17 ms·
New Tolkien book, The Fall of Númenor, to be published
- vermilingua 4y ago> If you love Tolkien, or if you love the Amazon series, this book is for you. I thought those two groups were more or less disjoint.
- everyone 4y agoI now just found out thats a thing.. Quoted sentence is doubly weird: How could anyone love it or otherwise? It hasnt even been released yet
- layer8 4y agoThey don’t want to revise that text once the series is out.
- vegai_ 4y agoHuh, is the Amazon series already out? edit it's not. Why would anyone love the series when they haven't seen even a single episode?
- zeofig 4y agoI've already seen quite a lot
- vegai_ 4y agoYeah, the trailer wasn't extremely promising. But who knows -- I think it's entirely possible to mix contemporary trendy politics without hurting the quality of the actual piece. It's more a question of overall quality than the actual politics. The lack of original source material is probably a riskier problem, and could lead into a GoT -like mess.
- fallingknife 4y agoI think contemporary trendy politics is cancer so I'm kinda biased here. But even if I concede that you are right and you can mix that in without hurting the quality, I can say confidently that you can't do that with Tolkien. He was a deeply religious Catholic and his world view and "contemporary trendy politics" just don't mix.
- Agamus 4y agoSorry, I'm confused. Does this new book incorporate 'trendy politics'? If someone knows, please tell. If it does not, this is one of the most exciting bits of news I have ever heard. If so, then the opposite is the case.
- dwighttk 4y agoI think parent was writing about the Amazon series.
- causality0 4y agoIt hasn't been done well lately. I nearly cringed out of my skin when Peacemaker and Resident Alien both made awkward anti-anti-masker speeches on the same week and I happened to watch them back to back.
- simonh 4y agoI'm trying to keep an open mind. I've no problem per se with Middle Earth including plenty of people of colour, it's right there in the source material. Numenor was quite far south, and the nearest places to it on the continent are Umbar and the far south. We know they had lots of contact and colonies there for thousands of years, and it would actually be kind of weird if there weren't southerners or people with some southern descent turning up in Numenor. Plenty of justification for people of colour to play a huge role in any story of or about Numenor, or any group that comes from there. I'm not sure about the Elves and Dwarves, but sure, if humans from the south are of colour, why not Elves and Dwarves from down south too? It all depends how it's handled. Game of Thrones did a fairly good job on this, with characters from different parts of the world often looking like it, aside from some issues with casting extras (pasty looking Irish Dothraki for example). As for warrior Galadriel, well, she was in a war. She personally walked all the way from the Undying Lands through the icy wastes of the North with her people, who suffered huge losses. That journey was no joke, and I have no problem believing she fought alongside them, and was entirely capable of doing so. Having said that the fake fan engagement stuff was horrifyingly cringey. We'll just have to see.
- prawn 4y agoThey're anticipating that people will discover the book because they're presently longtime fans or future fans via the Amazon series. Bet it explains the timing of the book too. See this invented conversation: "I'm going to that new city restaurant next week." "I really liked it. Actually, I got a cookbook by that chef. If you love the restaurant, this book is for you." That the two groups apparently lack overlap would support the press release mentioning each separately: Whether you're a hippy environmentalist or conservative/independent rancher, solar panels are for you!
- capableweb 4y ago> Bet it explains the timing of the book too I think the submission article is pretty obvious about that the timing is on purpose: > The book, due out in hardback and deluxe on 10th November 2022, is conveniently timed to coincide with Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power which is being released this September, and which is also set in the Second Age.
- hjkl0 4y ago> the submission article is pretty obvious about that the timing is on purpose The article doesn’t actually make that claim. “Conveniently timed” means it’s the author’s own opinion. Which is almost certainly just as good as yours or mine is. It would be very different if the article claimed the book was developed alongside the series or anything like that.
