Tarmor's Terribly Tantalizing Tarasque Terrrifying Random Banter #234

[Anonymouswizard]

The raunchiest is when Lùthien is said to "lay hands" on Beren.

Based on my Official Guide to Touching for the English^TM they must have been married for three years.

If only it had been the only one... Fun fact: the actress for Tauriel was promised the character wouldn't be put in some bull**** love triangle.

Hmmmmm... Can we squeeze a fourth character in there, make it a love quadralateral?

There is considerable debate around which of the groups present does not count as one "army".

Hmmmmm.. do the Men count as an army, or are they more of a militia?

[Keltest]

I dont think the eagles count as an army A: because they were late, and B: because there were so few of them.

[DavidSh]

I dont think the eagles count as an army A: because they were late, and B: because there were so few of them.

And C: because they were an air force.

I can't find either of my copies right now, but I recall Dwarves, Elves, Men, and Goblins as distinct armies, with separate, possibly conflicting, goals. The Wargs seemed to be pretty tight with the Goblins.

[Keltest]

And C: because they were an air force.

I can't find either of my copies right now, but I recall Dwarves, Elves, Men, and Goblins as distinct armies, with separate, possibly conflicting, goals. The Wargs seemed to be pretty tight with the Goblins.

I think the Wargs are considered separate from the Goblins due to the previously established relationship where they sometimes work together for a common goal, but arent part of the same chain of command, so to speak. Much like the Elves and Men.

[Rater202]

Anyway, I've started a thread for my readthrough of The hobbit, if anyone's interested

[Anonymouswizard]

I've just spent the better part of an hour running around trying to find my parcel, only to discover that the person who might have it possibly isn't in the building (and I've had confirmation that it was definitely by the letterbox earlier).

I'm annoyed. After a month's wait for release and an eleven hour shift I was very much looking forward to reading my new book. Instead I've just had additional stress when I've got an early start tomorrow.

[Tarmor]

If I were to do a let's-read thread over in Media Discussions where I give my thoughts on the book chapter by chapter from the perspective of someone with an intellectual knowledge of the book reading it for the first time, would there be an interest in that?

"You have my bow!" You can't have my sword... I sold my swords decades ago. (Yeah, wrong movie, and I'm sure its not in the books.)

I'm interested. It's about time I re-read Hobbit and LotR myself.

I've just spent the better part of an hour running around trying to find my parcel, only to discover that the person who might have it possibly isn't in the building (and I've had confirmation that it was definitely by the letterbox earlier).

I'm annoyed. After a month's wait for release and an eleven hour shift I was very much looking forward to reading my new book. Instead I've just had additional stress when I've got an early start tomorrow.

I hope you find it soon!
I ordered some older novels last weekend from the USA to fill gaps in my book collection. I'm looking forward to these arriving as it includes a four-book set I've never read, and the third book of a trilogy (I have the first two, never read)... I've been given 5 tracking numbers for 11 books. I might have the joy of parcels arriving all next month!

[Peelee]

Question: I've never actually read The Hobbit. I know the gist of the plot from pop-culture osmosis, wiki walks, general exposure to The Lord of The Rings, and occasionally clips of Rankin Bass film, but I've never actually read it.

I discussed this with my mom a bit ago, and she gifted m a copy of the 75th-anniversary pocket edition of the novel as a birthday present this morning (I am 28)

If I were to do a let's-read thread over in Media Discussions where I give my thoughts on the book chapter by chapter from the perspective of someone with an intellectual knowledge of the book reading it for the first time, would there be an interest in that?

I'd love it!

[Bartmanhomer]

Is the Hobbit based on the Lord of the Rings?

[Peelee]

Is the Hobbit based on the Lord of the Rings?

.....no. No it is not.

[Bartmanhomer]

.....no. No it is not.

Ok. I thought The Hobbit was based on Lord of the Rings but you're telling me it isn't.

[Peelee]

Ok. I thought The Hobbit was based on Lord of the Rings but you're telling me it isn't.

The Hobbit was written first.

[Bartmanhomer]

The Hobbit was written first.

Ok. Thank you for telling me that.

[Tarmor]

Is the Hobbit based on the Lord of the Rings?

You could say that the 'Lord of the Rings' is based on 'The Hobbit'.... in that it follows after The Hobbit, and the events of The Hobbit are very important to set up what happens in LotR.

[Bartmanhomer]

You could say that the 'Lord of the Rings' is based on 'The Hobbit'.... in that it follows after The Hobbit, and the events of The Hobbit are very important to set up what happens in LotR.

Yes Peelee already mentioned that the Hobbit was first.

[Beeftank]

Tolkien wrote the Hobbit first as sort of a stand alone story, then later when he wrote LOTR he decided to make the hobbit a prequel to it.

Haven’t read any of them though. I tried LOTR but I got bored around the mines of Moria.

