10 ms·

Tolkien'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. A

Tolkien'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 ago
This 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 ago
  Breath of the Wild comes to mind
- baud147258 4y ago
  yes, 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 ago
    Definitely 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 ago
  It 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'
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    There are plenty of stories you can tell that don't rely on tracking down a MacGuffin and plenty of ways of making a MacGuffin unique other than being from a lost golden age.
foo_foo_can_do 4y ago
Indeed it's hard to relate to something so unrealistic /s
nine_k 4y ago
Tolkien was a devout Christian; what other view of a world would you expect from him?
- thinkingemote 4y ago
  That would only really map onto the fall from the garden of Eden. Of which there is evidence for I think. (Evidence that the idea influenced Tolkiens Middle Earth) Any general romancing of past times is not Christian specific. It's likely that the author was writing though a period of intense instability. Something like a major world war or two. That would for sure be an influence.
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    If you read the Old Testament, you'll find people living for centuries, miracles happening, and God intervening in matters all the time. But then people's lives grew shorter and life became boring and mundane. The Christianity we know today was the state religion of the Roman Empire. It's core doctrines were agreed on in a council summoned by Constantine the Great. But then the great ancient empire fell. It was replaced by many lesser kingdoms, which tried to keep some old traditions alive, and the Church was the unifying force. But then the Church itself split apart, and the last remnants of the old empire fell to infidels coming from the east. And then the Church split again. The idea that the world becomes lesser over time used to be a core part of Christian worldview. Industrialization changed that, but Tolkien considered the consequences of industry and technology a great evil.
    - blowski 4y ago
      This is true of many mythologies, it's far from exclusive to Christianity. Roman/Greek mythology: > Both Hesiod and Ovid offered accounts of the successive ages of humanity, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains and evils. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man Hindu Mythology: > Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred, or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata
pfortuny 4y ago
But that is because the ancients were more than human. Notice that it is a hobbit who destroys the ring of power, nobody else could, be he dwarf, elf, wizard, whatever. Not even Aragorn! Not so depressing if you look at it this way.
- guiriduro 4y ago
  Well, technically, a covetous, duplicitous, schizophrenic creature that was once something like a Hobbit did it. But I think your point stands.
  - thehappypm 4y ago
    Nobody else could have brought the ring to Mt. Doom. Hell, the ring drove Boromir to madness and he wasn’t even a bearer.
rich_sasha 4y ago
Hmm, all of the old powerful things come from the past. Good and bad. Sauron for example. But if the "era of men" has come, as the elves say, perhaps the Middle Earth dwellers are doing something ok? I suppose the Middle Earth in Frodo's times are a reflection of early medieval times. And to some extent that's how it was. Collapse of Western Roman empire was a time of terrible economic downturn.
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  Yeah, we never really got to see the third age at its prime. We just know that the rise of Gondor came with a millennia of peace and prosperity for the west before things stalled. In the same way the period just before and after the collapse of Rome was not the best, but that doesn't mean it was worse than ancient civilisations at its peak.
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    The Third Age was roughly 1000 years of growth followed by 2000 years of war and decline. In some of Tolkien's writings, you can clearly find the idea of immortals fighting the long war that slowly wore the Numenoreans down over the millennia.
    - sigmoid10 4y ago
      Nonetheless, the immortals (including Ilúvatar, but mostly their underlings) messing with the world was a lot more prevalent in the first and second age. The third age was kind of a transition to the age of men, which finally came by in the fourth. So for humans progress was definitely positive overall if you don't just look at the cataclysms.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > But if the "era of men" has come, as the elves say, perhaps the Middle Earth dwellers are doing something ok? It's more a question of the elves spontaneously losing the will to live.
inawarminister 4y ago
Eh, the Numenoreans reached a quality of life that was better than First Age Middle Earth inhabitants (don't mind the guys chilling @ Valinor, literal Paradise/Avalon), then we in the Sixth Age did it again. But yeah, the metaphysics of the setting, that all creatures no matter how great or small only have so much gas inside themself - not even Melkor was able to reach his greatness in the dawn of the world, or even during the First Age. He spread himself too thin in his monstrous creations - dragons, orcs, thousands other things, and into the soil and gold of Arda Marred.
everyone 4y ago
