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Review: Tolkien's World
Tolkien's World, The Paintings of Middle Earth, coincides with the centenary of his birth. More than a dozen artists, already famous for their interpretations of Tolkien landscapes, some newcomers to the trilogy, have created more than 50 paintings published therein ($15 from Harper Collins).
The full-page images are all illustrated with text from Tolkien's works, and they bring the stories to life in a way that is sometimes dark, sometimes lively, usually haunting. The book is clearly organized -- text on the left, painting on the right.
At the end, the artists -- they are from all over the world -- explain their interpretations and drawings and where applicable, their personal experiences with the trilogy. For a Tolkien afficionado, it's immensely satisfying to match your own imagination against those of artists like Michael Hague and Roger Garland. John Howe's "The Great Goblin" is amazing, and Inger Edelfelt has painted a stark, strange and simplistic "Gollum." As the Hobbit himself put it, "deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum -- as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face." There is more good writing in that paragraph than in plenty of fictional and mythological tales.
"Thorin, Prisoner of the Elves," "The Arkenstone," "Frodo and Gandalf." "The Haven of Morionde," "The Brandywine River " -- the collection will intrigue readers who want to prep for the movie, or newcomers who want a sense of what Tolkien's worlds might look like. It would also work beautifully for kids.
The art is uneven -- certain painters' images might not square with your own. But some, like Ted Nasmith's "Glittering Caves of Aglarond," or John Howe's "Gandalf," will make you want to frame them and hang them up. Tolkien's World is a first-rate creative achievement.
It's going to be disturbing when kids start getting nine-fingered Frodo action figures in their happy meals...
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
Philology = the scientific study of languages and their development.
;) Please don't mod me up... I'm not karma whoring.
I had to look it up in the dictionary
I own this amazing book myself and I am also an artist. It's a wonderful thing to see paintings of the most beloved scenes of middle earth rendered by some of Tolkiens biggest fans. I remember painting a scene (for a high school art course)from the hobbit where Bilbo is in the cavern holding the elven blade. I wondered if there was a repository of artwork pertaining to Tolkien and almost 10 years later I discovered this book. When I opened it up to see Sting and the look of Bilbo inside I was floored. I especially enjoy the work of Alan Lee. He is truly a master of fantasy art. If you have a chance see more of his work with Brian Froud in books like Faeries, and Gnomes. Amazing work!
There is no spork.
IMHO, the closest anyone has come is the Brothers Hildebrand, and even there they've got the wrong Aragorn. (The Hildebrand version of Aragorn looks more like a plumber than the descendant of the Kings of Westernesse.)
By the bye, is anyone else as dismayed as I that every bar napkin Tolkien ever scribbled a note on is now being published? It's getting worse than the prolific undead pen of L. Ron! Does every word the man wrote have to be mined for posthumous publication?
This ring, no other, was made by the Elves.
Who'd pawn their own mother to grab it themselves...
1) Started: Silmarillion
2) Started and completed: Hobbit
3) Started and completed: LOTR
4) Tolkien Died
5) Christopher Tolkien and Guy Kay compile Silmarillion
I'm not a Tolkien fanatic, nor a know-all, but I'm a great fan of his books. What I've reacted to reading his books is the drawings of the hobbits and also the way the upcoming movies present them. In my imagination I've made up a picture of creatures closer to dwarfs than to human children. If I don't recall much wrong dwarfs are in fact taller than hobbits.
In the movie Frodo looks like a human child, but wasn't he rather old (40 years or so.) In the paintings in the books and in the movie he looks too young. Although hobbits don't have beards one would expect a more rugged face. In addition hobbits are normally fat - in a jovial sense.
One thing I'm sertain about are their feet and toes. They should be hairy, but I've never seen drawings of their feet.
What do other people think. Are the pictures of hobbits correct, as the book presents them.
Look a monkey!
Katz writes:
after World War II,
"The Hobbit" was published in 1937. World War II ended in 1945.
