Can we have a simple Tolkien appreciation thread Veeky Forums? Share and discuss art, favorite stories, feels...

Why does the meme go around that the setting is a immaculate land of sunshine where nothing bad ever happens and problems are resolved by punching? I see people regarding Tolkien like that even when more or less the opposite of those are major themes in LotR

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Shit dog there's so many good ones I honestly can't choose

Turnermohan is based. Merlkir is great too.

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What parts of the Silmarillion could be more easily adapted?

I'm thinking of the tale of the children of hurin and the downfall of numenor since they have a dark fantasy vibe which would most likely appeal the most to a modern audience, and fairly typical plot structures. The lay of beren and luthien would make for a good movie.

I liked when Ulmo just didn't give a single fuck when it came to most boring-ass councils of the gods.

Ulmo was the most proactive of the Valar too. He's directly responsible for Gondolin and Earendil was basically an envoy of Ulmo for the better part of his life as a mortal

Well he had to deal with Ossë.

Who is the best named Tolkien character? I think it has to go to Ar-Pharazon the Golden

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Túrin Turambar always rolled off the tounge really well. It's simply fun to say to. I remember first reading his chapter in the Silmarillion and quietly reciting aloud his name to myself occasionally.

Lots Tolkien's writings did that to me though. I'd read something in my head then read it aloud, especially some lines from Return of the King. Epic writing, I fucking loved it.

So I assume Sauron just decided that he didn't want those orcs any more, because dying will be their only accomplishment.

The towers look like they were ment to set the forest on fire.

The goal might have been to just burn as much of the forest down as he could.

Orcs are cheep. If that horde kills a few hundred elves it was orcs well spent.

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You know, knowing what I know of Tolkien's mythos now and looking back on how all of creation came from song, it really adds something to the scenes with song in the books.

That is awesome.

Glaurung the Golden is the best villain. He's an evil bastard and loves his job (being an evil bastard).

Tolkien had a thing for trees, the sea and singing besides linguistics. You could also make a drinking game out of every time he says "the West" when referring to Valinor or Numenor. In fact, it'd be safer for your liver to look for the times he says "West" and is talking about the actual cardinal direction

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

It was the greatest thing of all time when I first read it

I always liked Cirdan for some reason. And Earendil.

I thought it'd be bigger

Middle earth always felt too sanitized to be mythology

Looking at it, it's roughly 900 kilometers from end to end so nevermind, I suppose.

In between all the murder, incest, and rape baby incestuous lust induced murdering, I suppose you can find sanitized bits.

youtube.com/watch?v=pISzxdEgDCU

The reason it is sanitised is because all those elves and dunedain felt bad for all the murder and lives lost because they have the immortality to be really depressed about it all.

Also Hobbits have it better than literally everyone else because Dunedain rangers give their lives to protect them in secret.

>fingolfin
>blonde

even the movies don't portray the setting in that way.

The world is grey, the mountains old.
The forge's fire is ashen-cold.
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls.

The LOTR setting is supposed to be a fictional history for the world we live in today, right? Has anyone ever considered expanding on that idea, and making a piece of sci-fi media where space-faring humans stumble on wherever Iluvatar fucked off to?

Smaug was the golden one.

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That is fucking awesome.

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So what happened in the 4th age anyway? Dwarves just died out and men lived lived content lives without anything going on?

Whatever else you think of the PJ films, he got Rohan fucking perfect.

>he got Rohan fucking perfect
Does this look like a land of pastures and lush tall grassland?

The armor, I meant.

Hold the fucking phone.

One of the hobbits alerted the orcs and other baddies to their prescence by dropping an armored corpse down a well in the Chamber of Marzabul, right?

By this map, the chase sequence from there to the end of the complex was 120 miles or more.

WTF?

DUDE HORSES LMAO

Those were the foothills in the northern-eastern borderlands were they not?

I thought they always showed the interior like Edoras and the villages to be pretty flat and grassy.

He most likely is not in the physical world but in the timeless halls, which are beyond the universe

Now, Tolkien was doing a more "realistic" and less mythological version of the Silmarillion where the Kingdom of Arda meant the Solar System and the rest of the Ainur were just busy elsewhere in the universe, but he died before completing it

It's a fan made map.

I've read before that Tolkien considered writing a grimderp GoT-esque account about the fall of Gondor and the failure of Aragorn's heirs but ultimately decided against it.

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It's called The New Shadow. It started with there being "orc-cults" where kids seemingly used "pretending to be an orc" as an excuse to be an asshole but which upon further investigation turned out to be actual Morgoth worship. You can actually read what little was actually written in The Peoples of Middle-Earth. There's actually a discussion about religion between one of those teens and a man old enough to remember the War of the Ring

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Jesus christ I butchered the grammar in that post

Anybody played that Middle Earth mod for Crusader Kings II? Is it accurate in any way?

Some of The Hobbit stuff was bretty good even if literally everything else was irredeemable.

I like the idea behind the Dwarf armour, that everything is angular to mimic cut gemstones.

Stretch are you in this thread?

reminder
youtube.com/watch?v=SQkygZdZ_Vk

That eases my disdain a significant amount, why not use Guillermo's stuff though?

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If I remember correctly Earendil was one of the first if not the first thing to be written of Middle-Earth. Tolkien liked the name a lot so he made a poem based off it.

