Lord of the Rings

He actually was, and some ones that were contemporary to his writing. But a lot of present day readers don't notice them, like the lost manuscript conceit.

>implying it's not a linguist's attempt to justify to himself spending so long making up languages by tacking on a story about industrialization and Catholicism with some mythological bits for spice

>LotR
>Swords and Sorcery

Pick one.

How would you classify it?

It's a high fantasy. Such stories revolve around vast plots that dwarf the small characters within.
Sword and Sorcery has big characters in small stories.
Where LotR is about the vast clash between good and evil, and the small, but vital part played by a few people, a Sword and Sorcery tale is generally about a larger-than-life figure like Conan, sitting by the fireside and telling you stories about the time he was a pirate on the black coast.

Or, crazy fucking thought here, it was novel and unique at the time it came out, and then over time, after being aped and adapted a million fucking times, we've become sick of it and it's lost most of it's impact.

Same reason kids talk about Aliens being boring and cliched, or saying that the original Star Wars trilogy is meh.

We've seen so many different versions, parodies, copycats, and every other adaptation you can imagine, that being able to view Lord of the Rings with a "fresh" mindset like what it would've been exposed to decades ago is pretty much impossible.

No it's not perfect, but it also came out a long ass fucking time ago and set the building blocks for what we have today.

This.

LoTR deserves a lot of credit for coming up a bunch of fantasy cliches, and it was pretty original at the time, but honestly it's not that well written and the story is not all that good.

IMO, LoTR's most important contribution is the worldbuilding, not that I particularly like Middle Earth, but it showed that putting a lot of detail and thought into your world can pay off.

Not him, but I would argue it's not really high fantasy either, but rather a kind of fictional myth; it's more akin to Robert Graves's work than anything else.

High Fantasy typically doesn't have the kind of narrative play that makes LoTR tick. You might have complicated plots and settings and characters, but usually the transmission of information from the narrator to the audience is clear, simple, and direct, the omniscient voice tells you stuff, and you (with suspension of disbelief) absorb it.

It's a fictional mythology, like said.
Tolkien wrote the Middle Earth books (well, maybe not The Hobbit) to be, for lack of a better analogy, a fictional Beowulf.
You should really read the introduction some time. The book we read isn't a fantasy novel. It's a fictional translation of a fictional ancient text. When Gandalf translates a poem from Elvish into English in the novel it comes out perfectly, down to having a working rhyme scheme, not because he's that good, but because a "scholar" -- ie, Tolkien -- translated it for us.
In the same way, if you were to go read Beowulf right now you wouldn't really be reading Beowulf. The oldest version of the text we have is missing pieces, and is actually a copy of an older text, meaning what we do have is likely different from earlier versions. But we don't see that when we read the book because scholars and translators have filled in the gaps with their best guesses.
And that's what's happening in LotR.
Frodo, Bilbo, and Merry all kept journals. Their work was compiled in something called the Red Book of Westmarch, which was later translated by a steward of Gondor and some other people over the course of a few hundred years, each of whom added and changed things.
Our version of LotR is a "translation" of this text, sort of like the meta narrative from Princess Bride, but significantly more complex and well designed.

Read one of the books out loud some time. It actually changes style several times. Parts feel like a journal, parts feel like a fairy tale, and a good bit comes across like an epic poem transcribed from an earlier oral tradition (with lots of repetition and a clear cadence, such as Gimli's speech about the mountains before they went to Moria, the bit where he gives their names in several languages).

It's an incredibly impressive work.

Also, this:

>but his stories ring with an authenticity

>only two options
Shit thread.

>it's not that well written
Actually it is. It's very, very well written. But it's written for scholarly-minded people, not general audiences. It doesn't work like a novel because it isn't supposed to; it's supposed to read like a translation of an ancient text.

We're just not the audience he was writing for.

Which is why I find it hilarious that American hippies made it popular with bootleg copies given out during Woodstock.

I have a boner for linguistics so
>ultimate patrician-tier exemplar of what swords-n-sorcery can be
If I had to pick, but It's really more of a mythology.

I like Lord of the Rings, but Nehwon is a better setting than Middle Earth and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are more interesting characters than the Fellowship.

In my own humble opinion.

Say, user, I was recently re-reading the Fellowship, and one thing that jumped out at me is quite literally every single song that Frodo and Co sing or refer to of shire-make is made by Bilbo.

