quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: Dude... Just ignore John Huston's narration at the beginning and just listen to the music behind it. That has given me chills for thirty years.
--Jonah
Mate...How can I listen to the music with all that late 70's American country folkish John Denver wannabe crap going on?
quote:How come Sauron didn't notice every time Bilbo used the ring throughout The Hobbit?
As I recall it's because it wasn't full "awake" at the time. Remember that Sauron's essence is tided to the ring and visa versa and at the time he was skulking down in Dol Guldur, not even at half strength. At least that's the explanation I recall. Supposedly it's also the reason why Bilbo just went invisible and not into that freaky wrath dimension, according to the film makers. Having said all the the supposed reason why it abandoned Gollum before Bilbo showed up was because it had heard Saurons call, so presumably it still had some mojo, just not enough to call back.
quote:Originally posted by Reverend: Mate...How can I listen to the music with all that late 70's American country folkish John Denver wannabe crap going on?
*lol* Yeah, those are the songs I don't like. Listen to the first thirty or forty seconds, ignoring Gandalf's narration... or not. That's the music I'm talking about. It comes and goes throughout. Some of the music cues are meh, some are good.
And that's teh explanation I've always seen for the ring/Sauron. He was coming back to strength and calling the ring, but Dol Goldur was in no wise the power battery the Barad-dur was.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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quote:I thought the only time an elf ever became a mortal was when Elrond's brother chose to become human rather than elven in the Silmarillion.
Arwen did do so, it's one of the greatest tragedies of the elven people and is also intimately connected with her progenitor from Beleriand in the first age.
Except for Arwen and, before her, Elrond's brother Elros Tar-Minyatur, the first High King of N�menor, the only elf to have chosen mortality was L�thien Tin�viel. The story of Beren and L�thien is one of my favorites from the Silmarillion for many reasons, but one big reason is that it connects with the future War of the Ring in different ways, not the least of which is L�thien, the most magnificient elven princess of all time, whose beauty was passed on to Arwen. Aragorn sings of them in the extended FoTR edition, on the way to Rivendell.
All this typing has made me want to re-read the Sil again, even though chapters like this one sting me ol' heart.
Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Nim: Daniel Butler said: I thought the only time an elf ever became a mortal was when Elrond's brother chose to become human rather than elven in the Silmarillion. Arwen did do so, it's one of the greatest tragedies of the elven people and is also intimately connected with her progenitor from Beleriand in the first age.
Except for Arwen and, before her, Elrond's brother Elros Tar-Minyatur, the first High King of N�menor, the only elf to have chosen mortality was L�thien Tin�viel. The story of Beren and L�thien is one of my favorites from the Silmarillion for many reasons, but one big reason is that it connects with the future War of the Ring in different ways, not the least of which is L�thien, the most magnificient elven princess of all time, whose beauty was passed on to Arwen. Aragorn sings of them in the extended FoTR edition, on the way to Rivendell.
Grr, all this typing has made me want to re-read the Sil again, even though chapters like this one and Turin's hurt to read.
It's interesting I'm listening at this very moment to the FotR - complete recordins. This is on the first disc right at the end (Aragorn singing the Song of L�thien).
I reckon that the Narn � Hin H�rin (The Children of H�rin) would make a wonderful movie. So tragic!
posted
I've seen Hurin around for a while now, is it any good? I gather it's an expansion of certain sections of the Silmarillion, but I was never able to get into that book. Lord of the Rings was hard enough for me to read, but that thing gave me a migraine just two pages in...OK, slight exaggeration, but it was still pretty hard going!
posted
Yeah, it's hard going, but the Tale of the Children of Hurin (Pretty much Turin's story) is one of my favourite parts of the Silmarillion.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
The Silmarillion edition that I have (illustrated by Ted Nasmith) is 304 pages long all in all, so I can usually finish it in one weekend. The tale of Hurin I like because it involves other characters established before the events of the story (Glaurung, Morgoth) and is weaved into a few of the humongous battles against Morgoth on the plains outside Angband.
Hm, Lucas said he would never do a Star Wars production not involving the Skywalkers, and yet now they are preparing to do a TV series focusing on everything BUT the Skywalkers, during the dark times. So maybe it isn't totally impossible to see some parts of the ancient times of Beleriand on the screen, if they are doing "The Hobbit" now, after all.
Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:The tale of Hurin I like because it involves other characters established before the events of the story (Glaurung, Morgoth) and is weaved into a few of the humongous battles against Morgoth on the plains outside Angband.
Now see that's my problem right there. I'm a very visual thinker, part of being artistic and all these weird made up names make it very difficult for me to actually picture what's going on. With LotR it wasn't so bad as most of the hokie pokie first & second age stuff was told more or less in passing and related to something in the narrative - the origin of the Ring and Gollum, snippits here and there about Elrond's childhood memories or the musings of Treebeard - all reasonable easy to digest. The only bit where you have to swallow all the exposition at once is the Council of Elrond but even that's more or less linear and builds on what you already know. The Silmarillion on the other had reads like the book of Genesis, with begotting and giants and waking up piles of ash and calling them elidarundiwotzit in the land of brushynekkiway that walked with a bit of a limp in the spring.
