Lord of the Rings

xpost You have reminded me this book is a beautiful indulgence:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/flora-of-middle-earth-9780190276317?cc=us&lang=en&

Father/son team, dad's the academic botanist, son is the hardcore Tolkien fan, and the whole thing is a detailed but also sober-minded treat, suggesting real world analogues as needed and so forth. I learned a lot!

the Icelandic sagas def helps understand his style of storytelling

re medieval stuff, its funny bc both me and my bookclub friend studied Tolkien’s translation of Gawain in college etc & minored in middle english but until now never really pulled all the threads together between the medieval stuff and LOTR etc #lifelonglearning

wow that Flora book looks awesome

We did the Gawain translation for the podcast back in June -- it was good to go back to that, there was a lot I'd forgotten. A very strange work!

I'd say offhand the key non-Tolkien-written books that serve as useful/informative addenda are Carpenter's biography -- though a deeper and more complete study with material and facts that weren't in there is long overdue -- Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-earth -- Christopher Tolkien used it himself! -- Fonstad's editions of The Atlas of Middle-earth and Wayne Hammond/Christina Scull's editing of Tolkien's artwork and the reader's companion to LOTR. But the Flora book is a real treat too.

i am def interested in reading the biography at some point

Obviously this isn't the entire case -- we get a lot of Sam's internal thoughts the closer we get to the end, for example -- but other characters we're never 'inside' in ways we're more familiar with. Boromir is never a POV character, for instance.

The only POV characters are the hobbits I think? We follow the chase party after Merry & Pippin are kidnapped, but there's nothing internal there, just external description of what's happening. Actually we might get some of Gimli's POV in the Paths of the Dead sequence, but other than that the whole saga really is (largely) written in hobbit-view.

i’ve been reading the nibelungenlied (nbd) and that feels like a big source - german originally but with a scandinavian offshoot that preserves more of its archaic original story than the german version which permuted more. a ring of power, a small creature who forswore love to possess it etc. (lots more women in the nibelung saga tho!)

Tolkien knew it well and translated some portions of it. But when asked about more specific connections he famously replied, "Both rings were round, and that is all."

Yeah but he dismissed everything tbf, i think he rather showily disliked speculation on the meanings of it all

In a few letters i read of his to Auden & others etc, he seemed to have be v self-conscious about his writing, like he was adverse to ascribing highminded motivations & talking about his “craft” bc he didnt want to seem like he was putting on airs

or that was impression i got

at least as far as LOTR etc went

He was definitely cautious, per deems. I think part of him was still surprised the outgrowth of his 'secret vice' turned out to be such a phenomenon. (Which itself is interesting because he'd already had a substantial hit with The Hobbit in the first place.)

for reasons i’m not entirely clear on i started reading the fellowship of the ring the other day.

1 the early conversations between gandalf, bilbo and frodo etc are really charming. i make this observation because of how bad the films are at this tone, managing a sort of imbecile joviality or theatrical menace. one of the pleasant things in the book is the adult to adult conversation between the two and exchanges like this on gollum:

‘

No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. ‘I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’

‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.

now maybe to read the thread lol. i didn’t realise there were so many posts from today.

nice in a sort of yes! otm! way seeing both deems and VG making the same point about the ambulatory pace (and yes the writing by detailed map is v evident if agree)

Tracer covered the snoozeworthiness of the council of elrond upthread tbf

The cloak-and-dagger feeling of that pre-Rivendell section is some of my favourite stuff - evading the shadowy enemy agents to smuggle the secret weapon out of the country.

The movie absolutely nails it, too

Tracer covered the snoozeworthiness of the council of elrond upthread tbf

Fonstad's editions of The Atlas of Middle-earth

I still have my first edition hardcover of this with the dustjacket. It played such a huge role in my love of Middle Earth because I loved maps and they were so insanely detailed. The white, brown, black scheme also made little me think the maps were somehow insanely old. You could just spend an afternoon looking at the travel maps and it was like reading the trilogy over again in a couple of hours.

Agreed that the flight from the Shire is best part of the books and movies.

Gandalf and then Bilbo in turn leaving the young hobbits totally underprepared works beautifully for the adolescent reader, feeds into the success of the narrative unfolding in a manageable way

I still have my first edition hardcover of this with the dustjacket. It played such a huge role in my love of Middle Earth because I loved maps and they were so insanely detailed.

I had that as well, and what a treasure. I do wish there'd been hardcovers of the updated ones. (Fonstad's other atlases, even for series of less-than-notable stuff, were also treats -- she passed too early but I'm glad she got to see the films and appear in some of the supplements.)

