Tolkien discussion?

[Argeus_the_Paladin]

I was wondering if there are any fans of the Tolkien Legendarium on the forum? If yes, could we discuss about anything and everything from the Silmarillion to the Lord of the Rings trilogy and everything in between here?

[Desu_Cake]

*Raises hand*
I still haven't finished the silmarillion yet. T_T
I've been meaning to, but there's just so many books I've been meaning to read lately.

[Funnyguts]

I couldn't finish the Silmarillion either. Way too long and dry. It's a good set of stories, but it reads like one of the history books in the Bible rather than a Old English poem.

[Endorphin]

*Raises hand*
I still haven't finished the silmarillion yet. T_T
I've been meaning to, but there's just so many books I've been meaning to read lately.

That could have been my post. :'D

I couldn't finish the Silmarillion either. Way too long and dry. It's a good set of stories, but it reads like one of the history books in the Bible rather than a Old English poem.

And that one too. x'D

I really liked the beginning, but I have so ridiculously much too read (8 philosophical books, 3 about psychology, around 16 about drawing, 2 about music, 3 for entertainment) and the part after the beginning (like, the whole book as far as I could see) was a little too dry to become my top priority.

Tolkien wasn't an author after all - doesn't change the fact that he was totally epic.

- R.

[Auro-Cyanide]

I love the lore of his books, but he needed a really good editor... or someone to give him a word restriction or something. You can skip a good chunk of The Two Towers and you won't miss anything :/ His shorter works, like the Hobbit, are better in my opinion. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy just went on and on and on and at the worst possible moments.

[Cake]

I used to be a huge Tolkein fan, reading and rereading the LotR trilogy and the Hobbit over and over again on top of watching the movie so many times I've memorized a huge part of it by heart. (I also read a bit of Dwarvish!) I've fallen out of touch with his writing in the past few years, where my obsession slowly waned towards the beginning/end of college, but it still doesn't change the fact that I find the whole world of Middle-Earth to be completely captivating and so well developed. I haven't read the Silmarillion yet, but I sadly I don't have a great desire to as of right now. (Especially since I'm busy indulging in the Game of Thrones series.)

[Argeus_the_Paladin]

Right, first discussion question up for speculation:

What probably happened in the Fourth Age?

We know that the elves basically grew weary and left for Valinor one after the other, so that by the beginning of the 4th Age even Rivendell and Lindon were dwindling fast. On the other hand, the dwarves went on overtime and took back pretty much everything worth taking in the North.

We also know that the reign of Aragorn was perfect - almost too perfect in most regards - Arnor and Gondor were reunited, Minas Tirith became even more of a Giant Towering City Of Concentrated Awesome than it used to be in the 3rd, Harad and Rhun basically about-faced and bowed to Gondor...

And we also know that an Age of the Children of Iluvatar kind of has to end with a cataclysmic event. But with everything priming for fluffy lambs, sunshine, rainbow and unicorns, what would have brought an end to the 4th, in your opinion?

[Funnyguts]

Isn't the fourth age still going? It's what we're in now, we just don't know it because we've modernized and the Hobbits have gone to hide from the Big Folk and such.

[Argeus_the_Paladin]

Well, according to some of the Professor's notes, (i) Arda is more like a parallel Earth than our Earth, and that while he had entertained the idea that ME is prehistoric Earth, he kinda sorta dropped it in the end, and (ii) according to some other notes of his, the modern age in that parallel world would have been something like the Sixth or Seventh age.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

I love the lore of his books, but he needed a really good editor... or someone to give him a word restriction or something. You can skip a good chunk of The Two Towers and you won't miss anything :/ His shorter works, like the Hobbit, are better in my opinion. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy just went on and on and on and at the worst possible moments.

I agree with this so much. The Hobbit was the first fantasy book I ever read, and I adore it. It is also the only book Tolkien specifically wrote for children and that had an editor chopping it up - which is a big reason it is the shortest, most entertaining, and enjoyably well-written of his books. I didn't read the LoTR books until after the first movie had come out, but I could never finish them. I mean, Tolkien starts with a chapter on tobacco farming, which has nothing to do with the story or book except hobbits grow tobacco. Later he spends a chapter or two describing the trees in a forest - and it isn't even a magical or unusual forest, just a normal one, and again, it has no purpose in the story. It's basically just nature porn. Not to mention all the times he randomly breaks into epic length poetry in the middle of a section. My enjoyment was also hampered by the fact that I had read dozens of fantasy books before that, all of them aping Tolkien's world building and races and doing it better. That's not Tolkien's fault, but it meant his mythology didn't blow me away or strike me as particularly good after seeing other authors copy them from Tolkien and improve and refine them.

I actually took a college course on the mythology of Tolkien and his writing - we studied and dissected all his works and the Silmarillion. It didn't really improve my view of his writing. The Silmarillion is a confusing mess, even breaking it down into charts and graphs. Every character in it has half a dozen names in different languages he almost randomly switches between, so that you can read an entire passage about a seeming large group of people and discover later that in reality it was only a couple of people being called every name under the sun. To be fair to Tolkien, I don't think he ever intended for the Silmarillion to be published, and it mainly served as his encyclopedia of knowledge for his world.

I can respect Tolkien for originating so much of the fantasy genre, but I'm extremely disappointed in his writing itself. I believe if he had written every book with an attempt to make it accessible to children and had a good editor willing to chop up passages and reign Tolkien's excesses in, all of his books could have been as amazing as the Hobbit.

I think the LoTR books became so very popular because of the IDEAS contained within them, and not because of Tolkien's writing ability, but in spite of it.