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Tolkien, 50 Years On
- mg 3y agoI run Gnooks, a self-learning literature recommendation experiment which has been used by a few million people so far. According to their likes, Tolkien is the 3rd most popular author: https://www.gnooks.com/top https://www.gnooks.com/top
- opdahl 3y agoVery interesting. Do you track any sort of demographic data, such as age, gender and location? Looking at the top authors I would wager millennials are the biggest users?
- mg 3y agoThe users only rate authors and enter no other data. So the only demographic data I have is the list of countries Matomo outputs. For last month, the top 10 countries look like this: United States 46.4% United Kingdom 8.1% Canada 5.2% Australia 4.3% Russia 3.9% Germany 2.9% Italy 1.9% France 1.9% India 1.8% New Zealand 1.3%
- forgotmypw17 3y agoThank you for such an amazing service! It would be cool to see popular authors by region. I bet there is also a lot of variance between the States.
- mg 3y agoGlad you like it! Yes, there are a lot of directions the project could evolve into. I have many ideas in a list. Finding a better business model than ads would be a good first step I think.
- vidarh 3y agoAffiliate links for the authors would be a start... Probably wouldn't be huge money, but links would be actually helpful and I doubt anyone would mind you making money of those links.
- forgotmypw17 3y agoI recommend writing a mission statement that makes it easy to see what the "cause" behind it is, and then providing easy ways to support or donate.
- opdahl 3y agoIf you don't mind unsolicited advice, I think your service could easily facilitate a paid "newsletter" of recommended new authors based on some sort of user profile.
- bell-cot 3y agoWow. Asimov at #10, Heinlein down at #86, and Clarke didn't make the top 100. Certainly not what I'd have expected. OTOH, your users probably aren't a statistically random sample of old S.F. fans...
- mg 3y agoCorrect, the focus is not on science fiction. Most users probably come over from https://www.gnod.com https://www.gnod.com after discovering one of the other recommendation projects. The music one is pretty popular. Or they come via googling for "author recommendation engine" or something like that. Clarke is at position 293: ... #292 John Flanagan #293 Arthur Charles Clarke #294 Augusten Burroughs ...
- vidarh 3y agoScifi isn't a particularly big seller (biggest genre fiction by a huge factor is romance and thrillers). Frankly the top entries do suggest a disproportionate amount of old S.F fans.
- WalterBright 3y agoAs I grow older, my formerly stellar opinion of Clarke's work has been drifting downwards.
- edanm 3y agoReally? Could you expand on why? (I'm a fan of his work but haven't read him in years)
- WalterBright 3y agoIt just didn't seem that interesting anymore. They also lacked a grand adventure, and seemed rather pedestrian. I felt I was supposed to like Clarke, but was just bored with it.
- bell-cot 3y agoHis older works, or some of his, ah, kinda-obviously-past-his-prime works?
- ekianjo 3y agoDan brown just before Frank Herbert?
- pfdietz 3y agoSeems legit.
- scruple 3y agoInteresting site, found an author I was unaware of to explore. Thanks for linking it!
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3y agoAnyone remember the EA Battle for Middle Earth series? There's a small group of people trying to resurrect it, but they might need a hand: https://github.com/Ravo92/Patch-2.22-Launcher https://github.com/Ravo92/Patch-2.22-Launcher
- vs49688 3y agoRelated - fix for the forced-death-after-3-minutes issue: https://github.com/vs49688/lotrbfme-launchers https://github.com/vs49688/lotrbfme-launchers
- jncfhnb 3y agoI played that as a kid. It was fun, but even as a dumb kid who did not understand depth it seemed unbalanced. I would be greatly amused to hear from someone more informed what the more mature community has concluded about it as a competitive RTS. As a dumb kid, unlike many RTS games where I would likely get trounced, I found myself entering random battles where we would get stale mated and bored because both sides felt unending.
- localplume 3y agoThe article doesn't even mention his religion/beliefs which is odd despite saying > They are shamelessly moralistic, written on the basis of exhaustive literary theory, linguistics, geography and world-building, and quite devoid of social commentary or Empsonian irony yes, because it was a heavily catholic work. > This mythology, he felt, must “reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth” but must lack all explicit reference to the Christian religion or the “real” world as we know it This is especially true though and undersold. Tolkien's catholicism had an immeasurable impact on his writing and LOTR. he wrote: "[LOTR was a] fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." his works are absolutely beautiful.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoI know the Tolkien stories inside out at this point. I just can't get enough of the language. The way he made modern English sound archaic is amazing.