Yeah the tone of LOTR is oppressive, reserved, alien, post apocalyptic. I read the novel many times as a kid and loved it, so I hated the 2001 film. Imo visually it was perfect, it literally looked like the books did in my imagination. But in every other respect it was completely off, especially the overall tone. The 2nd biggest issue for me was the music, they had a great opportunity to do something interesting and alien with the music, but nah its just generic hollywood rousing adventure music that never stops playing.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  As a New Zealander the movies always felt off. I'd read the books cover to cover multiple times by that point, and they'd transported me to a strange, beautiful and foreign world. Then I see it on the big screen and the landscapes and flora were all familiar to me. If I hadn't seen similar stuff in person, I'd seen them on local TV advertisements for beer, butter and toyotas. So I try and ignore them these days, and cling on to the LOTR that I first saw in my head that looks nothing like home.
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    I always wonder how Americans feel about their entertainment largely being set in American with Americans speaking American accents. How can you imagine a different world?
    - coastflow 4y ago
      Even within the United States, different regions can feel like different worlds. The most stark contrast I’ve seen is in the indie film Lady Bird where (SPOILERS) there is a setting change from a very small rural American town for most of the plot to New York City at the end of the film, with it’s subways, density, and architecture that felt familiar to any watcher from an urban area. Similarly, the suburban Texas setting of the King of the Hill deliberately contrasts itself with New York-based shows (referring to Seinfeld as, “I'll tell you what, man, them dang ol' New York boys. Just a show about nothin,’” with other joked about the disdain of many Texans of New Yorkers).
detuur 4y ago
That's entropy for you. On a cosmic scale, we are currently living in the universe's First Age. Maybe even Second Age. Stars are still being born, we still have supernovas, the light of distant galaxies still reaches us. On the other hand, Population II and III stars, the ancient supermassive stars who fused the metals that enabled the birth of Population I stars and the formation of planets, are all extinct now. Only the light of distant specimens, which has traveled for more than half of the univere's existence, still bears witness to their reign. But at one point, we will enter a Third Age. Light from distant galaxies will dim. Light from the earliest moments in history will grow too far to reach us as the universe unceasingly expands faster and faster. Still, our own little corner of space is still alive, stars still emerge. But they are dim and weak compared to the stars of old. When they die, they bloat and fizzle out. The last supernova in the galaxy was billions of years ago. It will remain like this for a long time. And then we enter a Fourth Age. The universe is dying. Fuel has ran out for new star formation. Even on the best nights, the majority of the night sky is pitch black. Black holes outnumber everything else. Except for a few galaxies, the rest of the universe is out of reach. The expansion has reached such a velocity that even travelling at the speed of light you will never reach another region of the universe ever again. Every day, another light goes out in the night sky, never to be replaced. This process is slow. The universe's death is immensely slow and dragged out. But it's not inhospitable to life. The vast majority of stars in this age are small, but exceptionally long-lived. They can support planets, and all the elements necessary for life. Seeing as life will eventually arise if the environment supports it, the universe will be booming with it. The overwhelming majority of all that will ever live will live in this Fourth Age. Cosmologists call it the Degenerate Era. To the species living in this age and their civilisations, the mysteries of the universe will forever be inaccessible. They can only observe the diminutive, extinguishing fragment of the universe, now spread out across distances many orders bigger than they are today. It will be a very populated, yet lonely universe. Eventually, the universe will die. Stars will flame out one after another. Planets will freeze. This phase dwarfs even the Fourth Age. It lasts seemingly forever. Slowly, the atoms in all that exists decompose as even their age starts to show. The universe itself becomes fundamentally incompatible with life. Only black holes seem unaffected. But even they are slowly dying. Ever so slowly. Not that it matters. Once time itself has lost all meaning, they start to slowly evaporate, until the universe is just a dead sea of energy, with naught but tiny ripples born from quantum randomness. After that, it will take an infinity of time for anything to happen. But anything can happen, and maybe, eventually, by pure quantum randomness, all the energy in the universe may coalesce into one point, and it can all start over again.
barrysteve 4y ago
His central idea is that living like Tom Bombadill is the joyous, uncomplicated foil to Sauron's world conquering evil. He was writing about a fantasy world 8000 years ago that was particularly dark and had yet to see 'the light'.
- rob74 4y ago
  How fitting then that Tom Bombadil was completely and utterly cut from the movies...
