The General Tolkien News Thread

[malickfan]

I thought I'd start a thread for general Tolkien related news-new books, articles etc.

To start with New Editions of Farmer Giles of Ham and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil coming out!:

http://wayneandchristina.wordpress.com/

I'm going to need a bigger shelve!

I wonder what the second part of 'New Tolkien projects' will be?

Fingers crossed for an expanded edition of Letters..

[Eldorion]

An expanded version of Letters would be amazing.  One of the few things left on my wish list for posthumously published Tolkien material (along with a "best of" collection from Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon that can be bought in book form).

[malickfan]

Just came across the following on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Hobbit-Facsimile-First-Edition/dp/0007440839/ref=tmm_hrd_title_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1390501314&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0007525540?tag=tolkcollsguid-21&camp=2902&creative=19466&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=0007525540&adid=0M55MRRQ80G1ZK0R20QY&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tolkienguide.com%2Fmodules%2Fnewbb%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ftopic_id%3D1500%26start%3D245


Neither are exactly 'new' books, but jazzed up (and likely quite pricey) reprints.

[Radaghast]

I wonder if that means it contains the original unredacted "Riddles in the Dark".

[malickfan]

I think it does, but you can read it in the Annotated Hobbit or The History of The Hobbit anyway.

[Radaghast]

The Annotated Hobbit is definitely something I'll want to get.

[Pettytyrant101]

[Pettytyrant101]

I hadnt seen this before (so sorry if anyone has posted it before- I must have missed it!)

[Pettytyrant101]

Not really a point to this post as such, more a musing.

Been watching the excellent, and highly recommended BBC documentary Britain's Great War, with Jeremy Paxman about WW1.

And I just got to the point in the war were tanks make an appearance, those devices which to Tolkien were the utter worst of everything and prime examples of arts of Sauron type thinking.
But that view seems to have been heavily at odds with the prevailing view.
When the tanks were deployed they took 7 miles of land from the Germans, far and away the most ground ever gained.
In Britain church bells rang out, people mobbed the streets to celebrate and in the words of Paxman 'Britain went tank crazy'.

The government saw a PR opportunity and a morale and fund raising one too and deployed tanks across the UK for the people to see in action. They were the symbol of hope, that we had finally come up with something which the Germans would not have an answer too in a war which to this point was nothing but pain upon pain.

It made me wonder about Tolkien's attitude, he must have seen how people reacted to this device he despised, and as a soldier in the trenches himself such a significant victory you might think would make him see it as a force for good.
His view was the wiser in my opinion, but just strange to see how at odds it seems to be with everyone else's reaction to the arrival of the tank on the fields of battle.

[Norc]

news? the guy's been dead since the 70's whaat?

[Pettytyrant101]

I couldn't be arsed hunting the section for a thread more suitable, figured this one would do   and wasn't significant enough for its own thread. And I'm probably drunk. I'll just check that by drinking this buckie    

[Norc]

haha, it's ok. i was just taking the piss (of the thread's title in general)

[halfwise]

Not really a point to this post as such, more a musing.

Been watching the excellent, and highly recommended BBC documentary Britain's Great War, with Jeremy Paxman about WW1.

And I just got to the point in the war were tanks make an appearance, those devices which to Tolkien were the utter worst of everything and prime examples of arts of Sauron type thinking.
But that view seems to have been heavily at odds with the prevailing view.
When the tanks were deployed they took 7 miles of land from the Germans, far and away the most ground ever gained.
In Britain church bells rang out, people mobbed the streets to celebrate and in the words of Paxman 'Britain went tank crazy'.

The government saw a PR opportunity and a morale and fund raising one too and deployed tanks across the UK for the people to see in action. They were the symbol of hope, that we had finally come up with something which the Germans would not have an answer too in a war which to this point was nothing but pain upon pain.

It made me wonder about Tolkien's attitude, he must have seen how people reacted to this device he despised, and as a soldier in the trenches himself such a significant victory you might think would make him see it as a force for good.
His view was the wiser in my opinion, but just strange to see how at odds it seems to be with everyone else's reaction to the arrival of the tank on the fields of battle.

It's an interesting question whether you make a war more moral by insisting you actually face the enemy (if you can't bring yourself to kill them face to face, maybe this whole war thing is a bad idea) or making it clean and mechanized so that soldiers don't have to become sociopaths (possibly for life) in order to do the killing. I understand that the main way you get soldiers to kill face to face is to put them in situations where if they don't fight back they die. This doesn't seem to have stopped warfare in the past, so i really don't know if mechanizing war is good or bad - except that it makes it too easy. With arms races there's no way out I'm afraid. Nuclear bombs didn't stop warfare, just stopped more nuclear bombs from being dropped.

[Pettytyrant101]

The tank didn't end WW1 either, for all the initial hope- Passendale was yet to happen.

There was a horrendous story from it recounted in that program that really struck home to me the sheer unimaginable horror of the situation at Passendale.

The shell holes, filled with water and dead were deadly. Planks of wood were put over them which the soldiers had to navigate under shell fire, if you slipped or fell off you were a goner.
A Commander recorded that on one push a man went in and others tried desperately to pull him back out, but so muddy and choked with dead had the shell hole become that he was stuck, in the end they had to leave him screaming for help up to his waist in the water and bodies as the shells fell.

Two days later the Commander returned the same way and reported 'the poor chap was till there, but now only his head was visible above the water and he had gone quite out of his mind.'

Mordor indeed.

[Bluebottle]

I always felt the First World War must have had a monumental impact on Tolkien. He always liked to remark when people suggested his books being inspired by the Second World War, that life for the soldiers in the First was at least just as bad.