- Archelaos 3y ago> The way he made modern English sound archaic is amazing. The trick is that he rarely uses words of Latin origin.
- DougEiffel 3y agoYeah Tolkien always used Germanic words when he could. Patrick Rothfuss does this too, which is why his works also sound so pleasant and poetic.
- WalterBright 3y agoI.e. before the Battle of Hastings and the takeover of England by France.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fmajid 3y agoBy the Duchy of Normandy, which was as Viking as it is French (Norman means literally Men of the North). The Abbaye aux Hommes William the Conqueror founded in Caen, and where he is buried, has a roof shaped like an inverted drakkar.
- Hortinstein 3y agoIs there any more information you can share about this, curious to know more
- Archelaos 3y agoNot much. Maybe I noticed it because, as a native German speaker, I am a bit more sensitive and also occasionally stumble over a word, I do not know. I just made a test and opened "The Fellowship of the Ring" at a random page. Here (in chap. 8: "Fog on the Barrow-downs") I read: "The air was growing very warm again. The hobbits ran about for a while on the grass, as he told them. Then they lay basking in the sun with the delight of those that have been wafted suddenly from bitter winter to a friendly clime, or of people that, after being long ill and bedridden, wake one day to find that they are unexpectedly well and the day is again full of promise." Here my observations: - It is not that Tolkien avoids words of Italic (Romance) origin altogether. In this passage there are several: "delight" (< lat.: delectare), "clime" (< lat.: clima), "unexpectedly" (< lat.: expectare/exspectare) and "promise" (< lat.: promissum). But he uses such words sparingly. In this way, he still sounds modern and not comically mannered. - At the same time, is prose has a lyric undertone. He uses discreet metaphors ("The air was growing ver warm agin" [not "getting"], "basking in the sun", "bitter winter", "friendly clime", "full of promise") and unusual, poetic words ("wafted", "clime" [instead of "climate"], "bedridden"). The changed feelings of the hobbits is not simply state (as if to say: "The sun came out and the hobbits' mood improved."), but demonstrated by their behaviour and then explained not with a single, but with a double elaborate comparison that emphasises the contrast between the hobbits previous and their current state. - His style is plain but not simplistic. The whole passage has a nice rhythm, starting with a short simple sentence, a slightly less simple second and a long third, which is nevertheless not overly complex. He uses simple words to make his point ("very warm", not "boiling hot"). I would suggest you try it out yourself. Just open the Lord of the Rings somewhere, take a short passage or a few lines and write down your observations for at least half an hour. If you feel that you have finished earlier resist that urge and carry on for half an hour. The interesting observations typically happen a while after you have written down the obvious. Another very instructive experiment is a backwards translation. If you know a language other than English, get a translation of the Lord of the Rings and translate a random page (without looking at the original first, of course) back into English. Then compare it with the original.
- thedailymail 3y ago"For all that he has inspired many a mediocre imitator, the power and legacy of Tolkien, and the high fantasy he invented, cannot be understated." The correct phrase is "cannot be overstated." I cannot overstate how common the erroneous "understated" variant has become, to the point it now seems likely to replace the original. The problem seems to arise from the trifecta of overstated being less familiar than understated, the difficulty of parsing the meaning of the phrase (which is basically "impossible to exaggerate") and—with apologies to Doug Piranha—litotes. <End rant>
- yuvalr1 3y agoI was actually confused by that for a moment when reading the article. I think rants such as yours are good and important. Despite not being a native English speaker, I think English speakers should strive to hold to their language rules and not let globalism and less informed people like me take their rich vocabulary and correct grammar away from them.
- actionfromafar 3y agoThe natives do it plenty to themselves, too. It cannot be <whatever>stated.
- nkrisc 3y agoIt is an entirely self-inflicted wound.
- mongol 3y agoWith English as a true lingua franca, I think us non-native speakers should feel some ownership too. It is the language we are required to speak when communicating with foreigners in a globalized world. I think we should see it as our language as well.