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    THe movies were mostly Disney-field twaddle that ignored or overwrote many of the central themes and characters in the Lord of the Rings. Their only redeeming feature was that some of the actors delivered excellent performances, within the limited scope created by the director and screenwriter, and the landscape was kind of pretty. The list of atrocities is long - the entire character of the Ents, the entire character of Faramir, the conversion of Saruman from a master propagandist and manipulator to a cartoon villain... Then there was the addition of unnecessary comic and action scenes, and the exclusion of critical scenes (Scouring of the Shire). Read the books, ignore the Hollywood adaptations.
tigerlily 4y ago
That’s only if you are elvish, though. Are you an elf?
LAC-Tech 4y ago
The more history I learn the more I think that in some respects - certainly culturally and artistically - this is true for our own time.
taurath 4y ago
Tolkien was a British person in the early 20th century so the cultural context in which he lived was one of an empire in decline, 2 world wars, and as the series was written a Europe and UK in relative ruins. Romanticism about the power, influence, justice, and luxury of the empire was a driving propaganda technique during the wars.
- rob74 4y ago
  If you look at Brexit, you will find that romanticism about the power, influence, justice, and luxury of the empire is still a driving propaganda technique...
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Even _before the Empire_, nostalgia for a fictional past was a huge thing in England; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_England.
  - dash2 4y ago
    That is widely said, but I know of no serious social scientific finding that nostalgia for empire played any part in Brexit vote share.
    - rob74 4y ago
      Ok, maybe not nostalgia for the Empire specifically, but nostalgia for the "good old times", when the EU didn't meddle in the UK's business and force it to e.g. display the hated metric measurements besides the beloved Imperial ones (ha! there you have the Empire again!). And to quote some sources: according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_of_Brexit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...): > Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the European Union was "the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK". ("in the UK." meaning: "by the UK." logically implying: "on behalf of 66 million UK citizens not 508 million EU residents.")
simonh 4y ago
It's an imagined mythology for rural England, so follows the same historical outline. For most of the last many thousands of years civilisation was all happening far away (Greece, Rome). Bits of those civilisations made their way here but our civilisation and high culture is based on the leavings from distant past glories. All the action long ago was far away from this green and pleasant land, but now is our time to step up and take responsibility for history.
- arethuza 4y ago
  Claiming a lineage back to impressive forbears is a pretty common thing - didn't the Roman's claim ancestry back to Troy, even the Scots claimed ancestry back to the Scythians...
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    Yep, and that includes Britain, which some mythologies claim was also founded by a Trojan, Brutus of Troy, descended from Aeneas himself.
    - dhosek 4y ago
      Not to mention the whole British Israelite thing—where there is the claim that the Brits are descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. Then there's the hymn Jerusalem which speculates that Jesus himself came to Britain.
      - arethuza 4y ago
        The myths link Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, King Arthur, Holy Grail, Glastonbury and lots of other things: https://theconversation.com/glastonbury-archaeology-is-revealing-new-truths-about-the-origins-of-british-christianity-93805 https://theconversation.com/glastonbury-archaeology-is-revea... Meanwhile here in Scotland we've just got a rock that someone used as a pillow - but we do have a cool footprint and a nice island with "its cargo of mouldering kings".
    - 4y ago
DrBazza 4y ago
World War 1 had a massive effect on him. My grandfather who served in WWI aged 16 or 17. He saw things he couldn't unsee, and wasn't what you would ever call "cheerful". That generation had a very different world view.
- arethuza 4y ago
  Tolkien write about Sam: "My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen 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...
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
The Shire was a pretty bucolic place. Life was good, the beer was good, tobacco was available and corn was easy to filch. It was the place the Hobbits knew they wanted to return to, regardless of the wonders they saw or the horrors visited upon the world.
isaacfrond 4y ago
Not to mention the abysmal position of women in the book. Did you know that there are zero women in The Hobbit? Not to forget the thinly concealed racism. I've read the book many times, but recently, I can't enjoy them anymore like I used to.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Few women going on adventures in a pre-industrial society doesn't strike me as odd.
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    Nor was few women going on adventures the least bit odd for the era in which the books were written. And that being an age (WWI to WWII) where "men got to go out on exciting adventures" was often a rose-colored-glasses translation of "over 100,000 lucky men got to become casualties of war in merely the Second Battle of Ypres, in which the Germans first used poison gas on a large scale" grim realities...being a woman starts to sound like the better deal.
