f13.net

Oh, come on WUA that's bullshit.

Anything can work on film, and I do mean anything, in the same way anything can work in print: all that is required is talent and the conditions to make it work. The LotR movies were deprived in both of these areas - the director and screenplay writers lacked sufficient talent, and the producers (New Line) failed to provide the material with the conditions to flourish into anything beyond a simplistic meller draped (well, smothered) in wank-tastic CGI of totally inappropriate designs. Clear examples abound - Shelob was absolutely nothing like the loathsome monstrous form depicted so well by Tolkien (and in fact the movie Shelob looked like something from a Harryhausen movie, albeit computer-smooth). The balrog was just plain wrong - big fiery monster (perfect for a merchandise toy...) replaced what could have been a genuinely frightening study of a fallen angel (and no, they did not have huge bat-like wings) and Gandalf's staff was broken when he cracked the bridge (the broken staff foreshadows his fall, as it did with Saruman). I really could go on and on about the inadequacies of these movies and I would be happy to debate you on the grounds that the LotR movies are biggest missed opportunity in the history of motion pictures.

edit by samwise: rules, motherfucker.  No editorializing in the thread title.

Is that it had wings that upsets you or that they were bat-like?  Because Tolkien never described it's wings, only that it had them. Would you have preferred dove's wings perhaps?

 :uhrr:

(http://www.enterprisemobilitymatters.com/.a/6a00e008d27b938834011168451929970c-800wi)

Rita Skeeter.

And you'd be wrong.

They aren't perfect films, but Jackson did an incredible job.

And he left out most of the singing. Top marks for that.
Tolkien clearly states butterfly wings. Giant black glossy butterfly wings. Jackson ruined the entire movie the entire trilogy the rest of my year reality as we know it by NOT making them butterfly wings.  :uhrr:

The former... from the description in The Ring Goes South, The Bridge of Khazad Dum, the balrog has no wings. Tolkien uses the term "wings" as a simili: "... and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings".

Later in the same section he writes "... and its wings were spread from wall to wall...", and I take this to be allusive of the aforementioned shadow.

This is of course a subject of considerable debate to those who are interested in arguing interpretation. This is however complicated further if one chooses to consider Tolkien's desciptions of balrogs and their activities in other works. For example, in the Silmarillion when Morgoth is ensnared by Ungoliant and he calls out for help, the balrogs come to his aid and appear to cover an immense distance in a very little time - some say they flew to his aid on wings, others that like Morgoth himself, they passed over the land like a great cloud of darkness - I prefere the latter.

And I do not agree that Jackson did "an incredible job" with the LotR movies - I think he did an adequate job of making event movie "blockbusters" out of a literary work that deserved much, much more. 

 :oh_i_see:

I'm going out on a limb here and say nobody could have made a movie that would satisfy every single fan and the picture he made for himself in his mind.

Jackson succeeded as well as anyone could. Sure, I could bludgeon Legolas to a bloody pulp with his skater shield, but that doesn't invalidate the rest as a great movie.

To be fair, elves in literature tend to do shit exactly like skate shield Legolas.

And the Rings trilogy was extremely well done.  Of course it strays from the books here and there...not like it's the first time that's happened.  Shit, it's unavoidable for books-turned-movie.  I don't think it could have been done much better in any reasonable way.

I bet those panel discussions can get pretty heated.

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wvoLtwni0kc/R13FdLyfTkI/AAAAAAAAMiI/J1b2lXLkRq0/s400/nerd-fight_thumb.jpg)

Oh fuck, VE probably wanted some ten-hour marathon of hobbits walking and walking and singing and walking and singing and walking and walking that nobody normal would have ever sat through.

Please stop talking now.

You mean as opposed to the eleven or more hours of material we were presented with that still managed to throttle the story leaving a twitching corpse with Jackson/Boyens/Walsh's finger prints all over it?

Recently I watched the associated commentaries from the extended version DVD releases. I hooted with laughter when Boyens in an act of supreme condescension, after she and her literary hatchet-wielding cronies had struggled with the story and screwed up monumentally, admitted that Tolkien "knew what he was doing"... Wow - I bet the ghost of JRRT can sleep at last knowing that all his erudition and literary efforts have been approved by a cack-handed pulp screenplay hack.

Your posts make baby Jesus cry.

Oh man, this is even better than the tank vs. mech discussion.

Anyone who strives to remove Tom Bombadil from anything is a hero.

I post a bit in the wow forums defending the game.  I was starting to think I was a rabid fanboy or something but these posts have shown me how truly delusional people can get over something.  Thank you for putting things in perspective for me.

Wow, when Tolkien said the balrog had wings, I never thought to disagree with him. I'm starting to think Harry Potter doesn't wear glasses and Superman doesn't have a cape, and instead those are allegories too.

Obviously it was just drinking Red Bull.

Tolkien was an excellent world-builder, but an average writer.  Many, as you see here, are just fine with the exclusion of Bombadil.

No, it isn't.  It might be to people who don't get, for example, English.  He had wings of shadow.  You know.  Black ones.

