Anyone notice the similarity of mordors shape to turkey? and minas tirith to constantinople on the bosporus...

I think there's a misconception that Tolkien disliking direct allegory means he thought none of Middle Earth was inspired by real life. He straight up says what certain parts are inspired by e.g. the two elvish languages being based on Welsh and Finnish. His point wasn't that there was no relation to history, but that the story itself wasn't an allegory of one thing in particular, it's a more general story about good and evil.

tolkien was a fan of the pagans.
middle earth is based upon the invasion of greece by the persians I think

>tolkien was a fan of the pagans.
>middle earth is based upon the invasion of greece by the persians I think
With this kind of thinking you could find almost any allegory.

How can it be an allegory if it was set at least 10,000 years before the period in which it was written?

>middle earth is based upon the invasion of greece by the persians I think

It isn't. At all.

/thread

>good and evil

i.e. catholicism vs islam and bringing the orthodox patriarchs back into catholicism in the process.

Black Speech is based on Turkish and Tolkein, being a hardcore Cathocuck would naturally see Turks as being the ultimate evil

Black speech was never stated to have any direct real-world inspiration and has only been vaguely connected to Hurrian by others, due to how little Tolkien wrote on it. Stop pulling things out of your ass.

No I don't actually, there's no bosphorus, it's not a peninsula and it's pretty flat compared to anatolia which is mostly hills. If you ask me it look more like levant.

fuck off keklord.

And Dwarvish was based on Semitic languages. Dwarves are described as short, having large noses and being obsessed with gold and treasure. I wonder on which race they were based on...

>Tolkein damage control

Just look at it for a second. Anyone can see it is based on Turkish. Tolkien was a filthy racist who grew up in apartheid South Africa and portrayed the non-white "swarthy" and "tawny" Easterners as evil

>State an absolute fact.
>Even linguists haven't connected it to Turkish.

No I think you're the one on damage control here.

bosphorus as the river separating east and west. plus mordor rectangle, turkey rectangle.

They don't want to, because they know it will prove that Tolkien was racist once and for all. Right now, that matter is in a grey area. Tolkienfags have managed to damage control what orcs are supposed to be (black people) well enough

i think turkish girls are hot desu, and greeks

orcs are not black people. haradrim were, orcs are the turks

the change of orcs from elves into these weird beasts is turkification metaphor and the multicultural turksih armies.

But both naz and gul come from farsi?

it was all the same to tolkein.

>Linguist that taught at Oxford for years.
>Confusing language families that distant.

M8.

thehistoryofbyzantium.com/2015/03/31/episode-69-lost-to-the-west/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Constantinople_(717–718)

Compare it to LOTR, its very familiar. Even the politics before the siege.

After all the retarded protestant evolution detail threads I was actually starting to miss all the retarded catholics that infested this board

Then this thread happened

>tolkien was a fan of the pagans.
No he wasn't. Read the Homecoming of Beorthnoth

Ok bear with me here. I honestly support the idea that tolkien was a closeted byzaboo and the battle of helm's deep is just one big allegory for the fall of constantinople.

So, first thing: helm's deep is a formidable fortress, and the last hope of an endangered realm, but at the same time can turn into a deadly trap seeing as it only has one access, much like constantinople since the ottomans had an overwhelming naval superiority.

Second, the arrival of an unexpected allied batallion before the siege: a troop of elves in lotr, a genoese contingent in real life. This is important because in both cases the commander of this batallion goes on to cover an important role in leading the siege, but most importantly because...

Third: a breach in the wall is made trough the use of explosives, the commander of the relief troop gets killed, and this causes the defense to crumble.

Fourth: the defenders prepare for a last stand, just as the king of rohan wants to charge on horseback and die an honorable death, Konstantinos throws away the imperial garb and prepares to die as a common man, among his comrades

Fifth: in the film, gandalf comes to the rescue at dawnbreak of the third day, that is to day, the day the fortress was to fall.
Well, the night before the fell of constantinople, a thick fog surrounded the city, and flaming-like lights were seen in the distance.
Quoting wikipedia:
" The next day, on 26 May 1453, the whole city was blotted out by a thick fog. When the fog lifted that evening, "flames engulfed the dome of the Hagia Sophia, and lights, too, could be seen from the walls, glimmering in the distant countryside far behind the Turkish camp (to the west)", historians noted."
This is now known to have been caused by the eruption of kuwea volcano, but at that time the flames were thought to have been the fires of Janos Hunyadi's army, come to relieve the siege. Gandalf wore all white, and was atop a white horse. Hunyadi's title? The white knight.

no ethnically they were all the same to him.

