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W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

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Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#121

Post by _a_a_a_ »

ISTM a lot of book reviews by official reviewers, meaning those employed to write reviews, are often horribly gushing. Books have now unfortunately become just a product to be sold and the reviewers are part of the marketing. If I want an honest review I go and read a bunch of reviews off Amazon, accounting for the shills that are there as far as I can.

What really bothers me is I know there are some very good books out there that are well worth reading but aren't well known just because the authors aren't, and again, books now are being sold as a brand, just as much as soft drinks.

In the UK we have a radio 4 programme where people read and critique each other's recommendations. I can't bear it because they're so pretentious, but I also because the books they go for are almost always (AFAICT) from mainstream authors – these people want a nice, safe, conventional environment. They're just boring people.

Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#122

Post by morelisp »

slibhb wrote: post #37
stevenwoo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m old and tried re-reading it recently and the low number of female characters and voices is really jarring now. YMMV. There’s so much I haven’t yet read I just moved on.

[flagged]

I agree with the sibling commenter that Bilbo is very gay-coded, to the point I cannot imagine it to be an accident, but even explicitly within the text - https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FE5bMUoIXoAAAo9I.png

Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#123

Post by Ntrails »

morelisp wrote: post #119
croes wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the deus ex machina trick of turning Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White. That's like Spock's inner eye lid. BTW the primary actors are Sam and Frodo and their friendship where one carries the burden of the ring and the other carries his friend.

I don't think you can criticize "deus ex machina" as a plot device when it's, from go, literally "ex deus" - Gandalf is on a mission (/ missions) from god, and Eru's not gonna let him get off so easily.

It's arguable whether you want to describe the wizards as 'Mortal' in the first place.

The return of Gandalf never much bothered me, it fit well enough.

Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#124

Post by slyall »

hogepiyo wrote: post #18
andrewstuart wrote: post #10

It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. It was one of the happiest parts of life - to be able to read the books and venture into that world. It's been spoiled for me by the ridiculous movies like The Hobbit (holy god, Peter Jackson turned Dwarves into ridiculous comedy clowns, covered Radagast with birdshit) , the endless licensed garbage and whilst The Lord of The Rings movie was quite good it h…

I don't think the original Lord of the Rings trilogy would really be filmable as a 1:1 book to film adaptation. As a book fan I think Peter Jackson did a pretty good job with it in general; the behind the scenes footage really shows that they did care about the source material. Fellowship particularly I would still say is great, Two Towers and ROTK have some moments that are either downright ridiculous or against the…

One thing Amazon could do is adapt the Lord of the Rings into a TV show. 60 one hour episodes could be interesting.

Personally I prefer the books to the movies and dislike many of the changes.

I'm following the "Other Minds and Hands" podcast/video. Corey "Tolkiien Professor" Olsen and Maggie Parke talking about adaptation especially for Tolkien but also lots else.

Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#125

Post by elihu »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #103
wolverine876 wrote: post #98

Tolkien wrote the essential story - for our time : An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people of the world allow themselves to be influenced by it; they embrace despair and abandon goodness and all resistance; or they are corrupted and even help the enemy. The primary actor is a wise old man who travels around, not using great powers, but waking them…

"The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. Moreover, though Gandalf rarely displayed his power, everyone outside the Shire suspected that he did possess power and belonged to an elite, and today there is great distrust of elites. I think a lot of idealistic…

> "The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights.

At the risk of making this political, our present era also has an old man who has earned the respect of younger generations by being well-informed, consistent in his views, with a strong moral compass and deeply concerned about the welfare of all people. I would argue that Bernie Sanders is the Gandalf of our times.

We also have a lot of Denethors and Sarumans and Wormtounges. Our Dark Lord isn't a person, but maybe it's an ideology -- that if we can just maximize shareholder value everything will work out fine. Tolkien didn't like allegories and insisted that the ring wasn't symbolic of anything, but if it was our ring we can't bring ourselves to cast aside is fossil fuels.

Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#126

Post by rightbyte »

croes wrote: post #115
wolverine876 wrote: post #98

Tolkien wrote the essential story - for our time : An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people of the world allow themselves to be influenced by it; they embrace despair and abandon goodness and all resistance; or they are corrupted and even help the enemy. The primary actor is a wise old man who travels around, not using great powers, but waking them…

I don't like the deus ex machina trick of turning Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White. That's like Spock's inner eye lid. BTW the primary actors are Sam and Frodo and their friendship where one carries the burden of the ring and the other carries his friend.

