Lord of the Rings

I started watching the Hobbit re-edition (it's still a 4h movie so it takes a while) and so far it's enjoyable. I guess there are no super-mario scenes with Legolas this time.
2 evenings of great entertainment. This was actually the first time that I enjoyed watching 'The Hobbit'.
No Legolas (I guess there is one short scene when you see him from behind), no super-mario-entertainment-park-scenes either.
The guy managed to lay emphasis on the important things thus giving back the story some of its grace.

@Michael B-C- great find, thank you.
 
Hours I've watched of the Rings of Power 1/4.
Hours I've watched of Rings of Power reviews 20.

I was expecting it to be awful, but it really exceeded all our expectations I think, as it's actually an abomination.

There's only one cure for this and that's to blow the dust of my Tolkien books.

Yep, we went full META on that one too. Didn't watch even a minute of the crap, but a few hours worth of demolition jobs by Nerdrotic and the Critical Drinker. So we basically watched the whole thing through the lens of rantering YouTubers. And Amazon didn't earn a penny or stats from it. Going forward, that seems to be a good way of "watching" modern shows :lol:
 
No Legolas (I guess there is one short scene when you see him from behind), no super-mario-entertainment-park-scenes either.

I had to laugh, in my current reading of LotR, when I came to a super mario bit where an Elf nimbly runs on a single rope across a river and back, before saying (paraphrase) "oh, I guess not everybody can do this 😎" and bringing out a couple more ropes for the non-Elves to hold onto :D Also earlier where Legolas is very pleased with himself for his ability to run lightly across the top of a snowdrift. So I guess the Elf acrobatics were at least, er, somewhat based on the text!
 
I had to laugh, in my current reading of LotR, when I came to a super mario bit where an Elf nimbly runs on a single rope across a river and back, before saying (paraphrase) "oh, I guess not everybody can do this 😎" and bringing out a couple more ropes for the non-Elves to hold onto :D Also earlier where Legolas is very pleased with himself for his ability to run lightly across the top of a snowdrift. So I guess the Elf acrobatics were at least, er, somewhat based on the text!
Good finds and reminders Brandon. I found the super-mario Legolas of LOR enjoyable moments of brevity - whats not to like about the Oliphaunt ballet culminating in the gruff faint praise of 'That still only counts as one! from Gimli. But the excesses of the Hobbit was quite another matter, none of which was helped by the hammer jaw and immobile frown that the CGI made of him - achieving the seemingly impossible logic of making him centuries older then than he was to be some 60 years later!
 
Probably not the first time someone thinks about it, but...

What if this work (LOR) would describe the Work of a person on its endeavour towards trascendence?

What if some of the main characters or scenes would be aspects/archetypes/parts of the psyque/challenges/helpers & threats of that person's journey towards next level in a STO way?

If so, who/what would represent what?

Probably characters in different scenes/dialogues could represent specific different concepts, but could we identify generic concepts linked to characters in general or scenes?

Gandalf: Superior Knowledge/wisdom?

Gimli: Perseverance?

Aragorn: the hero aspect, meant to become a King like in the old tales?

Legolas: Some key skills needed to perform the Work, sharpness, intelligence maybe?

Boromir: The human aspect prone to "fall" for example?

Arwen: The feminine energy aspect, the Queen of the alchemical marriage with the King?

Moira scenes: Nigredo phase of alchemical imaginery (since Gandalf returns in triumph as the White/Albedo)?

Destroying the ring: A quest for an important Service to All?

Frodo: The humility, perhaps, the lack of ego? Is that why he is the only one to sustainably avoid the corruption of the ring, hence a key requirement to perform and "finalize" the Work?

Galadriel/other key elves: 4D STO energies?

The eagles: ?

The rings given to the different races: ?

Who would be the C's or other 6D STO?



You definitely know this work much better than I do, what would be your take?
 
Yes, same here regarding its importance etc. With a few exceptions we watch them both, LOTR and The Hobbit, every year. My first encounter was around -79/-80, the cartoon. Didn't know what it was at all, I was only 11 years old.

My first attempt to read something was Silmarillion, got it from the local library, haven't returned it yet. :) Also got some Sci-Fi goodies like Robert A Henlein, Arthur C Clark and Asimov etc….
I was around 14-15 and I read a lot at that age, but I got a tired of all the names and relationships and I needed to have copies of the family trees, the map etc around the walls so I didn't have to look it up every sentence, but my mother wouldn't allow it.

I think I stopped on page 120 something, and the paperclip I put around the register is is still there! 40 years ago, maybe it is time to finish it? For me this was pure magic and my first contact with the true Genesis…right?

Here is a picture of the book, amazing isn't it? It was printed 1979.
 

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I was thinking about Amazon's Rings of Power and thought of a solution to that mess. Most, if not all, of the positivity for that series comes in the form of the sets/scenery and music. So, Amazon should go back and re-edit the series by eliminating all dialogue, action, and characters. Play the episodes as is but only showing the scenery, the sets, the environmental sounds and the music. It would be such a wacked out ambient trip that it would be admired, if nothing else, for shear weirdness. THAT, I would watch.
 
It would be such a wacked out ambient trip that it would be admired, if nothing else, for shear weirdness. THAT, I would watch.
I guess if it's all green screen stuff, then there would be the background imagery separate from the actors? I enjoy watching nature and forest hike videos every so often, if only briefly..
 
I guess if it's all green screen stuff, then there would be the background imagery separate from the actors? I enjoy watching nature and forest hike videos every so often, if only briefly..
At which point, might as well watch the discovery channel or something that isn't trying to make a woke out of you.
 
50 years ago this week, his work in Middle-Earth complete, J.R.R. Tolkien passed over to the other side.

Let us commemorate his deeper purpose as a far from simple gardener who saw the planting of things to be of the greatest moral import - a purpose he prophetically seeded so as to sustain those in need in this time by imaginatively reminding us that this world we now inhabit, the encroaching darkness of the one ring (pure STS), can only be defeated by the will of god the creator of all things (Eru Ilúvatar) enacted through the free will choice of his children who face evil's demand for total obedience by instead willing themselves to fight the long defeat... because it is the right thing to do, whatever the apparent odds, whatever the disillusionment that surrounds them...

So in memory of J.R.R. and his gift to us, first up an article I stumbled upon today that touches on some of these matters in the face of modernist reductionism...

Tolkien, 50 years on

The true scale of his legacy is gradually becoming apparent

2 September, 2023

By Sebastian Milbank

50 years ago, J.R.R Tolkien left this world much changed for his having been in it. The anniversary is being celebrated with a requiem mass in Birmingham Oratory, where he once served as an altar boy, and by celebrations and gatherings around the world. There is even, improbably, an ongoing attempt to make the poor man a saint, which one can only hope goes nowhere.

A romantic Edwardian, steeped in Northern European folklore and Victorian literature, Tolkien was and is despised by large parts of the fashionable literary establishment. I have known very few neutral reactions to his work. People either love or loathe Lord of the Rings, which seems doomed to eternally inspire adoration or ire, and nothing much in between.

Tolkien’s moralism is not the product of schoolboy simplicity

The often ferocious response of many critics perhaps stemmed from the apparent anachronism of the book, combined with its massive popularity. It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology. Literary critics of the time were taking up the “New Criticism”, which dispensed not only with the previous generation’s fascination with historical context in favour of close reading, but also with the traditionalist concerns for beauty and moral improvement, which were regarded as subjective and emotionally driven. Spare, complex prose, focused on the darker side of society, was in vogue. Into this context dropped 1,200 pages of dwarves, elves and hobbits in a grand battle of good and evil. They were greeted with the sort of enthusiasm one can imagine.

Edmund Wilson called the books “balderdash”, a battle between “Good people and Goblins”. The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”. As his work travelled into the 60s, political problems cropped up, with one feminist critic writing a book-length attack on the series to denounce it as “irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine”.

The mystery of how a book can so sharply divide opinion is answered perhaps by how profoundly original and unusual The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s wider legendarium are. They are shamelessly moralistic, written on the basis of exhaustive literary theory, linguistics, geography and world-building, and quite devoid of social commentary or Empsonian irony. Yet they are as much a radical departure from prior literary forms as modernist literature itself is, making the book doubly at odds with prevailing style and doubly original.

The moralism of Tolkien’s work is not, as some critics seem to suppose, the product of schoolboy simplicity. It is far too rigorous for that. So morally charged and orchestrated is the novel, that it would be numbered amongst the small number of works that might have passed Plato’s test for literature. Not only is this in respect of its exacting honouring of good characters and depreciation of wicked ones within its narrative framework, but equally in Tolkien’s utter refusal of allegory, thus meeting Plato’s challenge that poets are dangerous imitators of the world.

