Explain Lord of the Rings to me pls

[sneaksta303]

starts at 30 sec:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwxA9O-q2o8

 

lol

[sneaksta303]

RAPE HIM!!!!!

[Guest Wall Bird]

Fucking lol at that 'Primer' character diagram.

[posture]

I wonder if in 50 years Lotr will still be popular. It's doing alright so far.

 

I am sure the books will be, the films I am not so sure. In my opinion in the few years it has been they haven't aged too well and I feel a lot of time was wasted/spent on stupid shit.

[gaarg]

I meant the books. Movies will look quite stupid in a few years and we'll only watch them to have a laugh at the 00's.

[MAXIMUS MISCHIEF]

the movies are really good though .. theres nothing wrong with them stop being such a critic

[Redruth]

the classic tale of good versus evil that will live on forever. gollum and théoden being completely overcome by darkness, the near

uncontrollable wantings for the ring of power and the eventual triumph of truth

 

some of the most inspiring books ever written. tolkien is genius

.

[Guest ezkerraldean]

the triumph of nice pretty white christians from the west over evil dark ugly muslims from the east

[Redruth]

fuck off!

[Guest theSun]

i sort of wish they did the whole sharkey thing at the end, but return was already so long lolol

[dr lopez]

the classic tale of good versus evil that will live on forever. gollum and théoden being completely overcome by darkness, the near

uncontrollable wantings for the ring of power and the eventual triumph of truth

 

some of the most inspiring books ever written. tolkien is genius

.

you're not very smart are you?

 

jesus christ the writing in those books is pedestrian and almost unreadable. the man has two ideas: a grey mist... a green light. seriously. Look at any fucking page in any of those books and see if you can find grey or green. I've done it for about fifty pages and i can count my disappointments on one hand. u know there's a reason why actual english professors aren't tolkien scholars.

[Redruth]

dr lopez:

 

i've had some ill figures follow me round on the watmms with nothing better to do then attempt to

butcher my every word and opinion, but you are by far the most dedicated troll of them all

 

eat your disgusting salsa and stfu

[Caretstik]

If that ring made Frodo invisible why didn't he use it to spy on naked women and shit?

[KovalainenFanBoy]

Because he already had Sam for that matter.

[Guest Mirezzi]

I can't resist pissing off Tolkien drones and re-posting this since it was lost in one of our many database restarts...and /hi5 to the very few WATMMers with enough intelligence to resist Lord of the Rings nonsense.

 

(written after reading the books for the first time around 2002)

 

Tolkien once explained that the highest function of fantasy literature is to 'provide a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the World.' Tolkien writes with a death wish. This world is too complex and confusing, so escape into an enveloping fantasy world with no relation to present material conditions. Don't take action, just console yourself with middle earth, put your mind to sleep and don't forget to tip your hat to the gentry. Even as just a populist favorite, it’s bankrupt. It says the masses want escapist consolation rather than change, it says they like to imagine their traditional moral codes are so universal they exist even in imaginary worlds.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love fantasy literature, it's just that Tolkien is a boring and painstakingly written history devoid of meaningful fantasy. Who on Earth wants to escape into a sexless fantasy world? What's the point in fantasy that doesn't question reality nor subvert it, but rather creates a boringly obvious good vs. evil allegory instead? Bush and Blair are sure unlucky Lord of the Rings has replaced Star Wars as the generational adventure movie, with its anti-imperialist implications.

 

Tolkien wanted to reproduce an Anglo-Saxon pagan epic like Beowulf, but he was far too much the Christian. He thinks fantasy serves to recite the compensation of Christian values. His biblically famous trilogy is a second-rate pale Victorian (in spirit) imitation of North European pagan mythology. There is nothing challenging in his fiction. Evil is banished, everything is resolved, order restored, and the reader is left with no troubling questions about the fantasy world or this world or how they both relate to each other.

 

Tolkien sought to write a mythology for the English, while remaining an arch reactionary. "Touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire, but it’s damn good for you," as he once said. The Shire represents England, the Hobbits the people of England, the ordinary folk who are yet capable of the extraordinary. The message of Lord of the Rings, we know it has one because Tolkien keeps telling us it does, is that the English are the only people we can trust to hold terrible power. It’s puerile nationalism.

 

Lord of the Rings is unbelievably boring to read, its appeal is consolation for being human by escaping into a secondary world where everything makes sense and reaffirms a reactionary morality. It's nostalgia, Mordor's quasi-industrial landscape equates modernity with evil and the only way is to go back to a feudal order. If a Hobbit makes a grasp for power, bad things will happen, the Hobbits (English working class) only act in support of the men (the nobility). It's this recognition of their place in society that makes the Hobbits so trustworthy, because they won't upset the established order. It's repressive, without an ounce of sexuality and the author tells you everything in an authoritative tone. And let's not forget the second-rate poetry – “whimsy” – that’s strewn about the 1200 pages without mercy! There are no conflicting perspectives, no unreliable narrators, no questions for the reader to resolve. In Tolkien's world, there is only one version of Truth, one version of history for both good which is good and evil which is evil. The reader doesn't participate. The reader is just told what happens, reduced to a passive observer rather than an interpreter. It is a book written to preserve traditional conservative values against modernity.

