Please tell me that I'm not the only person on Earth who can't get into Tolkien

Cafe Society
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Well, me neither. The thing I can’t believe is how it has gone universally unacknowledged that Tolkien’s epic owes much of its inspiration to the body of Teutonic myths consolidated in Wagner’s Ring Cycle (a series of four Gesammtkunstwerk operas).

[BTW, the LOTR fanboys of today pale before those Ring Cycle obsessives of the late-Romantic period who trekked across Europe in order to sit through the entire cycle over a single day, as performed at Bayreuth, Germany. There’s a whole body of serious scholarship dissecting the symbols, musical motifs and structure, and, yes, antisemitism of that epic.]

I haven’t read Tolkien or seen the first of the trilogy; I was dragged to the theater by well-meaning friends (who wouldn’t take no for an answer) to see eps. 2 & 3, and was sorely disappointed. The acting and editing of Jackson’s films preserves the lugubriousness of Wagner (and what others have said was a failing of Tolkien’s books), only without the musical breaks and stentorian arias that are used to amplify emotions, motivations, and conflicts within the operatic form – the artistic expressionism that justifies such pacing.

All one needs to do, by way of a damning comparison, is to compare Jackson’s editing style to that of George Lucas (and not just his beloved original trilogy, either). The Star Wars films present vivid characterizations of all sorts of human, humanoid, alien, and robot types through mostly very brief vignettes of dialogue and action, before the retro wipe introduces the next (and often simultaneous) scene. The camera lingers on the characters’ faces only in particularly serious moments, in contrast to Jackson’s self-indulgent, overly-adulatory gaze.

In Lucas’ epic, characters almost never reveal much about themselves through personal disclosures, and scripted redundancies are held to a minimum. (One unfortunate exception to this admirable conciseness is the Emperor’s rather desperate attempts to intimidate Luke in “Return of the Jedi”. Other repeating motifs, like the heroes’ saying “I have a bad feeling about this,” are often in-jokes and offer welcome comic relief.) Instead, their characters and emotions are revealed through their actions. This terse, fast-paced, action-based directorial style energized the series and probably was as responsible as any other element for the overwhelming popularity of those films. But Jackson’s characters seem mired in seemingly endless reiterations (with very slight variations) of dialogues and entire scenes already belabored before – at least, this was my impression of most of the Hobbit and Hobbit/Gollum scenes.

What I’d like to see is a serious comparative and interdisciplinary study tracing the motifs and influences of Wagner’s Ring Cycle on both Star Wars and LOTR, respectively…

42

Check out the Alex Ross column in last week’s “New Yorker.”

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I’ve documented my attempts at getting into LOTR here before. I think I managed about about 1/3 of the first book before giving up in disgust. Just too many boring and verbose descriptions of yet another campsite in the forest. And the ‘songs’, don’t get me started on the flaming ‘songs’.

I’ve seen two of the films. They were ok, if over-long. I found it a struggle not to laugh at all the florid, speechifying dialogue. “Dark wings will bear the souls of all men of Erituia tonight and evil will arise from the dirt beneath the feet of honest elves… etc … etc” (I paraphrase.)

Nothing could persuade me to read the books.

I read the Hobbit years ago, because I wanted to complete the computer game. I didn’t like it for all the same reasons. Too many sudden magical skills getting parachuted into the plot at convenient times. I constantly felt cheated.

44

Nothing interests me about LOTR except Miranda Otto. Yum. :slight_smile:

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Read The Hobbit when I was 11. Loved The Hobbit when I was 11. Read it again a few times, loved it every time. I think I’d still enjoy it today, were I interested in picking it up again.

Tried reading Lord of the Rings when I was 11. Stalled out after FotR. Tried again when I was 12, 13, 15 and 16. Got as far as the end of The Two Towers the last time, but couldn’t bear to think about reading any more of it.

Finally, the summer after I graduated from college, I figured it was now or never, and I plowed through The Hobbit again – warming up – then pushed through the entire LotR trilogy. I hoped to enjoy it, thought it was better than I remembered, and have no interest in ever picking it up again.

As tedious as I occasionally found stuff like Elvish songs and weighty debates about the meaning of the ring, I mostly think my indifference stems from a 90º divergence between my interests and Tolkein’s. I like technology and cities; he likes pre-technological rural societies. I’m not religious, and am not engaged in the weighty moral issues he’s consumed with. I’d rather get on with characters and plot and skip over the history of runes.

I think the books are towering achievements, but they’re not towering achievements that inspire much more than respect in me.

