Slashdot Mirror
JRR Tolkien Book 'Beren and Luthien' Published After 100 Years (bbc.com)
seoras quotes a report from BBC: A new book by Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien is going on sale -- 100 years after it was first conceived. Beren and Luthien has been described as a "very personal story" that the Oxford professor thought up after returning from the Battle of the Somme. It was edited by his son Christopher Tolkien and contains versions of a tale that became part of The Silmarillion. The book features illustrations by Alan Lee, who won an Academy Award for his work on Peter Jackson's film trilogy. It is being published on Thursday by HarperCollins on the 10th anniversary of the last Middle Earth book, The Children of Hurin.
I'll probably buy it.
#DeleteChrome
Meanwhile, movie industry starts planning to make 2 trilogies of 150min films out of this book.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I thought I procrastinated putting things off, good to know someone else has me beat by 99 years.
The Silmarillion is worth a read if you have enough imagination to fill in some of the visual details yourself; it is in a sort of abstract epic writing style one level more removed from the writing in LOTR, so many people have trouble with it, but there are beautiful moments in it if you can read it. For example, it opens with a description of music sung by beings of great power at the beginning of time, and also of the discord that the great enemy tries to sing into the music.
And there are high hosts of elves, and fights of elven-kings, and brave acts of love.
Beren and Luthien is one of the classic grand love stories of high fantasy. I hope this version is a good one, but whether it is or isn't you should still check out the other one.
Real lawyers write in C++
Did you not read his books?
Death is to be feared by the young but welcomed by the wise and old. We are to fill our lives, and the lives of those around us, with adventures, song, stories, food, and love. After we've filled ourselves up and spread ourselves thin we should embrace the next life that awaits us all.
Trying to extend our lives beyond it's natural course is a path leading to pain, suffering, and evil. Those that are successful lose their humanity.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
And wrong again. JRRT wrote and re-wrote this tale in both prose and poem form over a period of twenty years. There are parts of the "Silmarillion" that CJRT has admitted he had to 'align' with other material (The Fall of Doriath) but that accusation certainly can't be made against "Beren & Luthien".
You're already pegged at -1, so this won't help:
Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic; there is a difference, and this caused problems even in his early life. Read Carpenter's Biography for the _official_ version. Unofficially, Tolkien struggled with the Church his entire life, and pretty much broke away from it after Vatican II, including walking out of Services when English was spoken instead of Latin.
That is not to say that he became a Protestant Christian; he believed in the old Fairy Tales and the way that they were told. In other words, Tolkien was a nutter. There were those close to him that had serious doubts about his sanity at times, especially when he retreated into his own World, and neglected to do such things as paying Taxes. (Which is the very reason why Jackson was able to make his Films; Tolkien sold the Rights off for a pittance when it finally came to pay Inland Revenue.)
As a devout Atheist, I quite like the old fossil. I really appreciate the way that he viewed His Church. But it was still based on Fairy Tales, and believing in them does not make them true.
What next life? This is the one we got and we got to make the most of it, and not welcome death.
I mean he's dead, the story was written 100 years ago but I guess they will change the law again, so that his grand-grand-grand-grand-children won't have to lift a finger and actually _work_.
Trying to extend our lives beyond it's natural course is a path leading to pain, suffering, and evil.
What natural course? The one where your mother died giving you birth and you die at forty because of a massive dental infection? Or the one where you're born in a sterile hospital and get to live to eighty five thanks to antibiotics, heart drugs, and/or chemotherapy?
Ezekiel 23:20
"Tolkien was also a devout racist."
No, he certainly was not. He despised the Nazis and spoke out publicly and specifically against their Racial "Theories", and he was also very public in speaking out against Apartheid in South Africa.
What I have a problem with is the fact that Tolkien in his Middle Earth was an Elitist. Aragorn was of High Birth but had to reclaim his Family's Throne. Elves are proudly Snobs. Even Frodo, Pippin and Merry come from "Respectable" Families. In fact the only character in "Lord Of the Rings" who is "Normal" is Sam, but by the end he is made Mayor, (For seven consecutive terms...), and pointedly, starts off his own Dynasty.
What little Democracy exists in his Middle Earth is in the Shire, and even there, Power is reserved for certain Bloodlines.
But that was _only_ in his Middle Earth. "Farmer Giles Of Ham" was an ordinary Farmer, prone to laziness and boasting, and in fact in the works outside of Middle Earth,Tolkien's original Characters are much more humdrum. (I'm leaving out his Translations such as "Beowulf" because those weren't his inventions.)
