Tag: tolkien

Sometimes I wax sentimental about the Tolkien fandom past …

dawnfelagund:

I worry that I sometimes come off as idealizing the past in the Tolkien fanworks community. And there are some things that I worry about, not so much in wanting to go back but wanting to make sure that we don’t lose the good parts that are historically part of our community.

But today, I have been working on a fandom history paper and I found (via an academic source no less!) a 2004 thread that reminds me of everything I don’t miss. (I first began lurking in the Tolkien fanfic community in 2004, and reading this, I marvel that I had the courage to not only delurk but post a story and start a fanfic archive of my own.) I spent about an hour reading through it and am still only about halfway through. I stopped because it was honestly giving me a headache.

For those who weren’t around the fanfic community during the LotR film trilogy and immediately after, this thread will give you a taste of what you missed. Things I won’t miss:

  • The kinds of people who will argue that an award should be rescinded because they perceive the author has made a canon error.
  • The kinds of people who tidily define quality Tolkien fanworks by how closely they stick to canon or use other expert references in conjunction with that canon.
  • The kinds of people who think that there is an objective way to measure quality of fiction, fan fiction or otherwise, and it is a good idea to exclude people and stories on the basis of those dubious criteria.
  • The words “purple prose.”
  • People who think the aforementioned purple prose is a sign of sophisticated writing.
  • Threads stretching over hundreds or thousands of replies that never once discuss canon/characterization choices in terms of their artistic impact or merit. (Everything is canon canon canon! Which is an absolute, unshakeable, nondebatable, black-and-white, right-or-wrong entity.)
  • People who dismiss a story the moment it uses the words man or woman rather than terms like elleth or hobbit-lass. And those who dismiss entire sites for containing such stories.
  • A fandom culture that will gleefully participate on a community called fanfic_hate while also complaining that everyone is so meeeeean and point fingers at others for destroying the fandom.
  • The sorts of people who admit that they lie awake and “pray” for the rejection or failure of another author’s work.
  • People who compare a fandom award they don’t like to Nazism. (And then, when merely asked to think about the appropriateness of that comparison, flail their hands around and invoke George Orwell.)
  • People who brag about how hardcore their favorite archive is about deleting stories that don’t fit the “guidelines.” And mean it as a compliment.

Some of the issues under discussion on that thread were very legit, the hurt and anger that people felt was very real, and this thread is probably the best proof I’ve found of the deep-seated distrust and animosity that existed between members of different archives.

And certainly the Tolkien fanworks community today isn’t perfect and isn’t pure nicey-nice … but it is a relief not to have to engage in these kinds of canatic arguments anymore. (Not saying they don’t exist … but these attitudes were mainstream in the early/mid-2000s; it was hard to write fan fiction without routinely encountering them, e.g., a well-meaning friend who advised me to label a story as AU because my Elves slept with their eyes closed, and I could avoid a lot of criticism and rejection of the story on those grounds.) I like feeling that I’m making art, not little replicas of Tolkien’s books; that fan fiction is not a paint-by-numbers kit but a deeply thoughtful, critical genre in which the complexity of Tolkien’s canon is honored, not distilled down to a set of inviolable rules.

And because it’s my nature to find goodness and hope in the midst of almost anything, my research today showed that the Tolkien archives established beginning in 2004–the same time as this thread was ongoing, in fact–were actively inclusive, resisting the idea that a Tolkien archive had to police correct use of the canon and impose penalties on those who broke their laws.

gaaladrieel:

The Quest of Erebor in Unfinished Tales, and A Brief History of the Hobbit are such gems. 

Gandalf just wants to save the world and comes up with even more plans as to how to do it as he runs into Thorin in Bree. And so he plans this quest and he gets angry at dwarves and calls poor little Bilbo a middle-aged bachelor that’s getting flabby and fat and tells Thorin he will fail and he won’t help him at all if he doesn’t bring this little hobbit of his, and Thorin tells Gandalf that fine, I’ll bring this damn hobbit of yours but that Gandalf will have to come along because “if you insist on burdening me with him, you must come too and look after your darling.” 
And when Gandalf tells Fili about Bilbo, and that his name is Bilbo Baggins, Fili is just like “What a name!” and laughs. 
And when they’re in Hobbiton, at Bilbo’s, Thorin tells Gandalf that Bilbo is “soft as the mud of his Shire, and silly” after Bilbo has gone to bed.

Why is everyone so mean!

And then there’s the fact that no Durin was supposed to die in the beginning. There was a battle, but not outside Erebor and no dwarves took any part in it, only Bilbo joining the elves and men in battle as he leaves the dwarves to go home. And that makes me both happy and angry. But then, then only Thorin dies, then Fili and Kili as well. argh.  

“In the original story neither Fili nor Kili died fighting alongside their great-uncle but survived to the end of the tale. The idea that the two most likeable of all Bilbo’s companions should also die in the battle – one of the saddest moments in the whole story, even though it occurs offstage while our narrator is hors de combat. [….] Thorin had still been their great-uncle when the First Typescript reached Chapter X, where at some point after the page was typed ‘sons of my father’s daughter’s son’ was changed to ‘sons of my father’s daughter’. The phrase ‘their mother’s elder brother’ perhaps suggested the presence of another brother as well, as would indeed eventually be the case, although the unfortunate Frerin was not invented until late in Tolkien’s work on The Lord of the Rings.”

