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#1 | ||
Princess of Skwerlz
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: where the Sea is eastwards (WtR: 6060 miles)
Posts: 7,500
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With this brief introduction I would like to open the discussion for all - what do you think of this story? What does it show us about the author? How does it make you feel?
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'Mercy!' cried Gandalf. 'If the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more do you want to know?' 'The whole history of Middle-earth...' |
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#2 |
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,316
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As he wrote to Hugh Brogan, “This university business of earning one’s living by teaching, delivering philological lectures, and daily attendance at ‘boards’ and other talk meetings, interferes sadly with serious work” (Letters, p.131).
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it. |
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#3 | ||
Overshadowed Eagle
Join Date: Nov 2017
Location: The north-west of the Old World, east of the Sea
Posts: 3,870
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As a writer I love Leaf by Niggle. It perfectly captures the twin feelings that nobody properly appreciates your work (^_~) and that your work isn't any good anyway, as well as the niggling (sorry) worry that in a cosmic sense, you're just wasting your time with it all.
It also contains probably my favourite vision of Heaven - the idea that you get to see all your imaginings brought to life and perfected! I strongly suspect this is Tolkien writing his own belief in what Paradise would (or should) be; I know it's mine. The whole story also casts something of a reflection of the Music of the Ainur. In both stories, there's an artistic creation which is interrupted and reworked during its making, which ends by being made real. And there's a definite echo between these: Quote:
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Have you burned the ships that could bear you back again? ~Finrod: The Rock Opera |
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#4 |
Princess of Skwerlz
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: where the Sea is eastwards (WtR: 6060 miles)
Posts: 7,500
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Let's talk about the character of Niggle:
In the very first sentence he is called a "little" man - I assume that does not refer to his body height, but to his lack of importance in the scheme of the world. Tolkien goes on to give him slightly negative characteristics: "not very successful", "idle", and though "kind-hearted", not positively so. Continuing: "ineffectual", taking on a project that was "too large and ambitious for his skill". Later on, "very ordinary and rather silly". And of course the meaning of his name sounds a bit derogative - a person who spends too much time on insignificant details and loses sight of the whole. Do you think he thought of himself in these terms, since the character is definitely autobiographical? Niggle's work needed "concentration", "hard, uninterrupted work", in order to get finished. He would have loved to get paid for doing just that. We know that Tolkien was kept busy with matters that he wasn't really interested in, such as correcting papers, and that illnesses in the family sometimes occupied his time. How do you see the person Tolkien describes?
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'Mercy!' cried Gandalf. 'If the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more do you want to know?' 'The whole history of Middle-earth...' |
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#5 |
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,316
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I think it's definitely autobiographical, and T here is harping on his admitted faults: procrastination, "niggling" over details, unplanned Big Picture, being annoyed at mundane but useful work getting in the way of the huge project only he thought had any value.
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it. |
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#6 | ||
Itinerant Songster
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The Edge of Faerie
Posts: 7,066
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#7 |
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,316
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Niggle is I think unique in Tolkien's career in that it is the only work I can think of which is explicitly religious.
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it. |
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