It’s Amazing! Granted I’m only like 110 pages into Fellowship but Tolkien is an amazing story teller. I read the Hobbit a while back and since I work from home (the one benefit of my company having Covid hysteria) I get to read a lot more.
I remember Peter Jackson saying he wanted to tell Tolkien’s story. It’s too bad modern day adaptations don’t have that respect for source material. Wheel of Time comes to mind. That showrunner is more concerned with lgbt representation than actually adapting the story. And I have no hope for the new show based on the Simarillion (which I’ll read after I finish the trilogy).
Keep reading good works.
Do good deeds.
Don't consume modern garbage.
Yea, I’ve reached a point when a movie is being made based on a book I’ve never read I just get the book. Like Foundation is on my stack to read. Recently read Dune
Asimov's "Foundation" so impressed the young OBL that years later he chose it as the name for his organisation (Al Qaeda) and also inspired his grand vision in general.
Really?! I never heard that. Wow
I've watched the first 3 episodes of Foundation. It's literally an analogy for the death of European culture and the the rise of black feminist culture. Stopped watching it.
Is the show really that much worse than the books?
And from your description of the analogy you could take it either way - that is the social commentary on the destruction in European culture being good OR bad.
I can't compare it to the books since I've not read them, but the theme in the first three episodes is definitely PC and racially based. You have the old empire that is controlled by a white patriarchy prophesied to die and the heroes are two black women from unprivileged origins who acknowledge that it cannot be saved, only changed.
It's a message that is all too similar to other modern envisionings of our ethos of heroes: death to whitey, especially white heterosexual men.
Like in West World, all the women kill all the men, Mad Maxx when our hero spends half the movie shackled and gagged, Star Trek Discovery when in the first 15 minutes of episode 1 the black klingon tells the white klingon that his color is a problem for him, The Last Jedi when Solo is killed off and the only white character that everyone wants to be a hero is side lined by feminist ideologies.
The black female leads are portrayed as heroes. The white male leads are portrayed as antagonists. Not sure how you can interpret it any other way.
I had no interest when I saw the race/gender swapping. There is no reason to do that unless you want to virtue signal
"You are what you eat" applies to your brain too.
Hooray! I'm a catgirl! A Yuri one at that...
(I read and watch a lot of catgirl manga & anime, it's true! I'm a guy eh?)
You're in for a fun journey!
I remember reading it as a kid but lost interest about half way through The Two Towers (fwiw, I was in elementary school at the time) then later on in middle and highschool got on the "Tolkien is overrated" bandwagon. Finally read through the series back in 2017 and not only did I enjoy it but I was old enough to really appreciate it and understand why Tolkein has the amount of esteem and regard he has.
A far better author than the legions of fantasy hacks (incl George R. R. Martin) we've seen since. And honestly, I think I'd go as far as to say classifying his work as "fantasy" is an insult to his writing.
Still have to read the Silmarillion though lol
I remember reading that GRRM wrote Ice and Fire to subvert Tolkein's tropes. At least Tolkein finished his books.
Pretty disgusting if true
Granted, I enjoyed reading Martin's series, but that is an evil reason to want to write a story. To tear down and destroy something that shows humanity at its best.. I just can't imagine being in a mental state to where I wanted to crush something like that. Well..no, I can, it comes from a place of resentment and envy, and that's the sort of frame leftists like Martin are operating from. Inb4 all leftists
To be fair there's nothing wrong with deconstructing popular and established works, genres, and authors, nor does it mean that you dislike them. Alan Moore was and always has been a fan of Silver Age superhero comics, but that didn't stop him from looking at them under a more serious and analytical light with Watchmen (and he hated the age of dark and gritty comics that it ushered in).
I think the bigger problem with Martin is that instead of just focusing on writing the best possible story he can imagine with A Song of Ice and Fire, he has instead made it his God-given mission to deconstruct every fantasy trope and convention that Tolkien made popular. Which has not only slowed the story down to a crawl because he's so damn focused on the unimportant minutia, but ultimately limited the tools he has at his disposal because that's ultimately what deconstruction does. When you deconstruct tropes, you can no longer play them straight or else you ruin the reason behind the deconstruction of them in the first place.
Good point and I think a lot of modern writers are obsessed with it or subverting expectations. Nothing wrong with that but there is a reason that the heroes journey exists. I remember critics gushing over the last Jedi.
Watchmen was amazing but like you said when you do something different like that you get lots of copycats
Tolkien was subverting Tolkien tropes before it was cool. The Silmarillion and the assorted Unfinished Tales are pretty dark, dismal, and depressing, and filled with morally flawed antiheroes that do some pretty despicable stuff. If anything, it was The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings that were the subversions, where the evil was finally defeated and the good did not fall to corruption.
Tolkien did it well I’m sure. Nothing wrong with occasional subversion but it seems that is what everyone does now. There is a reason the heroes journey has stood the test of time
Not finishing is the ultimate subversion.
i call it fantasy fiction.
You haven't even gotten to when it gets good yet! I kid of course, none of it's bad (though I'm personally not a fan of Tom Bombadil), but the first 200 pages are the slowest and feel like an extended prologue.
After reading Wheel of time with its extensive prologues in each book I can handle anything. lol
There are very few scenes of girls straightening their dresses in LOTR lol
Don't get me started on Tom Bombadil...
They have a ring of unspeakable evil that they must get to Mordor to destroy but - hey - we'll just spend 4 weeks partying it down here at Tom Bombadil's place and listen to his eeenteresing stories. :P
I read them as a teen while working a job that gave me a lot of down-time, just before the original trilogy came out. Probably need to re-read them just to see how my perspective has changes as I've gotten older.
I wonder if there are good audio book versions available.
There are. I used to be big into audio books years and years ago. I listened to LOTR on audio book and it was pretty good. I just remember lots and lots of singing. This was SO long ago the release I listened to probably predated Audible and was probably ripped from CD or tape. So I'm sure they've probably redone multiple versions in every English speaking country in much higher quality since then. There are also the BBC radio shows which I've heard are good but I've never listened to them.
Thanks, I'll take a look around to see what I can find.
Can't remember if I gave you this one already or not, but I highly recommend Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire trilogy. It's dark and gritty fantasy written in the last ten years with no woke bullshit whatsoever. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and his follow-up trilogy was similarly great. Just one to consider when you've finished Tolkien - or if you need a break with something a little more easily digested.
Thanks! I’ll add to my list
I tried to start fellowship more than once but couldn't get past the party. Then figured I could skip it and read two towers first and it started with an inventory of all the stuff they put in boromir's boat.
I love the worldbuilding but the prose felt like fantasy charles dickins