Lord of the Rings

}3 tbh xp

I came to love Laurie Anderson in a teenage post-surgical opiate haze

O stuporman

pic.twitter.com/PffvDO3nvK

— CJ Ciaramella (@cjciaramella) April 5, 2021

i read in a letter Tolkien wrote to WH Auden that he sort of saw himself in the Ents, in that they had the most of his “voice” iirc

which made me love them all the more

hurm

His shade game is strong when he sidecuts at critics of the books or those who insist on allegorical parallels he denies

"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer"

Plenty of gandalf waspishness in that

love it

It is pure.

loved the Rankin-Bass podcast, Ned! great thoughts from everyone, and y'all all have very good "radio voices" i think!

i especially love how much you come back to the LP. reminded me that also grew up with it, also on a Fisher-Price record player, and probably some of the "rentals" i remember are just me listening back to the album again. probably explains why SO much of the dialogue is really burned into my brain, at the level where any time i hear "mutton" i think "nothin' but mutton to eat." i don't think it was the double LP with the complete thing, though... but maybe?

anyway, once you started talking about that, i decided to pause the podcast and listen to the album first, to get in the mood and bring back the vibes. the copy i have now is one i grabbed a few years back when i saw it in the bins someplace; the cover doesn't match what i remember from childhood, but i could be scrambling things up. it's one LP with a lot of songs trimmed down or eliminated, as well as much of the dialogue. so basically taking the film's already very economical edit and turbocharging it. god knows what it would mean to a fresh arrival, but as just a way to relive the movie without watching it, it did the trick. i love how even in this hyper-compressed version, the depth of the voice performances adds all this space and mood and gravitas. there's just no way to rush through john huston's delivery. agreed that the major voice roles are all fantastic (with brother theodore's gollum maybe being the most inspired), and that preminger's thranduil is bizarre (but memorable!).

next to the voices the best thing about the film is the art style. nothing else really looks like it, and while it's incredibly 1970s it also gives it this weird out-of-time storybook magic for me... maybe that's just growing up with it, idk.

i don't miss the Arkenstone, but of course i've read the book far fewer times than i've seen the movie, in my lifetime... so things like that and Beorn almost feel like bonus deleted scenes when i encounter them. i do think the breathless, episodic story construction of the film does drain out some of the charm and nature-hike qualities which i think are present in this book (if less prominently than in LOTR). i've said this before, but imo the ideal hobbit movie is essentially "imagine Rankin/Bass had been in a position to make a 100-minute theatrical film rather than a 78-minute TV special." that's all it really needs... fill in some gaps so it isn't QUITE so breathlessly jumpy, let the characters breathe a little, and there you have it.

also, yarborough's songs never really bother me... again maybe because they're comfortingly familiar as part of the tapestry of the film. try as i might i can't *really* hear them as the work of a successful 20th century musician in his mid-40s choosing to employ a ridiculous amount of vibrato and lilt...... i just hear some bard of middle earth. pathetic i know. tellingly, i have a much easier time scoffing at his cheesiness for "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" (wtf), in a film i didn't see until i was probably 15.

whither the wtf re frodo nf

what the frodo

Sing along!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzl1iDuE-2I

The Ghibli connections are so interesting. I wasn't aware that they used a Japanese animation studio, but you can totally see how that might have influenced the feline/lupine dragon design.

https://lenafrank.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/smaug.jpg

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/studio-ghibli/images/3/30/Catbus.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20181024032653

https://cdn.myanimelist.net/s/common/uploaded_files/1448519241-203158f56b7d51d7d6037de6c3cadb03.jpeg

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/studio-ghibli/images/3/30/Catbus.jpg

the Minstrel of Gondor is such a dick

Just wanted to say thanks for the kind comments! And enjoy the archives if you like -- yeah I figured I wasn't alone in having those kinds of experiences.

Frodo of the Nine Finger is a madeleine -level time machine back to me sitting cross-legged on the living room floor watching our TV that we wheeled back and forth from the dining room.

Urgent and key

https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/lord-of-the-rings-the-two-towers-meats-back-on-the-menu-meme

keep meaning to come back here and post some scattered Tom Bombadil thoughts after that podcast episode but now i fear they've mostly slipped away...

It'll come back to ya

i think it was mostly just agreeing/vibing with all the stuff abt him being above and beyond most of the plot's concerns. always loved the bit about him in the Council of Elrond, which y'all discuss... where it's clear that his corner of Middle Earth would be the last to fall in Sauron's conquest (but fall it would), and yet also that giving him the Ring would be pointless because he just wouldn't internalize its significance. i think i like the *idea of such a figure* more than i like Tom and his antics. though the haziest of memories is telling me i was fonder of him on first read. maybe i responded to the fey, quasi-trickster elements --- i liked characters of that sort. i def pictured him younger and spritelier than the "Adventures" illustrations - more Peter Pan than David the Gnome.