According to the wiki it was specifically this line from an Old English poem

>éala éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended
>Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, over Middle-earth to men sent

It's also why it's called Middle-Earth and the source of the "aiya earendil elenion ancalima" line when Frodo faces Shelob.

Another similar example is that A Elbereth Gilthoniel is very similar to a catholic hymn called Hail, Queen of Heaven

Is this material featured in the Unfinished Tales, and if so, where might I find it?
The concept of it has inspired me towards making a plot for, I dunno, maybe eclipse phase, where the players would bumble onto a fantasy world where magic is still around, with perhaps one of the subplots being someone trying to reverse engineer how Ainur generate and anchor magic to a place.

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It's scattered throughout History of Middle-Earth. If you can stand the writing a good deal of it is on Myths Transformed almost at the end of Morgoth's Ring, though I'd say the version we got in the Silmarillion is much more interesting and mimics real mythologies much more closely

Jackson didn't know the direction that Guillermo was going to take as the film progressed so if he did that you'd have a massive tone shift happen somewhere near the end of the first film.

Also, mimicking the powers of the Ainur is precisely what sorcery is, though unless you're willing to add some sort of Morgoth analogue or more broadly a source of corruption on creation you'll have to rework it.

To give a rundown of how magic works the Ainur simply have the power to shape the world according to their nature. Lesser beings can grasp the bits of Morgoth's power left embedded in the physical world due to the Marring of Arda and make it do the heavy lifting for them. Elven magic is completely different and works by letting their spirits manifest on the physical world (it's said, for instance, that dealing with death lessens healing powers). Dwarven magic isn't detailed much but presumably they're just that good at building shit.

Well, tulkas was creator and maintainer of the sun, and his beat downs on melkor were some of his later, lesser achievements. The early age of area, that passed for uncounted eons before the world was made amounted to the creation and warring of the valar in the early dollar system. Really the thing to say is that the valar are the adaptive, multiform "delta-forks" of an extratemporal entity, that built a heavenly disk world megastructure in a scratch built similar system, and remember that the elves never spoke of magic, only excellent craft

Oh, and things can ALWAYS gain magical properties if destiny says so, like Merry's barrow-blade killing the Witch-King and being consumed or Beren being able to talk to animals

Apparently my phone doesn't like the world solar

You know, that's fair. I guess they should've had way more time to do it in but WB didn't approve of that or something then.

>tulkas was creator and maintainer of the sun
That was Aulë and Arien

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There was something I'd once read where he gives a more scientific explanation of the cosmos while still including the valar, I can't remember though where it was written

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Threadly reminder:
youtube.com/watch?v=lXAvF9p8nmM

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Can I get a TL:DR on that? Don't have the time to watch it right now

>How To Read J.R.R. Tolkien
Start at the beginning. Continue on until the end. Then stop.

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I get why they couldn't adapt the robe to the big screen but I still would have liked to see it

Is it even possible to make something like that with modern technology?

For thousands of years most of Middle-earth was under the rule of oppressive Dark Lords. Imagine how many elves were captured and raped while trying to escape to the Grey Havens, how many small communities of Hobbis and Drúedain in the East were enslaved by Sauron. Middle-earth is probably one of the darkest fantasy world out there, I'm talking Berserk levels of crapsack worldery.

The only "sanitized" part of the world is the Shire, and Tolkien makes a point that the only reason it can stay so is because it's protected by Gandalf and the Rangers.

This. Notice how the world gets quite dark immediately once the hobbits leave the Shire in LotR.

Yo but how come Eru didn't just fix everything instead of sinking an island full of innocent people?
#staywoke

Even then, it's got murderous demi-Ents and a living tree that attempts to murder everyone that comes across it. And the woods around the Shire itself are second perhaps only to Mirkwood in their dark and horribleness.

What happens in the rest of Gondor that isn't being besieged?

They could lift some material from the Númenorean chapters of "The Lost Road" and adapt the Akallabeth.

I love the steampunk Númenor of those chapters, btw.

>"And behold what hath happened since, step by step, At first he revealed only secrets of craft, and taught the making of many things powerful and wonderful; and they seemed good. Our ships go now without the wind, and many are made of metal that sheareth hidden rocks, and they sink not in calm or storm; but they are no longer fair to look upon. Our towers grow ever stronger and climb ever higher, but beauty they leave behind upon earth."

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"The teaching of Sauron has led to the invention of ships of metal that traverse the seas without sails, but which are hideous in the eyes of those who have not abandoned or forgotten Tol Eressea; to the building of grim fortresses and unlovely towers; and to missiles that pass with a noise like thunder to strike their targets many miles away."

Númenorean missiles! Too bad Tolkien abandoned that idea and in the published Silmarillion, Ar-Pharazôn sails to Valinor in an oared vessel.

>And so the companies came and were hailed and cheered and passed through the Gate, men of the Outlands marching to defend the City of Gondor in a dark hour; but always too few, always less than hope looked for or need asked. The men of Ringlo Vale behind the son of their lord, Dervorin striding on foot: three hundreds. From the uplands of Morthond, the great Blackroot Vale, tall Duinhir with his sons, Duilin and Derufin, and five hundred bowmen. From the Anfalas, the Langstrand far away, a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord. From Lamedon, a few grim hillmen without a captain. Fisher-folk of the Ethir, some hundred or more spared from the ships. Hirluin the Fair of the Green Hills from Pinnath Gelin with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men. And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came.

They're probably better off than Minas Tirith by virtue of not being under siege, but it varies