- dylan604 4y ago>They're anticipating that people will discover the book because they're presently longtime fans or future fans via the Amazon series. Bet it explains the timing of the book too. Wonder what people think after never reading The Hobbit until after watching the 6+ hours of movies then circle back to the book?
- wildmanx 4y ago"If A, then B." This statement does not claim that A is true. Basic logics, guys.
- parametrizept 4y agoWell if A is absurd and generally considered impossible, then it's still a strange thing to say in this context, even if it would be a valid statement in formal logic.
- wildmanx 4y agoMind you, A was "If you love Tolkien, or if you love the Amazon series," That's not "absurd". And, given time, it's not "generally considered impossible" either, once the series is out and people have watched it.
- jeanlucas 4y ago>Why would anyone love the series when they haven't seen even a single episode? Yeah man, it's called PR
- lobocinza 4y agoBecause giving current trends they will hate it after watching.
- easytiger 4y agoHiring woke academics (and I use that term very loosely) for the media junket to shore up the script was an obvious sign of concern
- prvc 4y ago>or They used a disjunctive operator, so what's your problem?
- havblue 4y agoMaybe that's the point, there are two kinds of people in the world: People who love Tolkien and people who love Amazon Tolkien.
- DeusExMachina 4y agoHis point though was that they don't like the same things. And this book is pure Tolkien, so it's for the first group.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoEven there I'd argue; I loved LotR and the Hobbit, but I couldn't get into any of the others; they don't flow as well as those, they come across as disjointed, etc. Maybe if you're more into the world building than the books, and if you don't mind a more "biblical" narrative.
- everyone 4y agoSounds like another Silmarillion.
- thriftwy 4y agoMore like another "The Children of Húrin".
- dmitriid 4y agoTo be honest, it's a transparent cash grab by the Tolkien Estate first, and anything else a distant 1000th.
- bowsamic 4y agoDo you not think that Tolkien fans want this?
- alpaca128 4y agoOf course many want this. Which is why this kind of cash-grab works in the first place.
- bowsamic 4y agoSo the Lord of the Rings was also a cash grab based on the success of the Hobbit? That's a strange idea
- bombcar 4y agoWhat’s funny is the publishers asked for another Hobbit, and Tolkien even started writing one (the early chapters have a more hobbity tone with thinking foxes, etc) but then went in a completely different direction and depth.
- 3np 4y agoWouldn't be much of a cash-grab if nobody bought it, would it?
- gpderetta 4y agoIs this the first book (except for the Hobbit and LOTR of course) not edited by Christopher Tolkien? Hopefully it will maintain the high quality of the others.
- winnit 4y agoThe article is a little contradictory on that, it first states that Brian Sibley is the editor but in the quote of Brian Sibley he states his task as 'bringing together J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings (under the editorship of Christopher Tolkien) relating to the dramatic history spanning the Second Age of Middle-earth'.
- ojbyrne 4y agoSo it says further down: “ Presenting for the first time in one volume the events of the Second Age as written by J.R.R. Tolkien and originally and masterfully edited for publication by Christopher Tolkien” So “originally” edited by Christopher Tolkien (who is dead), further editing by Brian Sibley.
- themadturk 4y agoI (perhaps over-optimistically) read it as Brian Sibley is taking the various edited work Christopher Tolkien did on the Second Age texts and bringing them together in a single place, in order, with some sort of commentary or framework around them. Doesn't sound like he's actually re-working the texts themselves, but who knows.
- lakomen 4y agoI wonder what an AI trained with Tolkien books would produce. The other day there was this Seinfeld joke telling AI and it was really good. I wonder if this could be done for dead authors, I would "kill" for a Gene Roddenberry Star Trek again in line with TNG.
- ianbooker 4y agoI think you do not need to wait that long for marketed AI written synquels. (I just made this up for "synthetic sequel"). It will be very interesting to see how exactly this is marketed and how big the market for such product will be. Sequels, spin-offs are alle the rage, but B-Sides, lost tracks or unpublished material are less mainstream.
- Narretz 4y agoThe obstacle here is probably consistency in long form writing. Even in short form writing, AI often jumps around and introduces new elements while ignoring old ones. New models that retain a sort of plot memory are necessary for long form generated writing.
- woojoo666 4y agohttps://youtu.be/1onxri0duN0 https://youtu.be/1onxri0duN0 is this the Seinfield AI you were talking about? Wow that legitimately impressed me. If that last joke was actually original and not present anywhere in it's training data, then AI is farther along than I thought Edit: ah looks like it was posted on hackernews a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31788976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31788976
- TecoAndJix 4y agoCheck out Star Trek: Strange New Worlds!! Nothing like the other “new trek” shows (Discovery/Picard) which I couldn’t finish because they felt nothing like Trek to me. SNW follows the moral/philosophical issue of the week format with lite tie ins between episodes. Very happy so far
- mcv 4y ago
- adrianN 4y agoTolkien's universe is a quite depressing one. It's a series of stable periods interspersed with cataclysmic events that permanently lower the quality of life. All the great things in-universe come from a previous age and it's essentially unheard of that any contemporary art surpasses what the ancients could do.
- yieldcrv 4y agoThis is interesting because many maaany fantasy works since then follow this theme as well Seemingly every JRPG style game has some confluence of magic and technology with a prior ancient civilization being better at all of it
- thehappypm 4y agoBreath of the Wild comes to mind
- baud147258 4y agoyes, I'm finding this trope a little tired because it's like everywhere. It could be interesting to have a setting in the first age, like there's no ruins from previous civilization, you are building what would become those ruins instead. And it's also not limited to fantasy, as it's also there in sci-fi
- yieldcrv 4y agoDefinitely a tired trope, but I like the Witcher’s variant on that. Mostly different dimensions that are collidable and occasionally traversed. Still has a segregated fairly advanced Elven kingdom seemingly predating man. But the observations that vanquishing threats to society dont necessarily raise the standards of living is some pretty well in the Witcher franchise. Very nihilist.
- saiya-jin 4y agoIt helps making for example artefacts/weapons/anything else worth striving for much less obtainable. For example 'every good smith can forge top class dragon slayer sword', instead of 'this unique magic sword from 2nd era forged by legendary smith xyz from unobtainium pooped by long-extinct fire dragons'
- AndrewDucker 4y agoI don't think this is new content though - it looks like this is all of the Second-Age writing brought together into one volume.
- tephra 4y agoIt is not new stories no but it is being edited to form a more complete story one could say. They usually provide some really good commentary by Tolkien scholars in these publications as well so usually well worth the money (note: completely biased Tolkien nerd).
- fodmap 4y agoTrivia: In the year 2000 a book with that name was published for the Spanish speaking market. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ca%C3%ADda_de_N%C3%BAmenor https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ca%C3%ADda_de_N%C3%BAmenor
- kosyblysk666 4y ago
- vlunkr 4y agoThis might be blasphemous among LOTR fans, but I wish the Tolkien family would work with other authors to complete these stories. You can still publish all the drafts and notes you want, but I would love to see them written in a more digestible format. There is so much potential in all these stories.
- i_haz_rabies 4y agoI agree. Considering how WoT fans feel about Brando Sando, this can clearly work.
- larusso 4y agoRemembering a piece about the Wheel of Time and how Jordan prepared the books beforehand. He wrote that he had the whole storyline already before him. He only needed to fill the gaps so to speak. He didn’t bring much of his own style in as he claims. What I think is great about the last books not completely written by Jordan is that you don‘t feel it when reading all of them back to back. I wonder if the source material from Tolkien is in a Format which allows to do the same. And also finding an Arthur that is willing to write in a specific style. But I would be happy enough if more parts of the world would be published in a normal novel like form. But then that was also the point of Tolkien to produce Folklore. So in essence he should be fine if another author retells his stories with a slight different way or take.