This month's Wired magazine has a whole cover story on Tolkein's works. I don't like them talking about it as a 'virtual world,' it sounds too much like one of Jon's articles. :)
The scariest thing, as usual, are the obsessed fanboys and geeks who take it *way* too seriously. I mean, I'm a big music fan, but going after rare CD bootlegs where John Lennon farts halfway through a demo of "Imagine" just does not interest me in the least.
Nobody will be able to appease the hardcore geeks 100%, because even they diagree on things, and will argue over minutiae that regular people simply couldn't care less about. If you can't get a suitable distance from the material, IMHO you have serious problems.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The Silmarillion (or, rather, Quenta Silmarillion[1]) was a work that was never definably "started" and never really "finished" in the sense of most books. Tolkien began writing the stories that *eventually became* the Quenta Silmarillion long before The Hobbit. There are several references in The Hobbit to places or events in Quenta Silmarillion (eg: Gondolin, Glamdring), but he didn't, at first, consider the two works as sharing the same "universe". Later, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien merged the worlds of The Hobbit with that of Quenta Silmarillion. There are still some remaining inaccuracties/contradictions, though.
[1] While Quenta Silmarillion consists of the vast majority of the published work The Silmarillion, the book is actually a collection of several inependent works: The Ainulindale, The Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion, and Akallabeth.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
There's a very good book "An Introduction To Elvish" (Ed. Jim Allen), that I used to borrow from my University library....
Tom.
Oh arse
I don't believe that Tolkien would have agreed that his family convinced him to write about more worldly events. Tolkien and the other Inklings (esp Lewis and Williams) were quick to say that they were using man's ability as a sub-creator (below God) and not corrolating any of their mythology to wordly events. Especially denied were any connections between The Lord of the Rings and any wars during the 20th century.
There's a book I've been reading by Humphrey Carpenter called The Inklings... it's about the association between Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams andd others. Fascinating stuff... sort
of a quasi-biography of all three and the confluence of their lives. Carpenter also wrote
a whole bio of Tolkein and collected a book of
his personal letters, both of which I've read bits of and are pretty good.
Warning: it's a different experience than reading
Tolkein's fiction. Tolkein spins grand myths; these are biographical.
Enjoy.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
C'mon Taco... high time for a LOTR/Tolkien icon on slashdot methinks...
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
I thought I was the only one revisiting Middle-Earth. I made a commitment earlier this year to complete the LOTR+H before the movie came out. I started reading the Hobbit in July. I will likely complete RotK this weekend. I thought I had given myself sufficient time to finish the books before Dec, but I didn't count on how much I would be sucked in, again, to Tolkien's wonderful prose and terrific setting. At night, instead of reading Maisy's Next $6 Throwaway, I have been reading Tolkien to my 4-year-old son. The language is too difficult for him to understand, but he recognizes the names of the Hobbits and Gollum. In troubled times, I hope, hearing his father's voice as he fades to sleep help calm his fears. I had not anticipated these books bringing me closer to my son, but I should have known that Tolkien's magic, like Hobbits, is always more powerful than you expect.
"I like to play with things a while... before annihilation!" Ming the Merciless
Yes! I have that book! Frito,Goodgulf, Tim Benzedrine! Attack Sheep!
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First of all, katz needs to spend a little time doing a thing called RESEARCH!
Second I hate when people imply or say that LOTR had anything to do with WWII. Tolkien said on MANY occasion that it had nothing to do with it. In fact he even gave an example of how the books would have been, and what the charaters would of done differently if it had been based on the evens in WWII. Of course some of it being written before WWII should clue people in.
...Floop went the tar pit...
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Nine from dot.coms doomed to die;
One from the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
One OS to rule them all! One OS to find them!
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
(Until the wizard of Finland frees them all.)
If you are a Tolkien fan and haven't already seen it, please check out this site.
After his father's death, Chris has published twelve annotated volumes of his father's notes in the
"History of Middle Earth" series. These are unpublished tales, alternative drafts, and background notes.
An incrediable amount of "what if" detail for the most ardent fans. Its been a while since I read
one of these, but I recall the material thinning out later in the series, as one leaves the main trilogy.
