I still have SOME of my powers, you know.
Question on the cover art … I distinctly remember from my high-school days (early 80s) a book cover (or maybe just an illustration on a calendar) that featured the Fellowship. Aragorn had long, flowing red curls, and looked sorta pudgy. The rest of the Fellowship looked equally silly, aothough it was obvious the artist was trying very very hard to make them look heroic. Anybody remember this? I’d love to see it again, just to laugh at it.
Sounds like a Hildebrandt image.
That’s dang close to what I remember seeing, but I’d swear that Aragorn (third from right) had curly red hair.
Egads, Rowena and the Hildebrandts, ugh!
After those lovely early years where the JRRT calenders were illustrated by JRRT’s drawings themselves, it was quite traumatic to see the later versions.
Or, a genre-defining piece of work becomes the origins of conventions for work that follows. So, there is something inherently ‘right’ about it because it is the ground-zero basis of comparison for all else related to it. Doesn’t mean you have to like it, of course.
I have (had?) that illustration on the cover of a Tolkien encyclopedia of some sort.
I don’t understand this complaint. It’s not like they had cell phones. Or landline phones. Or telegraphs. Or printing presses.
Theoden’s problem is that Saruman was going to hit him before he could do a proper muster. It takes days for him to raise the army that goes to the rescue of Minas Tirith.
Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-earth. An excellent resource, despite the Hildebrandt cover: http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Middle-Earth-Robert-Foster/dp/0345449762/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230658658&sr=1-1
Oh man, Aragorn looks like a pirate.
And Sam seems to be wearing Barney Rubble’s vest.
Oh. My. Motherfelching. God.
Poor Gimli. And though I never had a Legolas-liking bone in my body… man, frills fur AND stockings ? All in white ? I know his relationship with beardy boy is more than a little gay but…
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of him as anything but Arrr-agorn again.
To my mind, Tolkein had a habit of occassionally going too far with his homage to heroic poetry. I don’t mean simply in adding reams of poetry he wrote to his books, but in terms of adding stuff to his plots that would sound good in a heroic poem, but are difficult to believe in ‘live action’ as it were.
I remember one example of this, when (I believe) Theodin blows a horn so loud it “burst asunder”. In a heroic poem you can get away with that sort of imagry, but it is ludicrous in ‘live action’.
Order of the Stick #618
“Come back here and die for my fleeting tactical advantage!”
Um…but LoTR isn’t live action. It’s a book. I’d go so far as to call it a prose poem. That complaint strikes me as akin to complaining about the Professor’s relaying of Sam’s thoughts, because of couse in “live action” it’s not possible to hear what other people are thinking.
I know it is a book. :rolleyes:
I disagree it is any sort of “poem”. It contains poetry, certainly, but it is not itself poetry - and hence the difficulty with on occasion using the conventions appropriate to heroic poetry.
It breaks the admittedly somewhat fragile suspension of disbelief. The reader can picture in his or her mind the tropes of fantasy well enough - magical beings and the like; the reader can certainly accept the conventions of literature, such as hearing thoughts; but it is difficult, at least to this reader, to accept a man blowing on a horn so hard as to, quite literally, “blow it asunder” - in the same work where we are supposed to be immersed in the ‘realism’ of the companion’s trip towards Mordor.
That’s my complaint - he on occasion goes to far in adopting the conventions of heroic poetry into a different medium. If you like it, cool; to me, that’s a flaw.
So Theoden blowing apart a horn is out, but magic rings, swords that glow in the presence of certain evil beings, walking trees, and eagles big enough to carry grown men on their backs are okay?
Sure, because those things are part and parcel of the universe he’s creating. Extra powerful lungs are not, really.
The point of blowing a horn asunder is to indicate poetic exaggeration - he was blowing really hard because he was very moved.
Hence, if one was making a movie of the book, one could without shame or remorse film “…magic rings, swords that glow in the presence of certain evil beings, walking trees, and eagles big enough to carry grown men on their backs”. But I dare you to film an old king “blowing a horn asunder”. It would be Monty-Pithonesque. 
My point (lost now to the bellies of hamsters) is that I think you’re missing part of the central conceit of the book. In pretending to be the translator of an ancient manuscript, taken from stories originally written down by multiple authors and then copied and recopied by multiple scribes and redactors long before the invention of printing, Tolkien was quite justified in including such unrealistic details, because they were accretions added by later generations. Take, for instance, my favorite passage; Boromir’s makeshift funeral. In real-world terms in makes no sense for Aragorn, Legolas, & Gimli to take as long honoring him as they do, and far less that they could COMPOSE A SONG ON THE SPOT about him. But it is believable that at some point in the 4th age, someone wrote a song in praise of Boromir–either Aragorn or Faramir might have done so, or commissioned its composition–and that, in the process of compiling the Red Book, one of the scribes assigned to do so decided to include that song in the narrative as if Aragorn & Legolas actually sang it at the funeral. This fits the genre.
ETA:
Bolding mine. Also, it’s the 30th, and I don’t admit the movies exist on even days. You guys dreamt it up while high on pipe-weed.
In essence, you do not see these parts as flaws, but as integral to the work (and yes, the funeral of Boromir, a favorite passage of yours, is what I was going to mention next - it’s an absurdity 
).
Fair enough, but I do not see it that way - because he doesn’t go whole hog. He’s not writing an epic poem, and at other points (i.e. most of the time) he’s clearly ignoring the “this was written down through the ages by multiple ancient scribes” conceit and writing in the modern format.
It is similar to his other changes of tone his works suffer from - for example, The Hobbit changes from what is clearly intended as a children’s fairy story to heroic fantasy.
In reality, it is obvious that the good professor very much admired romantic/heroic poetry (much of his work is based on his appreciation of such stuff), and simply could not resist adding such flourishes on occasion. He did not do it consistently, thankfully, because a book of that length written entirely in that style would be very difficult to read. But his inclusions are somewhat jarring and the book would have been better without 'em (or have them moved to the footnotes).
