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frodo-with-glasses · 11 months

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More Reading Thoughts: The Epilogue, Version Two

Like all good writers, Tolkien couldn’t quite make up his mind how he wanted to write this part. Once again tagging @lady-merian and thanking her for her patience X-D

Jirt’s Text

“…with many pauses for thought he was writing in his slow round hand…” I chose to believe this refers not only to the printed script but to the actual hand that’s writing it X-P

*Smash Bros title screen* Primrose joins the battle!

It’s Elanor’s birthday :-D

Elanor has red-gold hair confirmed

SHE CALLS HIM SAM-DAAAAAAD TTuTT

AND WALKS UP AND HUGS HIM AS HE WRITES

Sam: Only you have heard the whole Book more than once. Elanor, being Very Precise: Three times.

Hello yes Elanor is adorbs and I love her

Mirkwood is called Greenwood now!

MERRY WENT TO VISIT EOWYN IN HER WHITE HOUSE

MERRY GOT TO HANG OUT WITH EOWYN AND BERGIL AGAIN I AM LIVING

MERRY SR. IS GONNA GIVE MERRY JR. A PONY FROM ROHAN

I WILL ACTUALLY CRY

Sam, sighing: “These questions and answers aren’t fit to go in a book like that. :-(” Meanwhile, Sam, literally in a book:

BOOKCEPTION

“Mr. Meriadoc might help me. He’s clever at writing, and he’s making a splendid book all about plants.” Confirmed: Merry is an herb nerd and I would die for him

Sam still says Elanor is just as pretty if not prettier than her flower, and she’s still like “okay Dad” LOL

“Though it’s over, as we say, things don’t really end sharp like that.” Way to elbow the readers for criticizing your 13,594 endings, Tolkien

“I think it was very sad for him. And for you, Sam-dad. For your treasure went too.” HI HELLO YES OKAY IT IS FRODO TIME

YOUR TREASURE holy honey-nut feelios i die

“It was sad, Elanorellë. It was, but isn’t now.” (Tolkien I see you but I’m still gonna write angst and you can’t stop me ‘cause you’re dead)

Sam takes comfort in the fact that Frodo got his reward, and he himself got abundant reward as well. “I am a very rich hobbit.” And one more thing:

“Before he went Mr. Frodo said that my time maybe would come. I can wait. I think maybe we haven’t said farewell for good. But I can wait.”

*SCREAMS INTO A PILLOW*

WAIT. ELANOR WANTS TO GO WITH HIM. “I shall not part with you, like Arwen did with Elrond.”

HOLY PRECISION SHOT TO THE DAD-FEELS, BATMAN

Okay okay okay if you don’t have this book, you’re not gonna believe me, but I swear this is a 100% verbatim quote:

Elanor: Good night, Sam-dad. But… Sam: I don’t want good night but.

I freakin’ love Lord of the Rings 🤣

Elanor “spied” and saw Sam receive the scroll from the King! Just like the Conspirators spied on Frodo and the Ring! And Sam goes “well that’s karma if I’ve ever seen it” LOL

Okay so he went with the Fullwise name here

Elanor: When should we get ready? What will we wear? HOW MANY CURTSIES SHOULD I DO??

Sam: You wanna see elves, kid? You’re gonna see elves. Elanor: 🤩

Sam thinks the fire burns lower when Elanor leaves ;u;

This is the second time Tolkien makes fun of the hobbits praising the predictable clear weather at the end of March as “something unusual for the season”, which tells me he was very fond of that joke

Yay! He went with the singing version! X-D

And still ends with the sounds of the Sea. ✨Foreshadowing✨

Christopher’s Notes

Okay Tolkien’s “resumé” of the end of the book here gives some fascinating insights

“But Frodo cannot be healed. For the preservation of the Shire he has sacrificed himself, even in health, and has no heart to enjoy it. Sam has to choose between love of master and of wife. In the end he goes with Frodo on a last journey.”

He sacrificed himself…but has no heart to enjoy it… :-C TT~TT

“To Bilbo and Frodo the special Grace is granted to go with the elves they loved – an Arthurian ending, in which it is, of course, not made explicit whether this is an ‘allegory’ of death, or a mode of healing and restoration leading to a return.”

No wonder the ending is so haunting. Is it death? Is it healing? It’s both, and it’s neither, and it’s incredibly mythical and storybook-ish. Holy cow.

Also thought this was funny:

“Hobbit-children were delightful, but I am afraid that the only glimpses of them in this book are found at the beginning of vol. I. An epilogue giving a further glimpse (though of a rather exceptional family) has been so universally condemned that I shall not insert it. One must stop somewhere.” Tolkien really be like #I’mNotBitter lol

#samwise gamgee #elanor gamgee #lord of the rings #lotr #my writing #assorted thoughts

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thebluehoursofmorning · 1 year

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Pregnant and need help? Find your local pregnancy center at optionline.org, get more resources at standingwithyou.org. There are many people more than willing to help you and your baby. Want to help moms in need? Go to preborn.org!