- albrewer 4y ago> you don‘t feel it when reading all of them back to back Having just finished reading the Wheel of Time books for the first time about a week ago, I disagree with this statement. To me, the difference was stark - after going through so many of Jordan's books, you can clearly see a subtle but distinct writing style for each of the main POV characters. After the transition, the characters stay (mostly) the same but the writing style distinctions between them disappear; the worst offender being Aviendha's POV chapters (so! many! exclamation! marks!). Sanderson also made a few mistakes in writing scenes involving the Aiel that contradicted lore laid down earlier in the series that really stuck out to me. That's not to say Sanderson did a bad job, not at all. I really enjoyed the series, and I think Sanderson does a much better job at portraying emotional characters than Jordan did, which was crucial for the ending having the quality and impact that it did. they're both quality builders and writers, and both excel in different areas. To me, though, it was if I had started watching something animated in the style of Arcane[0], and suddenly it switched to Moana[1]. Both fantastically animated and detailed, but the detail budget is spent in different places. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXmAurh012s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXmAurh012s [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPAbx5kgCJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPAbx5kgCJo
- kenbolton 4y agoI fell hard out-of-love with fantasy about the time of the release of Jackson's TFotR, which coincided with a hard "nope" to the fantasy "science" fiction of the Star Wars universe and has grown to a rejection of 95% of the MCU. They feel, to me, as schlocky and infantalizing as the fantasy of the Twilight & Harry Potter novels/films. It is all annoying nostalgia for an era that never existed. Give me the "hard" science fiction of Herbert, Card, Dick, Butler (especially Butler!), Okorafor, Liu, et al. Dick was problematic, sure, and Liu has said things about Uighurs I can't stomach, but their works look forward and not back.
- havblue 4y ago> Liu has said things about Uighurs I can't stomach I wonder whether he "had to", not that it makes it okay. The parts about the cultural revolution in the first book were interesting because I didn't know you could still get published if you wrote negative stories about the party.
- hguant 4y agoCritiquing the Cultural Revolution has been acceptable since 1981 when Deng published/authorized the party's second "Resolution on History," which laid out officially that there were "excesses" during the Cultural Revolution, and that they were primarily Mao's fault. This is in line with a lot of Chinese/Communist political thought in general - the Party is never wrong. If the Party endorsed what is later viewed as a "wrong action," then it must be the fault of an individual who erred or was corrupted in some way.
- havblue 4y agoIt's surprising how well the "no true Scotsman" fallacy works on most people...
- timwaagh 4y agoThat cow has been milked, milked again, squeezed for every last drop, then when it died, its corpse was milked and the pus that came out was mistaken for milk so it was squeezed again for every last drop of pus.
- natly 4y agoMakes me think of how gross it is that they still milk avicii's brand to this day years after his body left our world.
- dylan604 4y agoIs that even close to the same thing? LOTR keeps getting new "content". Has there been new music released from the library of avicii? I'm not talking about remixes upon remixes. Is there a AviciiSociety in charge of his legacy content that decides who/what/when/where can use the unreleased content to do something new? Maybe there is, and I can learn something new.
- adamc 4y agoLaundry lists of middle earth, coming to a "bookseller" near you. I love LOTR, but this is kind of gross.
- havblue 4y agoThis is why some people use the unpleasant metaphor of a skin suit to describe most of the continuing franchises of star wars, trek, marvel etc. They aren't primarily being written or inspired by their creators as much as new people wearing the skin of their creator.
- ghaff 4y agoWith rare exceptions like The Mandalorian, I can just no longer summon up enthusiasm or interest in franchises that date back to the 1960s or 70s--even when there's not really anything wrong with a given film or TV show. (Though there are plenty of examples where the latest film or TV show is not in fact very good.)
- JKCalhoun 4y agoWhy Amazon or Peter Jackson haven't taken up "Narn i Chîn Húrin" and film it I'll never understand. Such an epic, self-contained hero/tragedy.