rsynnott 4y ago
"The past is a lost golden age" has historically been a really common trope. Like, not just in fiction; people really believed in it.
- midislack 4y ago
  It's actually true, of course people believed in it.
  - cm2012 4y ago
    For most of the world this is obviously the best time to be alive in human history.
    - leadingthenet 4y ago
      There are definite arguments to be made in favour of pre-industrial / pre-agricultural society, shorter lifespans and lack of cures for various diseases notwithstanding.
      - hossbeast 4y ago
        Short version of said arguments?
        chubot 4y ago
        Search for Jared Diamond (polymath author of many great books) on agriculture as a mistake, e.g. https://equitablegrowth.org/agriculture-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race-todays-economic-history/ https://equitablegrowth.org/agriculture-the-worst-mistake-in... https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist... Agriculture made us a lot unhealthier and shorter in stature (monoculture/unbalanced diets), and it also lead to massive power imbalances -- modern people spend more of their lives working. This is a very mainstream observation -- it's also supported by Sapiens, the popular human history book of the last 5 years (recommended by Obama, Gates, etc.). David Graeber's recent book argues that many early human societies purposely avoided agriculture, and then got "trapped" into the inequality of agriculture. The argument is that there is enough for everybody, but agriculture leads to power imbalances, which make most people's lives miserable. It's true that they were more miserable say in the 1500's in Europe than today. We have "recovered" from Europe of the 1500's, but that doesn't mean that this is the best time ever!
Thaxll 4y ago
Well it's less depressing than Warhammer 40k lore.
- pier25 4y ago
  Or a Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones)
spywaregorilla 4y ago
A bit of a rabbit hole led me to this, a commentary by tolkien on his thoughts after drafting several pages of a book set about 100 years after the end of LoTR and Aragorn's death https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Shadow https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Shadow > I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men, it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would have been just that. Not worth doing I find that writing process fascinating. Begin writing about your world a few generations later. Find you've added some satanists and other assholes to it. Get upset because the world sucks now. Stop writing the story because it wouldn't be a good one to tell. It would seem he didn't control his own sense of canon and direction. He just had a genuine vision of it all and it was either going to be exactly that or nothing at all.
- ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
  I am fascinated by Tolkien's writing process and mind as well. I recently read the article about "Bamfurlong", its a place in the books that didn't really need a name. Nothing about the name influences the story at all, the name didn't even appear in the first edition. But he HAD to go back and add that name in later editions because this place and its history was SOOO real to him. For every story we got from him, he must have built a hundred more in his imagination of that place. http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bamfurlong http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bamfurlong
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    > Bamfurlong was a farm in the boggy region of the Marish in the eastern Shire. It was the home of Farmer Maggot > Tolkien says that the name "Maggot" was a Hobbitish name whose meaning has been lost in history. Maggot should not be understood as the English word maggot or larva. The similarity is coincidental. Another frankly incomprehensible example. "This guy's name was Maggot. Readers will probably mistakenly assume that's an artistic choice, but unfortunately that's his name and I, as the author, have no agency to change that"
memling 4y ago
> Tolkien'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. I've been sitting in this comment for a day or two now, trying to figure out what to say, because I totally get it. In a moment of serendipity, I was reading another book that illustrated I think the core conviction: humanity is not a machine, and while machines progress, people do not. Tolkien sees in man a great capacity for both good and evil, rejects the notion of man's inherent goodness (borne of his Roman Catholicism and first-hand experience of WW1), and asserts that Good, while perhaps much diminished with respect to evil, is inherently the stronger force. (I think he's essentially Augustinian here--evil is an absence of Good or a mimicry of it, but cannot actually create. It only perverts.) So yes, there is a sort of depressing aspect of his universe: a rejection of inherent goodness and of progress. People don't change, but their technology unleashes a capacity for evil on a massive scale. At the same time, there is an obvious thread of hope in the series, too. Evil cannot exist on its own, and the nature of the Good is to create anew. There are those touched from the outside whose goodness triumphs over the evil within and without. The eucatastrophe is real.