I suspect it has something to do with his traveling, maybe his contact with Elves, who seem to be the source of poetry. Anyway, I was wondering if you (or anyone in this thread really) had a theory more fully baked than that as to why he seems to have such a huge cultural impact.

Hobbits care about hobbit culture, and Bilbo cared about elven culture.

Give this a watch:
youtube.com/watch?v=lXAvF9p8nmM

It might answer your question, at least in part.

Yes, but that's not quite what I meant.

When Frodo, Sam, and Pippin start out, they sing a walking song. Composed by Bilbo. When they bathe in crickhollow, they sing a bath-song. Composed by Bilbo. When Frodo sings a song of the shire in the Prancing Pony, the one about the old inn and the Man in the Moon, it's composed by Bilbo.

As far as the book indicates (with admitted possible biases) quite literally every bit of "pop music" in the Shire is composed by Bilbo. There is nothing that isn't. That's a bit weird, don't you think?

LotR has nothing to do with the "fantasy" genre. It isn't related. It's an Arthurian romance written by a linguist. Beach reads and literature have very little in common. Fantasy novels are about plots and characters. Literature is about using words well. The two have next-to-nothing in common, except that they're both types of books.

Will do, at some point though, don't quite have an hour to sit down and watch through it all right this moment.

Scornful Conan is right. Calling JRRT sword and sorcery is like calling SWs cyberpunk

No, seriously man, no. JRRT has abominable dialogues, surprisingly generic descriptions, basically the same language for every character* and many contrived action sequences.

He shines in other things.

*=which isn't bad per se, but shit John, really? Motherfucking Galadriel, older than the sun and the moon, talks pretty much like Sam, some redneck prole?

Keep in mind that the story we are reading is a translation of Bilbo's, Frodo's, and Merry's journals. Frodo and Merry were part of the generation that grew up idolizing Bilbo, with Frodo's admiration going far and beyond simple hero worship. They were also, in a way, trying to emulate their idol's exploits, so it stands to reason they'd use his songs.

It is pretty obviously skewed towards being Bilbo-centric. At least part of this is likely due to our version of the text being filtered through several people who live in Middle Earth. When they were translating the text into Gondorian or what have you, if they ran into a song they didn't recognize they may well have just said it was one of Bilbo's, since he was one of the few Hobbits they'd even know about.

It's a mix of the two: Frodo/Merry/their generation fucking loved Bilbo, and people outside the Shire probably only knew about Bilbo, or knew about Hobbits through Bilbo.

Not him, but this

>basically the same language for every character*

Is just completely wrong. If you can't immediately identify the speech patterns of different characters, ESPECIALLY Sam, who has one of the most distinctive ones in the book, being the only one to speak lower class, modern, broken english, as opposed to someone like Galadriel who speaks with Anglo-Saxon style grammar half the time, you just haven't been paying attention.

Ah, beat me to it.

It was a bit of fanservice. Readers loved Bilbo, and he comes out after I dunno, 150 pages, so he had to make it there in spirit.

>or maybe hobbit songs are really naughtier than you would expect

It's not a Mary-Sue that's for sure and I agree that it's not a Sword & Sorcery either.

To me it's a mythical-historic epic.

More than that, it has some of the most wondrous pieces of humanity that shine forth. A lot of high fantasy forget that the best part of fantasy is the real emotional-soul.

Too many author's go for epic battles, intertwining plots and climatic showdown's, but these are all done with no substance. A lot of fantasy is like a lot of shonen anime in that regard, a fun read and a good time but no depth.

Whereas Tolkien created a masterpiece, filled with landscapes, creatures, languages and of course, the human element of struggle, hardships and what the power of small unimportant people who just want to do good can do for the World.

It's why as I grew up, my favourites went from Legolas, to Merry and Pippin and finally, to Samwise Gamgee, because he truly was the heart of the story.

'There's some devilry at work in the Shire,' he said. 'Elrond knew what he was about when he wanted to send Mr. Merry back.' Then suddenly Sam gave a cry and sprang away. 'I can't stay here,' he said wildly. `I must go home. They've dug up Bagshot Row, and there's the poor old gaffer going down the Hill with his bits of things on a barrow. I must go home! '

'You cannot go home alone,' said the Lady. 'You did not wish to go home without your master before you looked in the Mirror, and yet you knew that evil things might well be happening in the Shire. Remember that the Mirror shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them. The Mirror is dangerous as a guide of deeds.'

