Quote:
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Originally Posted by Aiwendil
. . it would be unrealistic for the Hobbits only to encounter upon their journey servants of Sauron, or people and things relating directly to the central plot. To give them a few unrelated adventures adds a lot to the realism of Middle-earth.
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Total agreement. To back you up (not that you need it much, but still), I'll wallow in self-repeating:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by HerenIstarion
( from Prologue Discussion)
I can’t help remembering A.P.Chekhov, Russian playwright with his saying: “if there is a rifle on the wall in act 1, it should be firing off at least in act 3”. And all the books I’ve read usually follow this scheme up neatly. I.e., there usually are no unneeded things. Tolkien, even apart from prologue, which is the treasury of such 'things unrequired for the development of the plot', is placing them here an there (wait till we reach Bombadil, heh!). Tolkien is hinting to older history of the world he brings us into, and does that not only via ancient and neatly worked out names (which feel solid even for the unconscious), old legends and bits of untranlsated poetry, but by means of those unrequired things, those Hornblowers and Bracegirdles, which are completely unneeded, but form a background, some feeling on the border of one’s consicousness, that there is more to it than the plot we are about to read, that plot is just a tiny friction of the whole world. All of that is forming first in the prologue, where the walls are covered up in rifles and guns of all sorts, which, apart from firing, never make later appearence at all! |
Good of you to put thrice as less words around it, too
edit: Dark matter will stand uncommented upon
edit2: Um, but why not. Ok - Nazgul can't be compared to Dark Matter on the basis that Dark Matter is not, as indicated,
absence of matter as such (I believe the view that vacuum is 'nothingness' is out of date also), whilst their mode of existence is more or less
absence of life and their longevity is due not to an abundance of life, but to lack thereof. So to say, those who can not die can not live either. Etc
cheers