W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by getwiththeprog » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:22 AM UTC

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…

Go Wolverine876! It sounds like you have actually read the books! You have my appreciation and support.

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

#192

Post by mikepurvis » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 6:42 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #135

mikepurvis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty inevitable that there will eventually be a TV series style live action LOTR— in theory that should give the breathing room necessary for the story to unfold over 30-50 hours rather than 8-9.

Given how TV series are lately written and how latests adaptations of loved books went, I really really hope they wont make one for LOTR too. Yes, in theory longer format should have more space to breath. In practice, we will get dialogs that will make you cringe, removal of everything that is not straightforward action, compression of everything nuanced into a single talking point and massive change in characters an…

I think it really could depend. Yes, there's a strong possibility that you get excessive cutaways to appendix content and a lot of invented side-drama to pad it out, but it's also conceivable that a longer take could include much more of the original dialogue. As a very silly and trite example, take Eowyn's iconic "I am no man" line from ROTK. In the book, that line is an entire speech, and it's fabulous:

> “But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”

The Mary Sue did a great long-form piece on how unfortunate it was that Eowyn's character wasn't managed better: https://www.themarysue.com/the-story-of-eowyn/

In any case, this is just one small example, but it's easy to imagine that with a longer treatment of Bilbo's birthday party, the hobbits might have been able to be more fleshed out as well, and less of just dumb comic relief. That said, even the 1981 BBC radio play that's considered by many purists to be the gold standard as far as LOTR dramatizations is only about 13h, so perhaps I'm being pretty optimistic to imagine that doubling that runtime could go anywhere good.

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

#193

Post by musicale » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 2:19 AM UTC

piaste wrote: post #177

musicale wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having recently slogged through some fantasy/sf tomes weighing in at 900 pages or more, I have to say that they make Tolkien - or Dickens for that matter - seem terse by comparison. To make matters worse, some of these monstrosities aren't even complete in themselves but are the first (or Nth) volume in an excessively long series. Perhaps novellas aren't commercially viable anymore, but I miss them.

It is difficult to tell a coherent story that ends in a satisfactory manner within a preset number of pages. Endings, outside of "and this is how everyone died", are inherently arbitrary and artificial, and it's tricky to disguise that. And if you're blessed with imagination, there is always one more character to do justice to, one more neighbourhood to explore. (Or, if you're Tolkien, one more etymology to plant.) A…

> there is a certain type of curious, intelligent, often young reader that delights in those details

> The market for massive 18-book series is a product of the happy match of that type of writer with that type of reader. But it's totally OK to not be that type of reader.

Indifferent/stupid/old readers should probably keep reading Tolkien, Dickens and other authors known for published brevity - Melville or Tolstoy perhaps.