garashirs:

if anyone ever tries to tell u the ‘power of friendship’ trope is stupid and corny just remember that frodo and sam saved the fuckin world and defeated a minor god with nothing but the power of friendship and love

association-of-free-people:

garrettauthor:

reeve-of-caerwyn:

tollers-and-jack:

alia-andreth:

absynthe–minded:

every time I see the words “Tolkien ripoff” in reference to fantasy I laugh, because while there’s a lot of Tolkien ripoff in worldbuilding it almost never crops up in plot or theme or characterization

like

where are my stories about the decay of the world from the glory of days gone by?

where’s the motif of limb loss?

where’s the longing for the return of something worth following?

where are the bloodthirsty oaths that tear sanity to shreds?

where are the evil spirits who try and destroy the gods with steampunk V-1 buzz bombs (looking at you, The Lost Road)?

where’s my continent-wide dialectical shift ending in massive arguments over the proper pronunciation of a name? where’s my family drama centered around sparkly rocks? where are my dragons the size of mountain ranges?

Tolkienesque Fantasy™: there’s a quest, the elves are bitchy, the dwarves drink a lot, farm boy hero.

Tolkien’s Actual Writing: absolute power corrupts absolutely, a little bit of power corrupts a little, to what extent are people responsible for their actions? does God/the gods really answer our prayers? and pacifistic undertones.

@reeve-of-caerwyn @oldshrewsburyian

Also actual Tolkien: The world is full of hope even in dark times. Kindness and friendship are what heroes are made of. Absolutely do not fuck with nature or you will regret it.

Also actual Tolkien: actual heroes are little people who band together because it is right, and because they must.

Also Tolkien; good things do not always happen to good people, if you defy the devil there’s a chance he’ll chain you to a chair on top of a mountain, curse your family, and force you to watch as your son unknowingly marries and impregnates your daughter, leading both to commit suicide when their identities are revealed.

Actual Tolkien: Respect nature or it will kick your ass

amlugnis:

Sauron: How do Dark Lords bath?

Sauron: Just like you, fool!

Sauron: We get nice and wet…

Sauron: Then we plot for world domination.

anarcho-tolkienist:

thepioden:

sunspotpony:

violent-darts:

owl-song:

tuulikki:

worldflower:

with-all-my-woes:

zarekthelordofthefries:

It sure is convenient that all these songs that ostensibly weren’t written in English all rhyme when translated into English, isn’t it, Mr. Tolkien?

yknow what really bothered me for some reason??
he used ‘loud as a train’ or smth similar to describe the balrog’s roar. like, no ok so y’know if this is supposed to have been ‘translated’ like you tell us, then wouldn’t it have been smth other than a train, like a waterfall?
idk it just really bothers me

Clearly he was talking about the train of Glorfindel’s robes which as everyone knows are covered in bells and jingle

1. I mean, he invented the languages he was going to translate, so if a rhyme didn’t work he could change the whole language if he wanted to. But actually, it’s not uncommon for translations (particularly older translations) to try to preserve or at least recreate rhyme schemes. For example, Tolkien translated “Pearl” into rhyming Modern English.

2. The train thing! It’s actually related to how Tolkien presents the hobbits as essentially “modern” characters who then go out and have adventures in the old heroic culture of myth and legend. As Tolkien says, “[The Shire] is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee…” (Letters, 230, #178). It’s very deliberately a part of the language. Think of all the modern, non-medieval things the hobbits have. It’s always a contrast between Modern English (Shire) and Old English (rest of Middle Earth). Even though Tolkien changed some foreign names to make them seem English, the hobbits still have

• tobacco (pipeweed), a New World crop
• drink tea in the modern English way
• potatoes, another New World crop, made more English-sounding as “taters”
• rabbits/coneys, which were imported to England in the 13th century
• a regular postal service
• mantelpiece clocks!