A flavor of these are in the appendix of the main LOTR volumes.
Too bad... I was so looking forward to seeing all those dwarves with mohawks...
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There are some pictures that I too possess and many more on this site. An url I know by heart longer since I had Internet Access, at a time when I had to actually visit one of the very first Internet Cafés in my country, while owning a 14'400 modem but no inet access.
/
:)
Amazingly, the url is still valid and works fine.
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pictures/fantasy/Tolkien
I hope the server owners forgive me
CU
Draxinusom
(PS, the famous and great albeit now stopped Ultima game series by Richard Gariott is/was heavily influenced by Tolkien which can be seen by his "borrowing" of the runic alphabet as well as familiarly sounding locations and people. Read the name of the big swamp in U7:2 backwards!)
Ironically, it's the "teaser" page inside the front cover and the passage does not actually appear in the story proper.
BoTR is a brilliant tribute to Tolkien and a hilarious work in its own right.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Precisely And The Hobbit was published in 1937 and Tolkien says quite plainly in the foreword to LOTR that it was written "between 1936 and 1949". In fact JRRT started LOTR before The Hobbit was even published but broke off in order to start what was eventually to become the (incomplete) Silmarilion. But his friends and family persuaded him that there was no audience for that book, so he went back to LOTR. And all of this happened before WWII, not after. I can't say I'm much inclined to take note of a review whose author is so little concerned with accuracy.
http://fan.theonering.net/rolozo/
Huge image gallery. Check it out.
Ok sure, this may not be totaly "on topic" but it is the background to what turned me into a Tolkien fanatic.
I play a LARP, called Dagorhir battlegames, that combines Tolkien's Middle Earth, the Dark Ages, and pure fantasy in a full contact combat sport. It is the most fun that I have had in years and is an amazingly cheap yet rewording hobby.
Check out the website. Look at the pictures. See you at the next battle!
~~ What's stopping you?
He made another common error as well. To quote Douglas Anderson, who wrote the 'Note on the Text' published in the 1994 Harper Collins edition of Lord of the Rings:
"The Lord of the Rings is often erroneously called a trilogy, when it is in fact a single novel, consisting of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three volumes."
This fact is confirmed by Tolkien in his Foreward, where he often refers the tale as one large volume.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Here we have what was potentially an interesting review of a book covering a topic that many of us love. How sad is it that the introduction to the story contains several errors. I'm not the biggest fan of the Professor's work, but can we have some elementary research?
The Silmarillion was begun (I believe) while Tolkien was a teen. It really began taking shape during his service in WWI and during his college years.
The Hobbit literally began as a bedtime story Tolkien created for his children. The decision to publish it, after much debate, ultimately came from the son of one of the publishers.
Upon the moderate success of The Hobbit, Allen & Unwin asked Tolkien for another work describing Hobbits. Tolkien resisted for a while, but finally agreed sometine during WWII. During the late 40's, Tolkien wrote to his publishers saying that the project was bigger than he originally anticipated. The Lord of the Rings was in progress.
Contrary to what many believe, LOTR was not his Life's work (it is also not a trilogy, a point he argued many times). It and The Hobbit are merely sidebars to the project he worked on for most of his life, revising and editing, and ultimately never finished: The Silmarillion. Tolkien did prefess the purpose for this work was to be an alternate mythology for Earth, because he feared that so much mythology from many cultures had been lost.
So, not only was Tolkien inpsired enough to create these stunning works, he also regarded it as a gift to all, past present and future.
Hopefully JonKatz will respect what has been given him by presenting factual information about Toklien and his Works in his future articles on the subject.
Only took me a few minutes to make, from a nicely rendered 3d wallpaper that I found very long ago. Just reduced the size and changed the background to white.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Don't leave it up to the imagination of the
You might consider going to the Tolkien estate and asking them for icon suggestions. Betcha they've already come up with some good ones... the small one with his initials all merged together is really really nice, but of course that's the official estate logo.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
... dang whippersnappers ...
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