Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?
I tried reading it a few times and never made it more than 1/3 of the way through. I kept losing my place because it all sounded the same.
Visualizing Tolkien
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#22You need to remove the stop words before visualizing them. Words such as 'the' 'and' etc don't need to be in the analysis
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#23>One of the reviewers argued that it was the hardest book to read because 'and' was the most used word in the book. I think the author took this way to literally. Granted, it inspired some fun (albeit odd and basic) data analysis. But the point of the reviewer isn't about word counts but about style and pace. That, narratively, the Silmarillion just felt like it continued on and on without clear sections of rising an…
I haven't gotten through the whole book, but it's also written in a style which makes it hard to immerse yourself in it. Characters aren't described in detail, major events are described in a few words, and entire lifetimes are glossed over... Certainly epic and at times quite beautiful, but completely different to LoTR.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#24"Visualizing English Text" seems more accurate a title. Cute process, but the result is entirely generic.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#25Where's the sentence length statistics? Average word length? Commas per sentence? All are surely much more indicative of reading difficulty than that "originality index" he came up with. Why didn't the author try the most obvious test of reading difficulty of all: Flesch-Kincaid? [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...
Hi, author here. First, it's she, not he. Second, because I hadn't heard about that obvious test at all back then. I never pretended to do a superserious scientific analysis but rather answer to the questions that came to my mind, by using a computer to validate hypothesis. But many thanks for the pointers & suggestions, though! I was thinking about rebuilding this to make it realtime+interactive so that more than on…
Hi author, I really liked the visualisations, especially the black hole thing.
I think I may have misunderstood the purpose of your article: I first read it as a serious attempt to use textual analysis to do a comparison of the comprehensibility of Tolkein's best-known works, in which case you fell way short of the mark by going no further than word counting. I think it started off like that, but on re-reading it I see that you say you hit a brick wall (paraphrasing) and decided to have some fun visualising your results so far; something you did very nicely. So perhaps I got the wrong end of the stick.
I thought about what you've taken on here. Doing things at the word level is pretty easy. Taking into account grammatical structure to get things like sentence lengths and clauses per sentence, or breaking words up into syllables (needed for F-K, for example) is considerably harder. I'm interested to hear what you come up with. Flesch & Flesch-Kincaid are US inventions so perhaps not obvious to everyone.
On he/she: I agonised over that for a good ten minutes over my breakfast. I read around your blog and your twitter page this morning for clues as to the appropriate pronoun. In the end I couldn't tell, so I went with 'he' because I stereotyped you. I nearly changed my wording to use constructions like "the author," "they," and various other mealy-mouthed alternatives but they were too ugly. So I did try, but I got it wrong. I apologise.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#26Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?
I was thinking the same. I never had problems with Silmarillion. Couldn't read Messages from Middle Earth however, that was just not enough connection. But Silmarillion, man, that's an epic collection of stories. I think it might be a cool material for a TV series. Say, one season for every major story with the same characters, plus some creative freedom for the screenwriters of course. Just think about it - battles…
Later parts of the book might be good (or even great) in movie format, but there's no way one can turn Ainulindalë into a movie... Or can they? For years I was passionately against the idea, but now that I think about it again, maybe I'm just being over-pessimistic? I mean, LOTR turned out to be quite good...
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking the same. I never had problems with Silmarillion. Couldn't read Messages from Middle Earth however, that was just not enough connection. But Silmarillion, man, that's an epic collection of stories. I think it might be a cool material for a TV series. Say, one season for every major story with the same characters, plus some creative freedom for the screenwriters of course. Just think about it - battles…
Later parts of the book might be good (or even great) in movie format, but there's no way one can turn Ainulindalë into a movie... Or can they? For years I was passionately against the idea, but now that I think about it again, maybe I'm just being over-pessimistic? I mean, LOTR turned out to be quite good...
IMO quite good is an understatement, it has become the best any LotR fan could have ever hoped for. And about Silmarillion: Think about how good some TV screenwriters have become in recent years - IMO they turn out more high quality TV scripts than movies nowadays, mostly because the big budget movie industry needs to always take the safe bets (and so you get stupid flicks like battleship et al.)
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#28Why does everyone find the Silmarillion hard to read? Am I the only one, who had no problems with that style?
I tried reading it a few times and never made it more than 1/3 of the way through. I kept losing my place because it all sounded the same.
Then try the audiobook: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/179221/the-silmarillion-boxe...
It's great. And I don't say that about any audiobook (and I listen to audiobooks quite often). The narrator does a great, great job.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#29Where's the sentence length statistics? Average word length? Commas per sentence? All are surely much more indicative of reading difficulty than that "originality index" he came up with. Why didn't the author try the most obvious test of reading difficulty of all: Flesch-Kincaid? [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...
Hi, author here. First, it's she, not he. Second, because I hadn't heard about that obvious test at all back then. I never pretended to do a superserious scientific analysis but rather answer to the questions that came to my mind, by using a computer to validate hypothesis. But many thanks for the pointers & suggestions, though! I was thinking about rebuilding this to make it realtime+interactive so that more than on…
The "originality" index bothered me, because as the work of a length grows, you'd generically expect less words to be introduced -- exactly what the results show.
The idea makes sense, but I'm unclear on how to actually measure it in a way that's normalized by page count.
Re: Visualizing Tolkien
#30>One of the reviewers argued that it was the hardest book to read because 'and' was the most used word in the book. I think the author took this way to literally. Granted, it inspired some fun (albeit odd and basic) data analysis. But the point of the reviewer isn't about word counts but about style and pace. That, narratively, the Silmarillion just felt like it continued on and on without clear sections of rising an…
I haven't gotten through the whole book, but it's also written in a style which makes it hard to immerse yourself in it. Characters aren't described in detail, major events are described in a few words, and entire lifetimes are glossed over... Certainly epic and at times quite beautiful, but completely different to LoTR.
Sillmarillion is just meant to be read in pieces, I think. It's very similiar to the Old Testament, and I don't know a single person that read the Old Testament in one sitting.