Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Feb 1, 2021 9:41:41 GMT -5
"a nation of shopkeepers", someone once famously said. Napoleon
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Post by berkley on Feb 1, 2021 9:46:55 GMT -5
"a nation of shopkeepers", someone once famously said. Napoleon
An unbiased observer if ever there was one!
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 1, 2021 10:30:58 GMT -5
And he was about the size of a Hobbit, too!
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Post by berkley on Feb 1, 2021 12:34:21 GMT -5
And he was about the size of a Hobbit, too! It would be funny if there were a French Comté* of Hobbits across the river (le Brie?) and they couldn't stand each other. Maybe that's why Tolkien never mentioned them, he just wanted to pretend they didn't exist! *I looked it up and Le Robert & Collins gives the French translation of shire as comté, but it isn't quite the same because in England the -shire ending is added to the names of counties, while in France they just say Comté d'Artois, Comté de Champagne, etc, so there isn't a real equivalent as in a different ending that is added to the end of the name.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 1, 2021 13:37:59 GMT -5
And he was about the size of a Hobbit, too! It would be funny if there were a French Comté* of Hobbits across the river (le Brie?) and they couldn't stand each other. Maybe that's why Tolkien never mentioned them, he just wanted to pretend they didn't exist! *I looked it up and Le Robert & Collins gives the French translation of shire as comté, but it isn't quite the same because in England the -shire ending is added to the names of counties, while in France they just say Comté d'Artois, Comté de Champagne, etc, so there isn't a real equivalent as in a different ending that is added to the end of the name. It was translated as La Comté in the first French version, a new capitalized name, which as you point out distinguishes it from the traditional use of the word comté (which is masculine, and merely defines the proper name that would follow it, as in the comté de Bourgogne, not to be confused with the duché de Bourgogne, because French politics can never be complicated enough!) Bree was kept as is, something I view as a minor scandal! "Brie" would have been much better!!!
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 9,591
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Post by Confessor on Feb 1, 2021 17:44:17 GMT -5
Can we talk about the Fox that appears in chapter three: "Three is Company"? This is the only instance in the LOTRs that I can think of in which we see things from the POV of a creature that is not a character directly involved in the story. It's a charming little passage, but it seems quite out of place in the book.
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Post by berkley on Feb 2, 2021 12:22:26 GMT -5
Can we talk about the Fox that appears in chapter three: "Three is Company"? This is the only instance in the LOTRs that I can think of in which we see things from the POV of a creature that is not a character directly involved in the story. It's a charming little passage, but it seems quite out of place in the book. The narrative voice sounds more like The Hobbit than LotR, so I wonder if it's a left-over from an earlier stage of the creative process where Tolkien was still thinking of writing some part of what later became LotR as a children's story, perhaps a short sequel to the Hobbit.
I suppose you could say that there is a tonal transition within LotR itself from the opening chapters, especially ch. 1, to something progressively darker and more serious, though it escalates pretty quickly. But IIRC the relatively lighter tone and content of even that first chapter wasn't matched by Hobbit-style narration: Tolkien uses a more mature narrative voice right from the start of LotR compared to The Hobbit.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
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Post by Confessor on Feb 2, 2021 22:19:33 GMT -5
The narrative voice sounds more like The Hobbit than LotR, so I wonder if it's a left-over from an earlier stage of the creative process where Tolkien was still thinking of writing some part of what later became LotR as a children's story, perhaps a short sequel to the Hobbit. I think that's extremely likely, yes. This passage was almost certainly a leftover from the period when Allen & Unwin just wanted another children's story about Hobbits.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 9,591
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Post by Confessor on Feb 3, 2021 10:51:55 GMT -5
Something else I noticed on this rather leisurely read through LOTRs (I have several other books and comics on the go) is that in the early part of the book the Black Riders are initially quite bestial and animalistic. While persuing the Hobbits in the Shire they groan and sniff and grunt a lot. At one point in chapter three, one of the riders dismounts from his horse and crawls along the ground towards the Hobbits on all fours like a dog, before being scared away by Gildor and the High Elves. In this respect, I think that the Ralph Bakshi animated film comes closer to the book than the Peter Jackson movies (though I love Jackson's Nazgûl too, of course).
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 3, 2021 16:08:29 GMT -5
I thought the Bakshi wringwraiths were absolutely awesome, back in the day. I still love them!!! I don't know if Mike Ploog's work on the film included their design, but they sure had a Ploog-esque feel to them!
