Lord of the Rings

Primes wheel of time adaptation suggests theyre not exactly flinging money around it looks like shit

I do wonder. Well, we'll find out in September.

Our new episode out in a few days; in the meantime, this whole thread is gold (he's about three-quarters through it)

1) throwing a guy off a cliff for an execution is metal as hell

2) what the hell is wrong with Idril?? Eöl is the worst dude, he imprisoned and eventually killed her aunt, and she’s still like “oh I don’t like this execution business, we should forgive him, I hate my dad now”

— Max Rebo’s Roadie (@KevKoeser) January 7, 2022

Bah, that's not the start of the thread:

some holiday break reading pic.twitter.com/R4KpZDoW52

— Max Rebo’s Roadie (@KevKoeser) December 23, 2021

idril otm, weirdly!!

Anyway, new episode? Why yes.

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/34

And a new episode on the Shire, because why wouldn't we do that?

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/35

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

worth putting on record again my love for these posts

And damn good posts they are, don't know if I've seen them before.

New episode out Tuesday -- our thoughts on the Valar as well as a certain new trailer and the like...

circling strings --> staccato stabs --> mournful theme

still floats through my head at odd moments fully two decades on from first exposure. i love Shore's scoring but this is the real shit imo

also having a pretty niche 'things you were shockingly old when you learned' moment right now as i realise for the very first time that blokey doing the end credits of each radio episode of LoTR is the same guy that did the little joke and then the end credits on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which i somehow never noticed while wearing out my cassette tapes of both as a youth. Hitchiker's being the second Radio 4 series which carried me through an unhappy childhood (and the third being a series of adaptations of the Jeeves and Wooster stories starring Michael Hordern (aka Gandalf) as Jeeves - it all connects!).

God bless BBC Radio 4 circa 1975-1981, the pinnacle of public service broadcasting

enjoyed your post on the adaptation above also WD

still floats through my head at odd moments fully two decades on from first exposure. i love Shore's scoring but this is the real shit imo

It's pretty fantastic. Absolutely does the job. (A classic compare/constrast -- this versus the opening theme from Bakshi's version. In a word, no. Bakshi famously hated it too but had no say in the matter.)

very little of Bakshi’s vision does the job for me (music included).

Those radio adaptations were faithful to the tone of the books in a way that the films weren’t imo (although I do love the films on their own terms)

This is partly cause a 40 years old radio drama will always be weirder and scarier than a 21st century hollywood mega-blockbuster by default, the atmosphere is unbeatable and not something it would be easy to replicate these days.

Partly cause the cast was better.

And partly cause they nailed the vibe so precisely. the music and the sound for particularly. Whenever that haunting main violin theme comes in between acts or scenes it acts an extremely effective shorthand for the “journey”. You hear it and you know that the team is now ~on the road~, it works in a way that the panoramic shots of New Zealand don’t really touch for me. The producers knew what they were doing with that music.

Really enjoyed the posts itt thread on the subject of walking, rambling, travelling as one of the joys of these books and I think the radio series does a great job in nailing the mingled contentedness, adventure, excitement, terror (in appropriate measure depending on where the heroes happen to be rambling). Given the limitations of the medium an the necessary ditching of all the descriptive passages I think that’s quite an achievement

Off topic but as it was mentioned waaaaay way way upthread when the Tolkien radio adaptations were first mentioned - the 70s radio 4 version of Asimov’s “foundation” is a pretty good time if you’re at all interested. It takes full advantage of the medium by paring the unreadable prose to the bone and compensating for the dialogue by putting the usual 70s bbc radio cast of people with delightful theatrical voices to good use

Also has some lovely atmospheric sci-fi sound effects which were pretty good for 1973.

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.

from dr casino upthread, provoked a thought (most of the posts in that run of discussion do this and ive lots id like to go back to, such is the nature of lotr adolescent obsession shared so commonly and a very good thing it is)

that reducing these encounters to physical fights makes them smaller things that they are in my reading as a child, where strider isnt just a warrier he embodies a greatness, a presence, a power that is more than his sword

above point stands for a reader pondering it, and it softens criticism of Jackson handling it visually in one way because how can you direct it other than a scrap?

pondering of which question (i was walking dogs in a tussocky field which was good ground for tolkien ponderings i felt) led me to the other great creative work of the twentieth century, kung fu hustle, and how each blow dealt was at times (when the direction of each fight shifts to show it) laden with the metaphorical power of the training and spirit and knowledge and presence of the warrior dealing it.

i think tolkiens heroes, like his remnants of structures and cities and nations, embody more than the shell they are in and this is true for me as i read the above encounter

"embodies a greatness, a presence, a power that is more than his sword" --- this is a nice observation and i agree that many scenes in Tolkien play better and make more sense when read in this mode. somewhere else upthread i was also talking about the balance between 'legend' and 'history'; for me the mix of the two describes a lot of LOTR's unique "feeling." probably most of my "huh, this is weirdly unconvincing to my brain" reactions to aspects of Tolkien result from taking in 'legend' passages in a more 'historical' mode.

