Tolkien, 50 Years On
thecritic.co.uk
thecritic.co.uk
The correct phrase is "cannot be overstated." I cannot overstate how common the erroneous "understated" variant has become, to the point it now seems likely to replace the original. The problem seems to arise from the trifecta of overstated being less familiar than understated, the difficulty of parsing the meaning of the phrase (which is basically "impossible to exaggerate") and—with apologies to Doug Piranha—litotes.
<End rant>
I think rants such as yours are good and important. Despite not being a native English speaker, I think English speakers should strive to hold to their language rules and not let globalism and less informed people like me take their rich vocabulary and correct grammar away from them.
I reside in Northern Europe where almost everyone speaks truly excellent English with a kind of formidable grammatical correctness. However, it is definitely spoken as a business/technical/lingua franca and not as a beautiful, poetic language in its own right.
I would love the people who speak it non-natively to truly own it by learning and caring about the nuances, idioms and poetry of English. Know and care for instance what it means when you have me in stitches, or he's a square peg in a round hole, or they got her goat or when someone sighs about a path not taken or says Ay, there's the rub.
English is as much about these idioms and aphorisms as it is about making grammatically correct declarative statements like "They write an email. I train an employee. It costs 17 euros. They respect the treaty. She prepares a speech."
Yes! Absolutely! I agree 100%. English contains multitudes!
What does it mean? I think I have even heard it. Where did it come from? Like, a poem or ...?
When my U.S. employer opened a technology center in Chennai, with the full intent of making two co-equal teams 12 hours apart, one of the first idioms our American staff learned from India was "do the needful." This is just to let you know that a whole bunch of very American tech people use this delightful and handy phrase all the time.
But 'international English' is not all how I talk to native speakers, or think to myself, or dream in. I'm quite comfortable with this split.
“Are not great”
Sorry, I had to correct somebody for something in this critique festival. You happen to be the unlucky winner :)
Most old books, movies... were subverted and reinterpreted today, just look at starwars or Witcher. Huge corporation spend billions just for an opportunity to defecate on Tolkien's grave. But his legacy seems to be resistant to this sort of damage!
Also “nonplussed”, which is its own antonym at this point, and needs to be sanctioned.
Wait a minute…
I don't know why decimate gets this pedantry. Maybe because it has interesting source but why not talk about the source. It is especially weird coming from online people who use new definitions all the time. Nobody is like the real definition of computer is person who computes. Or hacker is somebody who chops.
Another think, not another thing!
And it's harebrained, not hairbrained.
This is an overly simplistic statement about a great achievement, which has had a long-lasting cultural effect.
I'm a little confused about why "cannot be overstated" fits better when the preceding phrase is an understatement. Can you explain?
"Cannot be understated" is a phrase used to emphasize the importance or significance of something. I think that applies. (Google - ludwig.guru summarizer)
If you cannot understate something, then any statement no matter how bad (for example "it is mediocre") is likely to be an overstatement. That's now how you would think of something important.
Double negations are always tricky. "Can not be understated" can more clearly be written as "easy to overstate".
English slang is full of double negations. A sentence such as "I didn't do no harm", which would absolutely mean harm was inflicted, can mean the opposite. So it may be good to avoid them as to not confuse non native speakers.
personal pet peeve of which i’ve written about before:
loose vs lose
two completely different meanings and pronunciations.
which is interesting for sure since “loser” still has the Z sound (mostly), and to make something less tight you make it “looser” with an S sound.
eg There were some loose wires hanging out of the wall.
lose /luːz/
eg At least 600 staff will lose their jobs if the factory closes.
> Tolkien's whole output has been less important than a single episode of Rick & Morty.
There, I understated his influence. See how easy that was?
Can we please fucking stop pretending that every work of fiction must be about several factions in shades of grey fighting one another in a universe where Objective Good and Evil aren't a thing?
Yes, but not due to their own inherrent greyness, but because of the corruptive influence of evil they fought against. That's a huge difference to my eyes.
Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common.
That presumes that Objective Good and Evil are somehow just as unrealistic. That's very much debatable, though I'd not be surprised if right here on HN people can't see that.
> Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common.
Yeah, so is grey and grey morality. Hacks like GRRM make bank with objectively bad people on all sides, and it's tauted as 'realism'.
There isn't much of an economy or progress in general, with magic being a thing. The only sin the good guys are allowed is Pride.
