The Current Narrative

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

If similar posts were made here, people would (or maybe the correct phrase is "would have once upon a time") jump all over these posts, correcting or criticizing them. But what I hear here is ... crickets.

Thoughts?

I have gone from "little hope" to "no hope" that I would enjoy anything about the Amazon series.
I feel also that my complaints over the years have likely become tiresome, so I've elected to simply ignore the whole thing as far as possible.

[mhagain]

I mostly just want the show to not suck. Otherwise I'm happy enough to go along for the ride with whatever story it's going to tell. I know it won't be Tolkien, I know there are going to be parts of it that will be true, and other parts that will grate, but I've more or less made my peace with that. I just don't have the time and energy to invest in hating on something and that's OK. If it turns out I don't like it, I'll just go watch something I do like instead.

I also know that things are going to get very tiresome when it releases. There are still people out there who are so wound up in how the Star Wars sequels or latter seasons of Game of Thrones RUINED EVERYTHING FOREVER, and are so caught up in it that they're quite happy to continue producing 4 hour YouTube videos meticulously deconstructing every single minor point. Then there are the plot hole warriors who'll devote colossal energy to pulling out contradictions with obscure footnotes as evidence that they' re somehow more clever than the creators.

Finally there's the racist/sexist angle, already hard at work getting in a twist over deviations from "the lore". And it's always "the lore" with these people which is fairly convenient as it makes them easier to identify.

We've 3 months of relative peace before all this crap lands, and I want to just enjoy that.

So no, not too interested in engaging on this stuff right now. Particularly not when it concerns a show that's based on such thin source material that inventing stuff wholesale is unavoidable anyway.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Finally there's the racist/sexist angle, already hard at work getting in a twist over deviations from "the lore". And it's always "the lore" with these people which is fairly convenient as it makes them easier to identify.

That's rather a broad brush, don't you think? It is part and parcel of Amazon's contempt for Tolkien's creation, the "lore," that they run roughshod over everything including his admittedly Euro- and androcentric viewpoint; he very consciously calqued his creation upon, indeed set it in a fictional prehistory of, northwestern Europe. Why should criticism of this "we're going to make generic cliche-ridden fantasy but call it 'Tolkien'" thus be an identifier of "istaphobes?"

Pretty much everything in Tolkien's mental furniture led that way, from his youthful infatuation with the Kalevala to the fact that his tripartite division of the Elves stemmed ultimately from dissatisfaction with Grimm's explanation of Snorri Sturluson's account of the Norse alfr. His motivation, following Lonnrot and Grundvig, was to create a national myth, but out of whole cloth: it was indeed a "mythology for England" (Carpenter's phrase, but a decent precis of Letter 131). In fact, in The Lost Tales, Tol Eressea was England, the future island of Great Britain. At least until the early 1960s, and possibly for the rest of his life, the frame story/transmission vector was the Anglo-Saxon mariner Aelfwine.

Less well-known but just as direct is this, from Letter 180: "Having set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own." Middle-earth is completely ripped up by the roots if its grounding in the soil of England is removed. And this, from Letter 190: "'The Shire' is based on rural England and not any other country in the world... The toponymy of The Shire, to take the first list, is a 'parody' of that of rural England, in much the same sense as are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to. After all the book is English, and by an Englishman, and presumably even those who wish its narrative and dialogue turned into an idiom that they understand, will not ask of a translator that he should deliberately attempt to destroy the local colour."

It is all of a piece that Amazon's invented Harfoot protohobbits should have names that are linguistically impossible within Tolkien's subcreation, and skin-tones that are equally impossible. What Amazon is giving us is not Tolkien, but a cargo-cult with Tolkien featuring as John Frum; and "Nori Brandyfoot" is no more legitimate than a bamboo mockup was an actual DC-3.

Remember this blast, highly appropriate today:

I wonder why a translator should think himself called on or entitled to do
any such thing. That this is an 'imaginary' world does not give him any right to remodel it according to his fancy, even if he could in a few months create a new coherent structure which it took me years to work out.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

In this connection, it's worth reading Verlyn Flieger's paper where she speculates that the Notion Club Papers may have been another idea for a frame-story to replace Aelfwine, but one which remained explicitly English: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/176066

[alatar]

Hey there, ho there, I've spewed enough venom on PJ's LotR movies (and said some nice things too ) back when I used to care.



But then PJ's Hobbit broke me, with so much wrong that even non-fanatics could easily point out the nonsense, so what was the point in posting what we all know and can see? At least PJ got me invested in LotR, but he didn't with the Hobbit.



And now older (and I was old when I started posting here ), I care even less. Seems that most productions aren't aimed at me anyway, so I easily dodge them. Not sure if I'll watch Amazon's production - might do so so that I can discuss it with others. So seems like Galadriel warrior-princess is going to have adventures and, maybe, try to get the peoples of ME to fight the current rising evil. How exciting it seems...



But anyway, funny that I heard a 'tuber being nostalgic about how 'good' PJ's LotR was, and that they were hoping that it wouldn't be remade. Guessing that the recent trend of 'rewriting' the story has made them pessimistic. Wonder how much Amazon's production is feeding that feeling?



That said, the recent version of Dune (2021) gives me some hope. It was so close to my expectation that it was like watching a home movie (it actually got me emotional, despite me not having any). Hoping that something like that happens in my lifetime to one of Tolkien's works.