Seriously, what the fuck are you on ?

No, it did not have "wings of shadow" as you wrote above, it had in fact a shadow about it that "reached out like two vast wings" - which is exactly what Tolkien wrote. Now forgive me if I take the Professor's words over yours?

"Seriously", I (cordially) invite you to consider carefully the definition of the word "similie": an explicit likening of one thing to another, a semblance if you will. Ergo, equally explicitly not the thing it was compared to. Thusly, not wings - shadow that is like wings, but not in fact wings.

*listens for sound of penny landing in some unfathomable depth of emptiness*
   

I think you may just be bitter and can't appreciate that Jackson was a better writer and storyteller than tolkien.

So I considered the definition of the word "similie".  Here's what I found:

Did you mean: simile

Now, I already knew this but I felt like being an extra big jackass about it.  If you're going to go to all the effort to define the word, you could at least make sure you spell it correctly.  That's twice now you've referred to similes and you've managed to spell it two different ways, both times incorrectly.  I mean, I wasn't going to go all grammar snake on you the first time but you opened up that can of worms by going the condescending definition route in order to assert your literary superiority.  So now I feel obligated.  Learn to spell, Mr. English Professor.  Then maybe people will take your PhD in Tolkien Studies more seriously instead of thinking you're just whining about the movie not being a 42 hour literal interpretation snoozefest.  I don't really care if Peter Jackson got the size of the bunion on Bilbo Baggins' left toe exactly the right size.  I just care that the movie was fun to watch.

You might want to write a strongly worded letter to John Howe about his 1989 illustration "Glorfindel and the Balrog (http://www.john-howe.com/portfolio/gallery/details.php?image_id=284)" then. And the Tolkien Estate for putting his painting in various official calendars and books of Lord of the Rings art, bat-wings and all. They obviously didn't get the memo. His contact details are here (http://www.john-howe.com/contact.php). I'm sure he'd be delighted in hearing just exactly how he - and the estate - misinterpreted Tolkiens writings. I gather he's pretty chummy with Peter Jackson too (and may have been largely responsible for the movie design of the Balrog along with some bloke called Alan Lee who apparently has done the odd LOTR inspired scribble) so I'm sure he'll pass the word on.

edit by samwise: BBCODE FUCK

 :popcorn:

Funny thing is that I could easily pull all the previous posts about my BA (Hons)  in English Literature and Language.  I can even pull out my Dissertation on Ian Banks and my Third Year work on....wait for it.... Tolkien vs Beowulf.

But, really, that would be too much silliness for one page.

Mate, Seriously, loosen your grip on it a little and use a little lubrication before making the sliding motion.  Things will get better.  The only 'unfathomable depth of emptiness' would appear to be right in the centre of your soul.  Have some more Cheesecake.

Also, The Turtle Moves and the Balrog had Wings.

TBH I think PJ is a bit of a hack, if a very successful one.  He considers LotR to be the lowest common denominator of fantasy, set out to use it as the framework for a profitable and fairly generic fantasy movie because he thought it'd be easier than coming up with his own IP, and succeeded at what IMO was a pretty low goal.  But then I paid to see the movies in the theaters and again to get them on DVD, so clearly he did one or two things right along the way.  

In any case, though, you can spend as much time trying to convince people that JRR Tolkien was a good writer as you can trying to convince them that Dan Brown is a bad one, and never get anywhere on either point.  People like what they like.

Awwww, Samwise changed my title :awesome_for_real:

LOL, I thought that was just VE being a punk when he posted the thread, not you being a punk after the fact.  I stand by my ironfisted modding, though.

Anyone else have to double check the dates to make sure this was not some sorta zombified thread? Where the fuck did this topic skip up from given the fact the movies have been out awhile now?  :uhrr:

Seriously, go to any Tolkien fansite like Barrowdowns.com or theonering.net, register and post something like "Hi, I've been into Tolkien's stuff since Orlando Bloom opened my eyes to the majesty of the Elven race but I have a quick question; do Balrogs have wings?'

Then sit back and watch the 90 page threadnaught ensue.

Oh for fuck's sake, not the motherfucking Balrog wings argument again.  :uhrr:

EDIT: I love the books more than any sane person should, and even I will admit that the Tom Bombadil/Barrow Downs section would have messed up the flow of the movie. It nearly does so to the book.

The Balrog looked almost exactly the way I pictured it in my mind's eye. That whole sequence is among the very best in the movie trilogy imo.

It started here in the SW thread:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=17228.msg666120#msg666120

then died down until VainEldritch quoted WUA's post from a month ago.

I don't think Jackson would disagree with being a hack given his amateur splatterfilm background, but don't sell the man short. He enjoyed the narrative, thought it would make a good film and worked hard - very hard - to get the project off the ground. When it looked like the film financiers would force the entire trilogy into one movie, he went around Hollywood until he got New Line Cinemas to support doing three movies. He filmed three movies back-to-back across a huge number of areas with a lot of pre-planning and logistics. It wasn't a situation where he wanted to make "a profitable and fairly generic fantasy movie" because he could have done that with anything, or accepted the one movie deal (which would have been easier). He wanted to make LOTR properly and IMO succeeded as best he could while also making it entertaining.