It was a deliberate choice that gave readers us a group of characters who can serve as tour guides to a mythical medieval adventure. Tom Shippey explains it better than I ever could:

…There is one very evident obstacle to recreating the ancient world
of heroic legend for modern readers, and that lies in the nature of
heroes. These are not acceptable any more, and tend very strongly to be
treated with irony: the modern view of Beowulf is John Gardner’s novel Grendel
(1971). Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he
could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is
Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism, a character whose initial
role at least is very strongly that of mediator. He represents and often
voices modern opinions, modern incapacities: he has no impulses towards
revenge or self-conscious heroism, cannot ‘hoot twice like a barn-owl
and once like a screech-owl’ as the dwarves suggest, knows almost
nothing about Wilderland and cannot even skin a rabbit, being used to
having his meat ‘delivered by the butcher ready to cook’. Yet he has a
place in the ancient world too, and there is a hint that (just like us)
all his efforts cannot keep him entirely separate from the past.

…

Bilbo’s behaviour is solidly anachronistic, for he is wearing a jacket, relying on a written contract, drawing a careful distinction between gain and profit, and proposing a compromise which would see Bard’s claim as running expenses (almost tax deductible). Where Bard and Thorin used archaic words (‘Hail!’, ‘foes’, ‘hoard’, ‘kindred’, ‘slain’), he uses modern ones: ‘profit’, never used in English until 1604, and then only in Aberdeen; ‘deduct’, recorded in 1524 but then indistinguishable from ‘subtract’ and not given its commercial sense till much later; ‘total’, not used as here till 1557; ‘claim’, ‘interest’, ‘affair’, ‘matter’, all French or Latin imports not adopted fully into English till well after the Norman Conquest. It is fair to say that no character from epic or saga could even begin to think or talk like Bilbo.

Basically, if Tolkien does a thing with words, there’s always a very good chance that the professor was having fun with language, and doing it very consciously (see: Mount Doom, name of).

And furthermore, the entire conceit behind the books is that they’re translated into English from the “original” Westron of the Red Book, meaning that a ‘modern’ translator could do whatever he wanted with the language to make it work for the equally modern audience while preserving the same feel/meaning.  Heck, even the characters aren’t named what you think they are (Merry, for instance).

LotR is actually the story of Maura Labingi, Banazîr Galbasi, Ranazur Tûk and Kalimac Brandagamba. Maura lived at Laban-nec, but left Haubyltalan and Sûza altogether, first aiming for a hill-town just outside Sûza but eventually for Karnigul (or, in Elvish, Imladris). Maura’s older cousin and dearest friend (in one person) Bilba Labingi lived in Karnigul at that point. 

The extent to which Tolkien goes to present LotR as an edited mediaeval text is actually DELIGHTFUL and also ABSURDLY GREAT; the prologue is actually a provenance and edition litany, explaining which recension of The Red Book he was working from in order to explain its likely oddities and inclusions (or exclusions). 

I have often actually wanted an edition with all known or reasonably extrapolated Westron put back in, because I’m really curious how it would read. 

@thepioden

It’s actually very cool how things were translated into what modern Anglophonic readers would parse as “normal” fantasy-names as opposed to like. Aragorn, or Thranduil, or Ecthelion, or Elbereth Gilthoniel. The untranslated names of the Hobbits fit much more neatly into the phonetic flavor of the Adûnaic that becomes the ‘Common Speech’ or ‘Westron’ in the Third Age (and which gives us names like ‘Tar-Minyatur’ and ‘Ar-Pharazôn’ and ‘Akallabêth’), but those names would be tonally jarring in an otherwise translated text. 

That’s also why the Dwarves have names like ‘Dwalin’ and the Rohirrim… have… pretty much any names at all. Since the Professor was translating the affect of the Hobbit names into modern English and was also a linguistics nerd, he preserved the linguistic relationship between Westron, Dalish, and Rohirric by translating them as the equally-ish related Modern English, Old Norse, and Old English (not that literally anyone but him would probably actually notice, but.)