And I can’t forget this, I love how Tolkien has just used Bilbo and Gandalf’s initials; 
“’Where are the eagles?’ he said to Gandalf that evening as he lay rolled in many warm blankets. ‘They are gone’ said G. […] ‘I should have liked to see them again,’ said B. sleepily.” 

And then there’s the very first manuscript of The Hobbit where Thorin is called Gandalf, Gandalf is called Bladorthin, Smaug is Pryftan, Beorn is Medwed, Lonely Mountain is Black Mountain, Mirkwood is Wild Wood, and Thror was supposed to be called Fimbulfambi because the Dwarf names are Old Norse and comes from Dvergatal in the Elder Edda (apart from Balin) and Fimbulfambi is then of course also Old Norse, just from Hávamál. And the author has added “Hávamál strophe 103: Fimbulfambi heitir, saer fatt kann segja: ‘a fimbul-fambi he is called, who can say little’ – i.e., a mighty fool or great idiot.” 

I can’t for the life of me take that name seriously, or the fact that Bilbo calls Beorn a furrier when Gandalf tells them about him. (And a fur-trader as the author says it is, is definitely not what I first thought of.) 

This turned into quite the post, but I’ve been re-reading The Quest of Erebor today, and looked through my History of the Hobbit again, and it’s been great, and it made me laugh a bit. 

Tolkien estate, Warner Bros. settle ‘Hobbit’ lawsuit

reuters-finance-yahoopartner:

By Jonathan Stempel

July 3 (Reuters) – The estate of J.R.R. Tolkien has settled an $80 million lawsuit against Warner Bros. over the licensing of online games, slot machines and other gambling-related merchandise based on the author’s books “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

The settlement by the Tolkien estate and book publisher HarperCollins with the Time Warner Inc unit, New Line Cinema and Saul Zaentz Co, which hold various marketing rights, was disclosed in a court filing on Friday in Los Angeles.

It also resolves counterclaims by Warner Bros. and Zaentz. Terms were not disclosed.

“The parties are pleased that they have amicably resolved this matter and look forward to working together in the future,” Warner Bros. spokesman Paul McGuire said in a statement on Monday.

Bonnie Eskenazi, a lawyer for Tolkien’s estate and HarperCollins, which is a unit of News Corp, provided a nearly identical statement.

Tolkien’s estate had accused the defendants of violating a 1969 agreement allowing the sale “tangible” merchandise, by associating the books with the “morally-questionable (and decidedly non-literary) world of online and casino gambling.”

It said this “outraged Tolkien’s devoted fan base” and irreparably harmed the legacy of the English author, who died in 1973 at the age of 81.

The copyright lawsuit was filed in November 2012.

Total worldwide grosses exceeded $2.9 billion for each of the big-screen trilogies for “The Lord of the Rings,” released from 2001 to 2003, and “The Hobbit,” released from 2012 to 2014, according to Box Office Mojo.

The case is Fourth Age Ltd et al v Warner Bros. Digital Distribution et al, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, No. 12-09912. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Grant McCool)

vardasvapors:

God the Hobbit is such a great and underrated book in so many ways, but I especially love its carpet-pulling-for-kids. Like really, if someone wanted to make an actually palatable adaption of it there’s no dearth of material for elaborating on and playing with it to make something fresh and unique, because it already is:

“Haha, wouldn’t it be fun to have a story where instead of everyone celebrating when the villain is defeated, the civilians sued the heroes for the zillion dollars in property damage they caused in the fight.”

“You mean like in the Hobbit?”

“What a twist it would be if, right after the main villain dies and the story is almost finished, Minor Villain #2 from 13 chapters ago that everyone had totally forgotten about suddenly turned up seeking revenge and killed three of the heroes.”

“You mean like in the Hobbit?”

“It would so neat to have a story about a knight slaying a dragon, but the whole thing is told from the pov of the supporting characters who messed around and caused the dragon attack in the first place, and the knight barely shows up at all.”

“You mean like in the Hobbit?”

I learned that he had never married. I thought that odd though I guessed why it was and the reason that I guessed was not that most of the Hobbits gave me – that he had early been left very well off and his own master. No, I guessed that he wanted to remain ‘unattached’ for some reason deep down which he did not understand himself – or would not acknowledge, for it alarmed him.

Gandalf talking to Pippin about Bilbo, Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth (via dheiress88)

But there are, I fear, no hobbits in The Silmarillion (or history of the Three Jewels), little fun or earthiness but mostly grief and disaster. Those critics who scoffed at The Lord [of the Rings] because ‘all the good boys came home safe and everyone was happy ever after’ (quite untrue) ought to be satisfied.

J.R.R. Tolkien, from a letter (n°227) to Mrs E.C. Ossen Drijver (1961), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (via

vanwatano

)

Silmarillion: there are no good boys and no one comes home

(via verymaedhros)