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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
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
Katz writes:
after World War II,
"The Hobbit" was published in 1937. World War II ended in 1945.
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 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
Frodo was indeed young, the Lord Of the Rings starts out with him at 33 (and Bilbo at "eleventy-one", or 111). 33 was considered to be just "coming of age," so it would equate with about 18 or 21 in human years (emotionally speaking), but of course hobbits are small, so a youngish hobbit would look like a young child.
Three OS's from corporate-kings in their towers of glass;
Seven from valley-lords where orchards used to grow;
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.)
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.