401–410 of 428 posts
But I do have an opinion on it. And boy, will I let you know what it is!
(Note: I'm not even a fan of LotR. More Silmarillion, so I'm not defendig LotR but to criticise something you haven't read... that must be the root of all internet evil).
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There's a lot more than just Orcs. Bilbo and the Dwarves almost get eaten by trolls in The Hobbit. There's intelligent giant spiders. The occasional Dragon. But frankly Orcs are bad enough. They're cunning, actually genuinely intelligent tool using predators. They're mainly carnivorous by preference, but can probably survive on stuff that would make you sicken and die if they have to. As soon as a rural population ge…
The shire is not special. Nothing before the adventure of Bilbo made anyone think that it should be kept secret. The hobbits are just reclusive, however, there are travelers passing through and Bree is on an actual crossroad.
There are scattered communities across the region that used to be Arnor and Eriador, but they’re mostly pretty isolated and insular.
For whatever reasons, establishing a stable prosperous community in Middle Earth just seems to be really hard. You’d think with ploughs, and agriculture, and domesticated animals they’d have densely populated the whole region in under a thousand years, but their history is of massive wars that laid waste to anything that hot firmly established, and incredibly hard very long term struggle to get critical mass for a recovery.
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Tolkien was a linguist, not a geologist or economist (his anti-industrial and pro-monarchical/religious perspective were a resistance to the changes occurring in his time), so it's no surprise that he spent so much time on the linguistics. His formative encounters with industrialization were the horrors of mechanized warfare in WW1, after which he retreated to the cloistered worlds of academia, religion (he was a dev…
Yes, we are on the same page as to what influences affected Tolkien, his limitations, his authorial intentions and goals, and the historical context in which his work was created. What the geophillic fans wish to hear however is more akin to, "Yes, Tolkien operated within these constraints. It would be great if someone could fanfic or headcannon their way into a reasonable conclusion with the benefit of hindsight and…
They sure are asking a lot of a fairy tale.
The author focuses on energy sources for machine power. But what about generating high heat for metallurgy? Coal burns longer and hotter than wood, and releases fewer particulates. Also coal is more energy dense than wood, making it easier to transport.
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If he was 100% aware of the status plate tectonics had at the time Tolkien was writing them he should not have criticized him as he did.
Maybe he was just sarcastic? It’s a no brainer that a person cannot be equally oriented both in linguistics and in geology. ... So it would be quite possible to declare an amnesty to the Professor at this place: they say, an offense undoubtedly took place, but it does not pose a particular public danger.
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It didn't. A few ideas from BOLT survive in the Silmarillion but it is certainly not a setting of LotR. Remember that neither Hobbit nor LotR originally was even in the Silmarillion universe it just sorta grew to be there. Fitting the Hobbit in actually is quite difficult.
> Remember that neither Hobbit nor LotR originally was even in the Silmarillion universe it just sorta grew to be there. Fitting the Hobbit in actually is quite difficult. We're not talking about some abandoned setting of LotR, we're talking about the world of the book that was actually published. Which is absolutely the world of the Silmarillion (also as published).
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The shire is not special. Nothing before the adventure of Bilbo made anyone think that it should be kept secret. The hobbits are just reclusive, however, there are travelers passing through and Bree is on an actual crossroad.
I think it’s special in the sense that it is surrounded on almost all sides for hundreds of miles by dangerous depopulated wastelands. The only exception is Bree, and that seems like a much more threatened and precarious community. It’s on the wrong side of the Brandywine, and within much easier raiding distance from the mountains, and whatever still lurks in the wastes that used to be Angmar. There are scattered com…
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> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. That's why so many great civilizations were founded in places with good geographic barriers around a productive interior. Ancient Egypt for example had the Nile and was surrounded by vast deserts, which weren't feasible to cross at the time. On the other end of history, the US has similar advantages.
I assure you that people crisscrossed the deserts in North Africa and the Middle East all the time in ancient days. Egypt's big advantage was its ability to produce lots of food along the Nile River and settle down and focus on something beyond survival.
Egypt's food production was certainly critical to its success, but its isolation was both its defense and its downfall. Other civilizations competed with each other and advanced their technology, while Egypt existed happily in isolation, unaware of new technologies like bronze and chariots. After the camel, along with ships able to carry significant cargo, Egypt's food production became a juicy target, and it was conquered by one civilization after another.
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Maintaining walls and supplying armies requires a fair amount of population though. Middle Earth is very thinly populated. The former Realm of Arnor is so thinly settled that the Northern Kingdom of the Dunedain had to be dissolved, and its people were reduced to a nomadic lifestyle. Sort of what happened to the crvilizations in the Amazonas basin in the 16th century.
> Sort of what happened to the civilizations in the Amazonas basin in the 16th century. Got any good sources on that? Sounds very interesting
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I would consider that a fault of the translation rather than the original writing, though not knowing Russian I couldn't say for sure. Translating literary works is a necessarily imperfect art, and as I understand it this translation was done on the translator's free time without compensation, so I'll take what I can get!
Translator is not to blame, since he's not a professional translator. Not even sure if he is a native English speaker. He did a translation because he was a fan of the original book in Russian, and I'm grateful to him, since otherwise I would not be able to read it. It's a pity that Tolkien Foundation actively battled any attempt to publish this book in English. Has that not been the case, I'm sure some publisher wou…