That he changed the story so that some characters weren't just cyphers is fine by me. Or included points from post-scripts earlier in the narrative so that they made sense.

In the making-of piece on the DVD (like I said, he must have done some things right for me to have gotten as far as watching the extras), he actually says that he set out with the intent of making a fantasy film because one hadn't been done in a while, and decided that if it wasn't at least as good as Lord of the Rings (in other words the lowest common denominator in his view) it probably wasn't even worth making, so the easiest thing would be to just do LotR.  He then proceeded to read the books at a gallop while scribbling down Cliff's Notes for himself to use in the script outline.

That's my recollection, anyway; it was some years ago I watched it so my memory may be exaggerating some parts.  He definitely didn't strike me as having any particular fondness for the source material.  Like I said, he did a serviceable enough job nonetheless, but I personally (and I am obviously in the wacko fringe minority on this) would still be very interested in seeing a film adaptation that tried to use more of what's unique about LotR and its setting.

It was up and down for me.  Some scenes were fantastic depictions of parts of one of my favorite books.  Some scenes made me go "what the hell?"  Overall it worked reasonably well, but I do feel like they went off in the weeds at times.  I should give it a rewatch -- it's been too long and I actually don't remember which bits were great and which bits were painful.

Considering Peter Jackson got his Balrog idea from Richard Garriott's Balrons, that makes this whole discussion mute.

Well played.

The 'mute' was a perfect touch.

Ahhh... nothing like a great thread to get your mind off the house buying process. Thank you f13!  :heart:

So how exactly would you describe the wings in your avatar?  Are they bat-like or just shadowy?

Seriously? The balrog? Geez.

Apparently the judgement of history is the movies sucked as no profit was made. Or so New Line has told the Tolkien vultures family accountants (http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/07/28/hobbit/).

I'd say they extend from his back like two wings the color of shadowed grass.

I'd say they were allegorical

Oh, sorry...hope I didn't offend you.  I just assumed they were actual wings due to the fact that they so obviously appear to be.

You know what's like a wing?  A wing.  I do love some literary interpretation, despite not spending a lot of time on it outside poetry.  Novels are just so long.

Just to contribute to the mess, I read that balrog bit just a month or so ago and I imagined the balrog looking more like what VE imagined, but then I started thinking of Tyrael and how cool that was.  If it was up to me, I'd probably do something like what you might have seen in that Constantine movie: coal-black humanoid, surrounded by a smoke cloud with occasional glimpses of red glow.  The wings would have been formed out of the smoke cloud when it needed to make that leap.  Then again, I'm not trying to sell my ideas to get funding, and you can't make an action figure out of smoke.

I'm also glad Bombadil was cut.  I can hardly stand the bastard in LotRO, and he actually fits in better in a MMO with it's disjointed narratives.

Need to rewatch the movies.

Same here. It pisses me off that he comes skipping in at the end of 1.11 to save the day. Fruity bastard.


It's okay. It's an easy mistake to make.

Oh, see, now you did it.  In the book, it's somewhat believable that Tom might show up in the nick of time and save the hobbits from the barrow.  In the game, popping into the Great Barrow via the Sekrit Door To The Boss Room is very insulting.  Firstly, how about a little help in the fight, ya prick?!  He's not saving my fellowship from anything, we already beat the wight.  And secondly, WHAT ABOUT THE DAMN BACK DOOR YOU PRANCING FUCKER?!  Didn't care to mention that?  Asshole.

Tom Bombadil is like my favorite thing in the entirety of LotRO that I've seen so far.

HEY NONNY NONNY

wut

I really dig the music in Tom Bombadil's house.  The guy himself, however, can fuck right off.

I never played that far into the game, but that actually sounds like they more or less got him right.  He's basically a force of nature; he never struck me as particularly likable on a personal level.

Oh, they absolutely nailed his character, which is why I can't stand him. :oh_i_see:

You handed in a dissertation on which would win in a fight? Awesome.

Yeah, but in fairness, it was the diagrams that nailed me the A.

Clearly, Beowulf, as an expression of the Male Perfection coupled with the Humility of the True Hero, could take that old fuck with the pipe.

The liberties taken with the first movie/book were a mixed lot.  The wight and the hobbits finding the HUGE PLOT DEVICE shouldn't have been cut, but Bombadil himself should have been pruned down to a short segment of frolicking to the rescue in the woods like an omnipotent retard.  Arwen appearing to save Frodo was completely unnecessary, and he really shouldn't have cut (lone) Frodo attempting to defy the Witch King at the ford, because the Witch King being a sadistic asshole by fucking with Frodo's head and smacking his ass down with a spell before going to take him prisoner was pretty awesome.

Frodo facing down the ring wraiths all by himself, knowing he was going to die, and still he faced them down and said "You shall have neither the Ring nor me!" I got goosebumps when I read that.

