By way of apology for derailing the WTF thread, feel free to continue the conversation here.
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Tolkien (continued)
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- Jul 2016
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I love the Hobbit and the three LOTR books, as well as the films. The Hobbit trilogy is way too long, but I still enjoyed them. I found the Silmarrilion too much like hard work though.
I keep meaning to reread the trilogy. Excluding Bombadil and the songs and poems would knock about a week off.
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This is the correct Tolkien timeline, as followed by me:
Young child: read Hobbit, enjoyed it. Teenage child: read LOTR, really into it. [then gap of around 20 years] Revisited LOTR, for rainy holiday reading. Passed the time well enough.
Heard rumours of a film project in the works. Really stupid idea, bound to fail, fans will hate the inevitable changes from the books, newbies won't be interested in any of it.
LOTR Films come out, huge hit, I resolve never to become a studio executive. Have to watch the films (because New Zealand), they're OK but half the time I'm going "ooh, that's near Wellington" or "she was in Shortland St". But later Billy Crystal says "New Zealand" a lot at the Oscars, so it's all good.
Hobbit films, too much. Off-screen issues (Peter Jackson versus the unions) but mostly just tired of the endless padding.
Summary: the books were important because at that age I wasn't reading anything, parents were just happy to see me with a book in my hand. So overall they were A Good Thing.
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The Hobbit films are better than I remember. I saw the last one soon after I had that bad concussion.
There is a lot of padding, especially in the third one. But it also includes a lot of stuff referred to in the LOTR books as having happened earlier. So it works better as a prequel to LOTR than The Hobbit book did because, of course, when he wrote that, he didn't know he was going to write the whole series.
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Originally posted by delicatemoth View PostThe Rings Of Power Amazon series is surprisingly entertaining. Galadriel is super aggro.
I think if it were otherwise the same story but not explicitly a Tolkien prequel, it would be a lot better received.
The nerds are all upset about any small deviations from Tolkien, even though it's a whole new story based on Tolkien's footnotes.
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Maybe it's because I ran into too many people who seriously referred to themselves as Frodo or Bilbo sixty years ago. But they reinforced an existing prejudice against all and any quasi-medieval elvish tomes. If I want, or need, genuinely fantastical writing I'll stick with William Blake ta muchly.
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Originally posted by Gangster Octopus View PostPlease don't take this wrong, but that is hopefully a fabulous non sequitur...
But I’ve seen it a few times at home since then and it was fine.
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Into my late twenties I thought The Hobbit and the LOTR books were wonderful and read them every few years.
Hadn’t read them for a while when the LOTR films were announced and couldn’t decide if I was nervous or excited. Once they came out they were well made and visually impressive, but voiced out loud, the dialogue sounded either self-important or a bit twee and silly. The spell was broken.
Good films or not I don’t know, but I’ve got no interest in the books any more.
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A fair bit to say on this, but the 1981 BBC radio series is still absolutely incredible.
You can listen to the entire thing here.
https://archive.org/details/lord-of-the-rings-10
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I listen to that at least once a year and have sampled and mangled it for my own entertainment (Black riders whispering "Baaagggggginsssss" sounds great slowed down). The Hobbit radio adaptation from the 1960s is also good. The online computer game is the only adaptation that had the guts to include Bombadil.
I really like made-up worlds, and middle Earth is one of the best, wonky and twee shit and all. The dialogue and characters are indeed crap, but it's like pop music, it doesn't really matter.
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Originally posted by Sits View PostInto my late twenties I thought The Hobbit and the LOTR books were wonderful and read them every few years.
Hadn’t read them for a while when the LOTR films were announced and couldn’t decide if I was nervous or excited. Once they came out they were well made and visually impressive, but voiced out loud, the dialogue sounded either self-important or a bit twee and silly. The spell was broken.
Good films or not I don’t know, but I’ve got no interest in the books any more.
That's something fantasy stories often fail to do, and the dialogue just ends up sounding stiff or turns into just one exposition dump after the next. Or, the story just dispenses with trying to sound antiquated at all and just uses contemporary idioms ... you know, for the kids! The current Willow show on Disney+ does that and the fans don't seem to be happy with it.
I didn't major in English so I don't know what this kind of story is called, but everything in Tolkien is in the third person. Nowhere in the text, as far as I can recall, does the story tell us what a character is thinking apart from what they say out loud. And there aren't a lot of adverbs or descriptors attached to the dialogue. No "he said, knowingly" or "Aragorn grimaced as he looked upon..."
It's just dialogue and action and even the action bits are a lot shorter and sparser that big battles drive the plot at several points.
That may be why it works as a film.
Adaptations of books that are told in the first person are often harder to translate without relying on voice-over, which usually just feels clunky, or have to add a lot of very unnatural-sounding dialogue where characters explain how their feeling in a way that real people rarely do.
Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 28-02-2023, 21:28.
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I've read LOTR a few times. I read The Hobbit afterwards and the tone of the book was so different it grated a bit. I've also read The Silmarillian and the tone is different again. That was deliberately written as a collection of takes like the sagas or the mabinogi.
The films went downhill for me. I really liked The Fellowship of the Ring. I thought The Two Towers was pretty good. I don't know if I've watched The Return of the King more than once. The Hobbit Trilogy was generally cack, I thought. From the dwarf-elf romance through to Stephen Fry mugging it up in Laketown. The only bit I thought they got right was the dwarf halls of Erebor.
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I read Farmer Giles of Ham. I remember very little about it, except what it looked like, but I'm struggling to find it on the internet.
This might be it
1376882666.1.x.jpgLast edited by DCI Harry Batt; 01-03-2023, 08:52.
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I read The Hobbit aged about eight, and thought it was great. I guess I was in my early twenties when I read LOTR, which I also loved, while agreeing that you could easily lose Bombadil and various songs and poems (I tended to skip-read them anyway). When the films came out, I thought they were generally excellent, so I was quite looking forward to The Hobbit. Then it was announced that this too would be a three part epic. Now, making a trilogy of LOTR makes sense; three books, and there's a lot of material. The Hobbit, on the other hand, is quite a short book, and I would say aimed at a younger audience. The film trilogy is (a) faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too long, and (b) falls into the trap of being Disney-fied for younger viewers, so for example the dwarves become comedy characters bearing little resemblance to dwarves as they appear in LOTR. This, for me, made it hard to accept the film(s) as a direct prequel to LOTR, as there was too much of a tonal difference with the imaginary 'adult' world of the latter trilogy. Don't even start me on the Stephen Fry character.
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