- donohoe 4y agoSkips this book but do read The Last Ringbearer, a well-written 1999 fantasy fan-fiction book: "Eskov bases his novel on the premise that the Tolkien account is a "history written by the victors". Eskov's version of the story describes Mordor as a peaceful constitutional monarchy on the verge of an industrial revolution, that poses a threat to the war-mongering and imperialistic faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude has been described by Saruman as "crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem") and the racist elves." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
- shrubble 4y agoIt may well be a well written book, and I will check it out, but it obviously is also written by a guy who is still butt-hurt by the fall of the USSR...
- darthrupert 4y agoThe premise is much more interesting than the quality of writing. It was rather heavy to read. Tolkien's writing is on a completely different level.
- tut-urut-utut 4y agoThe book stands on its feet. Why would private butt-hurtedness (is that even a word?) of an author matter? Wasn't Tolkien also butt-hurt by the decline of the British Empire? At least both authors have something in common. I still find The Last Ringbearer more optimistic than LotR, where even the victory against the biggest evil ever seems just like an ephemeral moment of partial restoration in a long period of inevitable decline of the human race. The characters in this book are alive, while in LotR there's much more character in mountains than in humans.
- xdennis 4y ago> Wasn't Tolkien also butt-hurt by the decline of the British Empire? In typical Russian apologist style (as evident by your comments), you resort to whataboutism, even without actually checking your accusations. Tolkien was conservative, but he was an anti-imperialist. "I love England not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth" – Letter 53 – December 1943 "I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust.” – Letter 100 – May 1945 https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/tolkien-and-empire/ https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/tolkien-and-...
- notacoward 4y agoI've always felt like this was one of the more compelling possible stories in the Middle Earth canon, so it might be the first one I seek out since being sorely disappointed by the Silmarillion. Done right, it could have all the drama and power of Game of Thrones but in a less depressing world. Unfortunately, since they don't seem to have brought in any outside writers, it's more likely to be yet another academically-dry collection of disconnected anecdotes. I guess we'll find out.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoSounds a lot like The Silmarillion. I got about a quarter of the way through that book, before giving up.
- 3qz 4y agoThe Tolkien Society is completely filled with oversocialized academics who compete to find the most insane interpretations of his work as possible. Not a good source! I wish they would be disbanded
- standardUser 4y agoI've been a Tolkien fan since a very young age when I would read and re-read the old copies my mother handed down to me of Hobbit and LotR. Then I went on to read the Silmarillion and all of the "unfinished" books. Having said that, I cannot fathom why anyone would be upset about new material. The books you love are still the books you love. They haven't changed at all, and they won't. If you don't like the new stuff, ignore it, like we all do for almost all media that is released.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y agoI wish someone had warned me about Star Wars, post-Disney acquisition. But, no, here I am subjecting myself to Kenobi. Maybe given the furor here, I should read the tea leaves, and avoid having another glowing memory tarnished.
- dporter 4y agoYou can literally just not watch it.
- ghostbrainalpha 4y agoIf you love the Lord of The Rings and are looking for a fun way to exercise, I can't recommend this Virtual Running App enough. I've run half way to Mordor and lost 8 pounds in the last couple months. https://www.theconqueror.events/lotr/ https://www.theconqueror.events/lotr/
- Maursault 4y agoTolkien wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote drafts. Like The Fall of Gondolin, this is not going to be a cover to cover story. It is going to be up to several attempts by Tolkien to tell the story, edited by and along with Christopher Tolkien's commentary. It is going to reveal few precious morsels about Numenor. Ultimately, the content itself is only going to amount to a short story, but told a few different times in slightly different ways. We already know the story, the outline of it, anyway. So now we'll get some fine detail here and there as well.
- diogenescynic 4y agoTolkien has released more books than GRRM since A Dance With Dragons came out. Surreal.