It's interesting to consider how characters can and do 'turn on' for certain scenes. Consider, thinking of Aragorn again, how in the first encounter with Eomer when he does the full 'here's my deal' bit both Legolas and Gimli are described as being quite surprised and astonished. Of course the hobbits provide a greater contrast in turn but that also makes his downshift moments interesting too -- thus when Pippin greets him with delight in Minas Tirith as Strider, Imrahil is all 'pfft' at the name and Aragorn's all "I like that name, translate it and deal with it."

Convince me it isnt a silly adventure novel and that it was worth giving up a great philogy career.

It's not "silly" so much as misguided. The Hobbit was a well-written children's book, very tight and engaging. LoTR is an inconsistent disaster. The only readable book is Fellowship; the 2nd is a slog and half of the 3rd is useless. Why does elven news travel instantly across the Misty Mountains, yet decades later Gimli still had no news about Moria? Why didn't they use the giant eagles to get at least a little closer to Mordor? Was Tolkien at all aware of deus ex machina?

Tolkien should have written another novel for his children, not created a sprawling system with little internal coherency.

frodo and the gang couldn't use the eagles because they would have been seen, and the whole plot depends on sauron not realizing that they were trying to destroy the ring until it was too late for him to stop them (he assumes that no one would 1) want to do this and 2) even be capable of it).

that first post bugs me every time i open this thread. tolkien didn't "give up" his career to write the books, he wrote them in his spare time.

I was about to say, it wasn't like he wasn't busy all that time!

criticising the second book as being a slog is like criticising a chicken for being a chicken

Also, the eagles aren’t fuckin taxis!

Quite. Our thoughts on the matter last year

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/29

Maybe the eagles weren't taxis, but they sure flew in whenever Tolkien needed a good deus ex machina. And what about the news about Moria not spreading for decades? Surely the dwarf news service would have gotten around to reporting on events after a bit.

Chickens can do their own thing and it's all well and good but I'm not planning on reading a chicken any time soon.

now im not one to demand nobody can criticise the stuff i like in threads about them

but the level of discussion on the books from those who love them is by some distance above these posts you're bringing in, which are cheap flyby zings that could be dropped in by anyone who has read a six-tweet run of things that might annoy lotr book lovers.

maybe thats cool with you. i think tbh it makes you look a right dickhead.

Now now darragh, be gentle.

I think the thing about Moria is that nobody knows what happened. They went in, and they never came out, and nobody’s been in there since.

Now, you can argue (I would) that surely someone in dwarfdom would have tried to find out what happened to Balin & co - that no news and no communication with the rest of the world for - what, decades? - would have spurred some action. But we also don’t have a lot of info about how the dwarf community works in general; maybe they’re used to total radio silence & totally isolated pods & certainly not travelling very much esp compared to men & elves (one can easily imagine hobbits who went away to reconquer an ancestral homeland and never came back & nobody would have expected another expedition to go after them; it would have been like “wonder what happened to ‘em, pass the beer nuts.”)

for the purposes of defending my gentility, dickhead was my rewrite option

yeah, i always just got the 'isolated pods' vibe. though surely if the goal was to get Moria going again as a full-scale mining operation, then they would have expected to have gotten, some shipments of ore coming back by now, or something. once again, it's best not to dwell too long on the logic of some of this stuff, because it works so effectively in its mythic outlines. the motives make emotional and legendary sense, not practical sense.

If I struggled with the last third of the hobbit, what are my chances for LOTR? Kinda tempted to do the bbc adaptation instead.

id recommend the latter for sure

if you like it the book is always there

Re: Moria, there aren’t that many more organized pockets of dwarves to even care, and the vibe is it was a foolhardy venture so why throw good dwarves after bad so to speak?

To my mind the dwarf story fits in with the whole feeling of the sheer EMPTINESS of LOTR-era Middle-earth, and I mean that as a creative positive note. There's this massive sense of disconnected isolation where there's very little travel as such, where empires have retreated and hunkered down, leaving little but the ruins behind, a vibe the Jackson films captured pretty well, I thought.

The last third of The Hobbit is balls.

The Moria disaster also coincides with the period in which Sauron's been gathering his power, and the dwarves and everyone else becoming even more closed off and distrustful than usual. Anyway, I think the dwarves basically knew that something must have gone wrong in Moria, but unless someone went in and looked, there was no way to know for certain.