Unfortunately, idiots like Skinheads have taken to Tolkien recently because they read into his works just what Tolkien repeatedly, and sometimes angrily, warned against: The Lord Of the Rings was _not_ Allegory. There was no relation there to real people or real events. It was just a _Story_. At a deeper level, it was an investigation into just what a Story is, and this is something that Tolkien wrote about extensively; the relation of Stories, his "Fairy Stories", to Myths and Legends.
So, in conclusion, fuck off.
"How to post as an Anonymous Coward, influencing people and winning friends"? "Posting cheap trash for fun and profit"?
Is it a new story? I've read somewhere that it's just a re-edition. How much different is it from the Silmarillion's chapter?
I obviously didn't bother to RTFA.
Citation needed.
That is not to say that he became a Protestant Christian; he believed in the old Fairy Tales and the way that they were told. In other words, Tolkien was a nutter. (...) As a devout Atheist, I quite like the old fossil.
If it's a compliment or an insult is in the eye of the beholder: Non-mainstream or deeply religious people that don't simply follow doctrine are excellent fantasy writers, not just Tolkien but for example look at Lewis Carroll and the Chronicles of Narnia, J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, all these fantastical, magical stories about a world that's more than flesh and blood come from some form of imagination very few are able to genuinely tap into. At least past the age they figure out Santa Clause is not real and their imaginary friend doesn't really exist. I can read/watch it, I can enjoy it.. but if I try to write fantasy I can never embrace that alternate reality the way good writers do, I'm way too grounded in the real world.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Trying to extend our lives beyond it's natural course is a path leading to pain, suffering, and evil.
So then we should ban antibiotics and measles vaccinations?
Should we reintroduce smallpox into the population?
The closest we get to overt racism in LOTR is that Orcs are described as "swarthy". To my mind, outside of Tolkien's clear hatred of Nazis and how they had co-opted his beloved Nordic culture, is that scene in LOTR when Frodo and Sam are in Ithilien and see Dunedain battling men of Harad (who were pretty obviously black people) and how Sam sees one of the Haradrim fall dead, and he wonders what lies or threats had taken the man so far from his home and family. Tolkien was making it clear that the common soldier is as much a victim as anyone else in a war, and while, as you say, he was not writing allegory (and in fact hated allegory), I believe scenes like this are directly informed from his experiences as a soldier in WWI.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Tolkien came at his mythology through a very unusual path. While, no doubt, he's deeply held Catholicism informed his writing (it's much more clear in his writings on the First Age than in LOTR), he really began developing the mythology as a means to produce a world in which the languages he was inventing could exist. He began developing the earliest Elvish dialects before 1917, which is about when he began writing The Fall of Gondolin, the first story in Middle Earth (though the conception as very different at that time). In his view every language must have speakers, and those speakers must have a history. He then formulated the notion of an "English mythology", so that through much of the development of the Silmarillion, he had the character of Aelfwine/Eriol who sailed to Tol Eressea and spoke with the Elves and learned of their history. And he kept on developing the various Elvish and other languages almost to the end of his life.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Elitist? Nah, these guys sound just like the good ol folk you would see in a Wal-Mart.
We Boggies are a hairy folk,
Who like to eat until they choke.
Loving all like friend and brother,
We hardly ever eat each other.
Ever hungry, ever thirsting
Never stop till belly's bursting.
Porking out from morn till moon,
And don't forget your plate and spoon.
Oh, wait.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's not what the copyright industry claims. What happened was that the international standard for the copyright term had been the life of the author's grandchildren, with the exception of the United States. In the 1970s, the United States aligned itself with the international standard. But over the course of the twentieth century, health care improvements caused people to live longer and have babies later. This led first the European Union and then the United States to update the details of what "life of grandchildren" is supposed to mean without changing the spirit of the standard. (Source: "The Copyright Term Red Herring" by Leo Lichtman)
The timing between the US joining the international standard and the international standard reflecting human longevity increase is unfortunate but still coincidental, as the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft recognized when failing to find "legislative misbehavior" in the 1998 extension. In theory, if the Congress thinks of a good enough excuse for a third successive extension, it could squeeze another one past the Supreme Court. But barring further drastic improvements in longevity, I can't find an excuse that would keep a third extension from appearing as "legislative misbehavior".
Thus the three short films establishing the character Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2024, after the end of the 95th Gregorian calendar year after the films' first publication. They will enter the public domain in the European Union on January 1, 2037, after the end of the 70th Gregorian calendar year after the death of Walter Elias Disney.
