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> Given that The Hobbit was not actually intended to be connected directly to his Middle-earth works except retroactively In the first version of the book I re

by xg15 4y ago

> Given that The Hobbit was not actually intended to be connected directly to his Middle-earth works except retroactively In the first version of the book I read, there was an offhand mention that a Took ancestor had married a "Fairy" (or Fae). It was never discussed in the book again and I found that later versions had it charged to "Elf". I always supposed that this was another bit left over from the time where the Hobbit was its own universe - at least I never heard any mention of Fairies living in Middle-Earth. Edit: Of course maybe a wiser choice might have been to leave it in - and present it as a sign that there are still a lot of unexplored corners in Middle-Earth and even after reading all the books, we don't know all about it. I think the modern pressure to have a "canon" which explains absolutely everything that goes on in the world can lead to sterile and unbelievable worlds as well if a worldbuilder gives in too much.

bombcar 4y ago
Tolkien originally used the term Fairy (as in Fae) to mean elf - but he changed the name without changing the concept; he felt the term elf was closer and fairy had too much “baggage” from Shakespeare and friends. I wonder how he’d feel known Ing that his concepts of orc and elf and dwarves now dominate fantasy
- xg15 4y ago
  Oh, I wasn't aware of that. That's interesting to know!
- jfengel 4y ago
  Tolkien also kept using the word "Gnome" to refer to a particularly high-class subset of the Elves. That, too, reads very strangely, because it puts me in mind of garden gnomes. I have no frame to think of the most beautiful Elves -- including Elrond and Galadriel -- as "gnomes". He eventually gave up on that and used "Noldor", a term he'd been kicking around for a while in various contexts. That's much more comfortable, but he kept using "gnome" way longer than seemed reasonable.
  - rimunroe 4y ago
    > Tolkien also kept using the word "Gnome" to refer to a particularly high-class subset of the Elves. What do you mean by "high-class" here? Do you mean they're Calaquendi, or are you saying they were esteemed greater than the other houses?
    - gpderetta 4y ago
      Yes, as opposed to the Moriquendi. So his gnomes were not of the, aehm, garden variety.
    - jfengel 4y ago
      The Gnomes were Calaquendi, who answered the call of the Valar (angels/gods) to come see the Light of the Two Trees in the West. The Vanyar (also Calaquendi) were probably "higher" than the Gnomes, but they were never seen in Middle-earth again. We learn very little about them, and I don't think they're even passingly alluded to in The Lord of the Rings. Some of the Gnomes returned to Middle-earth, so they outrank everybody who never left. He renamed the Gnomes "Noldor", and most of The Silmarillion is about them (and the Men who hung out with them). They came back to Middle-earth to retrieve the Silmarils, which had been stolen by Morgoth (the Big Bad of the First Age, and Sauron's boss). Galadriel is one of the very few we meet who were part of that go-and-return trip. It was a nasty business, and that's why her turning down the Ring and returning to the West was such a big deal. (Though she wasn't part of the story at the time they were called Gnomes, and she had to be retroactively inserted into it. He never did finalize that story, and we're left with a conflicting mess of unpublished stories.)
      - gpderetta 4y ago
        IIRC Galadriel is the noblest Noldor[1] left in Middle Earth at the time of the war of the rings. All children of Feanor (the main contingent of the Noldor) are dead by the end if the first age). The few Noldor that outranked Galadriel left by the end if the second era after the last alliance of men and elves and the war with Sauron. [1] which I think is also half Teleri.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 4y ago
  His version of orc, elf, and dwarves are close enough to earlier versions it’s hard to say how much he changed vs these versions simply fitting a modern aesthetic. Earlier dwarves vs Tolkien dwarves vs more modern examples don’t seem that different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)#Norse_mythology_and_later_folklore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)#Norse_mytholo... Elves are easier to argue but Santa workshop elves, Harry Potter elves, D&D elves, etc are all quite different.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    One thing Tolkien never had was pointy ear elves - that crept in somehow and now it’s everywhere.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Large and sometimes pointy elf ears where a thing before he was born, but I don’t know where pointy thing really took off. I suspect it was mostly a way to draw larger ears without it being as comical. 1870: https://freevintageillustrations.com/enter-an-elf-in-search-of-a-fairy/ https://freevintageillustrations.com/enter-an-elf-in-search-... He did say in a letter that Hobbits had pointy ears seemingly a nod to existing tradition, while elves had leaf shaped ears whatever that meant.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        He also said Gandalf’s eyebrows stuck out past his broad rimmed hat so sometimes his descriptions are a bit poetical.
    - zabzonk 4y ago
      Spock
- cafeinux 4y ago
