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This Turned Into A Tolkien Rant

I have finally read through the entire Silmarillion.

Good GOD, that was boring.

It shouldn't be. There was a goddamn fistfight between the Dark Lord and a giant light-eating darkness-spinning spider, which ended when the Dark Lord tag-teamed 75 Balrogs with their flaming whips and swords to drive the monster off. That should be interesting to read. But Tolkien's need to be all high saga narrative style whenever he's writing about Elves makes it mind-numbing.*

Also, his total Mary-Sueing of the entire species of Elves still bugs me. He keeps insisting that they're the fairest and wisest and noblest of races and they could totally beat you at everything and they're the best times infinity, and yet the entire Silmarillion consists of them bashing each other with swords because they have FEELINGS. And they seem to be rather forgetful. Rather than improving their skills, they made all the nicest stuff right at the beginning of time, and then it all got destroyed and they forgot how they did it and so they just sat around making less-awesome things and stabbing each other with complexly-named swords. Tolkien's contention that The Old Ways Are The Best Ways leaves his world unnervingly stagnant.

I do like to entertain myself, though, with the idea that Elves (or at least some of them) are color-blind. This is my explanation for their obsession with white and grey and silver. It's a stupid thing to complain about, but I really do get bugged with the lack of color in their world, so it's fun to think that all the soft grey EVERYTHING is actually riotously colorful. And yes, I know I am full of shit, but dammit I had to do something to get through this thing.

It makes me wonder why the hell The Hobbit is one of my favorite books, when The Silmarillion bores the hell out of me and LotR annoys me with its terrible dialogue, incessant musical numbers, and long bookends of hobbit fuck-aroundery. Maybe Tolkien's just a better writer when he gives up trying to sound magnificent. Or maybe the visions in his head are far cooler than the words he can put to them. But they are impressive visions, so even after all my ranting, I gotta give it to him--the guy's imagination had STYLE.

*Makes me want to reread David Eddings' books, because of his contrasts between the High Fancy Narrative Style and What Our Heroes Really Said--the latter of which is a lot less forsoothy and a lot more grumbly.

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Eddings for the win!!!

Maybe the Elves see colour like the Crystal Singers in that Anne McCaffrey trilogy ;)

Well, if elves are color-blind, then maybe they focus more on textures and stuff. (And now I'm picturing elvish lace-makers and knitters who churn out awesome things, but it's mostly in white and gray.)

I always thought the Silmarillion was more of 'Tolkien publishes his history of Middle Earth because he knows he'll never have time to turn it all into novels'.

It was published posthumously, with editing by his son Christopher, so yeah, it wasn't really made into a cohesive narrative before that. But honestly LotR has the same boring tone.

A lot of the sagas are all "it was better in the old days" and "we had better stuff in the old days" because they weren't written down until long after the fact, and by then people HAD forgotten how to make the really spiffy stuff. There are stories in the end days of the Viking Age of people raiding tombs because the older swords were made better.

And Tolkien was very influenced by the sagas.

True. I liked LotR a lot more once I'd seen the movie and had a better sense of it.

I loved the hobbit and the lord of the rings, had to fight to get through the silmarillion though, and honestly I don't remember much from it. :x

Oh, my, yes, he was. I kept expecting somebody to forge a Sampo to go with the Silmarils.

I don't mind the occasional saga-like "It was better in the old days" world, but it does give that feeling of extreme stagnancy, and it's almost obligatory in high fantasy -- possibly because so many people emulate Tolkien. It gets old -- dual meaning intended. "Oh, ho hum, let's see what you call your long-extinct wonder civilization. That you've never bothered to study. With technology you never even tried to emulate or reverse engineer."

To be fair, J. R. R. Tolkien knew that the Silmarillion wasn't a novel, and never tried to publish it.

I don't know whether he expected his son not only to live off his inheritance, but to do so by publishing things that Professor Tolkien chose not to publish in his lifetime, and in some cases left incomplete. (What novelist would publish Unfinished Tales with the title being an actual description of the contents, rather than, say, a story about someone who was never satisfied enough to send their work to an editor?)

At least the other sagas have the excuse that "But that civilization died out and the knowledge was lost." But even allowing for people getting sworded all over the place, that excuse still doesn't work when the civilization is full of IMMORTALS. Did they all get amnesia?

But they tend to get hung up on the past. "And lo, instead of taking advantage of a millennia-spanning lifetime to improve on his previous work, Finebob spent the rest of his life pissing and moaning over that one damn necklace he'd made five centuries ago that Celesteve cast into the deep pits of Orodruin because he didn't like that Finabob was going out with his sister Jessiel" sort of thing.

