How Tolkien created Middle-earth

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/31/drawn-into-tolkiens-world-exhibition

by mhb • 8 years ago

141 73 8 years ago

arethuza2• 8 years ago

One of the most touching aspects of the background of LotR is Tolkien's basis for Sam Gamgee:

"My ‘Samwise’ is indeed ... largely a reflexion of the English soldier—grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself."

https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-to...

digi_owl• 8 years ago

Seems that English society learned quite a bit from those two wars (at a steep price though). Sadly it seems those lessons are fading as the generations leave.

arethuza2• 8 years ago

One small lesson being not to deploy friends from the same area in the same unit where they are all likely to be killed at the same time:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-pals-battalions-of-the-fi...

Bromskloss• 8 years ago

Seems that English society learned quite a bit from those two wars

What do you have in mind?

rdlecler12• 8 years ago

Anyone else nostalgic about the Middle Earth and early D&D artwork?

KineticLensman6• 8 years ago

Yes. Some of the artwork in the exhibition has been previously used in Tolkien calendars and the like, which I loved as a kid. It will be great to see the original art!

ConceptJunkie2• 8 years ago

Yes. The early D&D artwork had so much more charm. The artwork they've used in the last 20 years is often very technically good, but it's also often kind of bland and generic. I usually prefer the simple line drawings of people like Jeff Dee and Erol Otus than the ultra-slick stuff you see today.

You can also see the same progression in the covers of Dragon Magazine over the years. The artwork for the first 5 years or so was often not the greatest technically, but there was much more variety than in later years when the magazine got slicker and fancier.

I think Tolkien's own artwork fits into this mold. It was very simple, but it captured a feel that is often lacking in more recent artwork, and let's not forget the immortal Hildebrandt brothers, who's style I always loved. Their character work was always amazing, but their architecture could be really bland. But ultimately it was a simple style that really captured the spirit of the books and the times in which they were done.

mbunch• 8 years ago

The art in Magic: The Gathering followed a very similar arc. Cards have absolutely amazing art today in terms of technique, but many older cards conveyed a sense of charm and whimsy that's gone now.

rdlecler12• 8 years ago

I feel that the basic art excersized your imagination more.

KineticLensman6• 8 years ago

The OP is actually reporting a new Tolkien exhibition in Oxford [0] rather than comprehensively describing Tolkien's creative processes. The exhibition and accompanying coffee-table book are about the novels rather than the recent films.

I've already booked my tickets - the exhibition is the most significant for years (if not ever) and will move from the UK to New York later in the year. And then Paris.

[0] https://tolkien.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

pnathan• 8 years ago

Do you perhaps know when & where the New York exhibition will be? I'm a lifelong Tolkein reader, and would love to see it.

ghaff• 8 years ago

The Interwebs tell me Morgan Library from January 25 to May 12 in 2019. I'll be in NYC in November; hopefully I'll make it in the spring sometime.

KineticLensman6• 8 years ago

Sorry, no. The exhibition is staying in Oxford until late October 2018 (i.e. five months) so it will be a while before it reaches New York.

awat• 8 years ago

There is so much to appreciate here. The bit about starting to create an elvish language really stands out to me in painting his passion for this world.

auntienomen2• 8 years ago

I think the story is rather the opposite. Tolkien began work on the elvish languages (plural, yes) first, and then started creating a mythology to fit them. The Lord of the Rings later grew out of that mythology.

erikpukinskis• 8 years ago

Is that based on other research you’ve done? The article says the language predates the books but doesn’t say specifically that the stories grew out of the language.

My sense is he did a lot of work in parallel and let the world find itself among many mediums.

vid• 8 years ago

When I was growing up, Tolkien's works were some of the few books sold in the church's bookstore. As I've grown older, I've grown more critical of the simple narratives in most literature, that make frequently abhorrent attitudes and acts possible. In the case of Tolkien, he literally dehumanizes the enemies. One example that stands out is the "light hearted" sequence where Legolas and Gimli hold a contest of who can kill the most orcs. These days, recognizing this type of storytelling, with all its justifications, is very often part of the problem, I try to find works that help develop more nuanced perspectives.