Sam sat on the ground and put his head in his hands. `I wish I had never come here, and I don't want to see no more magic,' he said and fell silent. After a moment he spoke again thickly, as if struggling with tears. `No, I'll go home by the long road with Mr. Frodo, or not at all,' he said. `But I hope I do get back some day. If what I've seen turns out true, somebody's going to catch it hot! '

I dunno man. He's not the same, I was a little bit exaggerating, but still, I think they are WAY too similar. It's basically some words, but Galariel does speak surpsingly simply. Too much to make her different to... everybody in the Fellowship, expect the hobbits, but to Frodo she seems an equal.

This is actually a good insight. Tolkien is someone that put much feelings in his work, and though I'm not sure he put it out well (I have to admit I'm more of an Epic Pooh-persuasion guy, read it) they are honest and this isn't a bad thing for us fantasy nerds. Most of our "founding fathers" had great visions of these brooding mercenaries and those star-spawn of horror, but JRRT put us through companionship and friendship.

>He's not the same, I was a little bit exaggerating, but still, I think they are WAY too similar.

And I think you're not reading closely. Really LOOK at what they're saying. Notice how Sam uses contractions, and Galadriel doesn't. How Sam uses non-proper words like "devilry", and modern honorifics as "Mr.". Meanwhile, Galadriel uses a more archiac form of social superior, "your master" (and clearly not in the modern sense of a master and a slave), and her archaic grammar "and not all have yet come to pass" instead of something like 'and not all happen'.

And that's before getting into other samples of either of their dialog. Can you really envision Galadriel saying "Oliphaunts"? Or Sam saying something like

>like gold fall the leaves in the wind

Galadriel speaks of how she doesn't understand Sam's use of the word magic, because it's applied to both what elves do and the "deceits" of the enemy; Sam uses a much more straightforward and modern word to describe the ring-vision he gets near Cirith Gorgor, that these notions are only a "trick".

Not to mention that you're reading stuff that's been translated into English, and Galadriel's own words are probably translated into Westron in the internal narration, and that they very likely aren't speaking in the same language at all; one of the reasons Pippin being hailed as a great prince was his poor mastery of the Gondorian tongue, and his mistaken non-use of formal second person conjugation.

It's intersting but overlooked how conflicted JRRT was on war.

On a side, we have the roots of anglo-saxon shit. So, war is glorious, the beautiful death, and possibly even the cristianized thing.

On the other side, dude went through the Somme.

I don't think if he wanted to justapose the two things he could find two war-experience more diametrically opposed.

So... well, battles in JRRT are tragic, but not really heroic (the real heroes are Sam and Frodo, and that's a whole different hero, they're quite clearly more similar to what a ww1 footman could've lived through; or maybe to a saint, interestingly enough).
They're focused on the single soldier, mostly, and what he felt - and while they do have some bloodthirst that was really "anglo-saxon" (Rohirrim did most of the battles of LOTR) it's anything but a good trait in the reader's eyes, and no real "epic" feat comes from the warriors we see here.
And they're incredibly short, considering what a fucking long book we are thinking about.

Here it's were WE should be conflicted about the movies, but that's another story.

Well, yeah, but still. Take Frodo's lines from the same chapter. Or even worse, Gimli's ones: he seems to outwit both her and Celeborn.

I realize he is middle-upper class in the Shire, but if JRRT wanted to make her SOUND different he failed to. But perhaps he didn't, I can concede that.

[the manuscript thing it's just a nod. Almost fanservice.]

LotR is which in your opinion?

>I realize he is middle-upper class in the Shire, but if JRRT wanted to make her SOUND different he failed to. But perhaps he didn't, I can concede that.

I don't know, they sound plenty different to me. And Gimli's "courteous" speech is a pretty major plot point, it's due to such courtesy that Galadriel surrenders some of her hair to the dwarf, something that she denied to Feanor ages ago.

And I would again point to the translation issue. I'm going to make an assumption, but I'm guessing you don't know Biblical Hebrew. Crack open a copy of your Old Testament, say around Genesis 25, or really, any chapter with Jacob and Esau's speech can be easily contrasted. Most translations I read, because they modernize and Anglicize what the characters are saying, tend to homogenize their speech patterns.

