I wonder how he’d feel known Ing that his concepts of orc and elf and dwarves now dominate fantasy
1870: https://freevintageillustrations.com/enter-an-elf-in-search-...
He did say in a letter that Hobbits had pointy ears seemingly a nod to existing tradition, while elves had leaf shaped ears whatever that meant.
He eventually gave up on that and used "Noldor", a term he'd been kicking around for a while in various contexts. That's much more comfortable, but he kept using "gnome" way longer than seemed reasonable.
What do you mean by "high-class" here? Do you mean they're Calaquendi, or are you saying they were esteemed greater than the other houses?
So his gnomes were not of the, aehm, garden variety.
The Vanyar (also Calaquendi) were probably "higher" than the Gnomes, but they were never seen in Middle-earth again. We learn very little about them, and I don't think they're even passingly alluded to in The Lord of the Rings. Some of the Gnomes returned to Middle-earth, so they outrank everybody who never left.
He renamed the Gnomes "Noldor", and most of The Silmarillion is about them (and the Men who hung out with them). They came back to Middle-earth to retrieve the Silmarils, which had been stolen by Morgoth (the Big Bad of the First Age, and Sauron's boss).
Galadriel is one of the very few we meet who were part of that go-and-return trip. It was a nasty business, and that's why her turning down the Ring and returning to the West was such a big deal. (Though she wasn't part of the story at the time they were called Gnomes, and she had to be retroactively inserted into it. He never did finalize that story, and we're left with a conflicting mess of unpublished stories.)
All children of Feanor (the main contingent of the Noldor) are dead by the end if the first age).
The few Noldor that outranked Galadriel left by the end if the second era after the last alliance of men and elves and the war with Sauron.
[1] which I think is also half Teleri.
Yes, Galadriel's father, Finarfin, was of the Noldor, and he married Earwen of Alqualonde, the daughter of Olwe, who was one of the two leaders of the Teleri.
This makes it sound like most Noldor were children of Feanor or that most of them followed Feanor and his sons, but that's not the case. The sons of Feanor and their followers were first to Middle-Earth - is that what you mean by 'main'? It's stated a few times that there weren't as many of them. The Noldor were an entire people, and most were neither Feanor's children nor followers of his children. (They were technically all under Feanor as high king of the Noldor for a time, though.) This is from the Silmarillion, describing their travel through Valinor on the way to Middle-Earth:
> Fëanor and his following were in the van, but the greater host came behind under Fingolfin; and he marched against his wisdom, because Fingon his son so urged him
and then after those who didn't follow Feanor cross to Middle-Earth in the north, many die, but there are still more of them:
> for the agony of those that endured the crossing of the Ice had been great, and Fingolfin held the sons the accomplices of their father. Then there was peril of strife between the hosts; but grievous as were their losses upon the road, the people of Fingolfin and of Finrod son of Finarfin were still more numerous than the followers of Fëanor,
Also, while reading The Hobbit, I've always felt like goblins aren't the little pitiful creatures we imagine today, but are a bit taller and muscular, like smaller modern orcs with more human proportions. It's not based on any description Tolkien, it's just how I imagine those creatures through the way they are told.
Last but not least, in the Hobbit his dwarfs (as it's how it should be written, according to the author) were a bit more "cartoonish" than the idea we have of them today: they wore colored hoods (much like garden gnomes), one had a blue beard, it's not said that they wear armor (and it's logical to think they didn't)...
All in all, even though he greatly and directly influenced today's fantasy, it's not exactly his concepts of orcs and dwarfs, at least, that dominate fantasy, but rather the interpretation that some later artists had of his concepts.
I'm not a Tolkien expert, though, so if anyone knows better, I'd love to be corrected.
He did slip it in with Dwarrowdelf as the name for Moria.
The goblins in the Hobbit are clearly the smaller orcs “in a kids story” where the evil isn’t clearly described. The Lord of the Rings makes this pretty clear that they are “Mirkwood/Moria orcs”.
One thing that’s common is dwarves now apparently are all Scottish in movies and that didn’t come from Tolkien (if anything his dwarves would be Norse).
Tolkiens Elves are more like superhumans - better, more beautiful, more heroic than ordinary men. They are more like how people in antiquity and premodern times thought of the ancient heroes and kings of the heroic age.
While much have been made of Tokiens fascination of Northern European folklore, his outlook is still pretty classicist and Lord of the Rings is basically a fantasy about the re-establishment of the Roman Empire.
...of course it might also be that the elves in the "Silmarillion universe" i.e. today's Middle Earth were always like the latter, and the playful elves from the Hobbit where another glimpse from the hypothetical "standalone Hobbit universe" before the Hobbit got moved to Middle Earth.
I agree with that. Leaving room for expansion, and mystery, feels like a more "real" world than one where everything has already been explored and done.
Fandoms sometimes put themselves into a corner, too, when they start making assumptions that all that can be said and done already has been. The Star Wars sequel series (episodes 7, 8, 9) come to mind. I think the majority of complaints came about because they dared to do something new to Star Wars. (Some of it was already hinted in the original films, too; as an example: Leia being force-sensitive)
(Warning, Star Wars rant follows)
Interesting to hear this direction of criticism.
