New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published

The article doesn’t actually make that claim. “Conveniently timed” means it’s the author’s own opinion. Which is almost certainly just as good as yours or mine is.

It would be very different if the article claimed the book was developed alongside the series or anything like that.

I'm not sure about the Elves and Dwarves, but sure, if humans from the south are of colour, why not Elves and Dwarves from down south too? It all depends how it's handled. Game of Thrones did a fairly good job on this, with characters from different parts of the world often looking like it, aside from some issues with casting extras (pasty looking Irish Dothraki for example).

As for warrior Galadriel, well, she was in a war. She personally walked all the way from the Undying Lands through the icy wastes of the North with her people, who suffered huge losses. That journey was no joke, and I have no problem believing she fought alongside them, and was entirely capable of doing so.

Having said that the fake fan engagement stuff was horrifyingly cringey. We'll just have to see.

That said, there is no shortage of excellent films that were adapted from mediocre source material or diverged significantly from it. [ADDED: And, of course, no shortage of films based on original screenplays.]

Does this new book incorporate 'trendy politics'? If someone knows, please tell.

If it does not, this is one of the most exciting bits of news I have ever heard. If so, then the opposite is the case.

I feel like The Boys Season 3 is a stark counterpoint to this opinion. I didn't mind the left leaning stuff in the first 2 seasons because it wasn't so overtly in your face, but season 3 just had to inject it in literally every aspect of the show. I've never literally had a bad taste in my mouth after watching a show, but I promptly cancelled my prime membership with a bad taste in my mouth after watching the first couple episodes of this season.

That's not "absurd". And, given time, it's not "generally considered impossible" either, once the series is out and people have watched it.

I hope you enjoyed reading my other comments, though I don't see how my expressed view on other topics have any relevance to the comment you are replying to.

> you resort to whataboutism,

Hey, it was not me who brought up author's private view on politics and past. And once it was there, I just pointed out that both authors privately share a kind of longing for the glorious past, which is even more evident in LotR and Hobbit than in The Last Ringbearer.

> even without actually checking your accusations.

I didn't accuse anyone of doing anything. I just expressed the prevalent sentiment of his books, and I think what he wrote there is more relevant than what he said in interview or private letters.

Some of the expanded universe Star Wars is quite good. I personally loved the KOTOR game and the Yuzhaan Vong books while hating all the Disney movies. I suppose the same argument applies to the Silmarillion since it was heavily edited by Tolkien's son.

Can you go into why it was considered a mess? I'm a relatively recent finisher of the series so I can't speak to the contemporary reaction of the fanbase, but my impression has been that the current community is, at a minimum, satisfied with Sanderson's work. There are several things that people complain frequently about (and that I agree with) like Mat's character development and the Androl arc. Not to mention the lost possibility of follow-on series after A Memory of Light! That doesn't mean people think it's a mess, though.

And to quote some sources: according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...):

> Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the European Union was "the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK". ("in the UK." meaning: "by the UK." logically implying: "on behalf of 66 million UK citizens not 508 million EU residents.")

Cryptonomicon

Edit: I was going to say that the name of the book isn't referencing that kind of crypto, but then I remembered that it actually is!

The focus on the Crossing of the Rhein and the Romano-Briton contenders for the throne seemed a little too conveniently dramatic. Having said that, I haven't read any more scholarly books on this period of history that contradict Baxter’s narrative and reading Coalescent book was a great way to learn about the various factors that caused the collapse of the Empire on the western fringes of Europe.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_of_the_Rhine

https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2019/01/21/episode-on...

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (dubious as it may be sometimes), Gildas, and archeological evidence from Essex really don't agree with "fell hard". It very much appears that the empire didn't have enough resources to continue propping up a fringe border province from the death of Julian the Apostate onwards, and that Brittania brought in Anglo-Saxon foederati to help out, who filled a power vacuum after Constantine III left (and possibly invited others to settle).

Particularly under Honorious, fighting between the Vandals and the Franks tied up almost all of the Roman resources in Gaul, which mattered in a way Brittania did not, and the population started to move into fortified settlements, especially after Constantine III took most of the legionary troops off in rebellion. This isn't really that different from what was happening in Gaul.

Fifty years before the "fall" of the West, there was no meaningful military presence in Britain which was not foederati, and before that, the situation was so precarious that troops revolted, leading to its abandonment. As early as the crisis of the third century, Roman Britain's economy shifted to become far more regional, since long supply chains through Gaul were untenable.

The primary exports were extracted minerals. It was, at best, colonial exploitation in antiquity. Raids from the Caledonians had never stopped, ever. Britons convincingly repelled an Anglo-Saxon invasion in 490, and it was primarily peaceful after that (and before that). Balkanized, yes, but hardly subsistence living with roaming bands of invaders.

This isn't any different than northern Gaul, or southern Gaul as the Burgundians, Visigoths, Franks, and Vandals cycled through. Or Illyricum. It happened earlier, but not like you describe.

It's incredibly telling that Gildas had both the time and education to write a somewhat polemical history less than a century after a "complete collapse of the system, (where) people went back to sustenance living", in classical rhetorical style, wherein he mostly seems to regard Britons as still being Roman (despite the "fall" of the West by that time, and the abandonment of the province 100 years earlier), as a Christian, which also tells us that Christianity had not been abandoned yet.

This is utterly at odds with your views. Where and from whom did Gildas receive his education? Why should we disregard his accounts of Mons Badonicus? Why should we disregard the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and archaelogical evidence from Essex, Wessex, and Kent?

This narrative is false.

Elves do not physically die, but they will enter comas and their souls will appear in the house of one of the Valar. The Silmarillion records this happening to one elf whose comatose body is maintained (but unresponsive) while their soul can be visited and conversed with.