Gandalf and then Bilbo in turn leaving the young hobbits totally underprepared works beautifully for the adolescent reader, feeds into the success of the narrative unfolding in a manageable way

I’d just like to chime in that Ned’s podcast is a delight — some eps are more interesting to me than others bcuz of my stronger connection to Hobbit-world & not so much the Silmarillion & all the apocrypha — but definitely something everyone should check out. It’s a nerdy ‘cast, but the 3 hosts take great pains to keep the conversation moving & not get sucked into whirlpools of ultra-nerdery.

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater

Well thank you kindly, that's quite nice of you to say! Won't disagree with any of that! If people want to take a dive but aren't sure where to start, I'd suggest the obvious with the first episode just because the three of us introduce ourselves, in essence, and explain why we're fans. But we got better technically after a couple of episodes so beyond that, I might go for:

4 -- Aldarion and Erendis
6 -- Friendship
8 -- Tom Bombadil
11 -- Dwarves
14 -- Tolkien adaptations (our general introduction to our eventual episodes about such things, whenever they appear)
18 -- The Ents
20 -- Eowyn

We have a lot of episodes on more open topics like fanwork as well as non-Middle Earth Tolkien things as well, and I certainly haven't listed all the core episodes as such either. I will say that two of the most fun episodes where I chose the topic were 13 -- my April Fool's to my cohosts where I made them read the most egregious thing ever, Dennis L. McKiernan's LOTR sequel in all but (changed) name The Silver Call Duology -- and 16, which was on the LOTR stage musical from the 2000s.

_Fonstad's editions of The Atlas of Middle-earth_

I still have my first edition hardcover of this with the dustjacket. It played such a huge role in my love of Middle Earth because I loved maps and they were so insanely detailed. The white, brown, black scheme also made little me think the maps were somehow insanely old. You could just spend an afternoon looking at the travel maps and it was like reading the trilogy over again in a couple of hours.

Ned, any First Age esp Children of Hurin (my absolutely favorite Tolkien story)?

We haven't done Turin and company yet -- we definitely will though. But as for the First Age in general, here and there -- episodes 2 and 3 are about death in Middle-earth and about Melian, so you may find things to chew over there though again we hadn't quite figured out our best format until episode 4. 5 on Galadriel and 7 on Ghan-buri-Ghan touch on elements as do others in lesser degrees; at some point we'll get around to grappling with that material more in discussion. It's all down to our continuing whims! (The smartest thing we did out of the gate was decide NOT to simply march through a close reading of any of the books.)

As a teenage fan, I enjoyed bits of Unfinished Tales; I did buy a few of the other posthumous books but I honestly can’t remember a thing about them beyond being bored silly.

Which of the posthumous books are of most interest / contain actual complete stories / aren’t basically drafts of the Silmarillion?

Children of Hurin, for me. As absolutely vicious and devastating as Tolkien got, like Greek myths.

Though it is more an expansion of the Turin Turumbar parts of The Silmarillion. It is absolutely a self-contained story.

xxpost You can ignore the first four books in the History series, then. The fifth one, The Lost Road, is of interest because it's where he was with Middle-earth development right before getting into writing LOTR -- a number of paths not taken, some interesting material there about Numenor. Six through eight cover LOTR but the ninth, Sauron Defeated, has the Notion Club Papers and related material that is as meta as Tolkien ever got, lots of meditations on what exactly he was doing or trying to do. The remaining three books, while covering later Silmarillion material, has a LOT with him late in life starting to question and heavily revise his original mythologies -- the last fifteen years of his life is almost him, not quite pulling a Le Guin with later Earthsea move, but him definitely giving lots of things a rethink. The forthcoming Nature of Middle-earth collection may have more in this vein too.

Yeah, I would emphasize The Silmarillion contains excerpted/summarized/streamlined versions of many finished/unfinished First/Second Age stories. Most of the books that came out over the last couple of years expand The Silmarillion versions into full-fledged versions.

versions>versions

Tracer covered the snoozeworthiness of the council of elrond upthread tbf

yeah we normally do 3 or 4-chapter sections a week for bookclub bc chapters are usually quite short

mid-read that week we realized council of elrond was fuckin HUGE so we called it & just did that one chapter that week lol

But as exposition goes, its what allows the glorious mad "evil comes to derbyshire" of everything after the birthday party to that point

Get through that (and tbh if you dont have to read it aloud selon chez hand its not *that* bad) and you're out the door and headlong to moria again

my lore-obsessed ass loved the council of elrond chapter lol. also love it when bilbo (or another character, but usually bilbo) breaks out into a song that lasts multiple pages.