If you read it in the original, you'll note that Jacob speaks "proper" Hebrew, by referring to things through their history and how he personally relates to them, whereas Esau is "crude", he refers to things by their physical characteristics. If you wanted to ultra-literally translate Gen 25:30, you get

הַלְעִיטֵנִי נָא מִן-הָאָדֹם הָאָדֹם הַזֶּה--כִּי עָיֵף

>Allow me, please, to swallow, from that red (stuff?), that red (stuff?) you have there, because I'm fainting.
1/2

It's almost incomprehensible, and in fact Isaac would go on to immediately notice it when Jacob is impersonating his brother; they talk very differently. I'm sure some translations preserve that, I won't pretend to be an expert among different translators, but a lot of them will skip over nuances like that, and if you accept the fictional chronology of LoTR, you've probably got at least 4 layers of translation for anything Galadriel says: Sindarin that Galadriel is actually speaking, turned to Westron that Frodo would write in, turned into whatever language Gondor is speaking in the 2nd century Fourth Age when it gets compiled in Minas Tirith, and at some point to modern English when Tolkien "gets his hands on it".
2/2

Bullshit. JRRT was an english writer, he most certainly didn't write Galadriel's lines in Westron (he coudn't have anyway, he didn't really create that language).
It's like telling people SWs cinematic issues would be resolved if only we watched the holomovies that they made in Coruscant about the life of the Skywalkers or something.

While I agree with you there, saying Galadriel and Sam sound the same still isn't true.

>Bullshit. JRRT was an english writer, he most certainly didn't write Galadriel's lines in Westron (he coudn't have anyway, he didn't really create that language).

Re-read the introduction. It is quite clearly laid out that what we have is several steps removed from the original writings, of which Tolkien is simply the last "translator" of the original.

It's why you get so much attention in the notes as to chains of assumption and knowledge that lead to the tales (I think the most clear laying out of such is in UT and the Disaster of the Gladden Fields). It's why when things that are clearly impossible and are glossed over, they're for the benefit of either the Hobbits, or the Rohirrim, their "close cousins" among humans. It's why you have all those anachronisms in the Hobbit, and why the narrator is clearly talking from the perspective of a human to another human.

Are you for real user?

And no, he DID mean there are matches in the Shire. It's not a metaphor or a "translation".

And then there's Appendix F from ROTK, section 2, "On translation"

>In presenting the matter of the Red Book, as a history for people of today to read, the whole of the linguistic setting has been translated as far as possible into the terms of our own times. Only the languages alien to the Common Speech have been left in their common form; but these appear mainly in the names of persons and places.

>The Common Speech , as the language of the Hobbits and their narratives, has inevitably been turned into modern English. In the process the difference between the varieties observable in the use of the Westron has been lessened. Some attempt has been made to represent varieties by variations in the kind of English used; but the divergence between the pronunciation and idiom of the Shire and the Westron tongue in the mouths of Elves or of the high men of Gondor was greater than has been shown in this book.

>And no, he DID mean there are matches in the Shire. It's not a metaphor or a "translation".

And are there guns? And gunpowder? And trains that come out of tunnels? All those are also to be found in The Hobbit. Funny how they don't use any those guns when Saruman comes knocking.

user, it's fiction. Understand? Middle Earth isn't real.

And JRRT didn't even really put out Westron anyway.

Sure there is gunpowder. Or at least something that greek fire. But probably gunpowder, considering that apparently Gandalf isn't the only fireworks artist around.

The problem with matches is here that isn't something the narrator tells us (like talking about trains in describing the silence of the Shire, a place where trains would fell pretty much "normal" for the reader, considering what the Shire looks like). It's Pippin's words.

I don't see the problem anyway: it's not the most absurd feat of engeneerign men put out there in the slightest, not even considering "magic".

>user, it's fiction. Understand? Middle Earth isn't real.

Yes, I understand that. Do you understand the point that I'm making? That Tolkien is dealing with what is itself a constructed narrative, and is trying to make that work; that he's dealing with a work that's been translated and re-tranlsated several times at least, and trying to introduce the garbling that goes with that, which is why you have names like Brandywine.

> But probably gunpowder, considering that apparently Gandalf isn't the only fireworks artist around.

Oh, who else does them? And how does the "gunpowder" they make them imitate birdsong, give off the scent of flowers, and extinguish local light sources, like the ones he sets off for Bilbo's farewell party do?

>The problem with matches is here that isn't something the narrator tells us

I have no idea what your bizarre fixation with matches is, you were the one who brought it up originally, and I'm still not sure what your point with it is.

>(like talking about trains in describing the silence of the Shire, a place where trains would fell pretty much "normal" for the reader, considering what the Shire looks like)

That's not how it comes up. The line is how Bilbo gives a shriek like a train coming out of a tunnel when he realize that they're off to go steal from a dragon.

> It's Pippin's words.