[azatoth]

Hardly original criticism there. Have not read Tolkien, seen the movies was entertained, but thought the making of documentaries were far more interesting as it looked they had a blast doing these movies.

[Guest Mirezzi]

Hardly original criticism there.

Indeed, but then again, when is the last time you read original or even interesting praise of Tolkien's gibberish?

 

For more on Tolkien's shitness:

 

http://www.bondwine.com/essays/superversive/superversive.html

 

Does Fantasy equal Subversion?

 

Subversion is a popular word in literary criticism nowadays, and some persons have suggested that it is the principal function of fantasy. Not a function, which may perhaps be true, but the function, the sine qua non of imaginative literature. John Grant has gone so far as to propose that anything that is not subversive is therefore not fantasy at all, but a subliterary ersatz that he derisively dubs Generic Fantasy, ‘this monstrous tide of commercially inspired, mind-numbingly unimaginative garbage — this loathsome mire’. In Mr Grant’s taxonomy, virtually everything derived from Tolkien, or showing his influence, is ‘garbage’ and ‘mire’. He does leave himself just enough room to wriggle out of the logical implication, which is that Tolkien himself did not write fantasy; but he does this by allowing that Tolkien’s work is, in some unspecified way, sufficiently ‘subversive’ to meet the Grantian standard.

 

Now, this is a remarkable claim for anybody to make. If just one author in the appalling history of the twentieth century was not ‘subversive’, it was J.R.R. Tolkien. He was an enthusiastic supporter of order, authority, hierarchy, in both the temporal and spiritual spheres; a passionately orthodox Catholic, a royalist, a hidebound traditionalist who did not even approve of refrigerators and called aeroplanes ‘Mordor-gadgets’. When Orwell said that a Conservative is ‘a thing that does not exist nowadays’, he was merely proving that he had never met Tolkien. A full study of Tolkien’s conservatism would fill up many books, so here I shall confine myself to a couple of quotations (cited in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien) that sufficiently illustrate the point:

I am not a ‘democrat’, if only because ‘humility’ and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power — and then we get and are getting slavery.

 

Touching your cap to the Squire may be dam’ bad for the Squire but it’s dam’ good for you.

Now, some foolish and superficial modern people, whose sense of history extends no further back than the remote primaeval dawn of the 1950s, think Tolkien was subversive because he was loudly opposed to ‘robot-factories’ and the destruction of the English countryside. In fact, and this note runs strongly throughout his work, he regarded industrialism and pollution as subversive, the one degrading human nature, the other destroying the order and beauty of nature as a whole. This sentiment became fashionable in the 1960s, and many of those who adopted it were subversives; but their reasons were not Tolkien’s. They opposed industrial civilization because their parents favoured it; Tolkien opposed it because it destroyed the kind of life lived by all the generations of his ancestors.

 

This leaves Mr Grant in an awkward position. According to his rash definitions, The Lord of the Rings must be ‘Generic Fantasy’ and ‘garbage’ because it is not ‘subversive’; but what most of his audience means by fantasy is ‘stories like The Lord of the Rings’. Mr Grant has not only cut off the branch he is sitting on, he then has the audacity to announce that it alone is the real Tree, and all else is merely a diseased fungoid growth. Often a surgeon must amputate a limb to save the patient; but he amputates the patient to save the limb. Whatever else this is, it is startlingly original.

 

Now, this is what Mr Grant wants fantasy to do:

It must meddle with our thinking, it must delight in being controversial, it must hope to be condemned by authority (whatever authority one chooses to identify), it must be at the cutting edge of the imagination, it must flirt with madness, it must surprise, it must be doing things that other forms of fiction cannot.

‘Cannot,’ Mr Grant? Ulysses, whatever else it may have been, was certainly at the cutting edge of the imagination. Joyce flirted with madness, and in Finnegans Wake he outright embraced it. His vision of Western civilization at the dawn of the twentieth century surprised huge numbers of people; it shocked them, offended them, appalled them; it was heartily condemned by all manner of authorities, and in some parts of the English-speaking world, it was difficult to obtain a copy of Ulysses without breaking the law. But it was not and is not fantasy.