Tolkien differed greatly from the disciplines of modernist authors of the time, with Borges describing himself as “disconcerted” by Tolkien, whom he accuses of “rambling on and on”. Well might the master of the short story feel about the master of the fantastic epic. Borges wrote a story, written in the first person and featuring the author himself, entitled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, about an encyclopaedia depicting an imaginary world, whose inhabitants believe in an extreme version of subjective idealism. So compelling is the imaginary world, that many people set out to imitate it. Objects apparently from Tlön start appearing. By the end of the story, the entire world is starting to transform into Tlön.

Something very much of that nature has taken place when it comes to Tolkien. His exclusion of distantiating irony and moral confusion from his works was not a naive choice, but a bold and experimental one, carried through with steely discipline. Tolkien’s world is the product of a lifetime of imaginative work. He writes of it, “I do not remember a time when I was not building it.” It is consciously escapist; indeed, it was this escapist fantasy that sustained Tolkien through life in the trenches of the Somme. Where many modernists greeted the Great War as a moment of disenchantment and disillusionment, a young Tolkien, who fought in it, took it as a spur to a mission of re-enchantment for a world desperately in need of myth.

His project, which he sketches out in a letter in 1951, was quite simply to create a mythos for a culture that he felt lacked one:

I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalised, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its “faerie” is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive.

This mythology, he felt, must “reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth” but must lack all explicit reference to the Christian religion or the “real” world as we know it. What Tolkien has invented, or one might say started, is what his critics wail of and his followers delight in: high fantasy.

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story — the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths — which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our “air” (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, whilst possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be “high”, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Tolkien’s contribution is doubly unique. On the one hand, he conceived the idea of giving to the English-speaking world a mythic cycle of its own, as Homer was to the Greeks, yet one that was fully the invention of modern literature. His second move, no less radical, was to apply to this world an exacting, almost Victorian moral and aesthetic discipline. Whilst historical folklore is full of absurd, grotesque and obscene scenes, Tolkien’s work is suffused with ethereal beauty, tragic heroism and a spirit of nobility.

The effect of the book on its readers can only be called edifying

Far from being snobby or otherworldly, his writing radiates the enchantment of the ordinary, the desperate simple longings of mortals for hearth and home. Adventures are not romanticised, but exhaustively transcribed. Every weary league across Middle-earth is wrung out of the pages, yet each step rings with significance. It is enlivened by an utter sincerity; yet literary and linguistic playfulness is everywhere, like the steps of a country dance, merry and solemn at once, done without a thought to the cynical gaze of the world. With its appendixes and encyclopaedias, its invented languages, its interpenetration of varied myths, tonalities and imagined cultures, it has many of the elements of the most sophisticated modernist game-playing. It yet entirely lacks the wink to the audience, the knowing nod that reassures the reader who spots it of their cleverness. There is no stitch or seam for the world to enter, or for the imagined world to escape. Equally, its plot has an extraordinary cohesion, with the parallel narrative arcs and events drawn apart and together again in near perfect harmony.

For those who are looking for that authorial wink, Lord of the Rings is bound to baffle and infuriate. Though it is a book intended for adults, it so often grips younger minds because it demands of its reader a sincerity equal to its own. As wrongly as many of its critics interpret the book, Wilson was not altogether incorrect in saying “It is not ‘about’ anything but itself.” As with Tlön, its deep, idealistic self-reference makes it almost infinitely compelling and gives it a timeless appeal many once-feted novels lack.

For all that he has inspired many a mediocre imitator, the power and legacy of Tolkien, and the high fantasy he invented, cannot be understated. The effect of the book itself on its readers can only be called edifying. In a world where many story-tellers glory in the sophistication of not having a moral, Tolkien invented an entire literary genre premised on having one. This moral sense is just as strongly aesthetic, with nobility of language and conduct a unified feature in true works of high fantasy.

More than anything else Lord of the Rings communicates a sensibility utterly at odds with the spirit of the age in which it was written. It is one of profound, tragic loss, of the vulnerability of irretrievable, ancient beauty, that must desperately be conserved and defended. It is of the inherent heroism of standing against destructive change, of hope beyond all reason, amidst the logic of history, which Tolkien named “the long defeat”.

Little wonder that his writing has delighted conservatives and horrified many progressives. In Italy, where national populism has swept to power, Tolkien has long been an icon of the Italian right — from the “Hobbit Camps” of the neo-fascist movement of the 1970s, to the current Prime Minister’s reverence for the books. Despite the association of Tolkien with the right, left wing Italian fans of the book are not hard to find, such as Italian author Michela Murgia, who used to enjoy singing in Elvish and read the books once a year.

