Jack Law's Lord of the Rings Thread.

[Corpsey]

I wonder what Tolkien would have made of LOTR 'fandom' - him being this venerable academic figure.

Mind you, academia is basically a more respectable form of 'fandom', isn't it?

She's good on the quasi sexual appeal of academia in it too, and the comforting closed loop nature of Tolkien's pseduo academic "faery" world (comparing it to similarly allusive and academic novels like Ulysses/crying of lot 49 which point outwards to a whole real world, unlike Tolks)

 

[Corpsey]

Some of the worst bits in the LOTR films are when they try and shoehorn in some romance.

It might have been better if they'd shoehorned some animalistic fucking in there, though.

And the sexlessness of LOTR

I'm probably misremembering but I think she talks about how Tolkien had a traumatic childhood then all his friends died in WW1 and clearly there's a degree of escaping into a sexless fantasy world where the violence is sort of glossed over and there's no cars and no tiktok

 

[sus]

I like how they make Galadriel a Nazi exterminating abominations

 

[sus]

They've gone all in on the "elves are fascist" theme

 

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, she went full Obergruppenführer in the last episode. It's enough to make you feel sorry for the orcs - I mean it's not like they can help being orcs.

 

[Mr. Tea]

In general I'm enjoying it but the "elves need the superdrug mithril or they're all going to die by next spring" sub-plot is absolutely terrible. Like something from a Marvel film. The problem is not that Tolkien didn't write that, but that he'd never have written anything like that, because it's totally inimical to his entire created world.

 

[Mr. Tea]

"elves need the superdrug mithril or they're all going to die by next spring"

I have to wonder what they're supposed to do with it - do they snort it? Shoot it? Booty-bump it?

 

[WashYourHands]

Read that as Elvis

 

[Corpsey]

I have to wonder what they're supposed to do with it - do they snort it? Shoot it? Booty-bump it?

Mithril pants

 

[Mr. Tea]

Mithril pants

Frodo had a mithril shirt, so this isn't that fanciful.

 

[Corpsey]

The orcs are a bit naziish themselves, with their bid for Lebensraum and their inability to travel by day

 

[Corpsey]

The hysterical nerdgasms of the ppl shitting on this show have actually turned me around on this and now I would die for Jeff Bezos

 

[Corpsey]

Saw Bill Bailey (self described huge fan of Tolkien) saying that the ponderous dialogue was driving him nuts

Now I've not read the books so I'm in no position to quibble on that score but if the Peter Jackson films are faithful to Tolkien in dialogue terms I'd assume the books are full of ponderous dialogue too?

 

[Corpsey]

Ahhh tis a gift

This hilarious pompous dialogue is one of the big appeals of the films to me

 

[Corpsey]

Nay sir, tis no mere trinket thy carries

 

[Corpsey]

Where did mvuents post go

I'd have to reread that lrb thing to see but although I agree there's a snobby tone to it I though the point she was making was that in order to understand the references in the crying of lot 49 you'd have to go out and learn about the world outside it whereas the lord of the rings is self enclosed, and while many of its readers will undoubtedly become interested in history, mythology (and all manner of things), they don't HAVE TO to understand the LOTR.

I guess the same is true of academia, in that you can become ensconced in (and a world expert in) some arcane area of knowledge and screen off the rest of the world.

 

[mvuent]

I'd have to reread that lrb thing to see but although I agree there's a snobby tone to it I though the point she was making was that in order to understand the references in the crying of lot 49 you'd have to go out and learn about the world outside it whereas the lord of the rings is self enclosed, and while many of its readers will undoubtedly become interested in history, mythology (and all manner of things), they don't HAVE TO to understand the LOTR.

sorry but you’ve phrased her point in a way that makes my brain unable to parse or respond to it bc i’m a dumbass. but i think this is maybe the telling sentence:

Spot the difference? That’s right: the second lot is entirely fictional, and doesn’t involve even the shortest trip from your chair.

if we leave aside any assumptions about what readers will do and focus on what’s implied about the works themselves, all she’s really saying, as far as i can tell, is that tolkien’s writing is pure fiction whereas pynchon’s at least contains elements of nonfiction. so if we assume that she’s trying to point out a weakness in tolkien’s work, then she’s getting close to a sentiment like this: why read some useless made up story when you could actually learn something about the real world.

don’t want to pin this too much on turner, who it looks like has written fiction herself… but the main reason that i find a few passages from that lrb article tiresome (passages that might seem innocuous to most people) is that i think they point toward a viewpoint that’s prevalent in a lot of highbrow circles and has had a really bad influence on art. a viewpoint that amounts to distrust or even fear of the imagination, of the human capacity to just make shit up.

