Okay, do we have any Tolkien geeks here?

Post Reply New Topic

...Because I just re-read LOTR this last week and I've kind of had it on the brain...and going back to some sites I looked at previously and thinking, you know, maybe I should actually apply myself and learn Quenya properly, dammit...

Anyone?

I would be more interested in learning Khuzdul...

I learned an awful lot of Sindarin vocabulary from methodically looking at every single elvishly named location (well, everything I could reach) in LOTRO and working backwards from here. It was nice to see that they'd put a lot of effort into naming things properly (although I'm usually disdainful of anything outside book canon - mind, the Prof. was apparently keen to have 'other hands' work on his world, and he did horrible (horrible, horrible, horrible!) things to the ME cosmology in later writings, so I probably shouldn't be).

I always find vocabulary much easier than grammar, though. Good luck with it. ^^

I was a big fan of LOTR when I read it in the 70s, then I read it, and virtually everything else Tolkien wrote, and even wrote papers in high school about it. I reread the entire series in English, French, and Spanish when the movies came out. I never made much progress with the languages because of their impoverished vocabulary.

If you've studied Latin, classical Greek, Old English, or Norse languages, the grammar of Quenya or Sindarin will seem very familiar (Tolkien was a classicist). Good luck.

I read them several times in my yute... I have most of the fonts from the various races, you can find them for free on the net (quenya.ttf, for example).
I actually liked the movie as well. I wish they'd put one line in the 2nd movie, though
"At least we have taught them not to carry torches"

wow... the dictionary too...

Just kidding.

Actually, I really enjoyed the Silmarillion although it does your head in a bit.

Only for the first half dozen times you read it, then it starts making more sense.

The "History of Middle Earth" books offer a fascinating insight into the way the stories developed, but I found them extremely hard work (haven't read all of them still).

Just realised - Grima is a philologist's joke - from Norse Grim(r) - hooded, disguised, it's one of Odin's names.

i gave up reading the Silmarillion
i initially got it because i thought it was an actual story. and in some ways it is. but boring as all hell even if it is a bit interesting. i wanted to finish it, just because i hate to leave a book unfinished. but it was too much of a drain on my fun-reading meters.

It rather depends on whether you like mythology. It's a much broader view...bigger timescales and wider panoramas, whereas regular fiction is up close. I've been reading real-world mythology since I was eight or nine, and I love that style of writing, but if you've been used to fiction that's more 'personal' and less 'cosmic', it probably is an acquired taste. Put it this way, I can't see them making the movie of the Silmarillion any time soon, if ever.

I was surprised when I looked out online to see just how much of the Elvish languages has actually been reconstructed - more than I thought. Also, there have been so many volumes of the Histories and so forth, I wonder how much remains unpublished now...

Ambivalence - what is it you don't like about the later cosmology?

I admit I've not read all of Tolkien's work, and I'm not a linguist... but what I have read (and I listened to a beautiful 10-tape set of The Silmarillon, read by the ever-captivating Martin Shaw) I truly enjoyed. Middle-Earth is such a rich world... all the cultures and mythologies and such. And the visuals - the well-known paintings, and the amazing work Peter Jackson's team did in realising their interpretation of Lord of the Rings - absolutely stunning.

Oh, and I used to play Iron Crown's old Middle-Earth RPG. That truly rocked.

From what I've read, as time went by Tolkein attempted to reconcile his invented cosmology (a flat Arda which later became round, the Sun and Moon, the Stars, and so on) with our real cosmology from the beginning of the world, which would make all of the origin myths redundant. He also wanted to increase the "power level" of Morgoth to cosmic levels (instead of being roughly coeval with Manwe) which would render all the battles of the Valar redundant. It all seemed drab and mundane to me.



I love the way he pronounces the names!

tape-set?...
by a "captivating" voice actor?
i may be able to listen to it that way .

it's just the organization, writng style, and dry cut narrative that bored my socks off.
i'm personally not up to "reading" it but i guess absorbing the contents via alternate venues might work.

I must admit - I like Martin Shaw, I love the first two parts on tape - the Ainulindale and Valaquenta - but found listening to the rest of it much harder.

I think you might be best served by skim-reading the Silmarillion - I would read the start (up until the Kinslaying) then skip along to Beren and Luthien and the War of Wrath. Then go back and read about the Fourth and Fifth Battles and Turin vs Glaurung. Then go back and read about Gondolin and Tuor and the rest. Ignore everything about Numenor (yaaawn) until you're feeling extremely masochistic, and use the Third Age stuff as a reference manual for LOTR.

The BBC audio version of LOTR, by the way, is brilliant.

I was thinking about the changed cosmology thing again, and I think there's an element of literalism involved on my part - if I hear that the Valar raised mountains, and Melkor knocked them down again, I want it to mean exactly that - not to be a mythic metaphor for something less obvious. While the published Silmarillion does contain references to the extent that "the elves don't really know what went on back then", the inference I've always taken from it is that the Powers really did walk about the land, more or less as is described in the myths. And that's what I want to think.

i've loved Tolkien's books since i picked up my dad's old copy of The Hobbit back in the 4th grade. every facet of his stories pull my attention in like a magnet. Tolkien is essentially my idol and his style of writing is the basis for my own fantasy stories.

one of his books i actually liked was The Lays of Beriland, because so many of the old stories and characters are mentioned in the LotR trilogy (ex. Ungoliant (shelob's lair, the two towers); Numenor and its destruction; Elvenhome; you get the idea).
i liked the Silmarilion too

the one thing i want to do is learn how to speak Elvish its such a cool language

I see your point. Myth has its own value; 'straight' history (and geology, in this case) has a different kind of value, and taking the one as a 'primitive' account of the other is a fundamental mistake, I think. In his essay 'On Fairy Stories', Tolkien expressed something of the same idea - said that when he was a kid he hated it when science books described dinosaurs as 'dragons' because he knew dragons had their own, purely mythical existence, and he argued that people who thought of Thor as 'just' the Norsemen's way of personifying the thunder were missing the point.

I wasn't aware of the later changes, and I rather like the visual image of 'the bent world falling away' from those who sailed on the Straight Road. That idea seems to have been much more a part of the scheme from the beginning.