yieldcrv 4y ago

This 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 ago
Breath of the Wild comes to mind
baud147258 4y ago
yes, 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 ago
  Definitely 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 ago
It 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'
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  There are plenty of stories you can tell that don't rely on tracking down a MacGuffin and plenty of ways of making a MacGuffin unique other than being from a lost golden age.

foo_foo_can_do 4y ago

Indeed it's hard to relate to something so unrealistic /s

nine_k 4y ago

Tolkien was a devout Christian; what other view of a world would you expect from him?

thinkingemote 4y ago
That would only really map onto the fall from the garden of Eden. Of which there is evidence for I think. (Evidence that the idea influenced Tolkiens Middle Earth) Any general romancing of past times is not Christian specific. It's likely that the author was writing though a period of intense instability. Something like a major world war or two. That would for sure be an influence.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  If you read the Old Testament, you'll find people living for centuries, miracles happening, and God intervening in matters all the time. But then people's lives grew shorter and life became boring and mundane. The Christianity we know today was the state religion of the Roman Empire. It's core doctrines were agreed on in a council summoned by Constantine the Great. But then the great ancient empire fell. It was replaced by many lesser kingdoms, which tried to keep some old traditions alive, and the Church was the unifying force. But then the Church itself split apart, and the last remnants of the old empire fell to infidels coming from the east. And then the Church split again. The idea that the world becomes lesser over time used to be a core part of Christian worldview. Industrialization changed that, but Tolkien considered the consequences of industry and technology a great evil.
  - blowski 4y ago
    This is true of many mythologies, it's far from exclusive to Christianity. Roman/Greek mythology: > Both Hesiod and Ovid offered accounts of the successive ages of humanity, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains and evils. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man Hindu Mythology: > Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred, or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata

pfortuny 4y ago

But that is because the ancients were more than human. Notice that it is a hobbit who destroys the ring of power, nobody else could, be he dwarf, elf, wizard, whatever. Not even Aragorn! Not so depressing if you look at it this way.

guiriduro 4y ago
Well, technically, a covetous, duplicitous, schizophrenic creature that was once something like a Hobbit did it. But I think your point stands.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Nobody else could have brought the ring to Mt. Doom. Hell, the ring drove Boromir to madness and he wasn’t even a bearer.

rich_sasha 4y ago

Hmm, all of the old powerful things come from the past. Good and bad. Sauron for example. But if the "era of men" has come, as the elves say, perhaps the Middle Earth dwellers are doing something ok? I suppose the Middle Earth in Frodo's times are a reflection of early medieval times. And to some extent that's how it was. Collapse of Western Roman empire was a time of terrible economic downturn.

sigmoid10 4y ago
Yeah, we never really got to see the third age at its prime. We just know that the rise of Gondor came with a millennia of peace and prosperity for the west before things stalled. In the same way the period just before and after the collapse of Rome was not the best, but that doesn't mean it was worse than ancient civilisations at its peak.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  The Third Age was roughly 1000 years of growth followed by 2000 years of war and decline. In some of Tolkien's writings, you can clearly find the idea of immortals fighting the long war that slowly wore the Numenoreans down over the millennia.
  - sigmoid10 4y ago
    Nonetheless, the immortals (including Ilúvatar, but mostly their underlings) messing with the world was a lot more prevalent in the first and second age. The third age was kind of a transition to the age of men, which finally came by in the fourth. So for humans progress was definitely positive overall if you don't just look at the cataclysms.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> But if the "era of men" has come, as the elves say, perhaps the Middle Earth dwellers are doing something ok? It's more a question of the elves spontaneously losing the will to live.

inawarminister 4y ago

Eh, the Numenoreans reached a quality of life that was better than First Age Middle Earth inhabitants (don't mind the guys chilling @ Valinor, literal Paradise/Avalon), then we in the Sixth Age did it again. But yeah, the metaphysics of the setting, that all creatures no matter how great or small only have so much gas inside themself - not even Melkor was able to reach his greatness in the dawn of the world, or even during the First Age. He spread himself too thin in his monstrous creations - dragons, orcs, thousands other things, and into the soil and gold of Arda Marred.