i think also on some story construction level, even if it wasn't planned this way, that Tom is a useful setup for Treebeard, who at first appears to be a similar sort. the Ents, though, *can* ultimately be stirred to action beyond their usual habits. maybe that sequence wouldn't work quite as well if we haven't already encountered this other personification of merry old Nature who is defined in some way by his indifference and unchangingness. and the Hobbits talk about Bombadil with Treebeard, don't they? maybe the only time he ever comes up after Rivendell...?

really the only thing i find totally indefensible about Tom is the stop-startness of the whole section, with his two-for-one sale on deus ex machina rescues. like, sorry JRR, you just gotta pick one. (and it's the barrow wight, no question.)

like i almost wonder if he wrote the barrow down sequence first, and then found the rescue from this god-being who comes out of nowhere unsatisfying. and so he makes sure we've at least met the guy, but in doing so doubles up on the saves. a retread of Gandalf's bailouts in The Hobbit... fine for a kids' book but not so narratively satisfying in this context, for me.

lol and in both cases it’s the hobbits falling asleep that does for them.

a grim reminder of the world beyond second breakfast, one's garden at twilight.... cakes...

also, can't remember: is the business of their barrow-weapons being enchanted (or the lead Ringwraith's role in the dim past of the North) ever set up before it comes into play? it's a neat tidbit to think about on the reread, but kinda comes out of nowhere iirc. or does Strider get a moment examining the weapons and hazarding some guesses about their provenance? just thinking about how this whole stretch does/doesn't weave into the tapestry of the trilogy.

nice that Merry gets to stab him though. payback for knifing Frodo at Weathertop!

For a number of these questions I'd have to dig back into the relevant History of Middle-earth volumes but I'd say it is important to remember he'd already come up with Bombadil and the general coterie some years before writing LOTR. He very much is an 'outside' element.

fascinating!

i feel like i could potentially offend hardcore fans here but a lot of the world's history stuff, much as i enjoyed reading and rereading it in the year-by-year appendix form, has never felt "real" to me. i think it's a combination of the timescales being SO long, and the emptiness of the world as we encounter it and as it's drawn on the maps. i think i've posted before about finding Gondor hard to grasp as a kingdom, beyond the walls of Minas Tirith. Tolkien's great, maybe unmatched, at wilderness and hiking down roads... but Middle Earth seems oddly bereft of farms and small towns. strangely, the sleepy Shire which no one down south has ever heard of, seems to be the most productive agricultural landscape on the planet. this has never kept me from enjoying the books, or running my eyes across the map and wondering about things, but it does make it a little harder for me to comprehend this lore of multiple great kingdoms in the north, all fallen long ago. they're just... gone? nobody lives there? why?

(this maybe also contributed to the pattern of CRPGs when they came along: big empty world map, mostly forests and monster-filled wastelands, dotted with a small number of teeny little towns and dungeons where all the plot happens. seems nothing like any place where humans have settled for more than, idk, a century. where is everybody??)

was also thinking about this brushing up on the Witch-King today. that dude had a serious resume! many kingdoms crushed, millennia as Sauron's right-hand man, maintaining strongholds all over the place... and yet the hobbits and Strider are able to hold him and most of his squad off with... a campfire, iirc? works for the spooky head of the terrifying ghost-story posse we've been running from all through the book, but maybe not so much for a deathless age-old Witch-King. it's also very odd it's only after eons of campaigns and struggles that sauron finally thinks to give them flying mounts. probably would have wrapped things up in book 1 prettttty quickly.

what works really *well* for me are the places that have been continuously occupied for ages, but under various regimes, like Moria and Cirith Ungol. that sense of history stacked up in one place feels much more accessible. *there* i have no problem accepting the sense of backstory/chronology looming behind. but man it's so insane that for example Numenor and the high "race of Men" are such a huge thing in LOTR and yet I never had the slightest idea reading those books that Numenor was an Atlantis-like continent sunk beneath the sea thousands of years before our story begins. i just figured it was, like, some kingdom somewhere.

aha, yes, posted about this here: LORD OF THE RINGS poll (film version)

great post DC. hard to argue with much of that. i have a faint memory of 'women and children' being herded to places of safety a couple of times. once at helm's deep and once at... Edoras? maybe? but otherwise yeah.

I like the strange emptiness, it fits, though -- like there's a remnant holding on amidst the wider ruins. I think it helps, for lack of a better term, that we don't really see much of Gondor outside of Minas Tirith -- we don't really get a sense of the land otherwise aside from a quick section detailing Aragorn and company leaving the Paths of the Dead, the confrontation/conversation at Erech, and then references to towns and farms and the like where people shut away the night and the fear the King of the Dead and company bring with them. In a way it makes me think (surely the intent, of course) of post-Roman Britain and Europe, where the ruins exist and there's great confusion and legends and stories about what it all meant.

