Lord of the Rings

youve to balance that with the random battles that occur outside towns, and the lack of save points

so irritating that iirc tolkien NEVER stops to tell us how much gold the Fellowship takes off any of the orcs they kill! ned can back me up on this, but i believe an early draft of the Lothlorien section did include them paying for training in various walking and climbing skills --- tbh that would help the later books make a lot more sense to me

Gold can't buy doughtiness

circling back to my above comments: i think perhaps what i'm rubbing up against is the difference between legend and history. and the books happen in a legendary world, admittedly with a novel's worth of detail such that the vague bits could be sort of noticed, maybe.... whereas the appendices and the maps are a lot closer to history, and maybe they'll never really completely be one thing in my head.

also forget Jackson replacing my imaginary pictures: i wonder how much differently i'd picture Middle Earth, what's close to what, how far apart things are, if i'd never had those maps!

re agriculture: i think there is (very) passing mention of south gondor as the market garden of minas tirith while mordor is fed by the slave-tilled fields of núrn on the sorrowful shores of the bitter sea of núrnen. the heady wine in the hobbit (which gets the wood elves drunk and sleepy) is from dorwinion by the sea of rhûn, which suggests that trade exists between easterlings and our guys

and don't forget the contraband pipeweed that winds up in orthanc

yes but saruman is very much a would-be indie hipster in this regard (early adopter and influencer gandalf: "oh so you like pipeweed? name three of their leafs") and -- as noted above -- even the best-informed in rohan and minas tirith and edoras are fully ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ abt the tobacco industry

lmao yes

maybe they'll never really completely be one thing in my head.

Cant let one thing rule em all tbf

hahaha

Gold can't buy doughtiness

It could in 1st ed AD&D iirc.

i wonder how much differently i'd picture Middle Earth, what's close to what, how far apart things are, if i'd never had those maps!

i know people say tolkien wrote these stories to build a world for his languages, but i kinda think he also wrote these stories to serve his maps haha

He said as much in his own way. I am glad both he and Christopher had the mania for them.

ned can back me up on this, but i believe an early draft of the Lothlorien section did include them paying for training in various walking and climbing skills

Hm, I don't immediately recall this but I'll have to think about it and do some digging in the relevant volumes. Monetary systems in general, like organized religion, are one of those things notable in LOTR for their absence. There's that exchange between Aragorn and Frodo in Bree where the former, still in Strider mode, says he has his 'price' and Frodo momentarily worries in that he didn't bring much money with him, for instance, and that itself builds on the fact that Frodo specifically sold Bag-End to Lobelia and then bought Crickhollow, which of course he stayed in one night and never again, making him the original flipper. Next on 'House Hunters: Buckland'...

haha I was definitely 100% kidding, but this is a great subject to open up! i'm pretty glad there's no exposition laying out what the currency of middle earth is and how many Ranger shillings go into a dwarf-dollar. tho i'm sure rpgs have done this many times over...

kind of funny that our plucky underdog heroes are also mostly landed gentry and men of leisure, plus one of their butlers.

but also this is part of the "how much has changed in our heroes" aspect of the Scouring of the Shire --- the dispute with the wretched undeserving branch of the Baggins family would have been such a big deal for them at the start, and is now very easily resolved and indeed the Sackville-Bagginses (iirc) are now just sort of pitiful and handled with a much lighter touch. a very different Frodo than the one who wished Bilbo had killed Gollum when he had the chance.

Right -- and that'll doubtless feed into our next episode: we're talking about the Scouring of the Shire.

Meantime, speaking of episodes, another podcast on our network, The Spouter-Inn (a general literature podcast, cohosted by our network founder and one-time ILX board vet Chris Piuma), has a new episode up specifically on Fellowship:

We conclude our cluster on Land with a look at the many lands in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien's foundational fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. #Tolkien #LOTR

Listen on your podcast app or at https://t.co/xbeSYwzfOD pic.twitter.com/pcU1ueQPdQ

— The Spouter-Inn (@TheSpouter) April 20, 2021

oooo sounds very relevant! downloading. and looking forward to the Scouring episode - easily one of my favorite parts of the entire series; i definitely align with those who see it as really really really crucial to everything.

Big fan of Merry bringing low the enemy's hated, hitherto-invincible captain with a one-in-a-million sword he plundered from a place of great danger and carried south for many miles, preventing Eowyn from being splattered into paste in the process, and then goes up to a dying Theoden and immediately apologises for not doing anything useful while in his service

lol

"oh, no, no, that was just beginner's luck, really"

You gotta underplay, you see.

