A History of the Silmarils in the Fifth Age | Hacker News Reader

A History of the Silmarils in the Fifth Age

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216 pointsmpweiher69 comments

I realize this article is a tongue-in-cheek fan theory. However, it does make me wonder what Tarantino was up to with Pulp Fiction.

The Ezekiel "quote" always bugged me because even without looking it up, anyone who spent any amount of time in the Old Testament, could tell that it was fabricated. "Finder of lost children" is not an OT motif in general, and certainly not in Ezekiel. Obviously, Tarantino knew people would look it up and go "what the heck is this?" Therefore I have to think it was an intentional move on his part, but why?

I think it's a tell that there's a story-under-the-story in Pulp Fiction which lends credence to the other observations. There's obviously something supernatural going on. One of the things I love about the film is that Tarantino doesn't explain anything. He lets mystery stay mystery, as any good story should.

I don't buy the Silmarillion connection. Nor do I think that this movie is a loose retelling of any specific classical tale, ala O Brother Where Art Thou. It's more likely that he doesn't have any specific story in mind, but sprinkled the supernatural element into PF to give it an air of mystery. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

There's nothing supernatural going on, except that the film is a very obvious and self-aware pastiche of, uh, pulp fiction plots. The Ezekiel quote is borrowed from an old martial arts movie, and the characters fully admit they just say it because it sounds cool before killing someone.

Because he took it from a kung-fu movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LYT4JC2dd4

That's awesome. Thanks for that.

I think Tarantino put mysteries into Pulp Fiction for the same reason Scott wrote this post -- the mind likes to make connections where there are none. Scott did this quite deliberately, to entertain us both on the meta-level and on the level. I suspect Tarantino added inexplicable elements so that we as the audience would be entertained by speculation. There's nothing underneath.

If you want to see what happens when the writers lose their nerve and try to explain everything, watch Lost.

> I suspect Tarantino added inexplicable elements so that we as the audience would be entertained by speculation.

Which is exactly what I concluded.

Indeed. I went on a bit too long and buried my point, I'm afraid. What I wanted to draw attention to was the self-awareness of the original post: It's entertaining on both levels because although Scott puts a great deal of sincere effort into drawing out the connections, he's also well aware that there's nothing there.

On the other hand there is X files.

There really needs to be an "engineer plot" genre where plot stays consistent to a small set of made up axioms. "The Strain" made an attempt. It boggles the mind why not in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy? The way most of them work it's like cold fusion landing in one's lap.

Kind of like Mobile Suit Gundam in that sense? Everything matches the rules established and follows logically from it?

>It boggles the mind why not in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy? The way most of them work it's like cold fusion landing in one's lap.

Zombies, like vampires in the pre-industrial age, are meant to represent the horrors that lurk beyond the limits of human understanding and control. Although I'm sure some author has attempted to "harden" zombies like that, to me the more you try to explain them, the less effective they are as monsters. Because they don't work rationally, they're demons of the Id.

Speaking of monsters from the Id, Forbidden Planet was another excellent piece of SciFi with a consistent logical framework.

(Also: Leslie Nielsen's first starring role).

Also, IMHO, one of the best designed robots ever to appear in cinema[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robby_the_Robot

I thought vampires were more about people who feed energetically on other people. Child molesters and the like.

Slow zombies probably don’t pose a huge “where does the energy come from” problem.

in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy

You will enjoy the book "The Girl With All The Gifts"

Spoilers in link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_with_All_the_Gifts

People who love this genre hang out at https://www.reddit.com/r/rational They call it "rational fiction".

There is quite some overlap with fan fiction, because people like to "fix" non-rational fiction. Eliezer Yudkowsky and his take on Harry Potter is the prime example. I can also recommend Alexander Wales who also made original fiction.

Probably the oldest related work is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.

Another name mentioned often in this genre is Brandon Sanderson and especially his Mistborn series, but I have not read it personally.

Alexander Wales' rationalist take on Superman, "The Metropolitan Man", is great.