i think a lot of people in or adjacent to academia find themselves in a predicament like this: they first came to love art/lit because of the sense of wonder they got from its immersive, escapist diegetic qualities, but then they went to college and internalized the belief that art is about saying something, commenting on the real world. it's not just that their values change, it's that the old value set becomes actively at odds with the new one. suddenly the qualities they so viscerally appreciated as children appear obfuscatory, cowardly.

so you get fiction writers who, on some level, have very mixed, confused feelings about the concept of fiction. the result is that serious art comes to mean concept art and auto-fiction. this stuff could only be venerated in a cultural environment that values insight far more than imagination. whereas i'm the opposite way. if i wanted insight i'd just read philosophy and i'd only turn to art if i wanted imagination. that's literally, definitionally, the distinguishing quality of fiction, so why act ashamed of it? i'd rate old akira toriyama stuff (let alone tolkien) way higher than some short story about a 27 year old in an mfa program in iowa.

tl;dr i’m a genius and all academics are (in the britsh sense) thick as fuck

 

[Mr. Tea]

sorry but you’ve phrased her point in a way that makes my brain unable to parse or respond to it bc i’m a dumbass. but i think this is maybe the telling sentence:


if we leave aside any assumptions about what readers will do and focus on what’s implied about the works themselves, all she’s really saying, as far as i can tell, is that tolkien’s writing is pure fiction whereas pynchon’s at least contains elements of nonfiction. so if we assume that she’s trying to point out a weakness in tolkien’s work, then she’s getting close to a sentiment like this: why read some useless made up story when you could actually learn something about the real world.

don’t want to pin this too much on turner, who it looks like has written fiction herself… but the main reason that i find a few passages from that lrb article tiresome (passages that might seem innocuous to most people) is that i think they point toward a viewpoint that’s prevalent in a lot of highbrow circles and has had a really bad influence on art. a viewpoint that amounts to distrust or even fear of the imagination, of the human capacity to just make shit up.

i think a lot of people in or adjacent to academia find themselves in a predicament like this: they first came to love art/lit because of the sense of wonder they got from its immersive, escapist diegetic qualities, but then they went to college and internalized the belief that art is about saying something, commenting on the real world. it's not just that their values change, it's that the old value set becomes actively at odds with the new one. suddenly the qualities they so viscerally appreciated as children appear obfuscatory, cowardly.

so you get fiction writers who, on some level, have very mixed, confused feelings about the concept of fiction. the result is that serious art comes to mean concept art and auto-fiction. this stuff could only be venerated in a cultural environment that values insight far more than imagination. whereas i'm the opposite way. if i wanted insight i'd just read philosophy and i'd only turn to art if i wanted imagination. that's literally, definitionally, the distinguishing quality of fiction, so why act ashamed of it? i'd rate old akira toriyama stuff (let alone tolkien) way higher than some short story about a 27 year old in an mfa program in iowa.

tl;dr i’m a genius and all academics are (in the britsh sense) thick as fuck

You raise some very good points.

With regards to fiction that's about the 'real' world, it's worth pointing out the central fact of Tolkien's psychology: that he was devout in a way that it's probably impossible for an unbeliever like me (or you, I would guess?) to fully understand, and that this informed everything he ever wrote. So, for all that he railed against 'allegory' (and I think he was a bit disingenuous here), he was always really writing about the relationship between man and God, salvation through faith, and all that stuff. And as far he was concerned, God is far more real than all the governments, armies, rockets, corporations, and so on that Pynchon writes about.

 

[Corpsey]

"I'm a dumbass" he says!

It's a big thing to consider, this question of fiction viz. "reality".

I'd argue that even the most imaginative of fiction has to have some sort of relationship with our own sense of reality to resonate with us. (I can't comment on LOTR books as I said, but I assume from watching the films that it has all sorts to say about war, technology, culture, what to do with talking trees, etc.)

And even the most "realistic" of fiction has to have an imaginative spark to work as fiction. (There's the Nabokov's aesthete stance on literature, that all questions of Theme, Ideas, etc. are besides the point of fiction. The what and why of it pales besides the how.)

Also I think fiction can offer insights into the nature of experience that you won't get reading strictly abstract philosophy. The fact that philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkeegard used literary techniques and forms should lend some weight to this.

It's interesting to me that what you're saying there is not a million miles away from Craner's contention that the French got cinema wrong by thinking it was a sort of literature, instead of a medium in which visual/sound elements should predominate.

And as I was walking around earlier I was pondering this, what value does imagination untethered (as much as it can be) from the real world have? LOTR is very much grounded in our reality – there are human beings in it, human-being-like beings, a world very much like our own was 600 years ago. There are kings and queens and courts and all that stuff.

And that's where I suppose you might question what value it has in terms of explaining the world it springs from and relates to. I'm sure there are plenty of amusing/irritating Marxist critiques of LOTR that do exactly that.

I'm rambling.

 

[william_kent]

was that it?

was that a "finale"?

want my prime money back jeff