Tom Bombadil
- Thread starter WarlKicken
- Start date
Oooo! That's a stretch - the Silmarillion being interesting! 
I always say it's like the Bible and some people like that because of the similarity, but I always used to regard it as being the cure for insomnia. As a reference book it's great though and Unfinished Tales is better in some respects except that's even more contradictory of itself and has truly frustrating annotations. Rippings reads they ain't though
I always say it's like the Bible and some people like that because of the similarity, but I always used to regard it as being the cure for insomnia. As a reference book it's great though and Unfinished Tales is better in some respects except that's even more contradictory of itself and has truly frustrating annotations. Rippings reads they ain't though
I did read Tom Bombadil as well but I was refering to your post, not The Silmarillion though it does have some interesting parts in it , Unfinished Tales I have but for some reason never got around to reading it or the Lost Tales I have the 1st two books,if I ever get around to reading LOTR again I may dip into to it.
For various reasons I'm currently working my way through the History of Middle Earth of which Lost Tales are the 1st 2 volumes and they make the Sil look like something by Harold Robbins... Some interesting ideas in there but really I've never seen so much made out of so little with reams of iterations and analysis over a few words transposed or couched slightly differently in no less than 3 and usually more versions....
Tolkien really was a great writer of prose, but my gods did he bloody work at making it perfect to the point where it lost all semblance of pace and character engagement. TH and LotR were written to make money is the bottom line and for that he sacrified thoroughness for art thank heavens as they're really (aside from stuff for the kids like the Father Christmas Letters) the only readable novels to come out of Middle Earth. There's some blistering ideas in The Sil and more elaborated in Unfinished Tales (especially interesting for Galadriel fans who had at least 2 other contenders for Mr. Galadriel in there and had kids with one of them as well as the daughter who married Elrond ) but he wrote the hell out of most of it in changing his mind about Orcs and the sun and the moons and whether they were around before during or after the Two Trees or the bloody Lamps 
Tolkien really was his own geek and didn't need a fandom at all really
Some interesting ideas in there but really I've never seen so much made out of so little with reams of iterations and analysis over a few words transposed or couched slightly differently in no less than 3 and usually more versions.... Tolkien really was a great writer of prose, but my gods did he bloody work at making it perfect to the point where it lost all semblance of pace and character engagement.
TH and LotR were written to make money is the bottom line and for that he sacrified thoroughness for art thank heavens as they're really (aside from stuff for the kids like the Father Christmas Letters) the only readable novels to come out of Middle Earth. There's some blistering ideas in The Sil and more elaborated in Unfinished Tales (especially interesting for Galadriel fans who had at least 2 other contenders for Mr. Galadriel in there and had kids with one of them as well as the daughter who married Elrond ) but he wrote the hell out of most of it in changing his mind about Orcs and the sun and the moons and whether they were around before during or after the Two Trees or the bloody Lamps Tolkien really was his own geek and didn't need a fandom at all really 
Jan Van Quirm said:
Oooo! That's a stretch - the Silmarillion being interesting!
I always say it's like the Bible and some people like that because of the similarity, but I always used to regard it as being the cure for insomnia. As a reference book it's great though and Unfinished Tales is better in some respects except that's even more contradictory of itself and has truly frustrating annotations. Rippings reads they ain't though
I always say it's like the Bible and some people like that because of the similarity, but I always used to regard it as being the cure for insomnia. As a reference book it's great though and Unfinished Tales is better in some respects except that's even more contradictory of itself and has truly frustrating annotations. Rippings reads they ain't though
Certainly an acquired taste - it's just so different from LotR in tone though and the depth's not great either. If he'd only written the tale of Feanor or the Fall of Gondolin in the same vein as Return of the King - just a smidge of passion and drama here and there - it would probably have been the greatest lyrical work of prose ever, in or out of genre, but I guess he just liked tweaking around more and never truly got to grips with putting the flesh on it.
If he'd only been able to use a word processor even, we might have seen it all decked out in language as compelling as we know he could write, because he was at least as prolific as Terry, but soooooooo flaming slooow - how Christopher Tolkien stayed sane piecing together all those hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pieces of longhand draft manuscript and scrawled notes I'll never know - just as well he occasionally got a typist in, or actually used a machine himself, else we'd never have got what we have in The Hobbit and LotR and the other books published in his lifetime.
This is what I meant when I was saying in another thread about how Tolkien's from another era, or even a whole world in reality now so comparisons to contemporary fantasy writers are hard to make in some respects.
If he'd only been able to use a word processor even, we might have seen it all decked out in language as compelling as we know he could write, because he was at least as prolific as Terry, but soooooooo flaming slooow - how Christopher Tolkien stayed sane piecing together all those hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pieces of longhand draft manuscript and scrawled notes I'll never know - just as well he occasionally got a typist in, or actually used a machine himself, else we'd never have got what we have in The Hobbit and LotR and the other books published in his lifetime.
This is what I meant when I was saying in another thread about how Tolkien's from another era, or even a whole world in reality now so comparisons to contemporary fantasy writers are hard to make in some respects.