Morality in Middle Earth is clearly not derived from divine mandates. Magic is relatively rare and not used to support economic activities all that much. It is in fact on its way out by the end of LoTR.
who is the most moral character? Gandalf. And he is a mouthpiece from the Valar to men.
Who are the most moral people? The elves. They're closest to the Valar and are always good, to the point you can debate whether they have free will or not.
What's the job of a moral ruler? To fight the beasts of Morgoth and men not from the north west, all the people that never got told morality from the Elves in ancient times.
what's the ultimate sin? to challenge God and the Valar, of course. God will sink your continent to the sea and reshape the planet if you dare.
The morally challenged characters in my opinion are Boromir, Sam, and Pippen.
Almost every main character is clear that they desire to do good. Their struggle is not navigating grey space, but trying to figure out how to overcome barriers to do so (personal, hierarchical, self sacrificial, etc.).
Brilliantly done show, blah blah. But no one in it was sympathetic anymore after a certain point. Everyone was a horrible human being - I find it hard to watch that.
... ok shoplifting is not one of the worse things to go on in this show, but I ended up disliking them both.
Yeah, I love The Lord of the Rings: read and re-read it as a teen (read it to my daughters when they were young — twice because the younger one was too young the first go-through). But I don't disagree with a lot of the criticism of the book.
I don't know the term that the critics would use, but I tend to say that I like "small" stories in general. A small story is more like the film "The Last Picture Show". A story where the entire world is saved from the embodiment of evil by a handful of determined but powerless good guys is the opposite of what I would call a "small" story.
But I forgive Lord of the Rings because I put it on a different shelf and in another corner. Tolkien wrote perhaps the second best "fable" of all time. It seems strange to me to hold it up to 20th Century literary trends.
The trick is that he rarely uses words of Latin origin.
Patrick Rothfuss does this too, which is why his works also sound so pleasant and poetic.
"The air was growing very warm again. The hobbits ran about for a while on the grass, as he told them. Then they lay basking in the sun with the delight of those that have been wafted suddenly from bitter winter to a friendly clime, or of people that, after being long ill and bedridden, wake one day to find that they are unexpectedly well and the day is again full of promise."
Here my observations:
- It is not that Tolkien avoids words of Italic (Romance) origin altogether. In this passage there are several: "delight" (< lat.: delectare), "clime" (< lat.: clima), "unexpectedly" (< lat.: expectare/exspectare) and "promise" (< lat.: promissum). But he uses such words sparingly. In this way, he still sounds modern and not comically mannered.
- At the same time, is prose has a lyric undertone. He uses discreet metaphors ("The air was growing ver warm agin" [not "getting"], "basking in the sun", "bitter winter", "friendly clime", "full of promise") and unusual, poetic words ("wafted", "clime" [instead of "climate"], "bedridden"). The changed feelings of the hobbits is not simply state (as if to say: "The sun came out and the hobbits' mood improved."), but demonstrated by their behaviour and then explained not with a single, but with a double elaborate comparison that emphasises the contrast between the hobbits previous and their current state.
- His style is plain but not simplistic. The whole passage has a nice rhythm, starting with a short simple sentence, a slightly less simple second and a long third, which is nevertheless not overly complex. He uses simple words to make his point ("very warm", not "boiling hot").
I would suggest you try it out yourself. Just open the Lord of the Rings somewhere, take a short passage or a few lines and write down your observations for at least half an hour. If you feel that you have finished earlier resist that urge and carry on for half an hour. The interesting observations typically happen a while after you have written down the obvious.
Another very instructive experiment is a backwards translation. If you know a language other than English, get a translation of the Lord of the Rings and translate a random page (without looking at the original first, of course) back into English. Then compare it with the original.
The Direct Object he would write first, and it was followed with a different word order, and still further, ere his sentence was complete.
As a dumb kid, unlike many RTS games where I would likely get trounced, I found myself entering random battles where we would get stale mated and bored because both sides felt unending.
United States 46.4%
United Kingdom 8.1%
Canada 5.2%
Australia 4.3%
Russia 3.9%
Germany 2.9%
Italy 1.9%
France 1.9%
India 1.8%
New Zealand 1.3%It would be cool to see popular authors by region.
I bet there is also a lot of variance between the States.
Yes, there are a lot of directions the project could evolve into. I have many ideas in a list. Finding a better business model than ads would be a good first step I think.
OTOH, your users probably aren't a statistically random sample of old S.F. fans...
Most users probably come over from https://www.gnod.com after discovering one of the other recommendation projects. The music one is pretty popular. Or they come via googling for "author recommendation engine" or something like that.
Clarke is at position 293:
...
#292 John Flanagan
#293 Arthur Charles Clarke
#294 Augusten Burroughs
...(I'm a fan of his work but haven't read him in years)
By then, AI can probably generate Jackson-quality movies with these recognizable characters in near real-time. It should be a fertile era for Tolkien fans who will finally get to tell their own visual stories within this universe.
But there are some interesting works diegetically aligned with the Tolkien universe that currently can’t be published or developed in the West for copyright reasons.
I’m thinking of the Russian pro-Mordor “The Last Ringbearer,” for example:
Consider "The Wind Done Gone", a parody of "Gone with the Wind". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Miff....
> The Court of Appeals recognized copyright in several characters from Gone with the Wind and found that The Wind Done Gone had "appropriate[d] numerous characters, settings, and plot twists". However, the court decided that this appropriation was protected under the doctrine of fair use.
> ... Mitchell's estate chose to drop the suit after publisher Houghton agreed to make a donation to Morehouse College.
My wife just read a thousand page fan fiction set in the Harry Potter world where the Death Eaters won, Harry Potter is dead, and Draco Malfoy has been assigned to Hermione for “breeding purposes”. The premise sounds like trash, but she was describing the intricacies of how wars are fought and political intrigues and a very personal and relatable story of standing up to power. She literally could not put it down, and said it was one of the most interesting and engaging pieces of literature she’s ever read.
Copyright just lets large corporations keep our shared cultural heritage under lock and key. These worlds are living rent free in our heads. We should be allowed to play around with them at our leisure and tell the stories we want to tell without the threat of financial ruin being brought down upon us.
Is that what Martin has been doing instead of finishing ASOFAI? Because that sounds exactly like him.
“Okay, so it was explained that Lord V didn’t actually care about pure blood, he was a mud blood himself. That was just to get the pure blood families on board with his revolution.
And he didn’t actually care about the babies, it was just that Malfoy was a really good mind reader (I forget the technical term) and he wanted Hermione’s hidden memories to root out all the secret members of the order.
But the wizard pop culture was really into the babies so it was more of a PR thing.“
She said she highly appreciated the realistic political stuff in the book. Anyway this is as much thought as I’m willing to put into this topic, you’re welcome to search “Manacled Harry Potter” if you really want to learn more.
Can't be worse than The Hobbit and the Rings of Power films.
The anti-war sentiment of Tolkien’s work isn’t even highlighted explicitly enough I find.
Dead Marshes echo WWI trenches and WWII fascism casts shadows over Sauron's dominion.
Frodo's scars mirror war's enduring trauma.
Myth making for himself, his children and general world (re-)building.
To mend, yes.
> "So many strange things have chanced that to learn the praise of a fair lady under the loving strokes of a Dwarf's axe will seem no great wonder."
I don't understand what is being said here. I assume I'm supposed to already be familiar with those literary criticism concepts.
Those few books I read of this ilk tended to be very dull.
Also bear in mind that literary criticism may be prone to being done for show and self-exhibition, much less about the book itself.
This http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html (starts with a quote from Donald Norman "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right") is a painful example of somebody discovering this. It's not funny, it shows somebody's time being wasted as they try to genuinely understand WTF it's all about, and finally 'getting it'. It's well worth a read.
I think 'interiority' here refers to an interest in the interior psychological deliberations of characters (which you won't find much of in Tolkein).
I also suspect that many of the people who accuse Tolkien of having too much of a black and white sort of morality would be offended if they read, for example, a history of World War 2 that humanized the Nazis. I understand the common criticism that he basically depicted entire races/species as being evil but after all, this is fantasy. Having read some of his letters, I doubt that he actually believed that there were any human ethnic groups that were essentially evil.
Eskov bases his novel on the premise that the Tolkien account is a "history written by the victors". Mordor is home to an "amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic", posing a threat to the war-mongering faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude is described by Saruman as "crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem") and the Elves.
Even so, I still recommend that every LotR fan to read it.
Morality is uncomplicated, there is a clear black and white divide and nobody ever wonders if say, Sauron might be coexisted with in some way.
Morality is deontological. Good actions are good, period. Furthermore, they don't backfire. When Gandalf lets Grima go, or when people take pity on Gollum, that's not naive idealism, that's the objectively right thing to do. Such actions just don't backfire on people in this world.