Does… Does OP not believe in translating poetry? Tolkien translated Beowulf into rhyming meter from Anglo-Saxon, but I’m sure that was just also CONVENIENT or whatever the fuck

joeysharku:

@losttinmymind asked if I’d ever explained what it is I love so much about orcs, and so I thought I’d make a masterpost for POSTerity (sorry). 
So, we have to define the (head)canon we’re working with first. Orcs are corrupted elves and their progeny, and thus Eruhíni, and thus possess free will and all the potential for damnation or redemption that the rest of us do (they also reproduce like us). If you prefer slime monsters, good on you but those are just not the orcs I’m talking about (that’s my hc origin for trolls though which are just little degenerate hick Melkors). In light of this status, I can’t help but regard orcs with the same empathy owed all of the Eruhíni, if not more.
Orcs provoke the pity in me Gollum did in Bilbo. They are born slaves, in irreversible ruin, and are in constant agony. Never did their god love them and when he’s “slain” by his usurping kin, they are utterly abandoned in a world that literally never accepts them, wanted only by enslaving devils. Despite this and every other disadvantage you can think of, they consistently excel. They are described as incredibly clever, indicating an undaunted creative spirit that is the surest sign of their divine heritage (their relative lack of technological sophistication can be understood as having no cultural tradition of recording previous discoveries or diagrams). They are strong and hearty and despite their individual cowardice, will throw themselves in waves at godblessed foes nearly twice their height (thus in any combat, *they’re* the underdogs except perhaps at Helm’s Deep). Their general cruelty and cavalier attitude towards death should not be seen as an individual failing but rather reflective of the status quo when God breeds you like chattel to suffer and die. And though we see no good orcs within the Legendarium, this is no mystery – it is sourced entirely from the Red Book of Westmarch, a compilation of histories and translations from elvish lore by hobbits. Orc individuals surely ran the entire D&D spectrum, from the rare Lawful Good to the incredibly common Chaotic Evil, and perhaps some tribes even fought against their masters.
To be a bit more philosophical, let’s remember that the races of the Legendarium (as indeed nearly all fantasy races) are just weird humans. We *are* orcs when we find ourselves trapped in institutions that dehumanize, merchandise, weaponize, and finally, cannibalize us. If Melkor is read as a demiurgical figure (that adjective taken directly from Tolkien), orcs are just humans caught in the violent phantasms of this mortal existence, preyed upon for the petty agendas of archonic slavers. Who says that isn’t the world we really find ourselves in…? 
To be less textually-reliant or philosophical, I like orcs because of hearing this song at 12 or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXQJS3Yv0Y. It made clear to me orcs were just as much victims of Sauron’s agenda as anyone else. It’s a immense tragedy that King Elessar literally genocides them, but it’s historically realistic and understandable (I don’t hate Aragorn for it). I comfort myself with hc’s giving them happy endings. To conclude, I’ll list some:

– hobbits are descended from goblins who escaped from their balrog master in the Misty Mountains in the Second Age, explaining their height and elvish features when they’re clearly trending more towards mannish stock. This allows orcs to have a strain that is counted among the Free Peoples, and far more gratifying, means Frodo’s (relative) success in destroying the One Ring is a huge cosmic irony.
– some orc tribes lived in Rhûn and Khand, and due to their regular mutual interests with Mordor, found common ground with the Men there. Despite the obviously problematic of Tolkien’s “least-lovely Mongol types” comparison, I imagine these orcs indeed mingled and mixed with the steppe peoples until there was little difference between them. If anyone takes offense, please believe me when I say, in light of all the obvious fondness I hold for orcs, this is meant as no insult.
– in my D&D campaign, which is set in the Second Age, orcs that fled on the sea during the War of Wrath were found and accepted by Ossë. These orcs, called gorgons, worship Ulmo whom they call the Deep Daddy. They trend chaotic good and for his part, Ulmo truly loves them and will not let the sea drown them but hides their existence from the rest of the Valar. 

I’m re-reading LOTR at the moment and one thing that surprised me was how intelligent and clever the orc characters were in the Two Towers. They weren’t dumb brutes like in a lot of LOTR-derivative work (and the movies to some extent).