My personal impression from watching The Force Awakens was the opposite: It felt like the movies where at the same time obligated to continue the story of the original trilogy (due to them being sequels) but at the same time not allowed to introduce any substantial new ideas.
That led to a very strange kind of "rhyming" history which really strained my suspension of disbelief:
Even though the Empire had been defeated and the Death Star blown up (twice), 20 years later somehow nothing noteworthy has happened except that a new Empire has sprung up - which looks and behaves exactly like the old one, has its own copies of Darth Vader and Darth Sidious and somehow can't think of anything better than building a third Death Star - which is promptly blown up again!
Same on the side of the good guys as well: Last time we saw them they were celebrating victory with flying colours, having freed the galaxy from the grip of evil, ready to usher in an exciting era of a nascent new galactic republic.
But sure, let's skip all that and fast-forward to a point where the good guys somehow ended up again as the scrappy underdogs, fighting against an overwhelming enemy. Nevermind even explaining what went wrong.
If the heroes do everything right, archive full victory - and still end up in the exact same place as they had started, I can't help but feel dreadful.
I'm sure the restrictions here didn't really have to do with canon: They were sequels, so strictly speaking there was no canon to respect, and the Extended Universe canon that did exist actually was a lot more daring and interesting than what the movie attempted. So my guess here is that the restrictive approach came from the producers who didn't want to risk their investment by trying out anything new.
Totally fair, it really is a remake of A New Hope. I think the same could be said of The Phantom Menace, for better and worse, but there is precedent in how to start a trilogy ;)
Episodes 8 and 9 do a lot more to stuff new ideas. Episode 8 still felt obliged to repeat the major plot points of 5 and 6 (I'll ding it for that), but once those were out of the way, the plot could really do its own thing.
> But sure, let's skip all that and fast-forward to a point where the good guys somehow ended up again as the scrappy underdogs, fighting against an overwhelming enemy. Nevermind even explaining what went wrong.
It's not the reading I came away with. The good guys won, set up the New Republic, became a bit too complacent. Despite Leia and others warning about the First Order faction springing up out of the ashes of the Empire, they weren't taken seriously. These are the resistance the films focus on.
The First Order showed that it was serious business by blowing up Coruscant, capital of the New Republic (as well as the Old Republic and the Galactic Empire).
No, it's just comically bad writing. A city-planet that has existed for thousands of years is blown up by the remnants of the "evil empire" which was anihillated 20 years before?
Star Wars in general is pretty poorly written and always has been. It made sense for the first film to be so successful, it was pretty nice for 1977. But I don't get how people can become immersed in this as an extended universe; the worldbuilding is atrocious.
My takes:
VII — Lame soft-reboot story, typical so-lazy-that-it's-bad JJ plotting. Bad, but not so bad it's not salvageable if the next two are good.
VIII — Oh thank god, easily the best Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, might even be better than Jedi—oh, wait, everyone hates it? WTF?
IX — One of the biggest train wrecks of a movie I've ever seen with a budget anywhere near this large. Fascinatingly bad. I was quite entertained, but not because it was good. It was like a 7-year-old who loooooved the original trilogy wrote their own sequel, complete with messed-up pacing, nonsense plot beats, confusing geography, a bunch of stuff that goes nowhere, and bizarre mash-up action. It was a fun watch in a "laughing at it, not with it" sort of way, but a really bad movie.
"Doing new stuff" wasn't the problem. Biggest problem overall was probably that JJ shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a plot, ever. He can punch up dialog (if we must do the modern "quips, quips as far as you can see in every direction" writing, anyway, which apparently we do), direct, and definitely do casting. No touching the plot.
On the plus side, only one of them's bad enough that it should be ranked down with the prequel trilogy. But another's not very good, and the other's the middle entry, so hard to recommend when the other two aren't good.
What did you like about it? I honestly can’t think of anything that landed.
IMO its biggest flaw is that the climax goes so entirely counter to what been foreshadowed hard the entire film, and cuts off any of several directions that alternative-version of it might have gone that would have been much better as far as storytelling possibilities in IX. I mean the part where Kylo offers to partner with Rey and she flatly rejects it. Almost any other way for that to have gone would have been more interesting and fit better with the way the film had been heading—Rey makes the offer to Kylo but he rejects it in favor of a face-turn; Rey accepts it; Rey rejects it, but because she doesn't trust him and wants to take over herself (to "do it right", of course)—anything like that would have been better. It's either a weird miss for the writer, or studio meddling, I reckon—and I'd bet on the latter, because damn does the rest of the script feel like it's going that way, to the point that I was kinda dumbfounded when it did the most boring possible thing instead.
I refuse to believe this is a genuine opinion someone holds. No one likes a a Mary Sue. Even if you are leftwing and watch the “movies” for their propagandistic value, it’s still objectively cinema.
I cannot explain what you wrote except by assuming you are firmly in the woke camp and defend the movie out of some tribal obligation.
In the first version of the book I read, there was an offhand mention that a Took ancestor had married a "Fairy" (or Fae). It was never discussed in the book again and I found that later versions had it charged to "Elf".
I always supposed that this was another bit left over from the time where the Hobbit was its own universe - at least I never heard any mention of Fairies living in Middle-Earth.