And I think it had a huge effect on the reality of death that comes across in his writing.

I think I shared something George RR Martin mentioned about that earlier were he talked about the death of Boromir and Gandalf gave an extra reality to the books. And in the Hobbit, which people like to call a kids book, three of the main characters die.

So the First World Wars effect on Tolkien and his writing I don't think should be underestimated.

[Norc]

wow fuck me.. this is interesting, can't afford to ignore this  this is exactly what i have to bring into my assignment

[Pettytyrant101]

I know    

[Bluebottle]

Well, it is an interesting perspective Petty brought up with the tanks.  

When Tolkien saw them being brought into the war in real time during the First World War, he saw machines and as such modernism take their place on the battlefield. As he saw this as a negative thing we might equate that he saw parts of modernism as something negative. It's very easy then to see modernism become part of what he presented as evil under Sauron in the LotRs. Fighting against tradition and the age old in the elves.

Interestingly in the final batlle when Sauron looses both the traditional and the modernistic side kind of loose, as the elves also disapear from Middle Earth. And that leaves us in what? A postmodernistic dystopia. Perhaps not, maybe that's a step too far.   

Interesting perspectives though. I did say you had chosen an interesting asignment.   

[Eldorion]

Interestingly in the final batlle when Sauron looses both the traditional and the modernistic side kind of loose, as the elves also disapear from Middle Earth. And that leaves us in what? A postmodernistic dystopia. Perhaps not, maybe that's a step too far.   

That's a thought-provoking way of looking at the ending. :)Unfortunately, though, my impression from Tolkien's writings (especially unpublished material) is that the situation under King Elessar was only a temporary one.  In the Letters Tolkien stated that Aragorn's descendants would ultimately be ... not necessarily corrupted, but just as subject to human weakness as the Stewards had been.

A story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Sauron]... proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor... would become discontented and restless- while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors –like Denethor or worse (Letters 344).

That story, The New Shadow, never got beyond the first chapter (of which there are two versions published in HoME XII), but this cynicism bordering on misanthropy is very present in it.  On the other hand, the epilogue to LOTR (published in HoME IX) is much more optimistic about the Fourth Age, almost uncharacteristically so, given the common refrain of the "dominion of men".

“I know,” said Sam. “The light is fading, Elanor. But it won't go out yet. It won't ever go quite out, I think now, since I have had you to talk to. For it seems to me now that people can remember it who have never seen it. And yet,” he sighed, “even that is not the same as really seeing it, like I did.”

“Like really being in a story?” said Elanor. “A story is quite different, even when it is about what happened. I wish I could go back to old days!”

“Folk of our sort often wish that,” said Sam. “You came at the end of a great age, Elanor; but though it's over, as we say, things don't really end sharp like that. It's more like a winter sunset. The High Elves have nearly all gone now with Elrond. But not quite all; and those that didn't go will wait now for a while. And the others, the ones that belong here, will last even longer. There are still things for you to see, and maybe you'll see them sooner than you hope.”

But Middle-earth is ostensibly the mythic past of our own world, which means that sooner or later the last of the magic must have died out and "modernity" triumphed.  But I do like to cling to the unpublished epilogue as a sliver of hope for the post-LOTR world of Middle-earth. NB a more extensive quotation can be read >here< for those who don't own HoME IX.

[Bluebottle]

That's interesting, Eldo.   

But the question would perhaps be, if we equate Sauron and his evil with the bad parts of modernism, which is not something one necessarily should take for granted, it would still be different to the "evil" the world might slip back into after the power and knowledge of Numenor passed. Sauron and evil forces as him is said in the LotRs to imbue a certain fierceness in his troops, a will and a purpose. Would the simple evil of men would be the same?

So maybe the idea of good and evil fading from the world, in the elves and Sauron, would rather than cast the world into evil leave the world devoid of both. A world devoid of real meaning, of real value, of right and wrong, which is after all what post modernism preaches.

And maybe that's what Tolkien, as a Catholic and a believer in good and evil necessitating each other,  feared most of all.  

The sense of, with evil good vanishes too is certainly very interesting. But as you point out, Tolkien himself perhaps felt the need to leave some hope. But there's still a sense that things will with time finally pass..

[halfwise]

That's a very interesting point, BB.  I think Tolkien was a natural cynic, bequeathed by the early deaths of his father and mother.  For this reason he needed religion, as it provided hope beyond all cynicism.  If good and evil were abandoned, then religion - the only true source of hope for Tolkien - would have to be abandoned as well.

[Pettytyrant101]

That does fit neatly with his use of the ucatastrophe, hope where this no hope.
A creator God with a plan and an afterlife where you are reunited with lost loved ones is a fine example of it.
The dying decay flesh that has come to a seemingly final and ultimate end is at the last moment born anew in a body of the spirit and into a state of Bliss.

[Orwell]

Fortunately (for him), Tolkien passed believing in Eternity. We are left at his grave which holds his bones, nothing else. Everything else of his physical and spiritual existence is gone forever. The only thing about him that is still alive is his legacy.

[malickfan]

An expanded version of Letters would be amazing.  One of the few things left on my wish list for posthumously published Tolkien material (along with a "best of" collection from Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon that can be bought in book form).

Just looking back in this thread, there is something along those lines already, this website has collected the Vinyar Tengwar issues together in 10 issue volumes, I haven't read any of this material myself but at those prices it's something of a bargain (even in Paperback):

http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?type=&keyWords=vinyar+tengwar&x=0&y=0&sitesearch=lulu.com&q=&pn=1

[Eldorion]

Damn, I'd never heard of that. Those are some amazing prices.