Author Topic: New TV Season  (Read 5378 times)

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Offline kimmy

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Re: New TV Season
« Reply #45 on: March 10, 2019, 04:02:43 pm »
I only read The Silmarillion once, about 35 years ago. I found it fairly hard to get engaged, not like the other Tolkien books. Hopefully this series will help make things come alive.

The first time I tried to read it, in my early teens, I couldn't get engaged either. When I read it again at about 20, I was really absorbed in it.

It's written in a completely different style... The Hobbit and LOTR are up-close and detailed stories of tiny pieces of the vast realm he created, while The Silmarillion is the exact opposite, a Cole's Notes summary of a long history with only brief snippets focusing on the individuals and their specific deeds. There are a few parts where it does delve into specific events in greater detail, like the story of Beren and Luthien, but most of it is very terse.

One of the early battles, just after Feanor and the elves have returned to Middle Earth, Morgoth unleashes his armies to try to eradicate them, but the elves completely massacre them. Tolkien sums up the whole battle in a paragraph, concluding with something like... "of the hosts that Morgoth sent forth, all that returned to the gates of Angband was a handful of leaves."   Just a very broad strokes approach to writing, yet with a sort of poetic touch that adds some subtext.

Tolkien was first and foremost a professor of languages. He created these imaginary languages for his own amusement.  Then he created some fictional peoples for his fictional languages.  Then he imagined a fictional world for his fictional peoples.  And then a fictional history for his fictional world, which he sketched out over a span of many years and never really completed.  And of his vast imaginary history, he took one tiny piece-- the story of Bilbo Baggins finding the ring-- and fleshed it out into a complete story for his son when his son to read as a boy.  And later he fleshed out a second piece-- The Lord of The Rings-- for his son to read as a young man.  I think it's interesting to think of the two stories as a father's messages for his son at different ages and ponder what he wanted his son to get from them.


For a TV series based on the Second Age, they'll be doing the same thing-- taking a portion of this long history, and distilling it into an up close look at a small portion and focusing on the characters and events in detail.


 -k
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