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Jesus, I trust in You!

#blue talks #this will be my pinned post #in adoration today i was really feeling the need to make this specifically with the pregnancy centers link #reference

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k-she-rambles · 1 year

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'Indeed it is,' said Gimli. 'Why, it is better than the honeycakes of the Beornings, and that is great praise, for the Beornings are the best bakers that I know of; but they are none too willing to deal out their cakes to travellers in these days. You are kindly hosts!'

Where's the recipe Jirt???

#lotr newsletter

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absynthe--minded · 3 years

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so what is Up with jirt's math

short answer is it's incomprehensible, because our boy is a proud entry in the long tradition of science fiction and fantasy authors not being able to do fucking math

now, I am not a mathematician, but Carl Hostetter, NASA Engineer, might as well be, and I am eternally grateful that he got to trial run this insanity before unleashing it onto the rest of us, but since I am not a mathematician I will try instead to explain some context for things like "why this happened" and "why Tolkien took this approach to his work", because that's something I've not seen a lot of conversation about and I think it's important.

Tolkien wrote the fragments and passages we see in The Nature of Middle-Earth largely at the very end of his life. These were some of the last things he was actively working on in terms of worldbuilding. (if anyone was curious, the last thing narratively that he was working on seems to be the specifics of Aredhel and Maeglin's flight from Nan Elmoth, particularly travel time and how far Eöl would have gone and how long it would have taken him to get to specific places.) the thing that's relevant here imo is that Tolkien at this point is hardcore into a phase that I sort of informally call 'Retcon Everything To Make It Realistic'. he's rewriting the cosmology of his world, he's reworking timelines, he's adding in additional details and doing math on population tables and growth rates.

why is he doing this?

there are a lot of factors, but the one that seems most relevant is that the critical reception to The Lord of the Rings was... not great, when it came out. It was a massive commercial success, and had a following of counterculture and hippie types, and garnered fans who grew up with The Hobbit, and wasn't a failure at all? but as a work of literature, the only seriously positive critical response at first was W.H. Auden, who loved the story and praised it often. Tolkien says in the foreword to the second edition that there were several critics who disliked his books, and he answers them sassily and snappily in the same quick-witted fashion we all know and love, but despite that, he was deeply sensitive to criticism. He was forever doubting the viability of his own work, and at one point he apologized to his publishers both for writing The Lord of the Rings the way he had and for the fact that the Silmarillion probably wouldn't be publishable. He wrote first and foremost for himself, and much of what he wrote he didn't expect anyone to ever want to read.

but by the 60s, LotR was a solid success, and he was tasked with working on the Silm, and it was hard going. The earlier drafts of the story, while they maintain a lot of their integrity (the Quenta, as preserved in The Shaping of Middle-Earth, is drawn from heavily in the published Silm, and that's quite early), have magical or fantastical elements that don't have rational explanations, and there's a lot of whimsy and innocence and fairytale vibes to the stuff that's earliest of all. this is a problem because the criticisms of LotR were usually (not universally! but often) centered around failure to understand fantasy as a genre and to engage with it on its own terms, largely because, well, this was the first time it had been done, you know? and I want to say that I can't prove this, but my best guess is that the criticism and the frustration with what would become high fantasy genre conventions and the inability to understand what Tolkien was doing - an inability that contemporary audiences don't understand because we live in a world shaped by him - are part of what sparked this frantic series of revisions and reconsiderations. The other part, of course, is Catholicism.

Tolkien of course could never make up his mind about anything, that's the nature of the beast when dealing with his drafts, but the direction things take after LotR was published tends to emphasize two things. The first is realism - the Sun and Moon are astronomical bodies, the world has always been round, here are the exact details and explanations of these various people groups and places and how often they reproduced - and the second is that he wanted to be clear about his own personal beliefs. There were IRL people who worshiped the Valar as gods, and even while Tolkien was alive he was engaging with the fact that the audiences who read his books were assuming he 100% believed or endorsed things based on their presence in the text. So his retcons and reframings tend to emphasize both plausibility and his own Catholic worldview, in the attempt to make it clear to critics and fans both who he is and what he believes, and to control the perceptions of his stories.

At the same time, he's very deliberately writing things distinct from Catholicism, and in at least one letter to his priest he says that he knows some story elements go against Catholic doctrine but he finds them fictionally interesting - he's not doing a C.S. Lewis and insisting that it's all allegorical. And I tend to think that if the critical and popular responses to LotR had been both kinder and a little bit less unhinged in their nature (keep in mind there were people calling him up on the phone at like four AM because his number was public) we would have gotten a very different look at the latter part of his writing career.

tl;dr why is his math bad? because people were mean to him, and because hippies.

#absynthe's meta #tolkien #the nature of middle-earth #replies #bioluminescent-fungus

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