[1] This fails to explain how the Mirkwood elves can live there. But the answer appears to be that they can't, since they leave along with the other elves.

Roman/Greek mythology:

> Both Hesiod and Ovid offered accounts of the successive ages of humanity, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains and evils.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man

Hindu Mythology:

> Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred, or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata

I would have a very hard time reading Genesis and then claiming that.

The "accuser" (Satan) says people only worship God because they get good rewards. If God doesn't reward them, they'd stop worshipping. God disagrees, and allows Satan to test his theory by inflicting great suffering on a righteous, blameless person (Job). Job's friends say "obviously you've sinned, and this is punishment from God", which Job denies. Job eventually demands God justify his suffering, and God takes him on a walk through all creation, effectively saying "you'll never understand divine justice, because it's way too complicated".

So this is not just a recent Christian question, but one that dates back to early Judaism.

You know. No pressure.

There is a lot of regional variation, but the difference is quite a lot smaller than in other places in the world.

It is indeed harder to imagine a different world because we are culturally isolated, but our isolated world is quite a bit larger than I would bet would be easily imagined coming from somewhere else.

The most stark contrast I’ve seen is in the indie film Lady Bird where (SPOILERS) there is a setting change from a very small rural American town for most of the plot to New York City at the end of the film, with it’s subways, density, and architecture that felt familiar to any watcher from an urban area.

Similarly, the suburban Texas setting of the King of the Hill deliberately contrasts itself with New York-based shows (referring to Seinfeld as, “I'll tell you what, man, them dang ol' New York boys. Just a show about nothin,’” with other joked about the disdain of many Texans of New Yorkers).

America as shown by Hollywood is a different world.

Still, my bigger point, is that I suppose I thought I was past the point where a movie could really wow me. Top Gun: Maverick completely disabused me of that (although I suppose it mostly means the bar is that much higher).

To return to Mad Max: Fury Road - it was fantastic but didn't leave me feeling blown away by the sheer spectacle of the thing like Top Gun: Maverick did, even though it was a spectacular movie, or like The Matrix had done 16 years before. Those flying and cockpit scenes in TG: Maverick, you really felt like you were there. I saw it on IMAX (which I'd highly recommend) and was on the edge of motion sickness it was that good.

I hope that makes more sense of what I'm trying to say: I wouldn't describe myself as a film buff, by any means, but I am someone who pretty regularly sees films at the cinema because, despite developments in home theatre, it's still tough to beat a screen that's 72 feet wide.

He could do well in a little indie movie that pushes his range but his life and personality prevents that way more than his range as an actor.

"LotR and The Hobbit brought us billions, and fantasy genre is doing quite well, so why not strike iron while it's lukewarm"

But more importantly, JRR Tolkien intended to publish the Silmarillion as an actual book with a canon narrative, just like Lord of the Rings, but he died before doing so. The Silmarillion, as published, was the product of an earlier thinking of Christopher Tolkien that tried to reconcile different versions of unfinished materials, written in a large timespan (a lot of it even before Lord of the Rings), into a single coherent piece. That is, to do the job of his father. At some places, Christopher had to write stuff almost from scratch, to fill gaps that his father intended to write but never managed to. And he did all this in just 4 years, with the help of just one other dude. So Christopher wasn't just the editor of the Silmarillion, he was also its uncredited co-author.

Christopher later thought that presenting The Silmarillion as the authoritative work containing a single narrative, instead of showcasing the multiple, contradictory narratives that Tolkien wrote over the years, was too reducing and misleading. If Tolkien had managed to publish the book, he would have blessed a single coherent narrative as canon, but he didn't.

As such, Christopher decided that his next work, The History of Middle Earth series (HoME for short), would actually showcase all draft versions and not just the one that Christopher decided to be canon. In this sense, HoME works better as the worldbuilding notes than the Silmarillion (and also other books like Beren and Lúthien, that describe many drafts of the story rather than just the one in Silmarillion)

Here's what Christopher has to say about this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion#Posthumous_pu...

> Because J. R. R. Tolkien died leaving his legendarium unedited, Christopher Tolkien selected and edited materials to tell the story from start to end. In a few cases, this meant that he had to devise completely new material, within the tenor of his father's thought, to resolve gaps and inconsistencies in the narrative,[3] particularly Chapter 22, "Of the Ruin of Doriath".[4]

> (...)

> As explained in The History of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien drew upon numerous sources, relying on post-Lord of the Rings works where possible, ultimately reaching as far back as the 1917 Book of Lost Tales to fill in portions of the narrative that his father had planned to write but never addressed. In one later chapter of Quenta Silmarillion, "Of the Ruin of Doriath", untouched since the early 1930s, he had to construct a narrative practically from scratch.[T 21] Christopher Tolkien commented that, had he taken more time and had access to all the texts, he might have produced a substantially different work. In his foreword to The Book of Lost Tales 1 in 1983, he wrote that[T 22]

> > by its posthumous publication nearly a quarter of a century later the natural order of presentation of the whole 'Matter of Middle-earth' was inverted; and it is certainly debatable whether it was wise to publish in 1977 a version of the primary 'legendarium' standing on its own and claiming, as it were, to be self-explanatory. The published work has no 'framework', no suggestion of what it is and how (within the imagined world) it came to be. This I now think to have been an error.[T 22]

> If there was any other unpublished material worth publishing, his son would have already done it.

I think this underestimates the huge job of publishing Tolkien's manuscripts. HoME was published from 1983 to 1996 and spans 12 volumes and some 5400 pages, and still doesn't contain everything!