Edited to remove bad reference to Nanking Massacre. The point is that glorious battle stories with simple morals are prevalent, and are a big part of Tolkein's stature.

Amezarak3• 8 years ago

I very much doubt that Tolkien was looking for inspiration in Japanese newspaper articles. According to your own link, the event wasn't widely known even in Japan until the 1960s, after the Lord of the Rings was written.

It seems more likely that Tolkien was drawing on much older (thousands of years) stories about the same thing.

jack6e• 8 years ago

This was likely inspired by an event preceding the Nanking Massacre

There is about no likelihood that Tolkien heard about a despicable war crime committed by an Axis power, involving an evil, flagrant disregard for human life, and decided to use that as material for two of his "good" characters. Nothing in Tolkien's works, worldview, or influences aligns with that sort of thought. This is the author who despised German publishers inquiring about his Aryan descent, even though, being of German heritage and a prominent scholar of Anglo-Saxon/Norse/Germanic literature, Tolkien could have perfectly flattered the Nazi mythology [0]. But in your opinion, while hating Hitler and the Nazis for treating Jews as second-class citizens (in 1938, when the persecution was not yet elevated to mass execution), he simultaneously decided, "well, this Japanese massacre of innocent civilians sounds like a fun bit of material, I'll use that"?

More realistically, the influence, as most of his influences, is in Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature, where accounts and songs of battles often make them appear almost like sport, with contests and even gamification. I suppose that is one method of mentally bracing oneself for such a horrifying activity, and for attempting to process the event afterwards. It is part of a common mindset of soldiers at war, one that even the Japanese murderers were engaging, albeit in a perverted misuse. In that view, both Tolkien and the Japanese were drawing from a (very) distantly related source, but much different in purpose, and certainly neither influenced by the other.

[0] https://io9.gizmodo.com/5892697/whats-classier-than-jrr-tolk...

ConceptJunkie2• 8 years ago

Thanks for setting the record straight in much more detail than I could have. Tolkien was a deeply moral man and his morals infused his works.

davidy1235• 8 years ago

OK, I was wrong about the very specific influence. But it's ultimately the same thing; flatten the idea of the enemy to make a sport of killing reasonable, and more entertaining stories. That may be an appropriate thing to do in the most dire circumstances, but it's still a disturbing moral choice given that "evil" most often has to be invented.

j-c-hewitt• 8 years ago

Famous Japanese author J.R.R. Tolkien was known to laugh hysterically as he tortured innocent Koreans, Chinese, and American POWs in between writing passages from Lord of the Rings.

Never let your ignorance get in the way of your righteousness, friend.

ghostbrainalpha2• 8 years ago

Just letting you know if you want to turn that paragraph into a whole Alt-Reality Fan Fiction..., I would happily support you on Patreon to read more of that.

cocacola13• 8 years ago

Entirely tangential, but the best album I've heard is Music Inspired by The Lord of the Rings by Bo Hansson. Instrumental progressive rock that, at least for me, entirely evokes a fantasy-like feeling and might even be, dare I say, superior to Howard Shores' score for the films.

Now that I think about it, Tolkien and works related to him seem to have set the bars for a few things - worldbuilding, fantasy literature, epic films, etc.; not to mention more than a few things that have been directly inspired by his works.

ghostbrainalpha2• 8 years ago

Sounds a lot like The Grateful Dead trying to LOTR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs0AmruS8Ro

cocacola13• 8 years ago

I've actually never listened to The Grateful Dead, so I can't say one way or the other :(

BerislavLopac• 8 years ago

Some time in early 90s I have actually set up a small ballet production with that album. :)

albutr• 8 years ago

Never heard of this before, but from what I just listened to it sounds pretty great, very ambient.

It's kind of weird that it's so old, it was published on vinyl in 1970, and according to wikipedia, this album hit the top 40 in the UK (idk why but I just automatically assumed it was much more recent, and not well known). So, it came out right around the same time that Zeppelin was putting out their first albums, and LZ IV also had several songs referencing lotr. Makes me wonder if rock musicians who wrote lotr-themed music was a sterotype/trend in the 70s.

cocacola13• 8 years ago

Glad you like it!