- WalterBright 3y agoI don't hew to the notion that a people can "own" a language.
- politelemon 3y ago> It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology. I don't understand what is being said here. I assume I'm supposed to already be familiar with those literary criticism concepts.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoNot sure if this helps or is even especially correct but: some decades ago there was a movement towards 'inner space', meaning rather than looking outwards at actions and effects on the world, it was about introspection and what was going on inside characters. This may be what they're talking about with interiority, and probably about the convoluted psychology. Those few books I read of this ilk tended to be very dull. Also bear in mind that literary criticism may be prone to being done for show and self-exhibition, much less about the book itself. This http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html (starts with a quote from Donald Norman "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right") is a painful example of somebody discovering this. It's not funny, it shows somebody's time being wasted as they try to genuinely understand WTF it's all about, and finally 'getting it'. It's well worth a read.
- foldr 3y agoThe only literary concept I see there is 'interiority'. All the rest are perfectly ordinary terms that you could look up in a dictionary. I think 'interiority' here refers to an interest in the interior psychological deliberations of characters (which you won't find much of in Tolkein).
- goto11 3y ago"Interiority" means directly showing the interior thoughts and emotions of characters, for example through first-person narrative or stream-of-consciousness. Tolkien follow a more classic style where we see the characters from the outside.
- hax0ron3 3y agoI dislike how much for Tolkien being good means the same thing as obeying the right authority. However, I think that his work does not really suffer much from this because he does not try to rub his moral attitude into the reader in the way that a cheap propagandist would. Unlike so many modern political writers of various ideological persuasions, he does not write paragraphs upon paragraphs trying to convince you, with all the nuance of a sledgehammer, that the bad guys are bad and that you yourself are bad if you disagree. He is more subtle than that. I would probably find his morality insufferable if he was not, given that so much of his worldview boils down to the idea that what is truly good is to serve and obey a god no matter how much suffering that god puts one through. I also suspect that many of the people who accuse Tolkien of having too much of a black and white sort of morality would be offended if they read, for example, a history of World War 2 that humanized the Nazis. I understand the common criticism that he basically depicted entire races/species as being evil but after all, this is fantasy. Having read some of his letters, I doubt that he actually believed that there were any human ethnic groups that were essentially evil.
- gausswho 3y agoI've not read it myself, but your post leads me to think that you may enjoy The Last Ringbearer. The premise, according to Wikipedia: Eskov bases his novel on the premise that the Tolkien account is a "history written by the victors". Mordor is home to an "amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic", posing a threat to the war-mongering faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude is described by Saruman as "crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem") and the Elves.
- TheGigaChad 3y ago[dead]
- qwytw 3y agoI did read it years ago and it's bad... I mean even ignoring what he did to Tolkien word and the whole premise it's still poorly written.
- livrem 3y agoBit of an aside, but this means we are now only 20 years from now the copyright on all his books published in his lifetime expiring, right? I wonder what effects, if any, that will have on the use of his works. Right owners of Sherlock Holmes and Conan for instance have kept fighting to control those works even after (some) copyrights expired. Otherwise will the market be flooded, for better or worse, with new movies and video games and other adaptations of Tolkien's works around January 1 2044? That is less than 21 years from now. The first of the Peter Jackson movies came out 22 years ago.
- pavlov 3y agoYes, 2044 is the year when Tolkien’s best-known works enter the public domain (unless laws are changed in the meantime). By then, AI can probably generate Jackson-quality movies with these recognizable characters in near real-time. It should be a fertile era for Tolkien fans who will finally get to tell their own visual stories within this universe.
- zabzonk 3y agoor a fertile era for worthless trash and porn
- pavlov 3y agoOne person’s genre-bending fan fiction is another person’s worthless porn… But there are some interesting works diegetically aligned with the Tolkien universe that currently can’t be published or developed in the West for copyright reasons. I’m thinking of the Russian pro-Mordor “The Last Ringbearer,” for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
- eesmith 3y agoThe "can't" is likely more for worry of the inevitable expensive court case than the actual chance the judge will find there was infringement. Consider "The Wind Done Gone", a parody of "Gone with the Wind". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Mifflin_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Miff.... > The Court of Appeals recognized copyright in several characters from Gone with the Wind and found that The Wind Done Gone had "appropriate[d] numerous characters, settings, and plot twists". However, the court decided that this appropriation was protected under the doctrine of fair use. > ... Mitchell's estate chose to drop the suit after publisher Houghton agreed to make a donation to Morehouse College.