The sheer pervasiveness of Tolkien, and still more the high fantasy of which he is the inventor, is so great it is almost hard to define. To grow up as a young man, especially a nerdy one, is more or less to grow up in Tolkien’s shadow, albeit one often distorted by commercial imperatives and crude imitations. He’s in the video games you play in your room, the films you watch in the cinema, the paperbacks you get from the library, the board games you play with your friends. Without your ever having to actually read his work, Tolkien has already annexed a substantial part of your fantasy life.

Romantics often don’t find the romance they seek, but cynics never find it

Tolkien would, of course, have hated a lot of consumeristic modern day “nerd culture”. At the same time, there is no question that even the worst elements derive their power from the sense of wonder and nobility that Tolkien imparted. It is these emotions, these sensibilities, that are most lacking in the modern world. Fantasy has become big business, because, in true Marxist sense, it is the “heart of a heartless world”. For young men starved of purpose, meaning and identity, the ultra-teleological world of high fantasy is a powerful, if dangerously seductive tonic.

Escapism and romanticism are much denounced, especially if they focus on beauty and moral idealism, usually by people living out their own fantasies of power, glamour or superiority. Yet escapism is just what keeps the souls of prisoners alive, inspiring the hope of escape itself. Romantics often don’t find the romance they seek, but cynics never find it. Even as “high culture” has waded hip deep into ugliness and relativism, unashamed moralism and idealism live on in popular culture, in no small part thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tolkien envisaged his work as a kind of myth for an England that lacked one. As English-speaking culture has become a kind of world culture, so too has fantasy become a kind of world mythos. European fairy tales, not modernist novels, have been the basis of Disney’s global reach. Famed Japanese animators Studio Ghibli, under the direction of director Hayao Miyazaki, have built their success on fusing English literature, fantasy and Japanese folklore, adapting children’s stories such as The Borrowers and Howl’s Moving Castle, and producing iconic films like Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro about the Japanese Kami, the animistic spirits of Shinto practice and mythology. Miyazaki is a critic of globalisation and technological modernity, but like Tolkien he has been part of shaping a new global popular culture, replete with its own mythology.

For every disenchantment, there is always a countervailing force of re-enchantment. As Tolkien himself argued, language perforce is in perpetual dialogue with mythology and the human quest for meaning. Where meaning is denied, or inadequate, it will spring up somewhere, borne from the longings of the human heart. Or as Tolkien put it:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.​

... and by a truly astute deep dive into the moral depths within Tolkien's mythos (taking the books alongside the films as his toolkit) by Video essayists Tom van der Linden aka 'Like Stories of Old', who I have found consistently perceptive, profound and positively provocative on all matters relating to film (other than environmentalism where he tends to lose his normally rock solid bearings...)

Highly recommended viewing for all LOR fans:


An extensive analysis of the deeper meanings and philosophy of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Peter Jackson’s adaptation, that examines Tolkien’s sanctification of pagan virtues, the role of heroism and moral victory in Middle-earth, the presence and purpose of higher forces, and the essential role of hope in Tolkien's mythology.

Chapters:

Introduction
I. Sanctifying History
II. Military Victory vs. Moral Victory
III. At What Cost?
IV. Freedom and Evil
V. A Cosmic Conflict
VI. Responsibility and Salvation
VII. The Guiding Hand of Ilúvatar
VIII. A Mythology of Hope
 
It's funny, last evening I was explaining to someone why Tolkien's work has true diversity that no other work of fiction could rival. In the Lord of the Rings, there are many heroes (contrary to others works where there is one hero and all other people are just there to serve the hero's story), each of whom has virtues and weaknesses to overcome, and yet they all try their best to grow (except Gandalf and the elves who are basically angelic demi-gods in middle earth). Frodo fails at the end, but he also prevails, and he couldn't go very far without Sam. Friendship, goodness, courage, love, this work has everything.
 
A very timely thread!

I used to have LOTR, Hobbit and Silmarillion books in my library and enjoyed reading them few times over. Well, I wanted to pick it up again after seeing this thread only to find out the books to be missing. Most likely a case of moving from one place to another plus one very large and hasty move over the pond.

Either way, the books have been ordered. Once they arrive, I figured Hobbit would be a good start for our son since they are the illustrated versions.
 
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