In the movie we got Aerosmith's daughter looking stupid with her ninja sword.

More an Arabian sword, surely.

Or a cavalry saber.

Eh, same thing!

Please note: in the story Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin Tuor does not in fact come to Gondolin, he just sees a vision of it. :oh_i_see:

He may not have initially had much fondness for the source material (although I don't think "it should be at LEAST as good as the granddaddy of all fantasy" means "it is the lowest common denominator" in the way that phrase is usually used), I am not sure how you can watch the movies or listen to the commentaries without seeing how much love went into those suckers, Jackson included. Maybe it's because I worked in theatre for a while and could see aspects of that process in THEIR process with their design and deciding how to make parts movie-able, but it took my breath away at times to see just how sincerely everyone involved loved the shit out of LotR. Seriously, watching the technical and designer people talk about it made me slightly sniffly, because they were able to work on a project that I'm sure they all dreamed of (in an abstract sense, not LotR specifically) when they got into the business in the first place. That's rare, and I felt really happy for them.

I do not think the leader of the Nine was the Witch King.

Yes, he was. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-king_of_Angmar)

Edit: Personally, whenever I play a multi-person party CRPG I usually have a character named Glorfindel (he also commanded my first X-COM base to victory over the aliens with something retarded like 150 kills).  I am not sure if I should be annoyed that he was cut from the movie and replaced by Arwen or if I should be grateful not to have had my imagination molested.

Damn you again, Appendices! :awesome_for_real:


I'm pretty annoyed by it and support such a position, but then I'm not annoyed by seeing someone else's interpretation of a book I read.

As someone who only read a bit of the books because I just couldn't get into Tolkien's writing style, I have to say I thought Arwen looked pretty bad ass and the "If you want him, come and claim him" part still gets me going. "FUCK YA! COME GET SOME!"

/shrug

Yes, and that would have been totally cool except Arwen was never meant to be the "gets me going" chick. That was Eowyn the valkyrie "I AM NO MAN! WHACK!" Arwen was a frail mincey-pincey elfish princess as a contrast to Eowyn. That delicate elven princess cliche? Yeah, Arwen started that. Daddy's girl. You read about Arwen, you go "Damn Tolkien was so sexist!" Then you read about Eowyn and go "Damn Tolkien wasn't sexist!" That was the thing. Jackson ruined the thing. My biggest gripe. Shield-surfing was downright canon compared to that schlock.

Right, to me the Arwen stuff goes beyond interpretation of the material and into "let's put a hot chick all through the three movies".

Ok, I can see that. But then again, I didn't understand the attraction between Aragorn and Eowyn in the movies anyways. It felt kind of wedged in to me.

I actually have no problem with them basically replacing Glorfindel with Arwen; it takes a certain amount of screen time with a character for the audience to go "OK, she's important in some way to the story" and that lets them do that. Having Glorfindel do that would just lead to 'wait, who the hell is this guy?' syndrome anyway, since he doesn't really come into the story anywhere else.

The thing I don't really care for is the weird soft-lighting semi-flashback "hey audience please remember Arwen is hanging around" scenes in the second and third movies, I don't think those were necessary.

Exactly.  Eowyn was written as the bad ass blonde warrior princess and Arwen as the ultra-feminine elf-princess.  Aragon was faced with a dilemma in the books, in the movie it was no contest and thus a really wasted plot arc.

Edit: Ingmar, I agree, putting Glorfindel into the movie would have just been fan-service and would have confused a big part of the audience.  But, well, part of the attraction of LoTR (for me anyway) was that the books only represented one part of one tale of an entire world of history and legend and Glorfindel is a major connection to that history.

I think Bakshi did it better, putting Legolas there. Arwen got her storybook scene on the bridge with Aragorn, and her many significant blushy glances across the courtyard. That was just fine and dandy to me.

Some of this was done to beef up Aragorn as a dramatic character who isn't automatically noble and with the right blood and will do the right thing etc., which was pretty much Tolkien's take on Aragorn and Faramir both: he makes them about as interesting as a block of wood, quite on purpose. I actually appreciated that Jackson et al thought that Aragorn needed to have a genuine dramatic arc.

On replacing Glorfindel, don't forget the reported reaction of Hugo Dyson, one of Tolkien's colleagues and friends who used to hang out at The Eagle and the Child (pub in Oxford, worth a visit) to listen to Tolkien and later CS Lewis read some of the drafts of their stuff. When listening to this section of the Fellowship, Dyson said something along the lines of "Oh, fuck, another elf!" when Glorfindel appeared. (There are other less profane versions, but he clearly said something like this.) I'm with Dyson on this one, really. Why not make Glorfindel into someone with long-term meaning to the narrative? Works for me.

Dramatic arc?  He starts off with the hobbits figuring he's a fucking highwayman.  You might have skimmed a few important parts.