I reread that bit yesterday and it's a very strange counterpoint to the spooky ghost train ride/cliffhanger of the film, where they come out of the other end of the paths of the dead and are followed by the dead for miles through this mysterious, neglected land while its population flees from them in terror leaving non-literal ghost towns in their wake

The film in its own way does sell the peril of the Paths in a bit more of a concrete way, whereas the book chapter is kind of several pages of "please do not go through the paths of the dead, you will die" followed by a short section of "well this sucks. Phew glad that's over with", and the dead are just like "yes boss, absolutely" no questions asked

There is also a fairly long description of places and comings and goings in wider Gondor as Pippin and Beregond look over the walls on the day the various Lords arrive with their forces to Minas Tirith, but it is quite sketchy and remote feeling, possibly not unintentionally

I think the feel of the land as the remnants of an historical overstretch works perfectly with the narrative of a dwindling colonial overrace retreating to its last few defensible positions tbh

Paths of dead works ok in books til youve seen jackson, for me, but its one of the parts i cant unsee after so is ruined forevermore

Also makes the Reunited Kingdom Aragorn establishes a bit amusing -- sure, take over all that land up through Arnor, there's nobody there to object! Unless you count the Shire and Bree.

Yeah that’s a really good point. It feels a little bit like playing make-believe.

The various RPGs have tried to flesh things out by imagining all sorts of scattered towns and cities and things that just aren't on the map. But, those are RPGs, so.

Still, there is the comment about people 'coming up the Greenway' in Bree and the like, there is the sense that people are moving INTO the area precisely because it's so apparently empty. But set against the various comments about all the darker forces that would menace the Shire without the Rangers' protection and how Bree is similarly protected and the like, kinda have my doubts that it's the best of worlds there.

The intro is strong on setting this up iirc (i do i read it a week ago)

In this analysis we will look at the case for the lord of the rings as a story about gentrification vs gatekeeping in rural middleclass districts

I think the feel of the land as the remnants of an historical overstretch works perfectly with the narrative of a dwindling colonial overrace retreating to its last few defensible positions tbh

This^^^ Nearly everything in LOTR is a faded remnant of a former glory, King-less Gondor, Osgiliath, Minas Morgul, Arnor/Barrow Downs, Moria, even Lothlorien.

i get all that, for sure. but like.... post-Roman Europe still had tons of people in it, right? just retreated to more local territories and fiefs, local lords claiming to offer protection in this increasingly wild and scary world, feudalism as a political economy uniting this structure of devolved, decentralized power with a certain agricultural and trade network... idk i think i just wished the company passed through one more Bree-esque town somewhere along the way. not that i know where that goes in the narrative mind you but it's just odd how much the map consists of mountains, forests and wastelands, and how few dots there are labeled with the name of a settlement. oh well - not what he was going for, and the world he created is quite memorable and vivid as this more primal and perhaps special place for it.

Well at the same time we have to remember we're dealing with something that has a patina of reality only. The closest equivalent to Gondor in real world terms -- a geopolitical entity that survives over three thousand years with only one relatively quickly resolved civil war of note and, that interruption aside, one dynasty of kings and another dynasty of stewards -- is *maybe* China, and said country has not exactly had that path over any randomly selected three thousand years of its own history.

It's a bit Death Stranding, tbh. Nature has largely taken back over and what's left are ghosts, ruins.

Probably a thread germ here but i have an irrational (pls note i freely lead with the admission) reaction to criticism (accepting that the good drs is mild as can be and not exactly the perfect application of what im talking about) that criticises a new or purely creative attempt for what it *isnt*

No doubt this is already thoroughly explored in some course or module ive missed

xpost but with the caveat that some fell machinery (and good) remains, lurking, activateable

nb growing up amidst medieval and earlier ruins and an infrastructure overgrown and crumbling compared to its heyday left little imaginative work required in this area for me perhaps

dmac, yknow, fair point! easy to riff and take potshots. i would generally take the stance that the criticism i'm most interested in is getting me to love/appreciate something i didn't before.

lemme say that i didn't really intend my remarks here *as* criticisms of the books... more turning over in my head things i've gotten out of them over the years. my mind since childhood has been rich with the concept and image of places like moria, bree, shelob's lair, minas tirith, mirkwood, and on and on. the short version of my long posts is: and i realize that some of these other places don't have that stickiness for me; i have pictures in my head but they don't link up with the lore in a way that "clicks." so this is 39-year-old Casino thinking about 12-year-old Casino's imagination and trying to put some specifics on why that might be.

Nope, i thought it was a good post and raising at interesting point and as i said the allergy i have to the /handwave/ type of thing /handwave/ was merely a mild itch from your example

We have had posters who will remain anonymuos who filled every thread they could on "what i would have done" and yrs wasnt, tbf, that

tbh those between-spaces in the book often feel like a blurry/dream quality travelogue vs the type of clarity and detail tolkien lavishes on his hobbywalking as discussed above so there's definitely *something* going on there

If we think that tolkien is as aware of how and why he/his characters are travelling, the trudge of a campaign through foreign and somewhat already defeated lands is going to have the sort of fug and lack of detail youve spotted, the same way that the orc-driven/orc chasing nightmare of the third book has an intensity despite being unpleasant, or the amble through the first few miles out of the shire has quite the opposite

it is, after all, a book about walking