The arrival of elves in helm's deep does not happen in books, it was only added in movies.

dude there were no elves in the book you're getting ahead of yourselves and no, minas tirith not hornburg.

you are gettiing memes from the film. go read.

>olkien was a filthy racist who grew up in apartheid South Africa
And was against apartheid, saying he had the hatred of it in his bones.

While I think someone could maybe make an argument that Tolkien is a sexist (in a traditional way, not a /r9k/ misogynist way) I really don't see the racism accusations having any bearing on his work. On a very surface level look at it, it could seem that there is some weird racial shit going on, what with the Elves, Orcs, etc, but this is only if you look at these like real world biological species. Tolkien was writing a mythology, not simply a crude-simulation of a world. An interpretation that orcs represent the demonisation of the an enemy (keep in mind that LotR is written from a bias perspective, and Tolkien knew all to well about how people depicted Germans during both world wars) has far more depth than that he just wanted to show turks/blacks/whatever as monsters, and I don't even neccessarily agree that they do represent demonisation of the enemy, they could represent the corruption of divine image, evil itself or numerous other things. This doesn't even get into him humanising the orcs to an extent, and he didn't consider them inherently evil.

Basically, when analysing his work, keep in mind that he consciously wrote it as a mythology, and a mythology that was written by the people in the work. The giant half-trolls from far-harad could easily just be big black dudes, but from a hobbit's eyes they may seem monstrous.

Gondor is Italy, not Thrace.

ORCS WERENT BLACKS, THERE WERE BLACK MEN IN MIDDLE EARTH WRITTEN IN HIS BOOKS. NOT ORCS.

>ORCS WERENT BLACKS, THERE WERE BLACK MEN IN MIDDLE EARTH WRITTEN IN HIS BOOKS. NOT ORCS.
I didn't say they were blacks, it's just that's a common accusation I see. One with a bit more weight is saying they are mongols or turks, but I pointed out why I think that's bullshit too

theres no one to one geographical mapping. But those men of numenor descent are of the roman empire.

No but see like, Tolkien actually wrote Orcs to be the thing I don't like because it fits my own worldview. No matter how much evidence is posted his ideals secretly aligned with mine as well as my interpretation of what he wrote, trust me.

Black speech doesn't sound anything like Turkish

>The Black Speech was not intentionally modeled on any style, but was meant to be self consistent, very different from Elvish, yet organized and expressive, as would be expected of a device of Sauron before his complete corruption. It was evidently an agglutinative language. [...] I have tried to play fair linguistically, and it is meant to have a meaning not be a mere casual group of nasty noises, though an accurate transcription would even nowadays only be printable in the higher and artistically more advanced form of literature. According to my taste such things are best left to Orcs, ancient and modern.

Even though they say it isn't based on history, if it was, I don't think it's completely alternative.

See I think Gondor would be more like Austria/other Southern-Central European states and the Rohirrim are like the Poles, the battle of minas tirith, the Battle of Vienna, where the Poles (the Rohirrim) answer the call to aid and smash a much greater force with an earthshaking cavalry charge at the moment when everything seems lost.

Constantinople would be one of the other cities that already fell. Osgiliath seems better. It was the ancient capital, it falls to the invaders, and it's spread out on two sides of water.

And part of me thinks tolkien used historical inspiration and sperged out at the suggestion because he felt he needed to be the absolute creative force behind the whole thing. But idk.

source: my autism

I'm not the op and frankly didnt know the elves were added in the film seeing as i never read the book, but the rest still stands

Tolkien was a conservative traditionalist Luddite and his works represent that. He didn't specifically add allegory into his works but if you look hard enough you can find analogies anywhere.