46

That’s actually one thing that detracted from my enjoyment of the books and movies. Our society’s technology FAR FAR FAR outstrips their society’s magic (yep, I know the Arthur C. Clarke quote). When I was watching ROTK with its army of Orcs as far as the eye could see and Sauron’s ring-eye winking maliciously at the castle defenders all I could think of was “one strategic strike on that mountain, one chopper cavalry machine gun strafe of the orcs and trolls, and one amphibious landing on the river banks and you’d see a disembodied spirit peeing in his own volcano while simultaneously howling for his disembodied Mama”. (The best magic Gandalf could manage was to turn his staff into a flashlight, for crikey sakes! Samantha could have wiggled her nose one time and turned every Orc there into a mewling kitten.)

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OTOH, I love the Harry Potter series. I wonder if the difference is between that of an agnostic v. a devout Christian author? Or because it’s more lighthearted and less tedious while still having a really terrifying villain (who may or may not look like Mr. Bean)?

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For the record, I love Ren fest (once a year), but I don’t dress up, I play and DM Dungeons and Dragons, read tons of sci fi (but not fantasy) I loved the movies (but I was a film major) and I CANNOT get through the books.

Reading or not reading Tolkien doesn’t make you any more or less of a geek.

jeevwoman, you really won’t even watch a half hour of one movie? That seems kind of bizarre to me… you don’t have to go rent them or put any effort or money into watching them but because of a bad experience when you were 14 you won’t give beautiful movies a chance? If you don’t like them after you try them, fine by me, but to refuse to watch movies you OWN because you didn’t like a book they weren’t based on is strange.

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It’s funny, during the battles of Helms Deep and Minas Tirith, i found myself thinking something similar…

“a couple of well placed MOAB’s or Daisy Cutters would solve this problem once and for all, heck a couple of pre-emptive thermonuclear strikes on Mordor and Isengard would have prevented the battles in the first place” :wink:

heck, an assault line of Abrams tamks and artillery would be all that was needed for the ground forces, arrows, swords and spears versus armor plating, 70MM cannons, and a vehicle that’s heavy enough to squish the orcs and come out with no more than a scratched paintjob, a few dents and bloodstains, all that would be needed would be some Apache helicopters and a few A-10 Warthogs to provide air support and engage the ringwraiths on their flying dragon-thingies (Fell Beasts?), tactical nukes wouldn’t even be neccecary… :wink:

Y’know, , i’ve tried to read the books of the trilogy, they just seem too dry and verbose for my tastes, but i also love the movies, they have that epic feel to them, the only problem i have with the series is that Elijah Wood’s sole emotional response to anything surprising or horrifying seems to be “Dull Surprise”, i mean, how many shots of him going all “buggy eyed” do we need to get the point across, he’s got the emotional range of one of those bug-eyed squeezy-toys (the ones you squeeze and the eyes protrude on stalks)

never thought i’d see someone with less emotional range than either Kathy Ireland (Alien from L.A.), or Torgo (Manos; Hands of Fate)

i’d love to see the crew of MST3K get their hands on the trilogy :wink:

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I hate the goddamned names. Everytime I had to stop to figure out which character had which names, I was pulled from the story. By the time I gave up, I just wanted to shout “WHY CAN’T THEY BE NAMED BOB!”

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I tried to read LOTR, and frankly, I couldn’t get past all the walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking,walking, walking, walking, walking
with frodo’s furry hobbit feet.

It’s kinda creepy.

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I suppose it depends on what you mean by “get into.” Unlike many people in this thread, I have made it all the way through the book. But it took awhile.

When I was about ten, a neighbor who knew I loved to read gave me a boxed set of The Hobbit and LOTR. I read The Hobbit quickly enough, and I recall liking it. I started on LOTR, but didn’t even make it past Frodo leaving the Shire. I tried again in college, and got a little further, but this time Tom Bombadil stopped me in my tracks. Damn Bombadil. :slight_smile:

I finally made one more attempt in the summer of 2001, in preparation for the movies coming out. I would have been 34 years old by then. Whether it was my own greater maturity as a reader, or greater patience, or what, I don’t know, but this time I got through pretty easily, and I found the book fairly enjoyable. Having now seen (and loved) all three movies, I’m currently reading it again, to pick up on what I might have missed the first time.

But, while I enjoyed LOTR well enough, reading it certainly wasn’t the life-changing experience so many Tolkien fans seem to describe. It’s a perfectly fine read, but not toweringly better than any number of other novels I’ve enjoyed. I can’t see myself troubling to learn Elvish, or commit material from the Appendices to memory, or anything like that. Once I finish it this second time, I don’t imagine I’ll go back to it anytime soon. I admire it as a monumental achievement in world-building, but it just doesn’t have any special resonance for me purely as a novel . And I generally like fantasy.

I’m amused by the complaints about too many names. Surely even the most ardent admirers of Tolkien can’t deny that every once in awhile, you’ll run across a paragraph like this (Fellowship, p. 276):

If you can figure out exactly how many things are being named in this passage, and which names are merely alternatives for the same place, you’re a better reader than I am. :slight_smile: