20 ms·

How Tolkien created Middle-earth

141 points by mhb 8y ago

arethuza 8y 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-tolkiens-batmen/ https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-to...
- digi_owl 8y 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.
  - arethuza 8y 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-first-world-war https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-pals-battalions-of-the-fi...
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      I'm not sure what you or the author of that IWM page mean - today the British Army still has a county regimental system, with the specific idea that the soldiers in a unit will have come from the same areas, have the same friends, be part of the same families, and so on.
      - iRideUnicornz 8y ago
        I agree, the blurb describes in detail what a "Pals Battalion" is, but not why it was actually problematic for the communities from which that battalion originated from. Basically, large groups of young men from the same community (hundreds to thousands), would all join up patriotically into the same battalion. After all, if they were going to join a war, they might as well join together with those that they know and already have bonds with. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences were those same entire battalions could be wiped out in a single day (like at the Somme), and now you had a community losing nearly all of it's young men at the exact same time, with hundreds of families in the same area now missing a son at the exact same time. As one would expect, the effects of this would be devastating mentally, and demographically enough so as to destroy smaller communities that had sent the majority of their sons and now no longer had fathers for the next generation.
        chrisseaton 8y ago
        But my point is this is exactly how Army regiments worked before, after, and today. The units recruit from specific geographical areas.
        smacktoward 8y ago
        Today they recruit much smaller numbers. Recruitment in the Great War meant mass recruitment -- Kitchener's first call for volunteers in August 1914 brought in nearly 500,000 men all by itself, and nearly 2.5 million in total would volunteer before voluntary recruitment was finally abandoned in favor of conscription in 1916 (see https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/voluntary-recruiting https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/voluntary-recruitin...). For comparison, the entire modern-day British Army only has about 80,000 regular troops. Moreover, a battalion was a unit of around a thousand men, so the "pals battalions" -- where men were encouraged to volunteer by being allowed to serve with people they knew -- ended up being drawn from extremely narrow geographical areas. There were pals battalions of men who all worked in the same factory, of men who'd all attended school together, of the players from the local football club and all their fans. So when one of these battalions got wiped out, as many did in the battles of the Somme, a very specific community would suddenly more or less cease to exist.
  - Bromskloss 8y ago
    > Seems that English society learned quite a bit from those two wars What do you have in mind?
rdlecler1 8y ago
Anyone else nostalgic about the Middle Earth and early D&D artwork?
- KineticLensman 8y 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!
- ConceptJunkie 8y 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 8y 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.
    - DonaldPShimoda 8y ago
      This is why I often end up with lots of old lands in my newer decks. I just love the way they're drawn. My friends don't get it, but to me the art is just so much more. That said, the newer sets do still produce art with that charm from time to time. But it's much rarer than it used to be.
KineticLensman 8y 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/ https://tolkien.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
- pnathan 8y 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 8y 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.
  - KineticLensman 8y 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 8y 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.
- auntienomen 8y 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 8y 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.
    - ianamartin 8y ago
      Just everything that's ever been written about Tolkien and his life and work. Including at least 3 biographies that I know of, countless scholarly papers dedicated to his linguistic work as an academic and fantasy writer, literally volumes of material that have been published by his son, himself describing his creative process, etc. It's a pretty well-known thing that he was a linguist first, wrote the hobbit to read his children as a story that fit in with the languages and mythology he'd already developed, and only ever considered publishing them because his friends (including C.S. Lewis) badgered him about it.
    - auntienomen 8y ago
      Not research I've done, just common knowledge. Have a look at the biography Humphrey Carpenter wrote.
    - jonnycomputer 8y ago
      its largely correct based on a lot of what I read. i think it may have been a more organic process of co-creation, where the language informed the world&story building, and vice-versa. But its definitely mistaken to think that he just created the languages to populate his world, as some kind of afterthought.
davidy123 8y 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.
- Amezarak 8y 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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jack6e 8y 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-tolkien-telling-off-nazis-absolutely-nothing https://io9.gizmodo.com/5892697/whats-classier-than-jrr-tolk...
cocacola1 8y 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.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  Sounds a lot like The Grateful Dead trying to LOTR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs0AmruS8Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs0AmruS8Ro
  - cocacola1 8y ago
    I've actually never listened to The Grateful Dead, so I can't say one way or the other :(
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- BerislavLopac 8y ago
  Some time in early 90s I have actually set up a small ballet production with that album. :)
- albutr 8y 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.
mkirklions 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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...
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    Specifically the walking for chapters upon chapters.
- KineticLensman 8y 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.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Actually it was six volumes reduced to 3...
    - KineticLensman 8y ago

141 points by mhb 8y 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-tolkiens-batmen/ https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-to...

digi_owl 8y 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.
- arethuza 8y 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-first-world-war https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-pals-battalions-of-the-fi...
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    I'm not sure what you or the author of that IWM page mean - today the British Army still has a county regimental system, with the specific idea that the soldiers in a unit will have come from the same areas, have the same friends, be part of the same families, and so on.
    - iRideUnicornz 8y ago
      I agree, the blurb describes in detail what a "Pals Battalion" is, but not why it was actually problematic for the communities from which that battalion originated from. Basically, large groups of young men from the same community (hundreds to thousands), would all join up patriotically into the same battalion. After all, if they were going to join a war, they might as well join together with those that they know and already have bonds with. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences were those same entire battalions could be wiped out in a single day (like at the Somme), and now you had a community losing nearly all of it's young men at the exact same time, with hundreds of families in the same area now missing a son at the exact same time. As one would expect, the effects of this would be devastating mentally, and demographically enough so as to destroy smaller communities that had sent the majority of their sons and now no longer had fathers for the next generation.
      - chrisseaton 8y ago
        But my point is this is exactly how Army regiments worked before, after, and today. The units recruit from specific geographical areas.
        smacktoward 8y ago
        Today they recruit much smaller numbers. Recruitment in the Great War meant mass recruitment -- Kitchener's first call for volunteers in August 1914 brought in nearly 500,000 men all by itself, and nearly 2.5 million in total would volunteer before voluntary recruitment was finally abandoned in favor of conscription in 1916 (see https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/voluntary-recruiting https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/voluntary-recruitin...). For comparison, the entire modern-day British Army only has about 80,000 regular troops. Moreover, a battalion was a unit of around a thousand men, so the "pals battalions" -- where men were encouraged to volunteer by being allowed to serve with people they knew -- ended up being drawn from extremely narrow geographical areas. There were pals battalions of men who all worked in the same factory, of men who'd all attended school together, of the players from the local football club and all their fans. So when one of these battalions got wiped out, as many did in the battles of the Somme, a very specific community would suddenly more or less cease to exist.
- Bromskloss 8y ago
  > Seems that English society learned quite a bit from those two wars What do you have in mind?

rdlecler1 8y ago

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

KineticLensman 8y 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!
ConceptJunkie 8y 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 8y 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.
  - DonaldPShimoda 8y ago
    This is why I often end up with lots of old lands in my newer decks. I just love the way they're drawn. My friends don't get it, but to me the art is just so much more. That said, the newer sets do still produce art with that charm from time to time. But it's much rarer than it used to be.

KineticLensman 8y 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/ https://tolkien.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

pnathan 8y 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 8y 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.
- KineticLensman 8y 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 8y 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.

auntienomen 8y 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 8y 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.
  - ianamartin 8y ago
    Just everything that's ever been written about Tolkien and his life and work. Including at least 3 biographies that I know of, countless scholarly papers dedicated to his linguistic work as an academic and fantasy writer, literally volumes of material that have been published by his son, himself describing his creative process, etc. It's a pretty well-known thing that he was a linguist first, wrote the hobbit to read his children as a story that fit in with the languages and mythology he'd already developed, and only ever considered publishing them because his friends (including C.S. Lewis) badgered him about it.
  - auntienomen 8y ago
    Not research I've done, just common knowledge. Have a look at the biography Humphrey Carpenter wrote.
  - jonnycomputer 8y ago
    its largely correct based on a lot of what I read. i think it may have been a more organic process of co-creation, where the language informed the world&story building, and vice-versa. But its definitely mistaken to think that he just created the languages to populate his world, as some kind of afterthought.

davidy123 8y 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.

Amezarak 8y 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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jack6e 8y 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-tolkien-telling-off-nazis-absolutely-nothing https://io9.gizmodo.com/5892697/whats-classier-than-jrr-tolk...

cocacola1 8y 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.

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
Sounds a lot like The Grateful Dead trying to LOTR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs0AmruS8Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs0AmruS8Ro
- cocacola1 8y ago
  I've actually never listened to The Grateful Dead, so I can't say one way or the other :(
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
BerislavLopac 8y ago
Some time in early 90s I have actually set up a small ballet production with that album. :)
albutr 8y 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.

mkirklions 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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...
- mkirklions 8y ago
  Specifically the walking for chapters upon chapters.
KineticLensman 8y 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.
- garmaine 8y ago
  Actually it was six volumes reduced to 3...
  - KineticLensman 8y ago