I still picture that whole scene with the fairly corny Nazgul from Rankin Bass, with the floating eyes/crown and metallic echo Skeletor laugh. Not exactly as effective as their Gollum or Smaug, but striking in its way.

The translation of how to do the eyes visually has always been a bit of a trick. Rankin Bass did that while the rest of their Nazgul were more withered skeletal types, Bakshi did the red eyes in the hood deal from the start but of course never did that scene, and Jackson used the helmet/crown as a bit of a visual trick for their version.

Meanwhile at Rivendell, Glorfindel spits his drink out

Our new episode next week but another Spouter-Inn episode on Tolkien with my cohost Oriana so check it out!

But we're not totally done talking Tolkien! Oriana Schwindt (@Schwindter) from Tolkien podcast @BytheBywater joins us for a bonus episode, where we discuss rivers, stars, and, OK, a little bit more about Tom Bombadil.

Listen at https://t.co/64cg3Yo00f

— The Spouter-Inn (@TheSpouter) April 30, 2021

Christine Kelley at Eruditorum Press (Elizabeth Sandifer's mob) has a psychogeography of Middle Earth going on as well, not as far as I can tell linked itt yet: https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/category/nowhere-and-back-again

Oh that looks good!

Just reread the bit in Sam and Frodo's initial scouting of Gorgoroth where the diminutive, big-nosed tracker orc tells the big mean orc to fuck off with his criticism because it's his own fault for being slow and shit at his job, and furthermore he hopes the Witch King really is dead because he's a twat, and then shoots him in the eye and runs off when he tries to attack him, and let me tell you that guy has main event charisma

That guy is your billion dollar Amazon show right there

I'd be down with that.

Anyway, our new episode is up!

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/26

oh boy! just listened to the Denethor family showcase and working on the Ent one today. :) relevant to my above comments on legend/chronicle/lore: i like your observation that maybe Denethor's attachment to the traditions, politics and details of the office sort of marks him apart from the way others in the universe relate to the past. and so perhaps me reaching for more concrete, graspable history is a bit Denethor-ish, and not really encouraged by the text.

Denethor is a civil service

The only other character we see attached to such a position is the guardsman showing ?pippin? around Gondor's barracks

Denethor is also that most overplayed archetype, the cautious governance that has kept the place running in between would-be inspirational leaders actually getting it right as opposed to wrecking the fucking gaff

Big fan of Merry bringing low the enemy's hated, hitherto-invincible captain with a one-in-a-million sword he plundered from a place of great danger and carried south for many miles, preventing Eowyn from being splattered into paste in the process, and then goes up to a dying Theoden and immediately apologises for not doing anything useful while in his service

― hiroyoshi tins in (Sgt. Biscuits)

Merry Sue nest pas

Just listened to the latest episode of By-The-Bywater, on the scouring of the shire. Cracking ep, one of the best yet!

Thanks kindly! We do our best.

‘Mortal Kombat’ Star Accuses Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ of Lacking Asian Actors
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/lord-of-the-rings-amazon-diversity-1234953348/

The most recent of the Eruditorum posts makes me think that's probably a good thing...

I finally watched the “Tolkien Edit” of the Hobbit movies, a fan edit that chops the trilogy down into one 4-1/2 hour movie.

It’s decently watchable, if not actually anything like good. About on a par with most of the Marvel movies I’ve seen (which is not high praise). But if you take it as canon, at least it doesn’t taint & stain the original LOTR trilogy the way the theatrically released Hobbit movies did.

Whoever put that together is kind of a hero.

area fan

There are a couple of those Hobbit edits floating around -- I have two, plus a separate one that's just the Dol Guldur arc. One of those edits did a pretty great job of reducing it down to three hours that followed as closely to the original text as allowed and basically did what I felt could have been done at the start, just tell the story in one film. From the moment they announced it as two films I had my doubts and we all knew what happened after that.

yeah, i’d prefer a single hobbit movie and a dedicated dol guldur movie

.. but then if LoTR movies came out now in the MCU age we’d also get a dedicated Tom Bombadil movie, so..

i want to see Lord of the Rings: Paradise, where they all get drunk on the beach and flirt in the pool

featuring tom bombadil, i mean

Tom Bombadil: Love and Thunder

xxp pretty sure that’s all what’s going on in the Undying Lands, thus why they’re in such a hurry to go sail there at the end

The Lord of the Rings 2: The Scouring of the Shire Part 1

: Genesis

Directors final cut

The Two Towers 2: Electric Boogaloo