[factotum]

Tolkien wrote the Hobbit first as sort of a stand alone story, then later when he wrote LOTR he decided to make the hobbit a prequel to it.

He started writing all the legendary stuff first. The Hobbit was just meant to be a cute story for his kids, but he couldn't help including aspects of his legend into it. This is why there's no creation myth for Hobbits in The Silmarillion, they were never originally meant to be part of this world! LOTR was written as a continuation with the popular hobbit characters after he was told that the chances of him getting the Silmarillion published (which is what he really wanted) were pretty much nil.

[Razade]

He started writing all the legendary stuff first. The Hobbit was just meant to be a cute story for his kids, but he couldn't help including aspects of his legend into it. This is why there's no creation myth for Hobbits in The Silmarillion, they were never originally meant to be part of this world! LOTR was written as a continuation with the popular hobbit characters after he was told that the chances of him getting the Silmarillion published (which is what he really wanted) were pretty much nil.

This is...mostly not correct? Tolkien was writing poetry and legends and creating languages since the 1910's but none of that really crystalized into The Lord of the Rings until way later and a lot of the early stuff doesn't really see much movement from his own private writings to what would become his mythology post 1930s. The stuff before that was a private mythology and he only wrote The Hobbit because it was an oral series of stories he'd tell his children but when they started to contradict his tellings with previous tellings, he decided to just write it down so there was a concrete version.

Even then, the Hobbit was loosely based on the legends he wrote privately and those legends went on to help build what we know as the Legerdum but the Ælfwine stuff and The Lost Tales are themselves not The Lord of the Rings backstory. Tolkien didn't start writing The Lord of the Rings until the 1940s, after the publication of The Hobbit, and what we understand as The Silmarillion and the rest of the History that Tolkien built didn't really crystalize until then. Even in the 1940's Tolkien was conscious of The Lord of the Rings being something of a sequel to the Hobbit as can be seen in his letters at the time.

It's just not true that Tolkien did not see the two connected from the beginning. There's pretty strong evidence from Tolkien himself that they were, from the get go, pretty intertwined and related as early as Tolkien sitting down to get the Lord of the Rings started. The relationship between the two are really complex, made even more so with his earlier writings and later revisions to what became his mythology. It's also just not true about The Silmarillion. He didn't even try to get that published until after The Lord of the Rings was written. He didn't approach it as a thing to be published until the 1950s and it was literally the rest of his life's work to get it to be something able to be published.

Tolkien's goal was not, at any point, to get the Silmarillion published before The Lord of the Rings. He did not feel his mythology was in a place to be published even in the late 1950s. He certainly, and expressed as much in his letters, didn't feel it was ready before The Return of the King which was published in 1955. Both works had already been published (the Hobbit by more than two decades and The Lord of the Rings by a decade) before he ever turned to try and get his Silmarillion published which..ya know...he never did. He died in 1973 and The Silmarillion was published in 1977 by his son along with a ton of unfinished notes and addendums to previously written material.

There is also a creation myth (of a sort. It's sorta fractured but easily put together) for Hobbits from Tolkein himself. They are an offshoot of Man, separated when Mirkwood Forest was created and separated them from Man. The Prologue of Lord of the Rings says

Despite we are separated now, the hobbits are close kin to us; anyway, they are closer to us than Elves, and even from the dwarves. In the ancient days they spoke in the human tongues, with a special dialect, and the same habits like us they have, for good and bad.

The Rohirrim know of them, and call them by their old name, Holbytlan in The Road to Isengard. They descend from the Stoors who themselves have links to Man. They were specifically related to the Northmen, and Merry even is noted as spending the rest of his life writing on this connection. The book is Old Words and Names in the Shire. They're also noted as a Young Race (so not Dwarf of Elf or anything like that) and that they have The Gift of Man which only further cements that they are not a distinct race but are some form of Man.

[DavidSh]

Various events took place in 1937. I quote from Christopher Tolkien, in an appendix to The Children of Hurin.

The Hobbit was published by George Allen and Unwin on 21 September of that year [1937], and not long afterwards, at the invitation of the publisher, my father sent in a number of his manuscripts, which were delivered in London on 15 November 1937. Among these was the Quenta Silmarillion, as far as it then went, ending in the middle of a sentence at the foot of a page.
...[ he continued further while the manuscripts were out ]...
My father had reached these words when the Quenta Silmarillion and the other manuscripts were returned to him; and three days later, on 19 December 1937, he wrote to Allen and Unwin saying: 'I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits --"A long expected party".'

So, where there wasn't a complete submission, he clearly had interest in publishing Silmarillion material before he got started on The Lord of the Rings.

[Razade]

Various events took place in 1937. I quote from Christopher Tolkien, in an appendix to The Children of Hurin.



So, where there wasn't a complete submission, he clearly had interest in publishing Silmarillion material before he got started on The Lord of the Rings.

