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Lord of the Rings, as Written By Everyone Else
sn0rt writes "A thread on Straight Dope asks what would happen if someone else had written the Lord of the Rings. Reader submissions include Ernest Hemingway, Douglas Adams, Mark Twain, HP Lovecraft, ee cumings, Milton, Mickey Spillane, Danielle Steele, Ayn Rand(!!), Ray Bradbury, Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Clancy. My favourite is Dr. Suess: 'Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!
I am too small to carry this thing!' 'I can not, will not hold the One. You have a slim chance, but I have none. I will not take it on a boat,
I will not take it across a moat. I cannot take it under Moria, that's one thing I can't do for ya. I would not bring it into Mordor, I would not make it to the border.'"
The sky was the colour of a Palantir, in tune with a dead mind.
Thomas Pynchon, IMO, would be the most facinating and bizarre person to have written the trilogy.
If it had been the case, Pynchon's Lord of the Rings may very well have made his Gravity's Rainbow (which varies from horridly arduous to incredibly beautiful) look like The Little Engine that Could (the only book out of the above that i've actually read every sentence from).
..There's a book of tales written by various authors, set in Middle Earth.
For the life of me, I can't remember what the hell it's called. The (blank) Tales or something. Not to be confused with The (blank) Tales that Tolkien wrote.
If I remember correctly, it opens up with a piece by Donaldson, and then goes on to other authors, some mostly famous, others quite obscure. (Peter S. Beagle, as seen in the opening blurb of certain versions of the LotR books, has a story in there as well.)
Yeah, I know, not very informative, but I've only seen the book once, and still need to get around to reading it myself.
They may appear similar, but when you dig deeper much of that similarity disappears; e.g. Lovecraft may have been "fascinated" by astronomy, but Tolkien studied Philology at Oxford and went on to teach at both the University of Leeds and at Oxford.
And are Lovecraft's and Tolkien's sources of inspiration really that comparable? Lovecraft's "dozens of arcane sources" vs. Tolkein's extensive use of the rich Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythic traditions?
(Just a nitpick, but the Inklings weren't actually an "all-male affinity group", as Dorothy Sayers was a member.)
"America is - without a doubt - the most bizarrre culture this planet has ever produced." --James Lileks
So I was just hanging around the hobbit cats, you know, digging the crazy pipe weed and the ale and wondering if I could ever get all the truth of it down, you know, the real deal, not the kind of half baked stuff you watch on the palentir but something that would make my heart whole, when this crazy cat named Biblo and his even crazier nephew Frodo started making a scene with some crazy birthday party where everyone was getting drunk and wailing to the moon and watching Gandalf, that old conjurer cat just get heavy with the fireworks jazz and I was yelling "Go, go, go" with the rest of them and then that Biblo cat gets up on the podium, lays down a nice little riff about how life's too short and sweet to hang out with great cats like us and then he just wigged, said "Goodbye" and POOF! that cat wasn't there. Everyone just flipped.
A little later, I got a gig as a gardener for Frodo and he used to lay on me all this crazy Elvish poetry about Elvish stuff, real high and mighty and soulful and sad, and one day that Gandalf came by and they were in the study talking away and because I started hearing something about the elves and just knew that Gandalf cat had some wonderful elvish poetry in him, I got too close to the window and started hearing all this wild, crazy talk about this ring Frodo had and this Sauron heavy who wanted to make the world into some kind of soulless meat factory and how he needed this ring to do all this and I guess I must have drank too much for lunch because I let out a little burp under the window and the next thing I know that cat Gandalf's pulling me into the house through the window threatening to turn me into something uncool like a toad and then he looks at me and says, "I know what a cat like you needs to do. You and Frodo need to go on the road."
And that's how the whole crazy thing started.