"By Elbereth and Luthien the fair," said Frodo with a last effort, lifting up his sword, "You shall have neither the ring nor me!"  Then the leader, who was now half across the ford, stood up menacing in his stirrups, and raised up his hand.  Frodo was stricken dumb. He felt his tongue cleave to his mouth, and his heart labouring.  His sword broke and fell out of his shaking hand.

Witch King: keeping the [Pimp Hand of Necromancy] strong.

Ack. Just reading those few sentences reminded me how lousy of a writer that guy was.  Cool characters and world, can't string words together worth a damn.

That's the hobbits' issue. You're not really getting what's meant by dramatic arc. Not all characters in stories have them (and that can be fine). But drama's essence lies in choice forced by circumstance, and the sense that at some key point, there are multiple plausible ways a character can choose to be or to do.

In Tolkien, there is never ever any suspense about whether Aragorn will do the right thing at the right time. (Again, same for Faramir.) That's because they have the right bloodline, basically. He has a few tough decisions: let Frodo go, chase after Merry and Pippin; go on the Paths of the Dead; go to the Gates of Mordor after Pellennor.

He's not ever really appreciably tempted by the Ring, he's not generally internally conflicted about much of anything though he's worried about whether the struggle against Sauron will lead to victory; and despite what you guys are saying, I don't think he's ever really much interested in Eowyn. She's sort of set-up as having a slightly pathetic unrequited crush, she's as much in love with him because he seems like an escape hatch out of a pointless life in Rohan as anything else. There's a scene in Return of the King where Aragorn is talking with Eomer about Eowyn post-Witch King and Aragorn pretty much says, "Never been interested in that chick, she's kind of hung up on me".

So the Jackson screenplays tried to make the Eowyn-Arwen choice more genuinely dramatic (partly by making Aragorn think that Arwen's done the chicken run out of Middle-Earth), they chose to make Aragorn more doubtful of his own kingliness, they tried to set him up as more worried about the rightness of his choices, all in service to making his eventual maturation into the King more of a genuinely dramatic triumph.

This particular reworking of the books was pretty good, I think. There's tons of other stuff that I simply don't get what they thought they were doing (like fucking around with how the Ents go to war, etc.) but I get the point here. The one ultra-dumb thing was making Arwen sick with the Sauron-cooties in order to give Aragorn more motivation to fight (like he needs it by the time he gets to the Paths of the Dead).

They had a ton of the props and costumes on display in Te Papa (New Zealand's national museum) in Wellington last time I was there. You're not wrong, there's some serious love and work that went into that stuff, including so many details that would never be picked up by a camera. Star Wars, this wasn't.

For what it's worth I always assumed the changes with the Ents were meant to foreshadow Pippin and Merry becoming more important to the storyline and to show how they were changing and getting involved.

"Jackson ruined the thing" and "[Tolkein] can't string words together worth a damn" on one page.

It's about a trilogy - "none of them can act as well as me" might go well as the third?

It was a huge thing for a lot of the people involved there and perfection / attention to detail was seen as very important even on a huge scale. Certain members of the special effects team had to basically check themselves into rehab at the end of shooting to get over the speed addictions they'd picked up trying to keep up with demand for things like rubber feet or having enough chainmail available. 

Also, I'm hugely impressed that each Ring Wraith cloak had about 50m of fabric in it.

Why don't we go for "the movies were ok in a way, but the movie v book fanbois totally ruin everything associated with this topic".

.

Sort of like Hemmingway to my mind, very terse at times, and you have to pay attention to the nuance and subtext, so it comes off as bland if you're not paying close attention.  On the other hand, he doesn't bloat it the fuck out like Robert Jordan, which is nice.


You actually nailed it with the Eowyn/Arwen thing.  He isn't interested, he pretty much explicitly states it.  However the movie's retcon is a pretty weak dramatic arc regardless.  Aragorn's dramatic arc in the book is entirely about his ascension to the role of king from his life as a ranger, taking on responsibility for others and being forced into decisions he'd rather not make.

My position is that neither Jackson nor Tolkein fucked up the movies or the books. I am immensely satisfied with both. Neither are perfect, but this thread is full of emo bleating.

This, and I don't even know what bleating means.
-
...to utter the cry of a sheep, goat, or calf or a sound resembling such a cry? The fuck is wrong with you? What, was it too hard to say emo crybabies? You had to pull a fancy word from nowhere?

The word "bleating" isn't fancy, it's just used more by people without internet access.

 :awesome_for_real:



JRRT, almost exactly like Hemingway!

Tolkien has nothing in common with Hemingway and "terse" is about as far away of an adjective I'd use for Tolkien as I could think of.

I didn't know you wouldn't understand it, being that I'm from Scotland via Australia and it's not a fancy word to me. Maybe we just have more sheep. Maybe you're pig-ignorant. Moo.

He was a boring academic, lover of language, and a Beowulf fiend. To say he was lousy and can't string words together?  :awesome_for_real:

I hope this post is a joke.


I think it's fair to say that the strength of LOTR is the narrative and epic scope rather than the actual writing. If you take away that narrative you're left with the Silmarilon (or however you spell it), an incredibly tedious read.