(Same reason Atlantis: The Lost Empire Did Not Work for me. They're stuck in a big hole under the sea and live for thousands of years, and they FORGOT HOW TO READ? I remain skeptical.)

Atlantis always bothered me as well. Bet explanation I can make is that only the royal family has true immortality, and the rest of the people just have lesser longevity. Even with a lifespan of centuries, you'll lose stuff in 8800 years. As for the reading, it may be that that literature was restricted to the highest classes, and they were all wiped out in the flood, except for Kida, who was too young to read at the time, and the king, who being blind was unable to teach anyone.
Of course, even with this, they should have been able to figure it out in that amount of time.

This is why I'd like there to be a Silmarillion film (or several). Jackson would alter the hell out of it, but he'd at least make it interesting.

I think the Elven colourblindness might be a result of their early years and the story cosmology. They woke up under starlight, the only greater light source being the Two Trees which were way the hell over in Valinor and which, from the description, seem to have washed everything in gold or silver during the apex of their brightness. After the Trees were destroyed, everything was in a sort of eternal twilight until the Sun and Moon were made. So it could be that for the first 5000-odd years of their existence, there weren't a lot of colours for them to use. And of course those that came later would pay homage to this period.

Edited 2013-02-11 23:21 (UTC)

I have to admit, in my own head the Default Fantasyland is a lot more Eddingsy than Tolkieny. Loved the snark.

I am unfamiliar with most of McCaffrey's works. How do the Crystal Singers see color?

I have never managed to get more than 1/4 way through the Silmarillon. Boring. As. Fuck.

I love the elves, but at times they can act like total assholes. Like the ones in Mirkwood. And the ones who refused to help the dwarves.

I find the color blindness (lol) of the elves an interesting contrast to the rest of the world they exist in. I see it as them being so 'refined' that they are above color, vibrating at a higher plane of existence as it were. I thought the elven city in LOTR was incredibly beautiful, but I'd get tired of it after awhile. Like you, I'd need color. Those patios that extend out over the cliffs would be covered in begonias and the archy buildings would all have wisterias growing on them.

I find Eddings supremely tedious and boring...

*grin* Fair enough. I don't, but I can totally understand why someone would.

They become hypersenstive to colour, so prefer muted colours with a textural aspect, because when they become hypersensitive those colours become more amazing than anything the non crystal singers see!

And you have prompted my reread of the Edding library, starting Belgarath tonight :D

Have you read any Brandon Sanderson? I have just been reading his Mistborn books and loving them.

I also find Eddings supremely tedious and boring, because it's ALL THE SAME. Same characters, same voices, did we REALLY need to write two sets of five and two trilogies that were ALL THE BLOODY SAME? I mean, come ON...

That said, the Hobbit was intentionally written for his children, whereas LOTR was written...um...in theory for grownups.

I admit, part of the reason Eddings interests me is watching how deliberately he changes variables in his books, and also how he recycles characters. Also, he wins for best author-self-insert ever in the form of the talking, snarky Purpose of The Universe, because it's somehow unconsciously meta. But like I said: I can totally see why one wouldn't go for him.

I have never read the Silmarillion, but I think I did start and couldn't get into it. But I loved The Hobbit and LOTR even when I first read them. Two Towers seemed to take forever, as if they spent months in the grassland chasing orcs and walking towards Mordor, but the story overall was great. I wonder if because I read so fast, the dragging/high narrative doesn't take as long, so I didn't notice it as much? And everything goes faster if I've already read it. But I love Eddings' works because they're so much more fun, with snark and candid characterizations everywhere. The repetition didn't bother me, because even the characters noticed it, so it seemed like something Decreed By Fate and deliberate, not that he couldn't come up with anything else so wrote the same story twice.

I think the colorblind elves theory is intriguing, though.

Yeah, I love that Eddings's characters are archetypes and don't really know how they feel about it. And how grumpy they get at times because the Purpose of the Universe has been NAGGING them to save the world for CENTURIES and it's getting old.

I thought it was interesting that he was so careful about which variables he changed--in the Belgariad our hero was what he called the Dumb Hero--or, at least, the innocent hero with no idea what was going on in the world. In the Elenium you had a similar quest for a Magic Thingamajig (his words, not mine), but he opted for a seasoned and world-weary hero to be the one on the quest. It's a fun difference.

