(March 26, 2015 at 1:56 am)whateverist Wrote: Wait, we agree about Martin? I like his characters.
Scholarship, huh? Mmmm .. what a fucked up way to get a story across.
I never said anything against Martin to begin with. I like Martin as an author and person.
Tolkien wasn't writing it for the layperson. Lord of the Rings (and mostly The Silmarillion, and the Hobbit) started because of Tolkien's passion for linguistics. In particular, in old English, the lines from a poem: éala éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended. "Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, over Middle-earth to men sent"
He thought "Earendel" was one of the most beautiful words he'd ever heard. Out of this came the story of Eärendil the Mariner, who features prominently in The Silmarillion, influenced by a silly Norse myth of a character with a somewhat similar name which Tolkien was dissatisfied with and turned into a gorgeous and heart-breaking tale.
The Hobbit started in a similarly weird way:
"One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it, which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner, and I wrote on it: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Names always suggest a story in my mind; eventually I thought I'd better find out what hobbits are like."
All of the mythology and stories of Lord of the Rings spin out from words - particularly Finnish and Anglo-Saxon and Welsh - and from Tolkien amusing himself by creating whole-cloth new languages, which of course needed histories to show how they evolved over time.
Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion (and later The Hobbit, to fit them) were re-written over and over because of Tolkien's obsession with words. He wanted everything to be perfect. When we read The Hobbit, the words are all very basic and English - names are simplistic, like "The Water" and "The Lonely Mountain" because we're reading it from a hobbit's perspective (and a child's) in which all the names given to locations are in the recorder's own language, and since we're presumably reading something translated out of "hobbit speak" we translate the names literally. In Lord of the Rings, the names for places are partially in Elvish. Or Dwarvish. Or possibly in the language of the Rohirrim, which is similar to hobbit. Each time a name is given, there's a wealth of history hidden in it. The same goes for people names. "Éomer" means "horse-famous" (one who is famous with horses - a great rider and warrior) and "Éowyn" means "horse-joy" (one who delights in horses). These are a people who, as Boromir and Gandalf explained, value their horses above all else, who fight on their horses and live by their horses and breed the best horses in Middle Earth. We don't think of it much in these modern times, but what names people were given reflected the values the society held. Many of the hobbit names had to do with flowers or their occupations. Hobbits value gardening (a gardener ends up being one of the most - if not the most - important characters in the book) and hard work and plain things. Elrond's name means "star dome" - stemming, I think, from the fact that Elrond is descended from the family which bore the Silmarills, and from his mother's name "Elwing", which means "star-foam" (she turned into a swan, eventually, and followed Eärendil over the sea). In the case of the Rohirrim, you can extrapolate through their names and language a roaming people who came from a certain part of Middle Earth before settling in the area of Rohan.
Lord of the Rings is one of those books which improves on repeated reading and extra digging. He doesn't purposely make you work for it - it's a book for people who WANT to work for it. If you love history and mythology and the evolution of the latter as well as the study of the first, and most importantly of all,
words, and their history and evolution, and suddenly the book isn't just a passion play between good and evil. It's a rich woven tapestry that includes Tolkien playing out some linguistic suppositions he had about real world history. And while many characters are simplistic based on their lack of action inside the book, the characters who get a lot of play time often have much more development or feeling than meets the eye. Tolkien just doesn't explore it in outright language, because that's not how he writes. Almost everything is described through action, not feeling.
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