Anyway our latest episode. Thoughts on the Valar...and a certain new trailer and all.

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/36

Shame to note this:

https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2022/03/01/112398-priscilla-tolkien-dies-aged-92/

A good run of course. Had a chance to meet her at the 1992 Centenary Conference in Oxford, she was the official 'family rep' to us, and various groups went over to her place for tea and chat. Very friendly and kind. Christopher was there too but stuck to a formal presentation and attending of a dinner, preferring -- I think very understandably -- to keep to a trusted circle.

i think tbh it makes you look a right dickhead.

You are the one calling me a "dickhead" when you are being an utterly isolationist Tolkien fan, unwilling to bring any of your critical faculties to bear on his work?

Right, my mistake.

could really use an eagle right abt here

(somewhat ironically, given yr distaste for eagles as a narrative device)

Ok, now you really do sound like a right dickhead.

seem to make them angry. one exception is (again) gandalf, the world's wisest man. he seems frightened.

idly scrolling through this thread again and i like this on the ring and its effects.

Boromir's fall is crucial to this whole deal (and anecdotally, among my LotR-obsessed friends (this is almost all of them, we were generally between the ages of 10-13 when the films were released and will probably never shake off the infatuation as a result), Boromir's fall and redemption seems to be the bit of the films which has most reliably stayed with people and which they found most emotionally affecting).

there are many reasons for this, some of which are - (1) he is a "normal" i.e. horribly, understandably flawed human character.

(2) his confrontation with Frodo is redolent of a drunk abusive father getting back from the boozer late and confusedly assaulting his child and this lands differently and is more immediately affecting than most of the stuff which happens in Middle Earth (Bilbo and Frodo's respective freak-outs re: the ring at opposite ends of the journey also good on addicts and addiction).

(3) Boromir is more or less the only main character (by which I guess I mean member of the fellowship) who feels at risk at any point of shitting the bed entirely. he he is therefore human and relatable and ultimately tragic in a way the others aren't.

the hobbits themselves are obviously reader / viewer surrogates in some respects but they are massively. pure of heart, not susceptible to the charms / evils of the ring. the incorruptibility of the stolid, simple yeomanry on the land. iir my Keith Thomas correctly, the stolid, simple yeomanry of early modern England used to burn small animals alive for sport, take bets on how many stones it would take to kill a cat tied to a pole etc). the hobbits are fun but they are too pure to be believable.

Aragorn is obviously a total daydream. he is a fairytale prince from the get go. you like him and trust him but you're made to feel very quickly that he belongs to a different world entirely. good use of the hobbits in establishing this tone early on (especially Sam, the stolidest, simplest yeoman of the lost (also the most natural poet) who senses Strider's weirdness immediately, is initially suspicious but quickly falls in love). you never believe Aragorn will cave to temptation.

the other ppl tempted by the ring at various points all belong to the fairy story side of things. (Gandalf, Galadriel, even Faramir with that "air of Numenor" which Sam identifies)

whereas Boromir is just a pretty normal bloke in out of his depth with no plot armour and no supra-human wisdom or magic to protect him.

he's born to a position of power and responsibility and like a great many apparently functioning but actually completely dysfunctional celebrities / leaders / parents suffering from imposter syndrome he is capable of wearing the pressure well under certain circs but beneath the surface there is this torrent of fear and anger and abject desperation.

he utterly fucks it up and while imo the other characters don't actually forget this, he also redeems himself in a non-trivial way, and then he dies, in some respects a hapless broken, tormented figure but also he is real. he fucked up and he tries to make it better and he sort of does but not really and everyone else has to live with that, and sometimes that's how it goes

tl;dr Boromir is really a pretty good character who has actual depth. Tolkien could write characters and he could do it well

this entire rant prompted by Sean Bean in fuckin Snowpiercer being on my tv tonight

typos taking that from barely coherent to utterly incoherent but i stand by every mistyped word.

new borad description

WD, that’s good stuff.

It is indeed

yeah fuck dude, that was excellent

Boromir has that constant weight of expectation & the shroud of a bad father wrapped around him & fear of fucking it up for himself & the whole what will dad say … check the boxes doomed doomed doomed

he sees himself nobly seeking what he believes is rightfully his but is really a slave to his doubt, it dooms him to fuck it up & makes us all kinda love him because he’s all of us

we all want to be sam but but maybe we’re all boromir

Just to say, LOTR starts with Bilbo in the power of the ring and ends* with Frodo similar - they're less susceptible, rather than not at all.

when i am tempted by the ring i simply think of the way my dad eats cherry tomatoes

lol

u_u

great Boromir posts! the casting/performance of Bean are also critical here imho.... he is really good at playing guys who are clearly not as cool/together/complete as the people around them, and know it inside (see: Ronin).