On the other hand, evil is a path to ruin and misery. Grima is miserable with Saruman, Saruman doesn't like him either. Saruman dies by Grima's hand once Grima has had enough, and Grima dies too. Villains don't get happy endings.
Mercy has a magical power of sorts. Frodo only succeeds because of his mercy on Gollum.
There's also an essentialism to things. Tom Bombadil is this weird thing, and that's that. You can't convince him to take care of the Ring, it's just not in his nature to care about that sort of thing, and it's completely non-negotiable.
Evil never creates, it only spends chunks of itself to corrupt perfection.
If you read it from the standpoint of "what if Catholicism was true, and the world functioned in the way the religion says it does", it's quite interesting.
Looks like you never read the scouring of the Shire
In the Shire, the trouble started when Lotho took over, before Saruman showed up. Lotho then got deposed and killed by Saruman.
So without Saruman getting there, the Shire was already in some trouble anyway.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Gollum surviving is the cause of a great number of very bad things, including Sauron discovering the location of the Ring. At the end of course it all comes together: if the location wasn’t discovered, the quest to permanently destroy the ring wouldn’t have started, and it’s by Gollum’s hands that it is destroyed. But the moral there isn’t “good actions don’t backfire”, but more like this: good action can backfire, sometimes in terrible ways, but good people must endure the consequences without doubt and without remorse, keeping faith that things will all be set right at the ultimate end. In the real world, of course, the ultimate end does not arrive before our deaths.
Denethor is the only cynic in middle earth.
And the defenders at Minas Tirith, Saruman, even the elves - the whole lot of them in middle earth have given up hope.
Despair is one of the key themes running through all of Tolkiens work. Denethor was far from alone
I’m reminded of the fact some people disliked Battlestar Galactica because it was inspired by Mormonism. That’s another case where I don’t have to share the same beliefs as the authors to appreciate what they created on their own terms.
I think if we only accepted and appreciated work that already aligns with our personal beliefs or ideology, we’d be missing out.
Myths and fairy tales don't necessary have morality like that. Fairly often, they just don't. The reiterations for little children are like that, because we intentionally write them to teach moral values. But the original collected versions fairly often end badly or the right act ends in disaster or million other things happen. Often times they are about smarter one winning foe comedic effect rather then anything else.
The good vs evil simplification is solidly something rooted in Christianity and Catholic tradition I am agree with that. Just not that straigfordly from Bible.
https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-sto...
Though I enjoy Jackson's movies as a whole, I have quibbles with some of his choices. But this one actually makes sense, from a cinematic point of view, and the screenwriting team did a good job of changing the story in such a way that changing one element removed the need for the other.
Well, Gondor tried to coexist with him but their watch grew slack and he took over the city built to watch him. Numenor embraced him and was ruined. Even the elves originally considered him a friend, before he betrayed them with the Ring. Saruman seems to have tried to use him. So if they don't think coexistence is possible, it is from bitter experience.
History that humanizes Nazi still ends up with them as bad guys who knowingly and intentionally committed genocide.
Yes and no. At least in LoTR, Tolkien's various Team Evil groups are pretty authoritarian. Often with the under-baddies ready to disobey or rebel the moment they think that they can get away with it. Under threat of war or violence, the various Team Good groups also tend to military-flavored authoritarianism.
But consider the start-of-story societies of the hobbits and the ents. Both have enjoyed centuries of fairly idyllic peace. The hobbits' authority figures - King, Thain, and Mayor - have faded to mythical and ceremonial offices. And their law enforcement officers seem to have been nothing but the Sherriffs - a dozen hobbits, armed only with walking sticks, with a feather in their caps as their "uniform". When the ent leader (Fangorn) is finally roused to action, he has to think long and hard to recall what other able-bodied ents there even are.
Having two such societies prominent of LoTR suggest to me that Tolkien had some quite un-authoritarian ideals.
(Yes, I'm omitting the Bounders, and Buckland's High Hay hedge, and ...)
It is always framed as a result of their badness. They do not rebel because they would plan to do something good - they rebel because they are selfish.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-t...
> They are shamelessly moralistic, written on the basis of exhaustive literary theory, linguistics, geography and world-building, and quite devoid of social commentary or Empsonian irony
yes, because it was a heavily catholic work.
> This mythology, he felt, must “reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth” but must lack all explicit reference to the Christian religion or the “real” world as we know it
This is especially true though and undersold. Tolkien's catholicism had an immeasurable impact on his writing and LOTR. he wrote: "[LOTR was a] fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."
his works are absolutely beautiful.