I like authors who create great prose but the "cult of the sentence" has gotten way out of hand in the past decade or so. I think 99% of readers prefer great story to great writing, so saying that he was a better storyteller than writer is hardly a knock.

 :heart:

I loved The Hobbit, got through Lord of the Rings and ground my way through The Silmarillion.

Tolkien wasn't writing modern novels, he was writing epics in the style of Homer or the sagas. Saying that Tolkien isn't a good novelist is like pointing out that Maria Callas was a terrible rapper.

I am not sure how the first sentence relates to the second. I love music and find music theory interesting, but I can't string notes together worth a damn.

And yeah, I know the style he was shooting for was HELO THIS IS AN EPIC, but that doesn't make all his flowery bullshit good. :P

Tolkien's style is really nothing like Homer's.

:awesome_for_real:

This is probably stupider than the Hemingway comment.

I'm calling Poe's law.

What the fuck? it's pretty well known that Tolkien wrote in the epic rather than the modern style with the possible exceptions of The Hobbit and The Father Christmas Letters. I'm not sure why what I said is even slightly controversial.

I'd say Lord of the Rings, outside of the "let's sing a song!" breaks, for the most part falls on the not-recreating-the-Prose-Edda side of things. For The Silmarillion and everything else not the Hobbit, your statement makes plenty of sense, I think, but the trilogy isn't trying to be Beowulf. It strikes me more like one of those big sprawling novels of the 1800s, where they cram in everything they can think of from comedy to tragedy to social commentary.

Allegedly Tolkien described it himself as a Romance.

Anyway, what does "writing in the epic" actually mean?

In the epic style is what Iain actually said. He's talking about writing in the style of Norse and Old English Epics-with-a-capital-E.

Or complaining that Richard Wagner wrote terrible choonz... then listening to Westlife. 

Neither am I. This thread is hunter souffle.

God, what happened in here ??

 :ye_gods:

It's a LoTR thread on the internet, what did you expect?  It's, like, a nerd synergy.

He specifically mentioned Homer and Homer wrote in the Homeric style, which is characterized by economy, hexameter (IIRC) and a specific sort of simile I forget the name of. ("Ajax pounced on the men like the wolf at the foal...")

Also the Illiad isn't particularly epic in that it has a fairly narrow scope and is rather short.

Gilagamesh is a lousy myth. Thank god they got better from there.

Almost as dumb as commenting on stylistic differences when you can't manage an eight word sentence without mangling it.

Too much  :awesome_for_real:, I think I'm full.


Yah this is what i was WTFing at. Tolkien is nothing like Homer. But it's not a very useful tangent this, so I'll let it go.

Yeah, I was mad about how it left out Tom Bombadil. 

That's odd, the last book I read ALSO failed to include Tom Bombadil.

This thread has turned into complete wank, by the way.  I think Sky once said that "some of you people are so smart that you've looped right back around to stupid".  I think that applies here.

Wurd.

In order to drag this thread down to the depths like the sea-bound Charybdis, daughter of Poseidon, might drag the swft vessels of merchants and pirates into her gaping maw, I might point out that Homer probably didn't write anything at all. The Illiad and Odyssey are considered largely to be examples of the oral tradition of Greek storytelling (no sniggering at the back) which is part of the reason why it's economic in form and why there is much usage of epithets and simile (which may actually be called Homeric Simile). It is hexameter though - dactylic hexameter to be exact or "heroic" hexameter as it was often called because of the many epic tales that used it (Illiad, Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses etc.)

Ironwood got to write about Beowulf and Tolkien - I spent a couple of years translating parts of the Odyssey and the plays of Aristophanes. On the plus side, Aristophanes features more people wanking than I remember there being in Tolkien.

Is this where I get to admit the Silmarillion was probably my favorite Tolkien book?  Or will that get me stoned?

It wasn't my favorite, but I didn't regret reading it or anything.  And rereading LotR afterwards gave me lots of fun :oh_i_see: moments where I was able to make connections I hadn't before.

Don't be a fool.  Tolkien was, as is herein proven, a terrible writer.  Terrible!  That he was able to string thousands of seemingly random words together to accidentally form one of the great epics of our age is pure luck and a series of silly coincidences.  Several of the posters in this very thread will verify my claim, so no need to argue.

He wasn't a terrible writer, but he needed a good editor to tone down the descriptive text and keep him focused.

To cite one of his bastard offspring as an example, I think Raymond E. Fiest's "Magician" was a much better book because an editor went through and reduced the amount of descriptive text. That his success then meant he could release the 'uncut' version plus write further, sloppier, much more description intensive titles wasn't a plus imo.

Fiest wrote descriptively intensive titles? Which ones would they be? I haven't read his books in a bit, but my memory is the books getting worse because he got sloppier and didn't seem to give a shit any more, not because he got indulgent.

Also I don't know why the Tolkien fans have such a hard time admitting his prose in LotR isn't great. It doesn't mean you have to stop liking the book. I enjoy reading quite a few books by people you could say have shitty writing skills, doesn't mean I have to come out saying they're like Hemingway or Homer... (residual lols!)