I think Tolkien rejected a lot of allegory and anything that smelled like it because he wanted his work to be seen as something that stands on its own. He wanted people to appreciate a story with elves, wizards and orcs for being a story about elves, wizards and orcs, without reaching for allegory that could help them justify it's appeal.
>Tolkien was a conservative traditionalist Luddite and his works represent that. He didn't specifically add allegory into his works but if you look hard enough you can find analogies anywhere.
Obviously someone's beliefs and views on the world are going to influence their writing (after all, LotR has a pretty clear love of nature) but that doesn't make it an allegory. An allegory is a direct metaphor for an event. For example saying his work is about war and the effects of war, and that WWI was an inspiration for his feelings on this, isn't an allegory. Saying that his work is about WWI is an allegory.

This guy gets it, I personally find it quite admirable that Tolkien worked as hard as he did to avoid direct allegory.

That's some good autism my friend, almost as good as mine (). Honestly I never thought of the siege of minas tirith as the siege of vienna, but now that you made me think about it, I can see clear similarities. Although I wouldnt equate osgiliath to constantinople, but to hungary: once a proud part of the realm, but now lost to the foreign invader, it also makes sense geographically.

Seeing as I'm reading the Fellowship of the Ring right now, I really like this thread

I know it is bullshit but just imagine how butthurt you should be so that you create an imaginary world where your side wins the war.

He has also stated in his letters that he considered Dwarves to be Jewish.

Misunderstood and keeping to themselves because of that. And, y'know, the gold thing.

This is not a joke, by the by.

Influence != allegory, Elvish was based on Finnish, this does not make Elves an allegory for Finns.

False, gimli would never try to destroy the ring with his axe, he would attempt to steal it

>when you realise that orcs are supposed to be a well organised military force with high equality equipment rather than barbarians with shitty equipment
I like Peter Hacksons orcs since the cosmetics are really nice, but I do wish we'd seen them a bit more organised. At least he got the Uruks right.

This. How can everybody gloss over this?

>Gondor used to be a unified Kingdom
>then it split into the Northern Kingdom of Arnor and Southern Kingdom of Gondor similar to how Rome split into WRE and ERE
>Tolkien himself referred to Minas Tirith as an "Byzantine City"
>Minas Tirith used to have an twin city called Minas Ithil which was basically Constantinople
>Minas Ithil suffered a great plague that weakened it similar to how Constantinople suffered the Justinian plague
>then the city got corrupted and converted into Minas Morgul similar to how Constantinople got turned into Istanbul
woah...

weren´t Gondor and Mordor a single kingdom called Numenor?

Numenor was a hyper-powerful kingdom that was destroyed after being corrupted by Sauron and being convinced to try to wage war on the in-universe gods. Gondor was its strongest colony and became its successor state after its destruction.

Mordor was always Sauron's own thing.

Numenor was an island based kingdom/empire, that fell after they tried to sail to valinor.

Gondor was founded as a remnant of this empire. I don't know too much about the history of Mordor, but I don't think it was occupied by Numenor.

>minas ithil is constantinople
>this means minas tirith is rome
>constaninople falls before rome
user, hate to break it to you, but...

No

Numenor was an Island kingdom that sunk similar to the legend of Atlantis after they declared war on the Gods. But it's architecture and civilization in general was more based of Ptolemaic Egypt.
The survivors of the sinking would settle on Middle Earth and create Gondor.

Mordor has always been there and a shithole.

Also I heard that Tolkien's distant ancestor was a hero of battle of Vienna. Cannot confirm it with sources.

>I don't know too much about the history of Mordor, but I don't think it was occupied by Numenor.
It was

It's the reason why Numenor fell in the first place since they went to war with Mordor and captured Sauron in a cage so he could manipulate the Numenorians into creating Morgoth cults.

Yeah Orcs are not just random ill equipped Barbarian animals, it's really weird they were presented that way.

Honestly movies make it look much worse than it is in terms of allegory, in books orcs are just corrupted creatures with an aggressive bloodthirst.

>It's the reason why Numenor fell in the first place since they went to war with Mordor and captured Sauron in a cage so he could manipulate the Numenorians into creating Morgoth cults.
When I was reading it, I recall that Sauron submitted willingly rather than being forcibly captured.

what if his dislike of allegory was just an allegory?

He did, although it's noted that Sauron was actually pretty terrified of the Numenoreans. It was all according to plan though, him willingly submitting like that was the first step in his game to gain their trust and corrupt them.