Non-mainstream or deeply religious people that don't simply follow doctrine are excellent fantasy writers, not just Tolkien but for example look at Lewis Carroll and the Chronicles of Narnia,...
Read about The Inklings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Tolkein and C. S. Lewis where both members. G. K. Chesterton was an occasional guest. Charles Williams is probably less well-known at this point (possibly because his prose was more unabashedly Christian -- e.g. "War in Heaven": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R... etc).
I've always found it interesting that both Lewis -- arguably one of the most famous of the Christian Apologists of his time, although Chesterton was no slouch -- and Williams wrote books that were either thinly disguised Christian fantasy or openly fantasies about biblical/apocryphal fantasy, while in the Hobbit and LOTR, the characters (with the exception of the Elves, maybe) HAVE no overt religion. Yes, there is a fantasy connection with the supernatural and magic, but there are no descriptions of worship or prayer -- it is more a matter of "invoking" the protection (or sometime receiving it gratis) of e.g. Elbereth. Elves are immortal (but not unkillable), they don't die they "return" to "the west" (a.k.a. "heaven") through some sort of dimensional barrier. And although there is magic in LOTR, for the most part in the BOOKS (as opposed to the overheated movie) it isn't "telekinetic" magic like battling with wand-based thunderbolts or using a ring to stop the heart of an enemy, it is more "perceptual" magic -- making somebody invisible, generating light, extending life, healing, harming. The closest you come to religion is probably the "resurrection" of Gandalf, "sent back" from death because his work "isn't finished".
This has the effect of making it remarkably uncomplicated and ecumenical. We don't really understand why Sauron is so horribly evil, or how he manages to get killed but come back from the dead to try to take over the world -- again -- or just what he wants to do with the world when he wins that he can't do already. We don't really understand why or how "rings" can be given power (or what power they actually grant, since nobody actually USES a ring to do ANYTHING overt anywhere in the story). We don't understand where Ents come from, we don't understand Bombadil, we don't see why or how barrow-wights could come to be. We don't even understand Saruman -- supposedly good guy turned bad.
We don't need to. It's just a damn good story about a war between cartoon good (so very very good, so very very uncomplicated) and cartoon evil (so horribly unredeemably bad, so very very uncomplicated). Not at all like real life, where evil doesn't come with such a clear label -- and neither does good.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Is that you, AC? Always good to know what "you" have said.
Atheism isn't a religion, and saying it infinity times won't make it be one. It is the absence of belief in a religion. A (without) -- theism (religion). It's what the word means.
It's also what atheists are. Most atheists require a mix of evidence and consistency with evidence supported belief in order to raise any old notion that somebody throws out there -- such as some incredibly detailed description of how the Universe was created by a mysterious infinite superbeing that is in almost complete contradiction with evidence-supported belief -- to the point where it can be taken seriously as a component of their worldview.
I can assert that on the dark side of the moon there is a rock that is a perfect replica of the head of Abraham Lincoln. I can probably even offer some sort of argument for why this should be so -- estimates of so and so many rocks, probabilities for any given rock to look like Abraham Lincoln -- and there is little doubt that the assertion could be true (and will continue to be at least possible until somebody examines each and every rock on the moon to falsify it) as it contradicts nothing in the Bayesian network of evidence-supported belief that we call "observational knowledge about the real world" -- stuff like the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology. But there simply isn't any good reason to think that it is true.
To believe that this assertion is true anyway, without consistent evidence to support it, to have faith that it is true in spite of substantial arguments against it, is the hallmark, the defining characteristic of religious belief. To hear the assertion, acknowledge that it is possibly true, and conclude that it is probably not true and that there is plenty of time to believe it -- if true -- once we have direct evidence, is the hallmark of the atheist.
As for "devout atheist" -- this is what we in the business of communicating call an "ironic self-description", not intended to suggest that he is religious, only that you won't convince him to become religious with any of the tired old arguments that carefully avoid confronting the simple fact that there is no even vaguely trustworthy evidence that any of the near-infinity of asserted religions are actually true.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
What natural course?
Bilbo described it as being stretched too thin. Despite not feeling the least bit frail in mind or body. He felt off without knowing why and didn't trust the way things were headed.
They die.
Beren, more than once.
#DeleteChrome
Unfortunately, idiots like Skinheads have taken to Tolkien recently...
You're kidding, right?
"OI! Elberef' Gil'foniel!"
Will this book make the cut? Time will tell...