everyone 4y ago

Yeah the tone of LOTR is oppressive, reserved, alien, post apocalyptic. I read the novel many times as a kid and loved it, so I hated the 2001 film. Imo visually it was perfect, it literally looked like the books did in my imagination. But in every other respect it was completely off, especially the overall tone. The 2nd biggest issue for me was the music, they had a great opportunity to do something interesting and alien with the music, but nah its just generic hollywood rousing adventure music that never stops playing.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
As a New Zealander the movies always felt off. I'd read the books cover to cover multiple times by that point, and they'd transported me to a strange, beautiful and foreign world. Then I see it on the big screen and the landscapes and flora were all familiar to me. If I hadn't seen similar stuff in person, I'd seen them on local TV advertisements for beer, butter and toyotas. So I try and ignore them these days, and cling on to the LOTR that I first saw in my head that looks nothing like home.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  I always wonder how Americans feel about their entertainment largely being set in American with Americans speaking American accents. How can you imagine a different world?
  - coastflow 4y ago
    Even within the United States, different regions can feel like different worlds. The most stark contrast I’ve seen is in the indie film Lady Bird where (SPOILERS) there is a setting change from a very small rural American town for most of the plot to New York City at the end of the film, with it’s subways, density, and architecture that felt familiar to any watcher from an urban area. Similarly, the suburban Texas setting of the King of the Hill deliberately contrasts itself with New York-based shows (referring to Seinfeld as, “I'll tell you what, man, them dang ol' New York boys. Just a show about nothin,’” with other joked about the disdain of many Texans of New Yorkers).

detuur 4y ago

That's entropy for you. On a cosmic scale, we are currently living in the universe's First Age. Maybe even Second Age. Stars are still being born, we still have supernovas, the light of distant galaxies still reaches us. On the other hand, Population II and III stars, the ancient supermassive stars who fused the metals that enabled the birth of Population I stars and the formation of planets, are all extinct now. Only the light of distant specimens, which has traveled for more than half of the univere's existence, still bears witness to their reign. But at one point, we will enter a Third Age. Light from distant galaxies will dim. Light from the earliest moments in history will grow too far to reach us as the universe unceasingly expands faster and faster. Still, our own little corner of space is still alive, stars still emerge. But they are dim and weak compared to the stars of old. When they die, they bloat and fizzle out. The last supernova in the galaxy was billions of years ago. It will remain like this for a long time. And then we enter a Fourth Age. The universe is dying. Fuel has ran out for new star formation. Even on the best nights, the majority of the night sky is pitch black. Black holes outnumber everything else. Except for a few galaxies, the rest of the universe is out of reach. The expansion has reached such a velocity that even travelling at the speed of light you will never reach another region of the universe ever again. Every day, another light goes out in the night sky, never to be replaced. This process is slow. The universe's death is immensely slow and dragged out. But it's not inhospitable to life. The vast majority of stars in this age are small, but exceptionally long-lived. They can support planets, and all the elements necessary for life. Seeing as life will eventually arise if the environment supports it, the universe will be booming with it. The overwhelming majority of all that will ever live will live in this Fourth Age. Cosmologists call it the Degenerate Era. To the species living in this age and their civilisations, the mysteries of the universe will forever be inaccessible. They can only observe the diminutive, extinguishing fragment of the universe, now spread out across distances many orders bigger than they are today. It will be a very populated, yet lonely universe. Eventually, the universe will die. Stars will flame out one after another. Planets will freeze. This phase dwarfs even the Fourth Age. It lasts seemingly forever. Slowly, the atoms in all that exists decompose as even their age starts to show. The universe itself becomes fundamentally incompatible with life. Only black holes seem unaffected. But even they are slowly dying. Ever so slowly. Not that it matters. Once time itself has lost all meaning, they start to slowly evaporate, until the universe is just a dead sea of energy, with naught but tiny ripples born from quantum randomness. After that, it will take an infinity of time for anything to happen. But anything can happen, and maybe, eventually, by pure quantum randomness, all the energy in the universe may coalesce into one point, and it can all start over again.

barrysteve 4y ago

His central idea is that living like Tom Bombadill is the joyous, uncomplicated foil to Sauron's world conquering evil. He was writing about a fantasy world 8000 years ago that was particularly dark and had yet to see 'the light'.

