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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3368 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What's the appeal in Lord of the Rings?

I've recently been press ganged by my friends into joining a Lord of the Rings book club and it's one of the more significant Ls I've taken in a long time. We've finished the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Rings and I'm actually not sure I've ever read fiction this boring. Gargantuan amounts of the plot are just them wandering through the woods. The characterization is borderline nonexistent and the dialogue is so stilted that I have trouble keeping the characters apart - why are there even two characters for Mary and Pippin when as far as I can tell they're the same character? Every page feels like a slog, the only decent part is Tolkien has nice descriptions of scenery.

I'm not trying to be a dick though, I want to enjoy these books, everyone tells me they're great. What am I missing? What should I be looking for / trying to get out of them?

As an unabashed and unrepentant Tolkien superfan, I will say that Fellowship takes off significantly once they get to Bree. If you're not there yet, definitely hold on.

What's the appeal in Lord of the Rings?

It's a phenomenal tale told with beautiful prose. But really the core of the appeal of fantasy is of being transported to another place; to escape the dull, superficial reality we live in for a world that is suffused with magical unreality. Part of why Tolkien sits at the apex of the genre is that The Lord of the Rings depicts a world much grander than our own, shrunken and withered. There is a sense of longing and nostalgia for a forgotten and irrevocably lost past when we greater than we are now. I think that people very keenly feel some loss of wonder and grandeur in the world, whether that loss be cultural, intellectual, environmental, and Lord of the Rings laments that loss in a very evocative way.

I saw someone point this out very clearly the other day: we associate "post-apocalyptic" with Sci-Fi, so we don't immediately recognize the Lord of the Rings as post-apocalyptic fantasy!

There were civilizations who carved statues and skyscrapers out of mountains, who turned forests into pocket universes of magic and beauty, who uplifted other forests to sentience, who built subcontinent-spanning empires ...

And we're walking through their ruins, terrified at the likelihood that even the few remaining places that people can call home are going to be lost as well. We see remnants of magic fading away, remnants of high culture in retreat, we've been outright told that past victories were hollow and temporary, and we can see that even another victory here would be merely the beginning of hope to preserve just a part of what's left ...

And what's left is still beautiful enough to want to preserve, if only a part of it, for however long it and however much of it can last. "We have fought the long defeat", says Galadriel, but even that length itself is a form of victory.

I wouldn't call LOTR post-apocalyptic just because there was no apocalypse. The world is in a long, slow decline rather than having had a single event after which everything is inferior to what came before. Even in the beginning of the world, there are legendary deeds that can't be replicated (Yavanna can't make replacements for the Two Trees, and Fëanor can't recreate the Silmarils).

I mean, at least as the movies present it, you could call Sauron's first attack a form of Apocalypse.

And there was an even bigger attack (with a bigger defense) ages before that from Morgoth. But really, even before that the world was in decline. It's just the nature of the world Tolkien created, and it wasn't pushed into decline by any particular event.

Also, I wouldn't count the movies' depiction of anything in LOTR as being particularly meaningful. They're good movies, but Peter Jackson didn't really grok LOTR if the movies are anything to go by.

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