Didn´t Mordor had allied states populated by human beans? I think it mentions a country called Umbar and some other I really can´t remember

It's heavily implied throughout the books and Tolkien's writings that most, if not all of the rest of Middle Earth is either already under Sauron's control or otherwise allied to him. The part of Middle Earth that we see in the books is effectively the last holdout.

Umbar, Harad (split into Near-Harad and Far-Harad), Khand and Rhun.
as points out, middle earth was in a dire state if you take into account the whole continent.

Umbarians, Easterlings, Haradrim and Variags.

The only difference is that Umbar used to be an Numenorian colony before they got BLACK'D.

Minas Tirith isn't Constantinople, it's VIENNA. Minas Morgul is Constantinople/Istanbul.

Also daily reminder the word Orc is based on the word Turk. The name Uruk-Hai is based on these guys: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yörüks

Well, congratulations! You got yourself caught! Now what's the next step in your master plan?

>Tolkien referred to the Old English origins of the word "orc", observing that "the word is, as far as I am concerned, actually derived from Old English orc 'demon', but only because of its phonetic suitability"[20] and "I originally took the word from Old English orc (Beowulf 112 orc-neas and the gloss orc = þyrs ('ogre'), heldeofol ('hell-devil')).
>The name "Uruk-hai" has the element Uruk, which is a Black Speech word related to Orc, related to the word "Urko" in Tolkien's invented language of Quenya. The element hai means "folk", so "Uruk-hai" is "Orc-folk". A similar term is "Olog-hai" ("troll-folk"), used for a breed of especially strong and vicious trolls capable of surviving sunlight.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkhon_inscriptions

sinking this kingdom...
WITH NO SURVIVORS

Yes and no. Tolkien's Orcs are not stupid - indeed, they are known for great cleverness in technological things. However, they are also careless and disorganized.

Uruk was an ancient Sumerian city, in fact the biggest one at it's times.
Hai is (perhaps) based on the word ''high'' which is used to describe some of the elves. High-Elves and it's equivalent Uruk-Hai. Hai is also used to describe the group of orcs like Muruk-Hai, Olog-Hai.

You know you can play a lot with those words and come with with different ideas. But we won't know what was in Tolkiens head..

Their disorganisation is more due their chaotic nature that only respects power rather than ineptness, they are organised when under a powerful leader

In movies they are just shown as inept animals

Right, they're not inept, but they don't naturally work together well. And unlike dwarves who take great pride in their craftsmanship, orcish equipment would definitely be more of the "whatever, good enough" variety.

Is this info from Silmarrilion?

Nah most of them are mentioned in Lord of the Rings. I think mostly during the battle for Minas Tirith.

>He has also stated in his letters that he considered Dwarves to be Jewish.
He said that in an Interview and he was mostly talking about the language and the diaspora situation. Stop your head cannon.

>I have not read the book but Listen how I unterstand it better than the Autor himself

Sauron is just a subordinate to Morgoth in the Silmarilion. I think he's mentioned only once or twice

no

Silmarillion is all about first era shit with Melkor and the elves. Sauron and mordor and barely ever mentioned.

Most of that info is brought up in Return of the King.

tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Of_the_Rings_of_Power_and_the_Third_Age

Also isn't the whole Downfall of Numenor in the Silmarilion? He gets mentioned a lot more often than twice for sure.

The third part of the Silmarillion is entirely about Sauron, the fall of Numenor, and his creation of the rings of power. There's not much information on the third age but he's the primary antagonist in that entire section of the book.

>gets beaten by a dog
>then tried to beg Eönwë for forgiveness only to run away and hide in Middle Earth
Sauron had a hard life.

>gets cucked by Elendil
>gets cucked not one but several Hobbits
>just wanted to impresse Morgoth
Eternal beta.

that's put in copies of the Silmarillion but it's a separate story.

The Silmarillion is the collection of several seperate stories. How do you know which were meant to be in there?

The Quenta Silmarillion all covers the first age.

It's part of the Silmarillion though. It's divided into 5 parts with the Quenta Silmarillion being by far the longest. All copies of the Silmarillion have it included.

Because the story of Numenor and the creation of the rings of power are in the second age. the Silmarillion refers to the stories in the first age. they're partitioned off from the rest of the book, at least in my copy