rob74 4y ago
How fitting then that Tom Bombadil was completely and utterly cut from the movies...
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  THe movies were mostly Disney-field twaddle that ignored or overwrote many of the central themes and characters in the Lord of the Rings. Their only redeeming feature was that some of the actors delivered excellent performances, within the limited scope created by the director and screenwriter, and the landscape was kind of pretty. The list of atrocities is long - the entire character of the Ents, the entire character of Faramir, the conversion of Saruman from a master propagandist and manipulator to a cartoon villain... Then there was the addition of unnecessary comic and action scenes, and the exclusion of critical scenes (Scouring of the Shire). Read the books, ignore the Hollywood adaptations.

tigerlily 4y ago

That’s only if you are elvish, though. Are you an elf?

LAC-Tech 4y ago

The more history I learn the more I think that in some respects - certainly culturally and artistically - this is true for our own time.

taurath 4y ago

Tolkien was a British person in the early 20th century so the cultural context in which he lived was one of an empire in decline, 2 world wars, and as the series was written a Europe and UK in relative ruins. Romanticism about the power, influence, justice, and luxury of the empire was a driving propaganda technique during the wars.

rob74 4y ago
If you look at Brexit, you will find that romanticism about the power, influence, justice, and luxury of the empire is still a driving propaganda technique...
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Even _before the Empire_, nostalgia for a fictional past was a huge thing in England; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_England.
- dash2 4y ago
  That is widely said, but I know of no serious social scientific finding that nostalgia for empire played any part in Brexit vote share.
  - rob74 4y ago
    Ok, maybe not nostalgia for the Empire specifically, but nostalgia for the "good old times", when the EU didn't meddle in the UK's business and force it to e.g. display the hated metric measurements besides the beloved Imperial ones (ha! there you have the Empire again!). And to quote some sources: according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_of_Brexit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...): > Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the European Union was "the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK". ("in the UK." meaning: "by the UK." logically implying: "on behalf of 66 million UK citizens not 508 million EU residents.")

simonh 4y ago

It's an imagined mythology for rural England, so follows the same historical outline. For most of the last many thousands of years civilisation was all happening far away (Greece, Rome). Bits of those civilisations made their way here but our civilisation and high culture is based on the leavings from distant past glories. All the action long ago was far away from this green and pleasant land, but now is our time to step up and take responsibility for history.

arethuza 4y ago
Claiming a lineage back to impressive forbears is a pretty common thing - didn't the Roman's claim ancestry back to Troy, even the Scots claimed ancestry back to the Scythians...
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  Yep, and that includes Britain, which some mythologies claim was also founded by a Trojan, Brutus of Troy, descended from Aeneas himself.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    Not to mention the whole British Israelite thing—where there is the claim that the Brits are descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. Then there's the hymn Jerusalem which speculates that Jesus himself came to Britain.
    - arethuza 4y ago
      The myths link Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, King Arthur, Holy Grail, Glastonbury and lots of other things: https://theconversation.com/glastonbury-archaeology-is-revealing-new-truths-about-the-origins-of-british-christianity-93805 https://theconversation.com/glastonbury-archaeology-is-revea... Meanwhile here in Scotland we've just got a rock that someone used as a pillow - but we do have a cool footprint and a nice island with "its cargo of mouldering kings".
  - 4y ago

DrBazza 4y ago

World War 1 had a massive effect on him. My grandfather who served in WWI aged 16 or 17. He saw things he couldn't unsee, and wasn't what you would ever call "cheerful". That generation had a very different world view.

arethuza 4y ago
Tolkien write about Sam: "My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen 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...

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

The Shire was a pretty bucolic place. Life was good, the beer was good, tobacco was available and corn was easy to filch. It was the place the Hobbits knew they wanted to return to, regardless of the wonders they saw or the horrors visited upon the world.

isaacfrond 4y ago

Not to mention the abysmal position of women in the book. Did you know that there are zero women in The Hobbit? Not to forget the thinly concealed racism. I've read the book many times, but recently, I can't enjoy them anymore like I used to.