- sien 3y agoIt's worth reading about the relationship between Wagner's Ring Cycle and Tolkien. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-the-rings https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/12/22/the-ring-and-t...
- JKCalhoun 3y ago> The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”. Yeah, I love The Lord of the Rings: read and re-read it as a teen (read it to my daughters when they were young — twice because the younger one was too young the first go-through). But I don't disagree with a lot of the criticism of the book. I don't know the term that the critics would use, but I tend to say that I like "small" stories in general. A small story is more like the film "The Last Picture Show". A story where the entire world is saved from the embodiment of evil by a handful of determined but powerless good guys is the opposite of what I would call a "small" story. But I forgive Lord of the Rings because I put it on a different shelf and in another corner. Tolkien wrote perhaps the second best "fable" of all time. It seems strange to me to hold it up to 20th Century literary trends.
- edanm 3y agoI think the term that is usually used in fantasy stories is "Epic Fantasy" (or, less common IMO, "High Fantasy").
- garyrob 3y agoThis is the second time I've seen "understated" (mis)used that way recently. I am afraid this may be a trend, like the appearance in the world of "irregardless," which is becoming an accepted word, or the use of "literally," which used to mean, er, "literally," and now can be acceptably used in situations where it is figurative. Or the use of "there's" when there are more than one entity being referred to and "there're" would have been used in the good old days (which I remember because I'm 67).
- EGG_CREAM 3y agoWhat's the actual harm in that though? English is a living language, and as such, meanings change over time.
- ISO-morphism 3y agoFor things like "there's" vs. "there're", not too much harm besides a loss of precision, Grammer can be sloppy and meaning is still understood. But for "could care less" or "cannot be understated" or "irregardless" they're _literal_ negations of intended meaning used unsarcastically and unironically. How does that not irk you at a visceral level? Learning English is already hard enough, and we want to sprinkle in "sometimes what is meant is the exact opposite of what is said, good luck figuring out when, rely on context I guess?"
- AllegedAlec 3y ago> The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”. Can we please fucking stop pretending that every work of fiction must be about several factions in shades of grey fighting one another in a universe where Objective Good and Evil aren't a thing?
- BerislavLopac 3y agoIronically, there are very few characters in Tolkien who are consistently and unwaveringly good -- the huge majority, including some of the central figures like Frodo and Sam, had at least some moments of darkness, however fleeting.
- AllegedAlec 3y ago> the huge majority, including some of the central figures like Frodo and Sam, had at least some moments of darkness, however fleeting. Yes, but not due to their own inherrent greyness, but because of the corruptive influence of evil they fought against. That's a huge difference to my eyes.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoTrue, but it's always obvious what the good thing is and what the evil thing is at any point. The characters themselves may falter but what they should be doing is immediately clear.
- watwut 3y agoIt is valid thing to point out for a critic. Just like unrealistic physics or one dimensional characters are. Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common.
- AllegedAlec 3y ago> It is valid thing to point out for a critic. Just like unrealistic physics or one dimensional characters are. That presumes that Objective Good and Evil are somehow just as unrealistic. That's very much debatable, though I'd not be surprised if right here on HN people can't see that. > Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common. Yeah, so is grey and grey morality. Hacks like GRRM make bank with objectively bad people on all sides, and it's tauted as 'realism'.
- dtgriscom 3y agoI've always enjoyed the humor throughout the stories: > "So many strange things have chanced that to learn the praise of a fair lady under the loving strokes of a Dwarf's axe will seem no great wonder."
- musha68k 3y ago> Where many modernists greeted the Great War as a moment of disenchantment and disillusionment, a young Tolkien, who fought in it, took it as a spur to a mission of re-enchantment for a world desperately in need of myth. The anti-war sentiment of Tolkien’s work isn’t even highlighted explicitly enough I find. Dead Marshes echo WWI trenches and WWII fascism casts shadows over Sauron's dominion. Frodo's scars mirror war's enduring trauma. Myth making for himself, his children and general world (re-)building. To mend, yes.