I can read the words, I can see where a sentence begins and that a full stop means it's finished, but somewhere in between I get lost and have the sudden urge to be afraid of giant spiders. Even when I really try I usually spend half the time flicking back and forth to the appendices, trying to keep track of what's what and who's where and how Maiar are old men with huge beards AND ancient god like beings who smoke pot.
posted
I think you misinterpreted my quote there. I meant that Glaurung and Morgoth had been introduced just a few chapters before the tale of H�rin's bane. Neither Glaurung nor Melkor were introduced like you describe, with some boring list of names or prosaically, they had their own stories.
As for you calling yourself a bonafide artistic, I didn't know that was a handicap for reading books with the informations in them. When I was 19, I sketched a guy in Laos with a graphite no.8 at a thousand yards in high wind. Maybe eight or even ten guys in the world could have made that sketch. But when I stumble upon lore related to a book I read earlier, I feel like it fleshes out the scraps of info I had gotten before, and then I am happy.
For instance, had I read "The Hobbit" after LOTR, I would've ate up all the stuff referring to the Necromancer and Gollum's relationship with the ring like it was ice cream.
And also, like Peregrinus was privy too, the swords of Gandalf and Bilbo/Frodo coming from the sacking of Gondolin? Shit like that, I love it.
Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
Reverend : You don't want to read The Children of Húrin. I had the same reaction you did to The Silmarillion (definitely nothing to do with artistry, though), and I don't think I even got halfway through Húrin before it was just too much.
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Nim: I think you misinterpreted my quote there. I meant that Glaurung and Morgoth had been introduced just a few chapters before the tale of H�rin's bane. Neither Glaurung nor Melkor were introduced like you describe, with some boring list of names or prosaically, they had their own stories.
As for you calling yourself a bonafide artistic, I didn't know that was a handicap for reading books with the informations in them. When I was 19, I sketched a guy in Laos with a graphite no.8 at a thousand yards in high wind. Maybe eight or even ten guys in the world could have made that sketch. But when I stumble upon lore related to a book I read earlier, I feel like it fleshes out the scraps of info I had gotten before, and then I am happy.
For instance, had I read "The Hobbit" after LOTR, I would've ate up all the stuff referring to the Necromancer and Gollum's relationship with the ring like it was ice cream.
And also, like Peregrinus was privy too, the swords of Gandalf and Bilbo/Frodo coming from the sacking of Gondolin? Shit like that, I love it.
Well I wasn't claiming Da Vinci like superpowers, just that if I can't picture what's going on, I get lost and it's all just a jumble of words. Perhaps it's more a form of dyslexia, who knows! All I know is all those names are bloody hard to keep straight, to the point where I have trouble associating them with anything visual.
Don't get me wrong, trivia and backstory is great, it's just the way it's presented is more like a writers guide to the source material. Very stuffy, like (surprise surprise) a scholar's recording of translated myths & legends, distilled down to the pure facts without any of the storytelling flare that made them compelling.
Now if they start writing books based on that material, then I'm all for it.
posted
I didn't mean to sound sarcastic, just wanted to get Laos in there. :-)
quote:distilled down to the pure facts without any of the storytelling flare that made them compelling.
I guess that was Chris Tolkien's way of trying not to color his father's work with his own tone, just putting in what he found in the notes. I like that, and from what I've heard he isn't too good of an author himself, so it was probably for the best.
There's one passage that sticks with me, a human that betrays his people by giving information to Morgoth in exchange for his lost wife, and Morgoth laughing and repaying him by "killing him in a most cruel way". I think it's a good example that there's a point to the absence of detail in the Silmarillion. You notice that the Valar or Eru was almost nonexistant in LOTR, except for when Gandalf is returned to the world or when Saruman dies and his spirit is scattered by a wind from the West. If the Valar and Morgoth where to be described and written in a typical fantasy-book perspective, like "Mandos adjusted his ethereal robe and scratched his star-beard while thinking about what to do with F�anor, having come just yesterday into his halls of the dead. 'Hmmm!' he exclaimed, changing his constitution to float through the wall and talk to the elves in the other room." would ruin the detached way they are described in the Sil as it is.
John Rhys-Davies discussed in the extra material for FOTR that you could mention in the book how Galadriel gives Gimli three strands of her hair as a gift, but you couldn't show it on-screen because it would look silly having him stand there with three flailing hairs in his glove and smiling.
To "reimagine" the Silmarillion and embellish it by modern authors, the way Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have molested the corpse of Dune, would seem to me like repainting the Mona Lisa to get the colors out the way they might've looked like when they were one week old, instead of just accepting what's there.
I didn't mean to go on so long and off-topic, it's just so seldom it comes up here and it's fun.
Registered: Aug 1999
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Daniel Butler
I'm a Singapore where is my boat
Member # 1689
posted
Nim: I believe it was Arwen I was asking about - how could she give up immortality, because I'd thought that was a privilege only offered to her father and uncle.
I can't relate to not keeping the names straight. Maybe it's my fairly significant talent for linguistics (not *languages* specifically, now, but linguistics). One of the reasons I like Lord of the Rings so much is because of the depth of the languages Tolkien created, even with names to go with them, appropriate to the language spoken by the named.
Registered: Jul 2005
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