No, it's the narrator of The Hobbit's words. And since in the fictional chain of transmission, the section of The Hobbit was written by Bilbo, and Bilbo displays no evidence of knowing what a gun is, or a train is, and certainly wouldn't include phrases like

>There is is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off.

I think that the narrative drift holds quite a bit of water, and yes, that includes translation artifacts on dialog.

But who the fuck cares about fictional "justifications"? If he wrote badly (and that is up to debate, no mistake) that's because he wrote the english text we're dealing with.

Fireworks:

> The fireworks were by Gandalf: they were not only brought by him, but designed and made by him; and the special effects, set pieces, and flights of rockets were let off by him. But there was also a generous distribution of squibs, crackers, backarappers, sparklers, torches, dwarf-candles, elf-fountains, goblin-barkers and thunder-claps. They were all superb. The art of Gandalf improved with age.

To me this and the fact the hobbits didn't suspect he was a fucckin' angel means that he wasn't that unheard of.

Who knows what the OTHER fireworks artists did? I mean, we don't know about the enchanted toys of the dwarves. But I guess that as much as Orthanc was a "mundane" feat of engineering (but quite absurd without... gee, what do they even use nowdays to cut basalt, lasers?) we can assume that magic isn't really that cut off form "mundane" shit there, and the hobbit didn't seem to mean anything different regardin Gandalf.
Besides, only the light source thing is really "magical".

>No, it's the narrator of The Hobbit's words

Nope.

>‘Raise the Shire!’ said Merry. ‘Now! Wake all our people! They hate all this, you can see: all of them except perhaps one or two rascals, and a few fools that want to be important, but don’t at all understand what is really going on. But Shire-folk have been so comfortable so long they don’t know what to do. They just want a match, though, and they’ll go up in fire. The Chief’s Men must know that. They’ll try to stamp on us and put us out quick. We’ve only got a very short time.’

Merry, whatever.

Or are you implying basically JRRT in his fictional "translation" undermined what the characters would have been saying? Because in that case basically we couldn't say anything about how the author meant ME to be, no?

>But who the fuck cares about fictional "justifications"? If he wrote badly (and that is up to debate, no mistake) that's because he wrote the english text we're dealing with.

Because he wrote with those justifications in mind, they are quite literally part of the text. He hides impossibilities in that space; the ride of the Rohirrim necessitates that they travel about 80 miles a day to get to Gondor on the time that they did, something that no mortal horses could do, and givein the amount of detail he puts in other travelogue, something very uncharacteristic for Tolkien as author to overlook.

>means that he wasn't that unheard of.

of course Gandalf wasn't unheard of. He made the rounds in the Shire frequently in the past.

>Who knows what the OTHER fireworks artists did?

What makes you think there are other fireworks artists? So far, I haven't seen any evidence for that.

>Merry, whatever.

I still have no idea what point you're trying to make with this. I have never doubted the existence of matches, and I can point to other instances of the term that you've overlooked, like how in the Hobbit, the note that Dwarves have never taken to them. I've been talking about guns, which not only is there no evidence of, you can conspicuously see their lack, given that people don't use them when it would be well within their best interests. Yet the narrator in the Hobbit likens Beorn's entry to the battle of fire armies to "drums and guns", indicating that the narrator is familiar with such devices.
1/2

>Or are you implying basically JRRT in his fictional "translation" undermined what the characters would have been saying?

YES! That is EXACTLY what I'm saying. That he's deliberately altering the text away from a completely accurate rendition of "what happened", given that this is a work of fiction, and that furthermore, he expects you to pick up on this. You are not getting the straight story.

>Because in that case basically we couldn't say anything about how the author meant ME to be, no?

Of course we can, because the deviations aren't random and are themselves products of fictional charters with all their biases and misapprehensions, if you can work out who they are and what they're looking at.

Take a look at this, from the Round World Silmarillion notes.

fair-use.org/j-r-r-tolkien/notes-on-motives-in-the-silmarillion/

>We read that he was then thrust out into the Void. That should mean that he was put outside Time and Space, outside Eä altogether; but if that were so this would imply a direct intervention of Eru (with or without supplication of the Valar). It may however refer inaccurately3 to the extrusion or flight of his spirit from Arda.

I love it when a bait comes together.

>That'd be Dune

One good book in a pile of rubbish.

Tolkein couldn't stop shitting out works of literature.

>Implying Sam is the best character

That's some straight up enlightened opinions you got there.

IIRC, Tolkein also said Sam was the best character.