adrianN 4y ago
Few women going on adventures in a pre-industrial society doesn't strike me as odd.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Nor was few women going on adventures the least bit odd for the era in which the books were written. And that being an age (WWI to WWII) where "men got to go out on exciting adventures" was often a rose-colored-glasses translation of "over 100,000 lucky men got to become casualties of war in merely the Second Battle of Ypres, in which the Germans first used poison gas on a large scale" grim realities...being a woman starts to sound like the better deal.

rsynnott 4y ago

"The past is a lost golden age" has historically been a really common trope. Like, not just in fiction; people really believed in it.

midislack 4y ago
It's actually true, of course people believed in it.
- cm2012 4y ago
  For most of the world this is obviously the best time to be alive in human history.
  - leadingthenet 4y ago
    There are definite arguments to be made in favour of pre-industrial / pre-agricultural society, shorter lifespans and lack of cures for various diseases notwithstanding.
    - hossbeast 4y ago
      Short version of said arguments?
      - chubot 4y ago
        Search for Jared Diamond (polymath author of many great books) on agriculture as a mistake, e.g. https://equitablegrowth.org/agriculture-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race-todays-economic-history/ https://equitablegrowth.org/agriculture-the-worst-mistake-in... https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist... Agriculture made us a lot unhealthier and shorter in stature (monoculture/unbalanced diets), and it also lead to massive power imbalances -- modern people spend more of their lives working. This is a very mainstream observation -- it's also supported by Sapiens, the popular human history book of the last 5 years (recommended by Obama, Gates, etc.). David Graeber's recent book argues that many early human societies purposely avoided agriculture, and then got "trapped" into the inequality of agriculture. The argument is that there is enough for everybody, but agriculture leads to power imbalances, which make most people's lives miserable. It's true that they were more miserable say in the 1500's in Europe than today. We have "recovered" from Europe of the 1500's, but that doesn't mean that this is the best time ever!

Thaxll 4y ago

Well it's less depressing than Warhammer 40k lore.

pier25 4y ago
Or a Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones)

spywaregorilla 4y ago

A bit of a rabbit hole led me to this, a commentary by tolkien on his thoughts after drafting several pages of a book set about 100 years after the end of LoTR and Aragorn's death https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Shadow https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Shadow > I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men, it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would have been just that. Not worth doing I find that writing process fascinating. Begin writing about your world a few generations later. Find you've added some satanists and other assholes to it. Get upset because the world sucks now. Stop writing the story because it wouldn't be a good one to tell. It would seem he didn't control his own sense of canon and direction. He just had a genuine vision of it all and it was either going to be exactly that or nothing at all.

ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
I am fascinated by Tolkien's writing process and mind as well. I recently read the article about "Bamfurlong", its a place in the books that didn't really need a name. Nothing about the name influences the story at all, the name didn't even appear in the first edition. But he HAD to go back and add that name in later editions because this place and its history was SOOO real to him. For every story we got from him, he must have built a hundred more in his imagination of that place. http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bamfurlong http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bamfurlong
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  > Bamfurlong was a farm in the boggy region of the Marish in the eastern Shire. It was the home of Farmer Maggot > Tolkien says that the name "Maggot" was a Hobbitish name whose meaning has been lost in history. Maggot should not be understood as the English word maggot or larva. The similarity is coincidental. Another frankly incomprehensible example. "This guy's name was Maggot. Readers will probably mistakenly assume that's an artistic choice, but unfortunately that's his name and I, as the author, have no agency to change that"

memling 4y ago

> Tolkien'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. I've been sitting in this comment for a day or two now, trying to figure out what to say, because I totally get it. In a moment of serendipity, I was reading another book that illustrated I think the core conviction: humanity is not a machine, and while machines progress, people do not. Tolkien sees in man a great capacity for both good and evil, rejects the notion of man's inherent goodness (borne of his Roman Catholicism and first-hand experience of WW1), and asserts that Good, while perhaps much diminished with respect to evil, is inherently the stronger force. (I think he's essentially Augustinian here--evil is an absence of Good or a mimicry of it, but cannot actually create. It only perverts.) So yes, there is a sort of depressing aspect of his universe: a rejection of inherent goodness and of progress. People don't change, but their technology unleashes a capacity for evil on a massive scale. At the same time, there is an obvious thread of hope in the series, too. Evil cannot exist on its own, and the nature of the Good is to create anew. There are those touched from the outside whose goodness triumphs over the evil within and without. The eucatastrophe is real.