Text: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10360716/1/The-Metropolitan-Man

Free audiobook: http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=1705

I can't thank you enough for this pointer. Just what I had in mind :-)

A slightly better pointer might be the wiki of the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/wiki/index

Zombies which don’t rapidly decay and fail make no rational sense, but that kind of zombie also makes for a lousy zombie tale. Zombies represent anxieties about life, death, disease, being eaten alive, etc.

> There really needs to be an "engineer plot" genre where plot stays consistent to a small set of made up axioms.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicAIsMagicA

> It boggles the mind why not in a single one of the zombie stories out there nobody bothered to wonder where the zombies get the energy?

From brains. Duh. ;)

I know someone who once trapped a cockroach in a box and sealed it shut. When the box was opened, years later, the roach was still alive. It had eaten some glue on the inside of the box, and then went into a kind of torpor, simply waiting for either death by dehydration or starvation or an opportunity to escape, whichever came first.

Zombies are like that. They gorge on fatty foods, like brains, bone marrow, and body fat, then go into an induced stasis that outwardly resembles death.

The zombinism vector is undoubtedly an endoparasitic fungus related to Cordyceps. Mycelium spreads throughout the host during the infection, preferentially following existing neural pathways, and flooding the body with antibiotics, to kill native gut bacteria and other possible putrefying factors. The normal digestive functions are destroyed. The regular circulatory system is destroyed. The only elements preserved are sensory organs, muscles, skin, and bones. All other functions are replaced by the fungus. The mycelium, as it followed the existing neurons, actually grows into a replacement brain and nervous system as it destroys the host's nervous system.

The copy isn't perfect, though, and genetically hardcoded structures produce an instinctual desire to seek out and eat more fat. Destroying the head does not actually kill the fungus, but it does remove its ability to create a facsimile of a mammalian brain, by scrambling the template. It could still make the muscles twitch, but would have no means of coordinating them into coherent movements.

I would therefore expect a zombie running low on energy to have almost no fat left, and ascocarps growing out of it all over, like cactus spines. It would probably resemble a spiky mummy. Any rotting appearance would be due to colonies of microorganisms that have evolved resistance to the fungal antibiotics.

So it's not just eating brains, but also not spending as much energy as a human normally does while using the organs evolved to keep a human brain alive.

In 28 days later the zombies all starve to death after six months or so. The hard part is just surviving that long without getting infected. Most zombies in fiction are implied to be supernatural though. So a scientific explanation is unnecessary.

> try to explain everything

Midichlorians

It's entirely possible that the Bible in the Tarantinoverse is not the same Bible that we have.

That's an excellent point. In the same way that Tarantinoverse airlines don't bat an eyelid at passengers having a katana as carry-on.

Tarantino knew people would look it up and go "what the heck is this?"

This guy did a movie where a Jew kills Hitler. He has shown he has no interest in the question of "What really happened." Re-writing a small bit of the Bible is trivial compared to re-writing the most important event of the 20th Century. His focus is on being interesting and entertaining and he clearly feels that it is fine to put distance between himself and reality to achieve his goals.

> The Ezekiel "quote" always bugged me because even without looking it up, anyone who spent any amount of time in the Old Testament, could tell that it was fabricated.

The quote comes from a film 20 years earlier, Karate Kiba, not from the OT (despite the attribution in PF).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Kiba#Cultural_reference...

As a note on Santa Claus being something different than we think: "Is Santa Claus a god?" (http://nautil.us/blog/is-santa-claus-a-god).

tl;dr: Omniscience (of child's deeds), rewarding the good (with gifts) and punishing the bad (with coal).

I always wondered how Christians were able to square the existence of Santa with the 2nd commandment. Then again, how they can reconcile Jesus with the 2nd commandment is bit dodgy to me too so what do I know.

I don't think any adult Christian thinks that Santa is actually real, so there's nothing to reconciliate

Sure, but they're teaching sacrilege to their kids.

Of course, but sacrilege is in the eye of the beholder. It used to be sacrilege to own a Bible not written in Latin and for a layperson to read it directly, now many Christians consider any Bible other than the King James version to be sacrilegious. There's no objectivity or rational thought at work, it's essentially cultural norms and politics.