 

The events of Joyce’s books are strikingly mundane; here there be no Tygers, except the strange beasts that lurk in the subconscious, dragged into the open by the novelist’s art and put on public display. ‘Right-thinking’ people professed to be shocked at the crudity and barbarity of the thoughts Joyce dared to express; but at bottom, what really shocked them was that he had dared to express their secret thoughts, the obscenities and blasphemies that cross everyone’s mind, but that in those days it was considered proper to hush up. He exposed a conspiracy to which even Mrs Grundy was a party. And he did it without inventing anything at all beyond the bounds of everyday reality. Tom Shippey has called Ulysses ‘One Day in the Life of a Nobody’. This is very apt; but it would be equally apt applied to almost any of Joyce’s most representative works. This perfectly fulfils Mr Grant’s laundry-list of desiderata, but it is about as far from fantasy as a work of literature can be.

 

At this point, Mr Grant’s bizarre classification system begins to make, not exactly sense, but at least an intelligible form of nonsense. It is as if a man were to say that he liked Soup because it is cold, thick, viscous, and not highly flavoured. Such a man could go to restaurant after restaurant, and to all his friends’ houses, and ask for Soup, and be disappointed every time. Consommé is not thick, chicken soup is not viscous, hot and sour soup has a flavour that will burn his tastebuds; and all these soups are served hot. Therefore he rejects them with scorn. These things, he says, are not proper Soup at all, but a strange and phony substance that he calls Commercial Soup. But when we analyse the man’s language, we see that what he wants is not really Soup at all. Milkshakes or custard would suit him equally well. When he speaks of Soup, proper Soup and not that nasty Commercial Soup, he means vichyssoise; and he may, for courtesy’s sake, extend a grudging acceptance to gazpacho and cold borscht. But it is only by coincidence that he applies the word soup to the object of his desire. And so it is with Mr Grant and his avowed taste for fantasy. He does not really like fantasy; what he wants is subversive literature, and when he does not get it, he blames everyone but himself.

[MAXIMUS MISCHIEF]

basically you just dont liek fantasy. if youre not feeling it youre not feeling it, dont subject yourself to shit you dont like

but i get the feeling that these people ENJOY getting themselves worked up about shit and posting irrelevant rants to justify their opinions

Edited March 17, 2011 by MAXIMUS MISCHIEF

[YEK]

i'm more sci fi guy . maybe that's why i don't think much oft he movies...(but they WERE pretty bad right??)

 

this never get's old though:

 

[youtubehd]YdXQJS3Yv0Y[/youtubehd]

[Redruth]

If that ring made Frodo invisible why didn't he use it to spy on naked women and shit?

irlol

[MAXIMUS MISCHIEF]

i'm more sci fi guy . maybe that's why i don't think much oft he movies...(but they WERE pretty bad right??)

 

this never get's old though:

 

[youtubehd]YdXQJS3Yv0Y[/youtubehd]

 

no they werent bad at all

[Redruth]

catchy choon, but 'i'd rather be singin' a good ol' hobbit song myself'.

 

[youtubehd]YdXQJS3Yv0Y[/youtubehd]

[TwiddleBot]

Hardly original criticism there.

Indeed, but then again, when is the last time you read original or even interesting praise of Tolkien's gibberish?

 

For more on Tolkien's shitness:

 

It's kind of easy to portray Tolkien as a knee-jerk neo-luddite meanwhile forgetting that LOTR is probably heavily influenced by his traumatic experiences during the Great War. Some of the thematic content is probably more obvious than others (like returning home to discover you no longer relate to your past). Anyway rather than posting a tl;dr thread check this out if you wish..

 

Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

 

Anyway as far as entertainment and readability goes, Hobbit wins for me hands down over LOTR, and I much prefer the darker (pre raped-by-disney) germanic folklore/faerie tales. The problem with LOTR is that it has been ripped off so endlessly, it has become -the- formula for fantasy and has lost its impact.. people assume fantasy equals wizards, elves and dwarves. Also when it comes to sexless, well, we are still recovering from the neuroses of the puritanical era.. meh... underslept, not enough coffee, out of here before i ramble

[gaarg]

One of my most beloved aspects of Tolkien's Middle earth writings is their non-modernistical approach. Most of Hobbit and Lotr stuff was written as modernism in art was progressing, developing, making new standards but Tolkien would omit it, even openly reject some of its ways.

 

For me that is bold, fresh and today wonderfully aspiring.

[Guest theSun]

it's easy to see why tolkien wasn't all about industrialization. i won't go into it here but feel free to read up.

 

i also think it's funny that some people expect LOTR to be some endall of fantasy. it's a book. JRR himself said it was only supposed to be a linguistic exercise, and he just winged it from there.

 

the content of the books is revealing of tolkien, but he, just like every other human, can't just remove himself from his own subjectivity. was he trying to make a world that is "realistic" by 2011 standards? he made one that was loosely based on the only life he knew - his own.