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Post by berkley on Feb 3, 2021 22:06:11 GMT -5
I've never seen the Bakshi films, but I will give them a shot someday. From the bits I've seen, it doesn't look like how I imagine Middle Earth and the characters of LotR, but it does look like pretty cool animation in its own right.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 4, 2021 10:41:52 GMT -5
I've never seen the Bakshi films, but I will give them a shot someday. From the bits I've seen, it doesn't look like how I imagine Middle Earth and the characters of LotR, but it does look like pretty cool animation in its own right. I must admit that I saw the Mike Ploog poster before reading LoTR, and so that's how I visualized the characters since!!! The Bakshi film is a noble but flawed experiment. Some scenes are amazing: the story of the ring, for example, is told in the form of a shadow play; that gives it a nice mythical quality. The rotoscoping of animated characters was something I had never seen before, and in some scenes it produces amazing results (the wringwraiths on Mountaintop really conveyed the sense of "there but not there" that sould come with creatures who live halfway in a shadow world). On other occasions, though, it just looks odd. The film, furthermore, is both too short (it stops after the battle of Helm's Deep) and too long... said battle, which is way less impressive here than in Peter Jackson's film, is lackluster and even boring. I was very disappointed by the film the first and second times I saw it; it's certainly worth watching it once just for its historical aspect, but I doubt it's anyone's favourite movie.
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Post by berkley on Feb 4, 2021 15:57:46 GMT -5
The Bakshi film is a noble but flawed experiment. Some scenes are amazing: the story of the ring, for example, is told in the form of a shadow play; that gives it a nice mythical quality.
The shadow play was a good idea, though I don't think it quite manages to creat the effect Bakshi was presumably looking for. Still, at least he recognised that some creative thinking was required for that sequence, something I think Jackson showed no signs of being concerned with in his treatment of that material.
I believe think Jackson needed to do something more or different to creat that mythic, lost in the mists of time feeling with histelling of the originas of the Ring and Sauron's earlier history and what he came up with was to me a cartoonishly absurd vision of Sauron in some heavy metal armour knocking soldiers around like bowling pins, not at all the epic, mythic feeling that whole prologue needed.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Feb 4, 2021 16:16:20 GMT -5
The Bakshi film is a noble but flawed experiment. Some scenes are amazing: the story of the ring, for example, is told in the form of a shadow play; that gives it a nice mythical quality.
The shadow play was a good idea, though I don't think it quite manages to creat the effect Bakshi was presumably looking for. Still, at least he recognised that some creative thinking was required for that sequence, something I think Jackson showed no signs of being concerned with in his treatment of that material.
I believe think Jackson needed to do something more or different to creat that mythic, lost in the mists of time feeling with histelling of the originas of the Ring and Sauron's earlier history and what he came up with was to me a cartoonishly absurd vision of Sauron in some heavy metal armour knocking soldiers around like bowling pins, not at all the epic, mythic feeling that whole prologue needed.
Actually seeing Sauron in the Jackson movies was a big let-down for me. I'm just grateful that Jackson scrapped the scene in which the dark lord physically fought Aragorn at the end of the trilogy (a scene we saw the preparation for on the DVD's extras). We didn't get to see Sauron in the novel, and it made him a much more effective villain!
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Post by berkley on Feb 4, 2021 17:23:04 GMT -5
The shadow play was a good idea, though I don't think it quite manages to creat the effect Bakshi was presumably looking for. Still, at least he recognised that some creative thinking was required for that sequence, something I think Jackson showed no signs of being concerned with in his treatment of that material.
I believe think Jackson needed to do something more or different to creat that mythic, lost in the mists of time feeling with histelling of the originas of the Ring and Sauron's earlier history and what he came up with was to me a cartoonishly absurd vision of Sauron in some heavy metal armour knocking soldiers around like bowling pins, not at all the epic, mythic feeling that whole prologue needed.
Actually seeing Sauron in the Jackson movies was a big let-down for me. I'm just grateful that Jackson scrapped the scene in which the dark lord physically fought Aragorn at the end of the trilogy (a scene we saw the preparation for on the DVD's extras). We didn't get to see Sauron in the novel, and it made him a much more effective villain!
Were they really planning to do that? Boy, I'm glad I didn't hear about it at the time because it could well have turned me off the movies completely before seeing them, even though they didn't actually include it in the final release.
Yes, I remember when reading it as a youngster, the feeling that Sauron, even without the Ring and in this weakened, disembodied form, was such a huge, god-like, menacing presence that pervaded the whole story, including the scenes when he wasn't present or when his name even mentioned - IOW, every moment, start to finish - all of that made a huge impression. Giving that presence a visible form - even though as readers and as viewers we know he possessed one originally - showing it to us onscreen, was a serious error in judgement.
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