobbits are a problem for the infield, but you’ve got to play them. Boromir has to cover the hot corner to prevent it becoming a complete shitshow and you just hold your breath with the right side of the infield.

Durin’s Bane and Gandalf have an epic battle. DB keeps fouling off pitches, Gandalf keeps coming with the craziest shit you’ve ever seen. It’s a stalemate. Ultimately DB strikes out but Gandalf gets pulled due to pitch count. Who comes in, in relief? What???

Gandalf the White!

— Tyson, Lewis’ Number 🍉 (@TyMoIsSecret) April 13, 2024