Because I liked his prose?  I'm fine with admitting I like reading some books by shitty writers (Harry Turtledove is a guilty guilty bad pleasure), but I always enjoyed Tolkien's writing.  I've actually never seriously heard anybody criticize it until this thread.  But then again, I enjoy heavily descriptive writing.

It always seems to come up in discussions about the movies.  Which means that whenever I hear someone bashing Tolkien's writing style I always quietly suspect that it's because they can't admit they'd just rather watch a movie with lots of things fighting other things than read a book with lots of words in it.

 :why_so_serious:

Because compared to other examples of the genre Tolkien's work is actually pretty sparse, and some of his methods appear fairly similar when you aren't doing something shortbus like trying to compare an action scene to a dialogue?

Really, you read way too far into that, this is a forum, not an epic.

I thought his Daughter of the Empire had long sections of unnecessary description, as did some of his Riftwar Saga. However, he also did get lazier / sloppier in pulling stories together.

It's been a few years however. I distinctly remember enjoying the edited Magician over the uncut Magician.

Is this thread basically what it is like to do a degree in literature? Because I like to believe so  :grin:

No, I think that to get a degree in Lit you have to agree with what your professors tell you and parrot it back to them.

I think this thread is closer to what it must be like once you have the degree and are trying to get hired in to a Lit dept at a Uni.

No.  If it had been like this, I'd have been sent down for putting some bodies in the ground.

I  :heart: Tolkien's use of the ;   :grin:

It is exactly like this, except you have to come up with a funky title for your thesis. Something like "From the Ebro to Mount Doom: How J R R Tolkien ennobles the legacy of Hemingway".

Mount DOOM!

Robert Jordan's sex scene with the bald chick in For Whom the Bell Tolls that consisted of nothing but written groans wasn't pure fucking author wankery at all.

I will say that Tolkien was a far better writer than 95% of the people who put out fantasy. Ok, 99.5%.

But again, ability to craft great prose is largely academic, especially in narrative-heavy genres. Nobody gets into reading because they're way into prose stylings.

It will not get you stoned by me...

The Silmarillion is an odd book, and I love it. It somehow manages to separate itself completely form all the other literature that I've read over the years. I can separate them in my mind: The Silmarillion and Everything Else. The division does not seem subjective or arbitrary. It just seems correct.

Rainy weekend.

So I introduced my GF to the series in which we watched the extended versions of all 3 films in 2 days.

Fantastic time - she loved it.

Peter Jackson's films are a really neat adaptaion of the animated movie by Bakshi. Once you realize that, and they they're really not adaptations of the books, everything works out.

wat

I'd not use the word "everything".

I like these movies. Especially the first one that doesn't have that Bombadil guy in it.

I enjoyed the walking scenes.

(http://goregirl.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/bad-taste.jpg)

:why_so_serious:

I  :heart: the movies. I enjoy the books too though there are parts that drag a bit frankly. Oh, and Tolkien is amazing at description but utter shit when it comes to the action. Ten pages about the flowers in the fields. A paragraph about a major battle that will influence things for hundreds of years. I'm exaggerating but still...

No wonder Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time series) was often referred as "Tolkien on steroids" :P

Loved every second of each movie. The charge of the Rohirrim in ROTK is the best and most emotional thing I've ever seen in a movie theatre.

Extremely late to this thread but what? (http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thatguywiththeglasses/nostalgia-critic/9754-lotr)

I have no problem with his arguments and opinions but he's very annoying to look and listen at.  I'd like to punch him in the face.

What what? Annoyingnerdguy even pointed out one of the big tells, that Bakshi's and Jackson's story structures are so close that TT ended in the exact same way that the animated movie did. They're obvoisly not identical, but I'd bet my last dollar that Jackson took much more inspiration from the Bakshi version than he did from the books.

They settled the Tolkien estate litigation today so that clears the way for the Del Toro-directed Hobbit films.

This can only end well.  And with nerdrage, but what else is new?

Unfortunately MGM's financial problems have put it in jeopardy again (http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/exclusive-details-mgm-makes-phone-plea-to-bondholders-for-millions-to-stay-alive-both-hobbit-and-james-bond-in-peril-bondholders-tell-studio-to-go-bankrupt-mgm-calls-that-worst-possible-outcom/).

I'm honestly not that excited about Del Toro's take on the Hobbit.  I can't say I've really enjoyed anything he's done, besides maybe Chronos.  Pan's Labyrinth was alright, but Del Toro is sooooo fucking heavy-handed.


This might delay the movie a year or two, at worst.  I think the Bond movies and the Hobbit are the two big money makers on the horizon for MGM, and they're more in danger of having those two franchises pulled and moved somewhere else.

:heartbreak:

You are wrong. 


Indeed. :drill:

I agree. The Devil's Backbone was pretty good, but the rest I've seen have been meh.

