JRR Tolkien reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)
openculture.com
openculture.com
Zip file with mp3 in it:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b2aPKgVVguOKMOOqWskaliOviYr...
Best enjoyed on a rainy afternoon in an armchair with a cup of tea.
Impressive, very nice. Let's see Paul Allen's recording.
My Tolkien audio of choice will always be the BBC production of LOTR:
https://archive.org/details/lord-of-the-rings-10_202401
Fantastic cast, including Ian Holm—Bilbo in the Jackson films—as Frodo.
Reserve audio versions for when you genuinely can’t look at the book because you’re doing something else.
Especially with a work like LotR it can be very tempting to skim parts; the audiobook will just continue on, which can help you encounter passages you’d normally have skipped over.
It wasn't until I had an audiobook version that I "sat through" all the poetry and tree-descriptions, and it was worth it.
For me, that's exactly the sort of "something else" I interpreted the previous comment to refer to.
My memory works much better when I hear something than if I read it, when it comes to non technical stuff.
The times I have just sat and listened to a well-told, well-paced story have been magical.
But the dopamine hit of reading -too quickly- competes; the pressure to "be busy" wins and makes me impatient for the spoken word by default.
The defaults are too high. I'd be better off reading less but reading more slowly, and listening sometimes.
But this is not the highest priority problem to fix, either, and I can't fix everything.
Would you also suggest to the families in the 30s & 40s that listening to the popular radio shows while sitting in the living room could have been a better experience if they had just read the transcript, instead? Or that they should have been multitasking during the shows, else it was a waste of their time?
(see what I did there?)
There is a Lord of the Rings MMO (like World of Warcraft) and a guy made a video recording a walk from the Shire to Mordor. Like you can just walk from the Shire to Mordor in the game. And it's almost 10 hours long in real world time to do that! But on top of that the whole journey is narrated by the Lord of the Rings audio book, with the relevant parts of the journey.
Incredibly relaxing
I don't have experience with the LotR Online outside of small clips here and there, but for the past 5 years or so I have been enjoying a bit more retro LotR "mmorpg", a free-to-play MUD that has been in development since 1991 or something: https://mume.org/
In MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth) getting from Bree to Mordor by walking won't take you 10 hours, but maybe 10 minutes at most. However, the trip and the destination will be full of dangers, whether it's from pve or pvp side of things.
As a side note, MUME is being developed by volunteers, and I believe the game itself is still ran on some Swiss University servers, where it all began, heh.
It was simply magical and I have many good memories venturing through middle-earth and meeting fellow chars.
Do you happen to know where does the narration by Andy Serkis come from? Is it a game? An audiobook?
I literally guffawed and thought, "Well, that's one good way of avoiding the dark riders." Makes that dramatic jump to the barge a little less intense. ;-)
Some are definitive, however. If you haven't heard Douglas Adams read all his books [1], you're definitely missing out. They're harder to track down, and not the best quality as most are copied from old tape cassettes, but I love listening to the genius at work.
Yahtzee Croshaw reading his books is fantastic [2]. As is Patrick Rothfuss reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things [3].
A more recent author I listened to was Adrian Tchaikovsky reading Service Model [4]. He was so good, I checked to see if he had theater training! Really great.
1. https://youtu.be/F_tcznHREXE
2. https://www.youtube.com/live/NNpQROC7dWA
On the other hand, I remember fondly the movie nights a local sci-fi club used to run until the mid-2000s. There were so many terrible Conan clones that were enormously entertaining. And there were some brilliant moments in the early LOTR movies. Such as "Where There's a Whip".
FTETTM has artistic license. There's no record of Collins (Apollo 11) saying "If you had any balls, you'd say 'oh my god! what is that thing?', scream and cut your mic" but it's very in line with his general character, you can imagine it happening
Apollo 13 put in a bogus argument with Swigert after the oxygen tank exploded
I will never not despise "artistic license" which is just simply wrong
The Hobbit movies, on the other hand, are both bad adaptations and bad movies. Truly awful stuff.
I think he’d have serious issues with things but not necessarily what everyone picks up on.
Christopher Lee reading the Children of Hurin is also fantastic.
Orcs aren't human, though. If anything, they were deelfized
If anything, it's their portrayal in the Rings of Power that is idiotic(trying to humanize them) - they aren't human, they don't have families or friends or internal lives and psychological doubts going through their heads - they are meant to be a force("force" like in "force of nature") of evil, not a misunderstood and exploited race of intelligent beings.
For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
I will however agree with you that it's truly insane how we have a global survailence company that is used to spy on citizens and destroy democracies worldwide that is literally called Palantir. Like, no one working there is seeing it?
Back in my day, LotR names were used for cool metal bands like Gorgoroth, Amon Amarth, Cirith Ungol, Carach Angren, Burzum, etc.
The Palantir are not evil creations in the book iirc. They were used by the great kings to see whatever they wished.
Heck, even in the book Aragorn uses the Palantir to make a critical decision turning the tide of battle.
A better metaphor (accidental or not) for surveillance technology I've never seen.
"We are easily corrupted"
[1] https://www.westword.com/opinion/opinion-palantir-technologi...
[2] https://www.pogo.org/investigates/stephen-miller-conflicts-o...
Denethor (?) tried to use a Palantir for good, but went mad after viewing its selections for years.
(you might argue it reflects certain social media outcomes ofc)
That’s not true. They were only dangerous to use as long as an insanely powerful immortal demon god had one. If you used a Palantir he would notice and draw your eye toward him. He could then make you see what he wanted you to see, unless you were strong enough to resist. He corrupted Saruman and Denethor merely by talking to them, showing them misleading things, and convincing them that he could not be defeated by any means. Kill Sauron and the Palantiri are safe to use again.
The tools are neutral. It is the users who are good or evil.
It’s the same with the Throne of Amon Hen, fwiw. It’s only dangerous to use because Sauron will notice that you’re using it.
Alt: Be Aragorn and wrest control of the Orthanc stone from Sauron.
"... all those of the Quendi [elves] who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes."
He had a problem: as a Catholic [1], he thought every creature deserved pity and second chances (you can see this when Gandalf rebukes Frodo when he says "it's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum"). If the Orcs are really "fallen Elves", they deserve pity and maybe mercy; they are worthy of redemption. Yet Orcs in LotR are to be killed on sight; there's only one passage in all of LotR where the Hobbits reflect on the corpse of an Orc with any kind of attempt at insight.
For Orcs to be a thing to be destroyed without mercy, unworthy of redemption, they must have not be corrupted souls. Yet here Tolkien found another stumbling block: according to his Catholic-influenced vision, Evil cannot create, only corrupt and destroy. So Morgoth couldn't have created Orcs, he must have used existing souls as raw material.
Tolkien never resolved this conundrum.
----
[1] someone in another comment argued quite convincingly that Catholics at times had no trouble murdering other Christians over doctrinal affairs, so let's add a qualification here: "Tolkien's Catholic-influenced morality, which was his own nonetheless".
i say this as a die hard Tolkien fan, having read (most of) HOME: i enjoyed Rings of Power quite a lot and i'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys the extended world of middle earth. the casting is great, i actually did enjoy the picking at the question of orcish morality, and because amazon was willing to throw millions at it, it looks fantastic for a tv show.
it doesn't follow canon (some weird squashing of timelines re: ringmaking, the akallabeth etc) which seems to upset a lot of geeks. however, one thing to keep in mind when interacting with extended works based on Middle Earth is that Tolkien didn't necessarily set out to codify everything perfectly (and what was there was definitely the result of his obsession and great care for the world he built). one of his stated desires in writing LOTR was to establish a modern mythology that other people could write/create within, so the fiction could take a life of its own. maybe he wouldn't always like the ways people built on his work, but that's the risk he took when he explicitly set out to invent a mythology for others to interact with.
we're still going to ignore the hobbit movie trilogy, though.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair (1878 - 1968)
"Because Pharaoh is paying daddy, and we need the money." - Unknown laborer at the Pyramid of Djoser, c. 2660 BC, explaining to his son why he's making a giant pile of rocks in the desert.
But it's also hard for me to imagine someone that today, chooses to interview and take a job at Palantir, and not know what they're up to, who Thiel is and what he stands for.
I found The Last Ringbearer a book good! Of course it's not in the same league as LotR, it's not engaging in vast myth- and world-building, but it's a well-written, fun book that manages to be engaging. Even knowing it was an alternative take to LotR, I wanted to know what happened!
For everyone who has not read it, it's not simply a "let's retell LotR, only from the perspective of the Orcs". It's a brand new "adventure" so to speak, which shifts the point of view but also describes new events. It starts at the end of the War of the Ring, with Mordor defeated.
Admitting that there's a very wide diversity of beliefs under the "Roman Catholic" banner - historic Roman Catholic armies have been eager participants in well-documented battles for the past 1,500 or so years. I'd assume that Tolkien would have had a wide variety of perfectly historic Roman Catholic arguments to chose from, to justify his fictional slaughter.
(If I recall, the orcs slaughtered in LoTR are pretty much all soldier or near-soldiers. Do orc women, children, or other non-combatants ever appear in the story?)
In many ways, that Wikipedia article feels like a Hays Code-era whitewashing of Roman Catholicism.
He really did struggle with this, re: the origin of the Orcs, whether they had souls, whether it was ok to default to massacring them without second thought, etc. He never really resolved it.
Most Tolkien fan communities are aware of this dilemma, it's one of those well-known things, along with "did Balrogs have wings?", "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" and "why did Sauron need to put his power within a ring, anyway?".