Many Conservative Christians do believe Santa Claus is an attempt by the "atheist establishment" to remove the Christian identity from the holiday, but that's due to a modern interpretation of Santa Claus as a capitalist icon, and the defensive nature of Christian conservatism. No Christian would likely have questioned the "Christianness" of Santa Claus a century ago, when the status of religion in Western society was unquestioned.

Are there any statistics on what portion of parents actually tell their children that Santa is real? I was raised in the Midwest US in the 90s, in a conservative Christian family, and as far as I can remember I never thought Santa was real. My parents confirm that they talked about Santa and wrote “from Santa” on some Christmas gifts, but they never intended us to believe Santa was real.

I also don’t remember belief in Santa to be common among my friends. I remember one friend who expressed belief in Santa as a supernatural being, and everyone poked fun at him for it.

And that's why I will never tell my kids he is real.

Saint Nicholas was very real however, and had a mean right hook for heretics.

Didn't he drop bags of money down the chimneys of poor people? According to Catholic theology, Saint Nicholas as a saint can also bestow gifts via prayer, i.e. "prayers of a righteous man availeth much." So one could argue the essentials of Santa Claus are true in Saint Nicholas, and parents are not lying when they tell their kid that Santa Claus exists.

Of course, that's disputed. I tend to believe it, however, because the sources which relate the story also add the Nicolas was put in jail for it until he apologized for letting his zeal overcome him. It's not the sort of detail that fabricated accounts would be likely to include, but it's certainly what would have happened had Nicolas gotten a little slappy with Arius.

First, by making the guy a saint.

Second, by making him an aspect of god...

Trinity is how they reconcile Jesus with the 2nd commandment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity

Basically put God == Jesus

But not God === Jesus. :-)

So then there's a concept of "godiness" to match "truthiness."

Is there a man page for this stuff?

No. But there are multiple competing, contradictory and vague interpretations of multiple translations and iterations of a "manpage", with centuries of cruft attached.

The Trinity as a concept is basically just annotated with "you are not expected to understand this," possibly because it attempts to describe a state of divine being which is beyond human comprehension, but more likely because it's actually nonsense.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/ and http://www.newadvent.org/summa/index.html

but the former is more like INFO while the latter is more like `man builtins` (that is, it assumes you already know a lot about the system)

You're looking for the ecumenical creeds, the first list on this page: http://www.reformed.org/documents/index.html

The Athanasian Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon are probably the most relevant, as they deal specifically with Christological questions. The Apostles' and Nicene are valuable, but are too early to have the specifics nailed down just yet. (In historical terms, an Arian or Sabellian would be able to agree with their content without too much equivocation or mental reservation.)

In Ruby, God === Jesus.

In Christianity, Jesus is God. There is a concept called Trinity which you can read about. Some Christians won’t make images of Jesus and some will.

Santa Claus is a folk tale version of a Christian who lived about 1500 years ago. I suppose you could argue that letting children “believe in Santa Claus” violates the first commandment. Not sure about the second.

While this is true, it's a point of view taken up well after Christianity was established as a way to get around the various conflicts on who Jesus was and how the three different "beings" in the Bible interrelate. Even one of the first teachers of the "They are just all the same thing." was excommunicated by the Church. It took a few hundred years for things to settle into what we have today - which I feel like should cast some doubt for believers on what was actually being taught in the Bible.

Yes, it’s interesting reading, but it is unlikely that the GP is a devoted Arian.

To the contrary, this view was held by the first apostles, who condemned this heresy as soon as in the first century.

> I always wondered how Christians were able to square the existence of Santa with the 2nd commandment.

More concerning is their failure to square the existence of Santa with the 2nd amendment.

Santa has damage reduction 25/+5 chaotic. He's been shot plenty of times by startled homeowners, but none of them have ever previously taken the steps of coalescing solid bullets from Limbo protoplasm and enchanting them to +5.

I never wondered this, because religions accumulate all kinds of internal inconsistencies as they age, and many of them weren't even all that consistent to begin with.

Humans are perfectly capable of holding two mutually incompatible ideas in our heads at the same time. That's how we would determine the winner of a contest between Batman and Ozymandias, or between Godzilla and Voltron, or between James Bond and Jack Ryan, or between Hit Girl and Nikita.