I must have just skimmed through LotR when I read it as a kid, because this time around I'm just overcome with how it drags. I had forgotten that the first half of Fellowship consists entirely of fucking around and musical numbers. (I had also forgotten that, while I admire his conlanging dedication, it's rather weird to have characters stop the action dead to tell their friends that the mountain to your left, which Men now know as Mount Intheway, or Hocketyblarg in the ancient tongue, is called by the Elves Ithilwithil or sometimes Wiggitywack, but the dwarves call it Glockendurm unless it's Tuesday and then they use the term Khar-daznog which means "Dude, that's a mountain over there and it's Tuesday" and on and on ...) He seems to know where he's going in The Hobbit. Not so much LotR.

I'd have a vegetable garden. Pretty AND edible!

... This is why I tell people I am a hobbit and not an elf.

The royal family being the ones with longevity was my answer, too! But then, yes, you'd think in 8500 years SOMEBODY would manage to decipher their own darn writing system.

Don't get me STARTED on their "root dialect" that lets them figure out how to speak all the modern languages. At least ... at least it's a NOVEL stupid way for a movie to dispense with a language barrier?

I've only The Way of Kings. I enjoyed it well enough. It had some cool ideas in it.

Sanderson's a point of pride around here, though. Why is it so many fantasy authors come from Brigham Young University? And why can I always spot them without knowing how I do it?

Better than Leeloo learning to read English in five seconds in The Fifth Element. Hollywood just has weird ideas about linguistics.

Speaking of colour, Sanderson has a party colour-based magic system in Warbreaker. It's not very complex, but use of magic drains the colour in an area, leaving it looking drab and grey.

Or the universal translator from Star Trek. Guys, the more you explain it the less sense it makes.

I always wondered why Leeloo could phonetically read "Please Help," but a) hadn't been around when the Roman alphabet was developed and b) had to guess that it meant "please help" instead of, you know, "Free with Proof of Purchase" or "Working To Serve YOU" or anything else an ad might say.

I always surprise people by saying that one of the more realistic portrayals of multilingualism is Star Wars. You've got two competing lingua francas and a lot of dialects that galactic citizens might be able to understand but not produce, so you get folks speaking different languages to each other and understanding it quite well. It's still got some weirdness, but it's surprisingly less strange than a lot of answers I've seen.

Could be. Maybe they have vision like cats.

(Were they awake during the time of the Lamps? I already forgot.)

I had to refer to this. Wikipedia has a page for everything in Tolkien, and often treats it like real history.

I started wondering about his religious leaning about half way through the first book, google answered my question and i was not suprised! (I did forget you were Utah based until now, whoops)

I love reading The Mallorian and The Belgariad in that order, backwards, and reminding myself just how young Garion was in the first books. And Eddings really has pinned surly teenage boy and petulate teenage girl (high school teacher here).

Naturally! And also, that's WAY easier to understand.

There are also at least two Tolkien wikis. I've been using them as cross-reference.

Stargate kinda did something similar, although in that case it's that the linguist character could figure out the language of the displaced humans because he knew Proto-Indo-European, and their language had apparently never changed since they were taken from Earth (even though they weren't immortal, so their language would have to have drifted as far from PIE as any other modern Indo-European language...let alone the fact that they'd been abducted from freaking Egypt where nobody spoke an IE language until the Greeks took over).

Yeah, actually, I think it would have made more sense for Jackson to have done movies of stuff like the Quenta Silmarillion or the Lay of the Children of Hurin, because they're so much less fleshed out, so the inevitable added dialogue and such could only expand on it.

But there's no way in hell Christopher Tolkein would ever let them adapt any of the stuff that wasn't part of the deal with JRRT way back in the day.

Well, he did basically write LOTR for two reasons: he needed an outlet/excuse for his conlanging, and his editor wouldn't stop nagging him for a sequel to The Hobbit. ;)

Okay, you've done better than me. I could never make it through The Silmarillion. It is nigh unreadable. I loved LOTR though.

With The Silmarillion there is at least the excuse that it wasn't really written (in its current form) by JRRT. It was cobbled together by Christopher from various drafts and such, none of which could be said to be in any way "final". Also, it covers a ridiculously long period of Middle Earth history. The Quenta Silmarillion is not a story. It has summaries of stories in it.

True. He thought he was almost done when he got to Moria, and there were quite a few drafts of early chapters where Frodo was named Bingo, which ... yeah, it wouldn't have been quite the same as an epic. So I would say that the reason it felt like he wasn't sure where he was going was that he really WASN'T. But it could've used an editor.

As for the conlang show-off stuff, I can't fault him for being excited, but in order to keep a good story flowing I think his editors should've relegated more to the appendices.

True. I still think it could've been made at least somewhat more interesting, but with its postumous editing that was probably doomed from the start.

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This Turned Into A Tolkien Rant

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