But not as what it became or even close to it and, clearly, among those things were what would become The Lord of the Rings. So it's still fair to say that he didn't publish Lord of the Rings because no one would print his Silmarillion. He was already working on what would become Lord of the Rings at that point. This is just known stuff at this point and to sum up his publishing of Lord of the Rings as something he did because what he "really" wanted to publish couldn't be published is just a vast, stark characterization of facts. He didn't have The Silmarillion in total even before he died, let alone by 1954 when Lord of the Rings was published since he was working on Lord of the Rings as early as 1937 and the rest of the trilogy by 1949. In fact, we know that Tolkein originally wanted The Silmarillion to be published alongside the Trilogy. Not before it.

[DavidSh]

The events as I imagine them were something like this:
He had been writing and reworking the Silmarillion material for quite some time, but never really finishing any of it.
He then wrote and had published The Hobbit.
The publishers then said to him. "That was good. Do you have anything else we might publish?"
He sent some stuff, including the Silmarillion material he had been working on, with the idea that he could produce a finished version if the publishers were interested.
The publishers looked at it, and said "Eh, do you have anything about hobbits?"
He sat down, thought a bit, and said to himself "I can do that".

Now you can provide quotes showing that I've got it all wrong.

[Anonymouswizard]

Also, from what I've heard it took several attempts for the shape of The Lord of the Rings to come together, the original intention wasn't to link it to the mythology he was also working on. But masterworks are made in the edit, and eventually Sauron became the villain instead of the intended giant, and the modern quest template was born.

But yeah, from what I've heard early editions of The Hobbit included some minor elements that don't appear in the rest of the Legendirium, and are the key thing pointing towards the book not being originally intended as part of it.

Side note, I thought the reason hobbits didn't get an origin was because they're short Men. A common ancestor with the Rohirrim a couple of Ages back or the like.

[Rater202]

The edition I have flat-out says that from the second edition onward major changes were made to the fifth chapter in order to tie it to Lord of the Rings which he was working on at the time.

And from what I've heard, Tolkien intended to make even more changes for a later edition but stopped after the revised first chapter was proofread by a friend who said "this is great but it's not The Hobbit anymore."

As far as I can tell, any other changes between editions relate to solely spelling and grammar.

[Fyraltari]

The edition I have flat-out says that from the second edition onward major changes were made to the fifth chapter in order to tie it to Lord of the Rings which he was working on at the time.

And from what I've heard, Tolkien intended to make even more changes for a later edition but stopped after the revised first chapter was proofread by a friend who said "this is great but it's not The Hobbit anymore."

As far as I can tell, any other changes between editions relate to solely spelling and grammar.

Yes, which is why The Lord of the Rings makes several mentions of a previous, inaccurate, version of Bilbo's story, and he's very sorry about it.

[Anonymouswizard]

Well a replacement for my preorder is on the way, theoretically arriving tomorrow and hopefully this time it won't be stolen by the time I get to the letterbox.

Still furious at this. It means that either one of the other people in the building is a thief, or is willing to let one in the building. Meanwhile I'm down another £25.

[Rater202]

Well a replacement for my preorder is on the way, theoretically arriving tomorrow and hopefully this time it won't be stolen by the time I get to the letterbox.

Still furious at this. It means that either one of the other people in the building is a thief, or is willing to let one in the building. Meanwhile, I'm down another £25.

Just give the word and, should the thief still be alive by then, I will have them killed upon my ascension to the grand ruler of the planet.

Joking aside, much suckage. Would you like a hug?

[Anonymouswizard]

Just give the word and, should the thief still be alive by then, I will have them killed upon my ascension to the grand ruler of the planet.

Joking aside, much suckage. Would you like a hug?

Sadly if I could make a reasonable guess at who it is I'd have already contacted the landlord. I mean, it's a day later, everybody got informed it was missing last night, if it had been outside my door after work I'd just have assumed they picked it up by mistake and double checked their post.

Virtual hugs only, please. You have to buy me dinner for physical hug privileges.

[Rater202]

I'll be making a homemade Lenom Rice soup today, if everything goes well. Will keep everyone posted on how it turns out.

I'm trying to get into the habit of cooking more "real" food, you know. It's basically why I started experimenting with things.

[Anonymouswizard]

I'll be making a homemade Lenom Rice soup today,

Homemade Leman Russ? Don't you need a permit for tanks?

Yes, I know my eyesight is terrible. BUT YOU SHALL NEVER MAKE ME SWITCH TO BIG TEXT MODE!!!!!

[Peelee]

Homemade Leman Russ? Don't you need a permit for tanks?

Yes, I know my eyesight is terrible. BUT YOU SHALL NEVER MAKE ME SWITCH TO BIG TEXT MODE!!!!!

Note to self, get Rawhide to set AW's profile to big text mode.