You don't think the plot was put out in advance for Gandalf to not die in Moria? Or what do you mean?

I guess he had to disappear for the fellowship to break up.

If I remember correctly, you don't get to know that he technically did die in Moria. That is background lore.

Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#127

Post by Sakos »

elihu wrote: post #125
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. Moreover, though Gandalf rarely displayed his power, everyone outside the Shire suspected that he did possess power and belonged to an elite, and today there is great distrust of elites. I think a lot of idealistic…

> "The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. At the risk of making this political, our present era also has an old man who has earned the respect of younger generations by being well-informed, consistent in his views, with a strong moral compass and deeply c…

What's changed is we've as a culture realized that age doesn't automatically bestow wisdom. A wise old man is a valuable part of culture and society. But not all old men are wise and it doesn't seem to be a function of being old. Bernie has held his beliefs for decades. He was wise when he was younger and that's persisted (or developed further with the guidance of time and experience) into his current age. Wisdom is something that has to be cultivated for a lifetime and we simply don't do that as a society or a culture. Did we ever? I'm not sure.

Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#128

Post by tremon »

tom_ wrote: post #35
cafard wrote: post #2

For a contrary view, Google for Edmund Wilson's essay, "Oh, Those Awful Orcs".

When I was a teenager, my mum suggested I read Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps it was The Hobbit. Whatever. There were some guys on horses, and maybe a spider. That's all I remember. It was boring as fuck, and I gave up at about page 70,000 - or so it felt like. I was still young enough that I hadn't realised that you could just give up at page 2 if you wanted. Anyway, dear reader, I guess my point is: if you hate this…

I never could get past the first chapter of The Hobbit. An Unexpected Party just drones on and on. The Lord Of The Rings also had its long slow introduction, but at least it wasn't as tedious as The Hobbit's.

Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#129

Post by wrp »

wolverine876 wrote: post #98

Tolkien wrote the essential story - for our time : An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people of the world allow themselves to be influenced by it; they embrace despair and abandon goodness and all resistance; or they are corrupted and even help the enemy. The primary actor is a wise old man who travels around, not using great powers, but waking them…

Well...I've read some intellectual biographies of Tolkien, and a common complaint is that it's hard to pin down his views on much of anything outside of literature. He wasn't a systematic thinker, but tended to write what sounded good at the moment without much regard for consistency with what had been written before. He had to do a lot of later editing to remove logical conflicts in his stories. Remember that the impetus for his fiction was to create a world in which his created languages could live. So, positing a coherent ideological message in his story is a bit of a stretch. Also, Tolkien's wasn't one to focus much on real world social and political issues. I think the most notable example of him writing about politics is in a wartime letter to his son, when Nazi antics forced politics into his normally narrow interests.

All that said, no good postmodernist would object to modern readers finding meanings in literature that weren't consciously in the author's mind.

Re: W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring

#130

Post by throw310822 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #95
jdshaffer wrote: post #27

Tom Shippey, a very well known and respected Tolkien scholar gave a talk about the book vs the Peter Jackson movies. It also ended up in an edited version in one of his books (I cannot remember if it was "Tolkien: Author of the Century" or "The Road to Middle Earth".) In short, he argues that Jackson actually did the best he could to present the book in a format that movie studios would accept, and even then was able…

Jackson was the anti-Tolkien. The book and movie stories had the same character names, many of the same events, but otherwise were completely opposite. A few things off the top of my head, great and small: Tolkien's books were primarily about the corruption of power, and showed that the Good and Wise avoided it. There's the Ring, of course, but also Gandalf traveled around motivating people, rarely showing any magica…

> Jackson's world was of commonplace, manipulative horror film techniques and action hero tropes.

Totally agree. The movies failed to evoke for me any sense of magic and mystery. I guess the what-you-can't-really-see and what-defies-your-expectations are not most people's cup of tea.

I like to compare Jackson's LOTR intro to that of the (often mediocre but brilliant in some parts) Ralph Baskshi's. The projected shadows, the choice of colours, are much more evocative than Jackson's literal storytelling.

https://youtu.be/AT18OJEPU9Q?si=3-TwFyybz_493nVD

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