I'm optimistic about Del Toro - I'd rather see a heavy handed whimsical interpretation from GDT than the inevitable unforgivable mess as delivered in suppository form by the antipodean fuckwit trio.

You're a little late to the party.

Also, boring.

Today is a bad to to make me look up a word in a dictionary, so eat my dick regarding 'antipodean'.

Considering that he was talking about suppository form, my response was more "stuff it up your ass".

You've never heard antipodean before? That ancient Greek joke about the ridiculousness of having people living on the underside of the sphere we all inhabit, the sheer absurdity of people with 'backwards feet' that was adopted as a genuine adjective to describe our southern hemisphere counterparts on the counterweight continent? I thought everyone knew about that.

I have no idea whom you're trying to ridicule.

I hate you, you made me laugh out loud at work.

What got me was when he compared the return of the king stint, right at the end. That face. :grin:

I can't get into the books, but the movies are cool. Especially the first one. The last one just seems full of battles, and starts wearing me down, but there are good parts there as well. Kind of curious if there is more "Ranger" period to Aragorn in the books? He never got any cooler than he was in that pub that the Hobbits first met him in.

Not a huge amount but there are actually other rangers in the books that he gets to talk to and battle alongside. They're all the remaining 'true men' of Gondor.

The Rangers are the last remaining men of some kingly line (the King of Gondor, yes, but it goes back further than that. I think Gondor was a degenerate lesser offspring of some other destroyed kingdom). The few remaining basically spend their time running around north of the Hobbits and Bree, killing all the nasty shit and thus letting the Hobbits have their idyllic lives.

Aragorn personally was raised in Rivendell, but spent a few decades roaming between Rivendell and the wilds being all badass with his kin. Admittedly, none of them are as badass as him, but they're all supposedly at least two or three levels more badass than ye old average human.

Yeah they're descended from the first men of the West who hung out with the first Elves to journey to the land of men. The basic theme of Tolkein's stuff is that things were way more badass back in the day and everything's slowly getting worse. Sauron himself starts out as the Lieutenant to the real big bad (whose name I forget) and basicallly the real bad asses of the LoTR are the people who got to be hang out with and help the ancient heroes/villains.

Morgoth.

Or Melkor.

And his fucking hammer was called Grond.  He could really smack that fucker around.

Isn't Grond the big wolfhead battling ram in the Return of the King movie?

That just goes to show how much more badass things were in the old days. Back then, Grond was a hammer. Now days, it's a seige weapon.

You'll never guess what they named the battering ram after...

When you read the Silmarillion, one of the things that takes some getting used to is realizing that Morgoth's armies had quite a few Balrogs in them, but that there were also some Elves capable of going mano-a-mano with a Balrog. That's just one of the ways that Tolkien drives the point home that the most mind-blowing confrontations in LoTR are just pale echoes of the First Age. He also keeps suggesting that there was beauty and wonder in that time which nothing in the Third Age can even approximate, but here Tolkien is a quintessential "tell not show" kind of writer, maybe because there isn't any way to take that particular dial up to 11.

Both Shelob and Smaug are described as titchy wee versions of spiders and dragons of old.

Everything was supersized back in the day and could rend mountains asunder with their teeth.

It's a recurring theme in the books.  One suspects that the 4th and 5th ages made hobbits into The Lollypop Kids.

I guess there's that parallel in "real" myths that are only touched upon.. i.e. Age of Titans fighting Gods or in other cultures where Giant monkey headed dudes riding griffons were a common sight. Or maybe even biblical. Like Goliath being standout, but the texts referring to a time where there were once a bunch of crazy fuckers running around like that.

It's a general thing in mythology, there was a golden age long ago and we're all just poor descendants of those great far away times. When Oisin comes back form Tir Na Nog he's able to lift huge boulders that the people of 'modern' times can't even roll or how Hercules and the Demi-Gods are all in the past or even how God used to come down and personally fuck people's shit up and Noah lived to 400 years old. People used to be bad ass and awesome, now we all suck.

My old man kind of says the same thing.

Like Morgoth and Hurin.

I liked Robert Howard's take. "Between the times when the oceans drank Atlantis... "

Every fantasy movie should have that old Chinese dude narrating too.. Just to tell you how awesome the olden days were.

Yea. It's a lot easier to make shit up for the hyperbole of it when there's no eye witnesses. Nor cameras  :oh_i_see:

Simarillion was like that though. The world started because Illuvator sung it in song. And all was in harmony except for the bad guy who eventually Sauron reported to. Each generation got successfully weaker/diluted and Middle Earth was really nothing more than a purgatory for people awaiting their turn at the Promised Land.

That is one depressing book though. Just a long series of events where the good times were footnotes to the conspiracies and bad guys starting wars.

NECRO'd

I didn't want to start up a new thread for just this shocking piece of news:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/06/25/peter.jackson.hobbit.ew/

color me surprised... just use the rest of the green paint we have around here  :oh_i_see:

This will end in awesomesauce.  Dude, break it into 2 movies, plz!

That's been their plan for a long time now.