  IIRC, "orc" is just the hobbit word for "goblin", so in the books there's no real difference between a goblin and an orc. Orcs as depicted in the LOTR movies and other modern fantasy works would be called "hobgoblins" by Tolkien, as they were goblin but the larger kind. Also, while reading The Hobbit, I've always felt like goblins aren't the little pitiful creatures we imagine today, but are a bit taller and muscular, like smaller modern orcs with more human proportions. It's not based on any description Tolkien, it's just how I imagine those creatures through the way they are told. Last but not least, in the Hobbit his dwarfs (as it's how it should be written, according to the author) were a bit more "cartoonish" than the idea we have of them today: they wore colored hoods (much like garden gnomes), one had a blue beard, it's not said that they wear armor (and it's logical to think they didn't)... All in all, even though he greatly and directly influenced today's fantasy, it's not exactly his concepts of orcs and dwarfs, at least, that dominate fantasy, but rather the interpretation that some later artists had of his concepts. I'm not a Tolkien expert, though, so if anyone knows better, I'd love to be corrected.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Dwarfs is the correct “english” but Tolkien felt the plural should be dwarves - he’d have preferred dwarrows but felt he couldn’t get away with it. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Dwarves https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Dwarves He did slip it in with Dwarrowdelf as the name for Moria. The goblins in the Hobbit are clearly the smaller orcs “in a kids story” where the evil isn’t clearly described. The Lord of the Rings makes this pretty clear that they are “Mirkwood/Moria orcs”. One thing that’s common is dwarves now apparently are all Scottish in movies and that didn’t come from Tolkien (if anything his dwarves would be Norse).
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Perhaps because of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw
- goto11 4y ago
  Tolkien didn't like how Shakespeare portrayed faeries in A Midsummer Nights Dream. But Shakespeare's faeries are much closer to the original folklore - they are mischievous and dangerous and wantonly play with humans leading to madness and disaster (for the humans). Tolkiens Elves are more like superhumans - better, more beautiful, more heroic than ordinary men. They are more like how people in antiquity and premodern times thought of the ancient heroes and kings of the heroic age. While much have been made of Tokiens fascination of Northern European folklore, his outlook is still pretty classicist and Return of the King is basically a fantasy about the re-establishment of the Roman Empire.
  - xg15 4y ago
    That's interesting. I think to a degree you can even see that shift inside Tolkien's works. In the Hobbit, the elves are actually portrayed as playful, mischievous and a bit fairy-like (in particular in the Rivendell chapter) whereas in LOTR they changed into graceful, deeply serious superhumans. ...of course it might also be that the elves in the "Silmarillion universe" i.e. today's Middle Earth were always like the latter, and the playful elves from the Hobbit where another glimpse from the hypothetical "standalone Hobbit universe" before the Hobbit got moved to Middle Earth.
HideousKojima 4y ago
Also IIRC Valinor is called "Faerie" at one point in The Hobbit.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  as a matter of interest, where?
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    In the chapter "Flies and Spiders" it says the elves of Milkwood were amongst those that never went to "Faerie in the West"
chungy 4y ago
> I think the modern pressure to have a "canon" which explains absolutely everything that goes on in the world can lead to sterile and unbelievable worlds as well if a worldbuilder gives in too much. I agree with that. Leaving room for expansion, and mystery, feels like a more "real" world than one where everything has already been explored and done. Fandoms sometimes put themselves into a corner, too, when they start making assumptions that all that can be said and done already has been. The Star Wars sequel series (episodes 7, 8, 9) come to mind. I think the majority of complaints came about because they dared to do something new to Star Wars. (Some of it was already hinted in the original films, too; as an example: Leia being force-sensitive)
- xg15 4y ago
  > The Star Wars sequel series (episodes 7, 8, 9) come to mind. I think the majority of complaints came about because they dared to do something new to Star Wars. (Warning, Star Wars rant follows) Interesting to hear this direction of criticism. My personal impression from watching The Force Awakens was the opposite: It felt like the movies where at the same time obligated to continue the story of the original trilogy (due to them being sequels) but at the same time not allowed to introduce any substantial new ideas. That led to a very strange kind of "rhyming" history which really strained my suspension of disbelief: Even though the Empire had been defeated and the Death Star blown up (twice), 20 years later somehow nothing noteworthy has happened except that a new Empire has sprung up - which looks and behaves exactly like the old one, has its own copies of Darth Vader and Darth Sidious and somehow can't think of anything better than building a third Death Star - which is promptly blown up again! Same on the side of the good guys as well: Last time we saw them they were celebrating victory with flying colours, having freed the galaxy from the grip of evil, ready to usher in an exciting era of a nascent new galactic republic. But sure, let's skip all that and fast-forward to a point where the good guys somehow ended up again as the scrappy underdogs, fighting against an overwhelming enemy. Nevermind even explaining what went wrong. If the heroes do everything right, archive full victory - and still end up in the exact same place as they had started, I can't help but feel dreadful. I'm sure the restrictions here didn't really have to do with canon: They were sequels, so strictly speaking there was no canon to respect, and the Extended Universe canon that did exist actually was a lot more daring and interesting than what the movie attempted. So my guess here is that the restrictive approach came from the producers who didn't want to risk their investment by trying out anything new.