The most psychically significant incarnation of Santa is from the Childlike Wonder Mythosphere, and Jesus is from the Abrahamic Monotheist's Age of Legends. In order for them to even meet, they would have to pierce the boundary between worlds, and perhaps exist together in some mutually neutral dimension. But when they cross over, they have to adopt forms and behaviors compatible with that dimension, which is why they look like paper cutouts in South Park and have no bendable knees in LEGO Universe.

If you enjoyed this, you'll probably enjoy the Unsong book, by the same author. It's basically the same idea, only bigger and better.

http://unsongbook.com/

It reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's writing in which he threads together various bits of historical information to explain current events in a new light, 'The Crying of Lot 49' is a good start for anyone interested but unfamiliar with Pynchon.

I feel like Unsong is much more attractive to a community of programmers if you describe it as King James Programming in story form :)

>I would guess that Maglor survived, found his Silmaril, lost his Silmaril again, and that Pulp Fiction is an account of him getting it back.

And now I want to rewatch and reread everything again!

Quite possibly the best thing that I have read in 2017.

You might want to give Unsong a try then, it's the same author: http://unsongbook.com/

Thanks, great read. It really reaffirms the brilliance of Tolkien's work. Lord of the Rings isn't just a nice story, it's a world with its own mythos and history.

Extremely relevant, there's a rational fic that's about exactly this topic: http://archiveofourown.org/works/3451040/chapters/7569143

> The movie Pulp Fiction centers around a mysterious briefcase. We’re never told exactly what’s inside

"Tarantino has admitted that there is no official explanation behind the briefcase’s contents, and that it was simply written into the screen play as an intriguing McGuffin."

I liked the soul theory better i.e. Marcelus's soul was in the briefcase and he sold it to the devil.

The briefcase held a new drug that had been in development for 10 years, ever since Huey Lewis requested it in 1984.

The request that it not spill or come in a pill required a novel delivery system, producing the high via modulated stimulation of the optic nerve, but subtracting the shorter blue wavelengths that might disrupt the circadian regulatory system and therefore keep the user up all night or make them sleep all day. Hence, the golden glow.

Every time someone opens up the case, they are taking an e-drug.

"If you all are anything like me then you had no idea what was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. So, through a friend of a friend of a friend who had a two hour conversation with Quentin Tarantino himself, I now know, and I thought I would pass along the information because it makes the movie even 100 times better than it already is.

Remember the first time you were introduced to Marsellus Wallace. The first shot of him was of the back of his head, complete with band-aid. Then, remember the combination of the lock on the briefcase was 666. Then, remember that whenever anyone opened the briefcase, it glowed, and they were in amazement at how beautiful it was; they were speechless. Now, bring in some Bible knowledge, and remember that when the devil takes your soul, he takes it from the back of your head.

Yep, you guessed it. What is the most beautiful thing about a person: his soul. Marsellus Wallace had sold his soul to the devil, and was trying to buy it back. The three kids in the beginning of the movie were the devil’s helpers. And remember that when the kid at the end came out of the bathroom with a 'hand cannon,' Jules and Vincent were not harmed by the bullets. 'God came down and stopped the bullets' because they were saving a soul. It was divine intervention."

https://www.snopes.com/movies/films/pulpfiction.asp

The briefcase held the actual, original MacGuffin and the actual, original Chekhov's gun--which was never fired in the movie. The former was the treasure that had been used as a nonspecific plot device by Sophocles, Menander, and an unbroken line of storytellers, through Shakespeare, and ending with Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, and Quentin Tarantino. The latter had a more recent origin, but somehow ended up in Tarantino's possession without him knowing of its significance.

It is somewhat obvious that Tarantino lost the plot devices some time after production, as they reappeared in fused form 6 years later in "Dude, Where's My Car?"

"Spoiler warning for The Silmarillion" (but no corresponding spoiler warning for "Pulp Fiction").

I've read The Silmarillion, but not seen Pulp Fiction, so thbbbbbt.

Absolutely wonderful, now I want to hunt down all the alternative theories so we can test them!

This is great! A very amusing What If?

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