If I had, to I might ascribe to the fact that the 60s and 70s apparently had a resurgence in popularity of Lord of the Rings as a new generation discovered the works.

This for some reason reminded me of a video in which Larry Wall says that Hobbits embody the three virtues of a programmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G49RUPv5-NU

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

Didn't know of that! Sounds like it might be similar to 1979 album https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentateuch_of_the_Cosmogon.... Two records of music by Dave Greenslade (w/Phil Collins) included a hardback book lavishly-illustrated by Patrick Woodroffe.

That production may have been encouraged by Jeff Wayne's 1978 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Wayne%27s_Musical_Version...

mkirklions3• 8 years ago

Does anyone know why Fellowship of the ring sucked?(btw, I really liked a few parts, particularly Tom)

It seems so different from every other book Ive read(only hobbit-RotK).

Like did he add fluff in the forest because of publishing standards at the time?

ThomPete• 8 years ago

Because that book was all about describing the world where as the movie tried to jampack a lot of action into 3 movies so milk it. There is a reason why Lord of the Rings were the first movie they did was much better suited for filmatization.

DragonBourne• 8 years ago

It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for Tolkien found from the letters that he had received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved.

I like the passage that they find trolls from Hobbit still turned to stone the most...

mkirklions3• 8 years ago

Specifically the walking for chapters upon chapters.

KineticLensman6• 8 years ago

He wasn't influenced by publishing standards to make it longer. LOTR was in fact quite long by the standards of the day and had to be split into three separate volumes as a result.

garmaine3• 8 years ago

Actually it was six volumes reduced to 3...

noonespecial• 8 years ago

I remember that the empty slowness of the "chapters of walking" made Middle Earth seem huge when my dad read the books to me as a child.

In stark contrast, Narnia (also read to me by dad at about the same time) seemed so small as to be a shoe-box diorama.

In my childhood imagination, Narnia was about the size of the Shire (perhaps with Bree thrown in for a sense of 'far off').

WesleyLivesay• 8 years ago

The general feeling I get when reading through some of the content released after Tolkien's death (History of the Lord of the Rings books specifically) is that the reason the first half of the Fellowship is at a slower pace than the rest is because Tolkien did not know where the story was going or where it would end.

The most telling evidence for this is how drastically the story and characters change from the beginning to Bree when looking at first draft compared to published text. It took a lot of wildly divergent drafts to get to Bree, with the texts rapidly evolving. My favorite example of this is that the Strider character was originally named Trotter, and he was a hobbit that wore wooden shoes. This type of slowly building story, where layer upon layer of idea built on top of each other is not really present for most of Two Towers and Return of the King.

It was almost like Tolkien was a train that gained momentum as it went forward.

DanAndersen2• 8 years ago

For anyone interested in the development of LotR over time, I really recommend listening to the Signum University online lectures going through the History of Middle-Earth series. Dr Corey Olson is going through each of the volumes in turn and offering great analysis of how the story began to emerge, just as you describe.

The lecture playlists (so far) can be found at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUxTFUltO4uXhEfqgI6GtIg/pla... .

Notable things about Tolkien's writing process:

- LotR was originally just meant to be a shorter sequel to The Hobbit. It's always fun to see his early notes about how few chapters he expects the book to take.

- When The Hobbit was first released, it was emphatically not part of the full legendarium that Tolkien was working on, re: the Silmarillion. He borrowed heavily from his private stories about the Elves, but it wasn't until he was writing LotR that he actually realized that everything was all connected into the same continuity.

- Tolkien was extremely conservative in his writing, in a waste-not attitude. He hated to just cut out things he had written, and instead would do a lot of recycling and reworking so that bits of dialogue and description he had done in earlier drafts would be preserved but with their context completely altered.

- Tolkien sometimes claimed that his worldbuilding started with a map, and then he placed a story inside of it, but looking through his early notes shows that's not quite true. He tended to think in terms of a series of adventures he wanted his characters to have, and would wiggle around locations on his still-nebulous maps to make the distances work (he was very particular about getting the distances and travel times all right!).

How Tolkien created Middle-earth

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