Whatever helps you get to sleep at night... 
Spoilers Lord of the Rings TV series
- Thread starter Cyrus
- Start date
He wrote in the '50s? I thought his stuff was more recent.
But anyways, I haven't been going into this expecting it to be exactly like the books, and so far most of the changes we've heard about sound relatively minor, compared to a lot of other adaptations out. A condensed timeline and a bit of sex, really aren't that bad compared to the kind of things a lot of older adaptations did.
But anyways, I haven't been going into this expecting it to be exactly like the books, and so far most of the changes we've heard about sound relatively minor, compared to a lot of other adaptations out. A condensed timeline and a bit of sex, really aren't that bad compared to the kind of things a lot of older adaptations did.
Tell me you're not a J.R.R. Tolkien fan without telling me you're not a J.R.R. Tolkien fan.
Tolkien had every intention of publishing The Silmarillion. He submitted it, as it was at the time, to his publisher in the 1950s, who passed on it. He kept thinking it and rethinking it, and he was never able to get it into a publishable form by the end of his life.
I know that CJRT eventually expressed regrets about publishing The Silmarillion as a finished work after he and Guy Gavriel Kay hammered into a mostly coherent whole because they made editorial and creative decisions that JRRT himself did not.
And that's okay, given what the material in The Silmarillion is. Because...
Again, tell me you're not a J.R.R. Tolkien fan without telling me you're not a J.R.R. Tolkien fan.
Your first mistake is that you're calling The Silmarillion "terrible" on the basis of not being something -- a novel -- that it doesn't even pretend to be. It is a collection of legends and stories, not unlike the Bible or the Elder Eddas or the Kalevala, and it's best understood on those terms. The Silmarillion is a compendium of Middle-Earth mythology, just as the Elder Eddas is a compendium of Norse mythology and the Bible is a compendium of Jewish and Christian mythology. People struggle with reading The Silmarillion for the same reason people struggle with reading Shakespeare -- the language is meant to be spoken. If you struggle with The Silmarillion, read it aloud. This was how the stories of the Norse gods were told. This was how the stories of the Old Testament were told. Tolkien was writing the stories that would have been told around campfires and mead halls in Eregion and Rohan and Gondor and the Dale in the Fourth Age, tales of the departed Elves and the world that was ages before, far out of memory. These are tales that would have been passed down from bard to bard, sometimes written, ofttimes not, and committed to memory, told and retold and polished in the retelling like a precious stone. If you can view Tolkien as inventing -- or rediscovering -- an ancient English mythology that was lost and buried in the endless invasions of Britain in the post-Roman period, then you'll get where Tolkien was coming from and why he wrote the stories in The Silmarillion the way he did.
CJRT, as I said, expressed regrets about the way he published The Silmarillion, and The History of Middle-Earth is basically a long exploration of how he eventually built the published volume, from its origins in World War I to Tolkien's final writings. If you're interesting in the writing process, delve into HoME. Otherwise, you can skip it.
On a different note, I've been thinking about the recent teaser trailer, which shows a bunch of characters looking up as a meteor streaks through the skies of Middle-earth until, at last, it makes impact.
The thought I keep coming back to -- did Celebrimbor forge the Rings from the meteorite? Did Sauron forge the One Ring himself from the meteorite?
And I can't decide if that's a cool thought or a cliched thought.
The thought I keep coming back to -- did Celebrimbor forge the Rings from the meteorite? Did Sauron forge the One Ring himself from the meteorite?
And I can't decide if that's a cool thought or a cliched thought.
There's precedent in Tolkein: Eol forged Anglachel and Anguirel from a meteorite. He may have devised armor from it, as well. I don't think there's any connection between Eol and Celebrimbor in the books, but they both knew Turgon and were in Gondolin at around the same time.
Unfortunately, I have run in to LOTR fans who reject the Similarion because of Christopher Tolkien's edits.
That said, I am currently on a reading of the Similarion, in part anticipating this series, and partially because my wife and I love exploring all of Middle Earth. I enjoy that right next to my Weta books about costumes and props from the Hobbit films.
it's foolish of them. if they don't like it, that's one thing, but trying to sift the son from his father when it comes to Tolkien is like getting the oxygen out of water. Christopher was involved in edits and notetaking as early as when when he was off-duty during the war.
He was more aware than anyone that the Silmarillion was never doing to be "definitive" as JRR's opinion about it (and everything.. he was rethinking the Blue Wizards again just before he died and had give up on the flat Arda idea) and he said so in the forward:
"On my father's death it fell to me to try to bring the work into publishable form. It became clear to me that to attempt to present, within the covers of a single book, the diversity of the materials – to show The Silmarillion as in truth a continuing and evolving creation extending over more than half a century – would in fact lead only to confusion and the submerging of what is essential. I set myself therefore to work out a single text, selecting and arranging in such a way as seemed to me to produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative."
I think people like 5555 that expect/want a novel really want an entirely different fiction author entirely. And there is no shortage of Tolkien homages.
JRR wrote novels occasionally, but that is just one literary art form among many, and itself a newer one not always best suited to the kind of legengs the Tolkien family had been enjoying. In fairness, Christopher continued to revisit the ideas in revisions such as Lost Tales, Children of Hurin (my favorite, really), and so on.
Of course, but it is the trend towards strict literalism rather than recognizing the work as an ongoing creative process that often impedes fan creativity, especially regarding adaptation. And I know because I use to be a similar type of a fan, one who felt adaptation meant strictly recreating without any variation what had come before. That has changed a bit, or perhaps mellowed a bit, as I get older and appreciate more and more that creative process of Tolkien and his son, and the people who are creating the adaptation of the work.
Whatever helps you get to sleep at night...
Why (randomly) drop a childish accusation in what had otherwise been a good faith discussion?
Why do you care?
Because it lowers the overall quality of the discourse in addition to coming across as an unwarranted provocation.
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