by xg15 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

Tolkien originally used the term Fairy (as in Fae) to mean elf - but he changed the name without changing the concept; he felt the term elf was closer and fairy had too much “baggage” from Shakespeare and friends. I wonder how he’d feel known Ing that his concepts of orc and elf and dwarves now dominate fantasy

xg15 4y ago
Oh, I wasn't aware of that. That's interesting to know!
jfengel 4y ago
Tolkien also kept using the word "Gnome" to refer to a particularly high-class subset of the Elves. That, too, reads very strangely, because it puts me in mind of garden gnomes. I have no frame to think of the most beautiful Elves -- including Elrond and Galadriel -- as "gnomes". He eventually gave up on that and used "Noldor", a term he'd been kicking around for a while in various contexts. That's much more comfortable, but he kept using "gnome" way longer than seemed reasonable.
- rimunroe 4y ago
  > Tolkien also kept using the word "Gnome" to refer to a particularly high-class subset of the Elves. What do you mean by "high-class" here? Do you mean they're Calaquendi, or are you saying they were esteemed greater than the other houses?
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    Yes, as opposed to the Moriquendi. So his gnomes were not of the, aehm, garden variety.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    The Gnomes were Calaquendi, who answered the call of the Valar (angels/gods) to come see the Light of the Two Trees in the West. The Vanyar (also Calaquendi) were probably "higher" than the Gnomes, but they were never seen in Middle-earth again. We learn very little about them, and I don't think they're even passingly alluded to in The Lord of the Rings. Some of the Gnomes returned to Middle-earth, so they outrank everybody who never left. He renamed the Gnomes "Noldor", and most of The Silmarillion is about them (and the Men who hung out with them). They came back to Middle-earth to retrieve the Silmarils, which had been stolen by Morgoth (the Big Bad of the First Age, and Sauron's boss). Galadriel is one of the very few we meet who were part of that go-and-return trip. It was a nasty business, and that's why her turning down the Ring and returning to the West was such a big deal. (Though she wasn't part of the story at the time they were called Gnomes, and she had to be retroactively inserted into it. He never did finalize that story, and we're left with a conflicting mess of unpublished stories.)
    - gpderetta 4y ago
      IIRC Galadriel is the noblest Noldor[1] left in Middle Earth at the time of the war of the rings. All children of Feanor (the main contingent of the Noldor) are dead by the end if the first age). The few Noldor that outranked Galadriel left by the end if the second era after the last alliance of men and elves and the war with Sauron. [1] which I think is also half Teleri.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Retric 4y ago
His version of orc, elf, and dwarves are close enough to earlier versions it’s hard to say how much he changed vs these versions simply fitting a modern aesthetic. Earlier dwarves vs Tolkien dwarves vs more modern examples don’t seem that different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)#Norse_mythology_and_later_folklore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)#Norse_mytholo... Elves are easier to argue but Santa workshop elves, Harry Potter elves, D&D elves, etc are all quite different.
- bombcar 4y ago
  One thing Tolkien never had was pointy ear elves - that crept in somehow and now it’s everywhere.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Large and sometimes pointy elf ears where a thing before he was born, but I don’t know where pointy thing really took off. I suspect it was mostly a way to draw larger ears without it being as comical. 1870: https://freevintageillustrations.com/enter-an-elf-in-search-of-a-fairy/ https://freevintageillustrations.com/enter-an-elf-in-search-... He did say in a letter that Hobbits had pointy ears seemingly a nod to existing tradition, while elves had leaf shaped ears whatever that meant.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      He also said Gandalf’s eyebrows stuck out past his broad rimmed hat so sometimes his descriptions are a bit poetical.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    Spock
cafeinux 4y ago
IIRC, "orc" is just the hobbit word for "goblin", so in the books there's no real difference between a goblin and an orc. Orcs as depicted in the LOTR movies and other modern fantasy works would be called "hobgoblins" by Tolkien, as they were goblin but the larger kind. Also, while reading The Hobbit, I've always felt like goblins aren't the little pitiful creatures we imagine today, but are a bit taller and muscular, like smaller modern orcs with more human proportions. It's not based on any description Tolkien, it's just how I imagine those creatures through the way they are told. Last but not least, in the Hobbit his dwarfs (as it's how it should be written, according to the author) were a bit more "cartoonish" than the idea we have of them today: they wore colored hoods (much like garden gnomes), one had a blue beard, it's not said that they wear armor (and it's logical to think they didn't)... All in all, even though he greatly and directly influenced today's fantasy, it's not exactly his concepts of orcs and dwarfs, at least, that dominate fantasy, but rather the interpretation that some later artists had of his concepts. I'm not a Tolkien expert, though, so if anyone knows better, I'd love to be corrected.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Dwarfs is the correct “english” but Tolkien felt the plural should be dwarves - he’d have preferred dwarrows but felt he couldn’t get away with it. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Dwarves https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Dwarves He did slip it in with Dwarrowdelf as the name for Moria. The goblins in the Hobbit are clearly the smaller orcs “in a kids story” where the evil isn’t clearly described. The Lord of the Rings makes this pretty clear that they are “Mirkwood/Moria orcs”. One thing that’s common is dwarves now apparently are all Scottish in movies and that didn’t come from Tolkien (if anything his dwarves would be Norse).
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Perhaps because of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw
goto11 4y ago
Tolkien didn't like how Shakespeare portrayed faeries in A Midsummer Nights Dream. But Shakespeare's faeries are much closer to the original folklore - they are mischievous and dangerous and wantonly play with humans leading to madness and disaster (for the humans). Tolkiens Elves are more like superhumans - better, more beautiful, more heroic than ordinary men. They are more like how people in antiquity and premodern times thought of the ancient heroes and kings of the heroic age. While much have been made of Tokiens fascination of Northern European folklore, his outlook is still pretty classicist and Return of the King is basically a fantasy about the re-establishment of the Roman Empire.
- xg15 4y ago
  That's interesting. I think to a degree you can even see that shift inside Tolkien's works. In the Hobbit, the elves are actually portrayed as playful, mischievous and a bit fairy-like (in particular in the Rivendell chapter) whereas in LOTR they changed into graceful, deeply serious superhumans. ...of course it might also be that the elves in the "Silmarillion universe" i.e. today's Middle Earth were always like the latter, and the playful elves from the Hobbit where another glimpse from the hypothetical "standalone Hobbit universe" before the Hobbit got moved to Middle Earth.