My issue is with the Wikipedia article's heavy identification of JRRT's personal dilemma with the Roman Church and its doctrines. Historically, for that Church - one could just assume that the orcs were Protestants, so slaughtering them was perfectly okay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion
If the allies were counterfactually sensible enough to fly the ring to Mordor, Sauron could have been counterfactually sensible enough to station an Orc/Troll Battlegroup at the Sammath Naur, with a Nazgul combat air patrol.
(Vs. voice-of-canon Gandalf makes it clear that anyone seeking to destroy his Preciousss is simply beyond Sauron's Vile McEvil worldview.)
In fact, when Gandalf catches up with Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli in 'The White Rider' chapter, he explicitly tells them that Sauron has committed a major strategic blunder: attacking too early, as soon as he thought the Ring was in play. If he'd kept some forces back to guard Mt Doom, he'd have been alright. Especially because, as later becomes clear, Mt Doom isn't a normal volcano where you could just lob the Ring in from your low-flying eagle. The Cracks of Doom are in a chamber deep inside the mountain.
Quoting Elrond during the Council at Rivendell:
> “It has been said that Dragon-fire might melt and consume the Rings of Power, but there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough; nor was there ever any fire, save the fire of Orodruin, that could melt the One Ring.”
Also, the Dwarves that took the One Ring for melting would have likely fallen under its influence, postponing the destruction and ultimately keeping the ring as a keepsake, tool or weapon, like most living creatures would... except for some brave Hobbits, which took a longer time to be corrupted.
More fundamentally, this is not the kind of mindset with which Tolkien wanted us to read LotR. It can be done for fun, but if done seriously, it'd be missing the point.
My own opinion is that debating this is missing the point. Tolkien was about the hero's journey, which necessitates the hard path to victory. It's not at all about flying a modern superweapon into Mount Doom; that's too literal a reading.
On one hand, you're right.
On the other, it's unfair to Tolkien and to the scholars who study his work. He spent a lot of his life and effort towards developing this world, he deeply pondered the moral implications and theology of his world, and for all his denial of there being any analogies to the real world, you can see he considered them (he did describe modern men in the modern world as "Orc-ish", etc).
All of this to say we cannot just dismiss it as "it's a fantasy novel".
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/The_Fellowshi...
Tolkein of course denied this[2] .... and the timing wasn't right[3] and ... he wasn't a big fan of allegory[4], right?
However, perhaps he foresaw, however unconsciously or through shadow knowledge shared by others or Bentham's Panopticon[5] or seen too by Orwell' 1985[6], the coming surveillance state.
After all, in the trenches of WW1 he took his place managing signals communications in a battalion[7] and when WW2 arrived was approached to be a cryptographer, (even taking four days of preparatory courses on the subject![8] Before getting turned down[9].).
Foresaw what and shared how you ask?
That other, subtler, great Tool of Power to come out of WW2 -- the use of, and covert exposure of, signals encryption.
Encryption exerts its power in a manner not unlike one of the key functions of the rings... Anyone bearing the One Ring or the nine, who then puts on the ring -- like using encryption -- instantly makes themselves "hidden" to the mortal fellows around you.
But tragically, the prolonged use and reliance upon such power deepens and ensures ever increasing temptations and corruptions.
And such ring (encryption) use -- most unintuitively and dangerously -- makes you more, not less visible to the maker of the rings.
(Just as cyphertext stands out in a sea of plaintext.[10] (See Tor today[11], or in WW2 the then-novel phenomena known as radar traceback.[13] Or the then-novel-but-even-more-covert encryption traffic analysis[14].)
Perhaps he saw. And knew.
...
And why too the numeric gap between 1 ring, 3 for elves, 7, and the 9? Nobody knows for sure[15].
Perhaps too some linguistic colleague had whispered to the maker-of-languages (languages as obscure at that time as those of the Apache Code Talkers[16] and similarly perhaps unappreciatedly utilitarian) that... we already had "5 Eyes"[17]??
Perhaps then Tolkein knew? And passed on the word, for those willing to hear...
Poor Tolkein, he became beloved by the very Morlocks[18], err, 'easily corruptible men of middle earth" he warned about.
...
[1...18] Out of time! References available upon request. Or web search... Don't get me started on how this all connects to the Eye of Providence[19] or the Eye of Horus[20]! ;)
Just to expand on this, substantial portions of LOTR were written well before the atomic bomb became public knowledge, e.g. Tolkien had written first drafts of Book 4 (Frodo's journey to Mordor with Sam and Gollum) by 1944. In other words, it was already a fundamental plot point that the ring should not be used even as an ultimate weapon.
The depiction of war in LOTR is perhaps more closely associated with Tolkien's personal experiences in the war of 1914-18. The dead marshes in particular have similarities to the trenches of WW1
What is that referring to? Some new LotR adaptation or some new game?
> The way that orcs are dehumanized you have to wonder.
Why would they be humanized, they are not human?