About 40 pages, to be fair. I think it's fine. It puts the rest of the book on sure footing, and helps the reader to buy into the necessity of the quest.

If anything, three whole chapters in Lothlórien is the slog for me.

I’m reading some Wikipedia pages to confirm some half-remembered things and Jesus Christ

Originally, Tolkien intended for Éowyn to marry Aragorn. Later, however, he decided against it because Aragorn was "too old and lordly and grim." He considered making Éowyn the twin sister of Éomund, and having her die "to avenge or save Théoden". He also considered having Aragorn truly love Éowyn and regret never marrying after her death.

Fantasy stories are easy to start- witness the many, many followers-on to the story in question- but at some stage exposition must come in and you're either balls-out with it or you are dribbing and drabbing it and either way its almost impossible to not be either aping or overaware of Tolkien while doing so rly- the council was prob revolutionary enough in its day as an approach and this way we dont become a fantasy tale so in love with its court intrigues that we're stuck with bloody grandkids before things move on again

xp aragorn is ninety in the film also

Thats just what a ninety yr old aragorn looks like

Me: why was Aragorn so old, why did he live to be 210, was it legit just “he’s Numenórean, fuck you”
Google: it’s because he’s Númenorean, fuck you

I was gonna thread in something about how (according to one of the prefaces anyway) tolkien had been working on the story- in fact the entire prehistory and the lot, rly- for decades before the books themselves had to be assembled and how this i think tells in the delivery, feeds into the maps/walks above, the patient knowledge of the bits he has told before ans now leaves out, the sense that not just bombadil but behind every path not taken there are tales you arent hearing this time but may again, the joy in reading it and imagining him as your grandfather and imagining that you have heard those tales, that versions arent reworked nor facts changed so much as the old man tells the story as he remembers it now kr focuses the piece *thusly* in this telling because it pleases him to or because he had thought more on it since the last time we sat with him.

ive always loved that feeling, which it has given me since my first re-read, after id devoured the appendices and read even a bit about how long hed been putting it all together and constantly working it. One half archaeologist of an imaginary world and one half linguist piecing it all together as fragments come back or are discovered or are framed anew when another piece falls into place to cast it so. The lack of a definitive, only what was printed in the moment, adds to the feel of lore and not engineered fiction imo.

Because im currently reading steven erikson and lemme tell ya a ten-book grueller spun out as fast as mavis beacon could whip him based on a fucking card game he invented in college does *not* achieve the same sweet maturity

xp yeah I thought similarly when reading some of the appendices about the languages; they weren’t gibberish or a hobby, they were something he spent time and thought constructing and even if it was only to please himself he adhered to his own rules while writing it. You do get the sense of the story unfolding not merely as an imagining from his mind but as if it was a dear object that had been washed and ironed and folded and mended and taken out many times, and that what you see in the books was only a small fragment of the world he had constructed for himself.

Good comparisons all. The fact that it really was a lifetime's pursuit absolutely shows -- by the time readers would have first encountered as much of the backstory as was set when LOTR first emerged, the basics of the mythology were already almost forty years old. Tolkien himself had hoped for a longer life than he did (and he had a long one) and it does raise the question of what eventually would have come of his later revisions. But the alternate history in my brain is the one where The Hobbit never finds a publisher and he just settles into a career of public academia, private pursuits and his children eventually are bemused at all his old writings and what they might have meant.

Seeing the exhibition at the Morgan two years ago was very lovely on those fronts, and underscored how he just had these literal artistic visions -- the thematic illustrations and more that he worked on as a young man show that much -- and how that might have translated as he could those thoughts into language. More than once it reminded me that while he was never alone per se -- he always had his younger brother at least, and found his friends and colleagues and community -- there was a deep experience of loneliness when young after his mother died that percolates throughout the work.

Most of the books that came out over the last couple of years expand The Silmarillion versions into full-fledged versions.

Kinda, but Children of Hurin is the only one that's a straight read through. Beren and Luthien and The Fall of Gondolin collate and demonstrate the various versions of the story over time (and I still so wish he had done that full revision of the latter that he only got an initial way through -- it was shaping up to be a hell of a detailed story and it does have some of my favorite descriptive passages of his; if he had applied it to the original draft of the story which was strong and vivid enough in its own right, that would have been something).

The other story I wish he had finished was "Aldarion and Erendis," and I'm still pretty convinced we'll see at least some of that in the Amazon series. I've said for a while that a standalone publication of that away from Unfinished Tales, even if it's a short book, wouldn't be a bad idea. It really is unique out of all the core stories.

boring bits of LoTR = all bits wiv elfs, JRRT just too horny to edit at such moments is how i break it down to an extent