HideousKojima 4y ago

Also IIRC Valinor is called "Faerie" at one point in The Hobbit.

zabzonk 4y ago
as a matter of interest, where?
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  In the chapter "Flies and Spiders" it says the elves of Milkwood were amongst those that never went to "Faerie in the West"

chungy 4y ago

> I think the modern pressure to have a "canon" which explains absolutely everything that goes on in the world can lead to sterile and unbelievable worlds as well if a worldbuilder gives in too much. I agree with that. Leaving room for expansion, and mystery, feels like a more "real" world than one where everything has already been explored and done. Fandoms sometimes put themselves into a corner, too, when they start making assumptions that all that can be said and done already has been. The Star Wars sequel series (episodes 7, 8, 9) come to mind. I think the majority of complaints came about because they dared to do something new to Star Wars. (Some of it was already hinted in the original films, too; as an example: Leia being force-sensitive)

xg15 4y ago
> The Star Wars sequel series (episodes 7, 8, 9) come to mind. I think the majority of complaints came about because they dared to do something new to Star Wars. (Warning, Star Wars rant follows) Interesting to hear this direction of criticism. My personal impression from watching The Force Awakens was the opposite: It felt like the movies where at the same time obligated to continue the story of the original trilogy (due to them being sequels) but at the same time not allowed to introduce any substantial new ideas. That led to a very strange kind of "rhyming" history which really strained my suspension of disbelief: Even though the Empire had been defeated and the Death Star blown up (twice), 20 years later somehow nothing noteworthy has happened except that a new Empire has sprung up - which looks and behaves exactly like the old one, has its own copies of Darth Vader and Darth Sidious and somehow can't think of anything better than building a third Death Star - which is promptly blown up again! Same on the side of the good guys as well: Last time we saw them they were celebrating victory with flying colours, having freed the galaxy from the grip of evil, ready to usher in an exciting era of a nascent new galactic republic. But sure, let's skip all that and fast-forward to a point where the good guys somehow ended up again as the scrappy underdogs, fighting against an overwhelming enemy. Nevermind even explaining what went wrong. If the heroes do everything right, archive full victory - and still end up in the exact same place as they had started, I can't help but feel dreadful. I'm sure the restrictions here didn't really have to do with canon: They were sequels, so strictly speaking there was no canon to respect, and the Extended Universe canon that did exist actually was a lot more daring and interesting than what the movie attempted. So my guess here is that the restrictive approach came from the producers who didn't want to risk their investment by trying out anything new.