Comments on: Chapter 10 – Page 8

By: Hogan

Hogan — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:31:09 +0000

Aaaw…. Frigg has gotten her fucktoy back

By: maggPi

maggPi — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:28:48 +0000

This is for anyone who is reading the comic + commentary for the first time.
Coming back and reading commentary I skipped over in favour of story momentum, I found myself enjoying the whole LotR discussion. (Wish I’d read it sooner.)
I was surprised, however, that no-one picked up on the well-known (I thought so anyway) fact that Tolkien based Middle Earth on his own childhood home and its subsequent fall to the modern age.
Industry crept in, gained a foothold and massacred a pastoral idyll. What Tolkien wrote was an ode or homage to a place that he loved in his heart-of-hearts. Something precious lost, never to be regained. Innocence squandered.
The industrial takeover of his beloved childhood home broke his heart, and he strove to preserve it in some form.
It is the PLACE that is the main character, and the humanoids are the ones who affect it for good or for ill. (Which explains the pages and pages of descriptive prose that even I struggled through in my teen years when my patience and thirst for prose was at its optimum!)
If the social structure of the humanoid characters seems classist in a very “Brit-ish” way, it’s because it’s meant to be. They represent the people in Tolkien’s life, every aspect of Tolkien himself, and the social structure he was raised in and subsequently encountered throughout adulthood.
These characters can be read as either Tolkien himself, or as others expected Tolkien to be (ex; Gandalf vs Saurumon).
There are decades’ worth of published articles on the subject that one can read for oneself and draw one’s own conclusions.
Recommended reading on the “lost love/innocence etc.” theme, I offer “Lorien Lost (A Novel of Artistic Obsession)” by Micheal King. It left me feeling rather… incorpreal.

Apologies for any spelling/typographical errors.

By: Thracecius

Thracecius — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:45:17 +0000

Watch the British comedy series “Blackadder”, more specifically Series 2 (Blackadder the Second) and Series 4 (Blackadder Goes Forth), starring Rowan Atkinson. If you love witty dialogue and absurd comedy with a historical British background, you’ll probably like it. :)

By: Thracecius

Thracecius — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:31:21 +0000

A French-British hybrid? Is that a collaborative design effort between Peugeot and BMC to make a “green” car or something? ;)

Picard was supposedly a Frenchman, but he’s played by a British actor so it’s tough to remember that sometimes.

By: FoolishOwl

FoolishOwl — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 01:11:40 +0000

I’ve read the Silmarillion — several times, actually, but not recently. I forgot I’d edited that part out, as that was a pretty long comment already. Anyway, what I remember in the Silmarillion was a bit from the Elvish creation myth that said that dwarves had their own, very different account. And that was pretty much all there was.

Yes, there was more about dwarves in The Hobbit. Thorin Oakenshield had more authorial attention than did Gimli, to be certain.

The Silmarillion is great if you like its deliberately ancient to early medieval epic feel. I know a lot of people detest the sections of the Lord of the Rings that have the most medieval flavor, though, regarding them as flat and stilted, and not perceiving them as a fundamentally different narrative mode that blends with the others.