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#81 | |
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,307
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Well, I'm at least spared an accusation of inconsistency, since I hate the Jackson movies!
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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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#82 | |
Overshadowed Eagle
Join Date: Nov 2017
Location: The north-west of the Old World, east of the Sea
Posts: 3,856
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![]() What really winds me up (elsewhere!) is people insisting their read of the text is not just the best, but the only possible interpretation. I've had an amusing conversation on Twitter where I said that Beleg's whetting spell opens the possibility of a lightning-vs-fire-sword duel in Middle-earth (see Celeg Aithorn, and have Eonwe fight a Balrog), and someone has been insisting that those lines not probably are, but must! be metaphorical. There is no possibility that they could be literal, because... Sting was once described as a blue flame, apparently. Also, if the Valar had a world-breaking lightning sword, why didn't they send Gandalf back with it?!?! After all, he could already destroy armies single-handedly, so he should have it!! (On being queried on this point, they asserted that because Gandalf the Grey could equal a Balrog, of course Gandalf the White could destroy armies. Thaaat's when I stepped away.) And the odd thing is, holding and expressing a nuanced opinion - like "this thing is possible, though not really certain" - seems to wind that kind of person up just as much as their unsupported certainty does me! They really, really wanted me to be saying that the whetting spell was definitively literal. It was funny. ^_^ Anyway, in the spirit of finding weird hills to die on, I think we can all agree that if anyone in Numenor has any carpet other than this one, it will be proof that they are in the direct pay of Morgoth and intend to steal, spit on, and burn all our Tolkien books. ![]() hS
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Have you burned the ships that could bear you back again? ~Finrod: The Rock Opera |
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#83 | ||
Curmudgeonly Wordwraith
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Ensconced in curmudgeonly pursuits
Posts: 2,506
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"He has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour."
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And your little sister's immaculate virginity wings away on the bony shoulders of a young horse named George who stole surreptitiously into her geography revision. |
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#84 | |
Loremaster of Annúminas
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 2,307
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BTW, Corey Olsen is dead wrong; Tolkien absolutely, positively did write that Dwarf-women were bearded. War of the Jewels, p. 205.
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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. Last edited by William Cloud Hicklin; 02-22-2022 at 02:25 PM. |
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#85 | ||
Dead Serious
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Does Tolkien specifying that male Dwarves are bearded equal a syllogism that excludes female Dwarves from being bearded? Absolutely not, but it would be very odd, in a footnote where Tolkien goes out of his way to tell us the bearded status of nearly every male character of importance, that he would tell us that male dwarves are bearded and not simply say "all Dwarves are bearded" unless he meant by implication that NOT all female Dwarves are bearded. Of course, if you think Tolkien was a pure, logic-driven machine, then the two statements are easily reconcilable: all Dwarves have beards, all male Dwarves are a subset of all Dwarves, therefore, all male Dwarves have beards. (I don't mean "you" to be William Cloud Hicklin here specifically, though I suppose I am arguing against your post, so much as a rhetorical "you.") I think it should be clear to anyone who's read the HoME that Tolkien tended to forget ideas he'd jotted down before, and also that he was quite willing to revise previous ideas--his main constraint was that he considered things that had appeared in print to be "canon" (see: the Problem of Ros), except that even here he was totally willing to revise what was in print (see: the 2nd Edition)! All of which is to say... any adaptation of Tolkien is going to involve judgement calls simply to fill in the gaps, but there's the FURTHER--and even more fraught--judgement calls where Tolkien said more than one thing! (As an aside on Dwarven female beardedness, I think the pro-beardians have the better textual authority: besides WCH's quite definitive quote above, there's the published text of Appendix A, which has usually been interpreted this way, which is two texts against NoME's one. And, to cast a little extra aspersion toward Amazon, I doubt they could have read NoME early enough in their creative process to have considered it. As an aside to my aside: I wish we WERE seeing bearded dwarf-women, if only because the Aganzir-sect of this forum have inclined me to expect them and because I think it would be an interestingly canonical subversion of expected appearances. Amazon hieing away from this is actually a case counter to the dominant story of Amazon being "oh so woke"--at least if I can make the assumption that "bearded Dwarf women" would likely have been seized on, had they gone that way, as somehow transgressive and thus woke.) Ultimately, I expect the series to fail to live up to Tolkien because that has been my unshakeable instinct as the ultimate fate of all adaptations since I first saw the animated Rankin-Bass Hobbit in about 1999. No adaptation has yet proven me wrong, but that doesn't mean there haven't been good things in the adapations--gold amidst the dross. And just because I don't expect to much enjoy it myself doesn't mean that others have to share my exact level of apathy or the reasons for it.
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I prefer history, true or feigned.
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