the-books-we-travel - Tumblr blog

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I know the Ring can shrink/expand for different fingers, but is there a limit on this? Could a troll put it on? Someone please help me with this. 

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Tolkien Fandom?

Out of curiosity, how many of us are there? Feel free to reblog if you read the books/watch the films :)

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You know when you’re a kid and you want to go to McDonalds, but there’s no way that your parents are going to take you there, but then the better restaurant that they want to go to is closed so you wind up at McDonalds?

That’s basically Gimli getting to go through Moria. 

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Me: *screams into the Void*

Melkor: Oi, keep it down over there.

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some bad guys

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Newly discovered Middle-Earth map, with annotations by J.R.R. Tolkien, acquired by Oxford

The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1955, but it took until 1969 before the book was ever illustrated. 

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Nobody’s going to deny that, as it’s conventionally depicted, Middle-Earth - the setting of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - is awfully monochrome. In art, basically everybody is drawn as white, and all major depictions in film have used white actors.

When this state of affairs is questioned, the defences typically revolve around “accuracy”, which can mean one of two things: fidelity to the source material, and the internal consistency of the setting. Being concerned primarily with languages and mythology, Tolkien left few clear descriptions of what the peoples of Middle-Earth actually look like, so in this case, arguments in favour of the status quo more often rest on setting consistency.

Of course, we need hold ourselves neither to fidelity nor to consistency - the author’s dead, and we can do what we want. However, what if I told you that there’s a reasonable argument to be made from that very standpoint of setting consistency that Aragorn - the one character you’d most expect to be depicted as a white dude - really ought to be portrayed as Middle Eastern and/or North African?

First, consider the framing device of Tolkien’s work. The central conceit of The Lord of the Rings - one retroactively extended to The Hobbit, and thereafter to later works - is that Tolkien himself is not the story’s author, but a mere translator of writings left behind by Bilbo, Frodo and other major characters. Similarly, Middle-Earth itself is positioned not as a fictional realm, but as the actual prehistory of our own world. As such, the languages and mythologies that Tolkien created were intended not merely to resemble their modern counterparts, but to stand as plausible ancestors for them.

Now, Aragorn is the king of a tribe or nation of people called the Dúnedain. Let’s take a closer look at them in the context of that prehistoric connection.

If the Dúnedain were meant to be the forebears of Western Europeans, we’d expect their language, Adûnaic, to exhibit signs of Germanic (or possibly Italic) derivation - but that’s not what we actually see. Instead, both the phonology and the general word-structure of Adûnaic seem to be of primarily Semitic derivation, i.e., the predominant language family throughout the Middle East and much of North Africa. Indeed, while relatively little Adûnaic vocabulary is present in Tolkien’s extant writings, some of the words we do know seem to be borrowed directly from classical Hebrew - a curious choice if the “men of the West” were intended to represent the ancestors of the Germanic peoples.

Additionally, the Dúnedain are descended from the survivors of the lost island of Númenor, which Tolkien had intended as an explicit analogue of Atlantis. Alone, this doesn’t give us much to go on - unless one happens to know that, in the legendarium from which Tolkien drew his inspirations, the Kingdoms of Egypt were alleged to be remnant colonies of Atlantis. This connection is explicitly reflected in the strong Egyptian influence upon Tolkien’s descriptions of Númenorean funereal customs. We thus have both linguistic and cultural/mythological ties linking the survivors of Númenor to North Africa.

Now, I’m not going to claim that Tolkien actually envisioned the Dúnedain as North African; he was almost certainly picturing white folks. However, when modern fans argue that Aragorn and his kin must be depicted as white as a matter of setting consistency, rather than one of mere authorial preference, strong arguments can be made that this need not be the case; i.e., that depicting the Dúnedain in a manner that would be racialised as Middle Eastern and/or North African by modern standards is, in fact, entirely consistent with the source material, ethnolinguistically speaking. Furthermore, whether they agreed with these arguments or not, any serious Tolkien scholar would at least be aware of them.

In other words, if some dude claims that obviously everyone in Tolkien is white and acts like the very notion of depicting them otherwise is some outlandish novelty, you’ve got yourself a fake geek boy.

(As an aside, if we turn our consideration to the Easterlings, the human allies of Sauron who have traditionally been depicted in art as Middle Eastern on no stronger evidence than the fact that they’re baddies from the East, a similar process of analysis suggests that they’d more reasonably be racialised as Slavic in modern terms. Taken together with the preceding discussion, an argument can be made that not only is the conventional racialisation of Tolkien’s human nations in contemporary art unsupported by the source material, we may well have it precisely backwards!)

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The Hobbit (2012-2014): Gandalf the Grey

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hahaha

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shout out to Karl Urban as Eomer for giving one of the most heart wrenching cries ever produced in cinematic history where you can essentially feel the anguish and shock that he is going through to find that his sister was on the battlefield, and is now injured, presumably dead. words cannot describe his pain.

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A small sketch of Manwe. Pay no attention to that little cloud. The author has drunk too much hot tea…

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The Silmarillion, Valar: Manwë, Varda, Yavanna , Aulë, Nienna, Vairë, Mandos, Nessa, Melkor

фестиваль Мишки Allez hop!

14 feb 2016

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Reconciling Flat Middle-earth

world building meme + 1 climate/earth history

Arda being flat bothers me. Really, really bothers me. I’ve got no problem with most of the ‘it’s just magic’ things in Tolkien. I can totally accept that a wizard did something reality-bending once, and happily go on. Messing with the consistent functioning of natural laws? Nope. Once is fine, a continuing logic bomb of a situation is not.

Because why do Middle-earth’s physics appear identical to ours if their world is flat? How likely is that? Not to mention the practical problems of a Flat World give me a giant headache. First, if there is no sun there is no liquid water here. None. Or seasons, or tides, or weather, or magnetic poles, or geologic activity, or any number of things that rely on having a sun, moon or round planet. You don’t even have gravity! Flat Arda is a sheet of ice in a void. And I believe the Valar are intelligent enough to design a system they don’t have to constantly pour power into maintaining, one that drives and regulates itself through natural processes.

And the logic gets a thousand times twistier when you try to explain plants and animals existing in a sunless world. Because we’re back to the sun problem - it powers nearly every living thing on this planet, and without it we’re down to some very strange bacteria living in extreme environments. Starlight is not sufficient for photosynthesis. With no source of light energy we have no plants, without plants there are no animals, and our poor elves are starving to death in Cuivienen.

And no, don’t you ‘Sleep of Yavanna’ me! Without the lamps, what’s keeping the water from freezing solid and killing all the plants? Elves have to eat, and even if the Valar kept everything alive by a ridiculous expenditure of power, the elves are still going to starve. It’ll just take longer. Theoretically, some of the plants would be ‘frozen’ with ripened food, but any food harvested wouldn’t regrow, so that food source would run out. Did the sleep of Yavanna include animals? If not, what were the animals eating? If so, the elves would last a little longer eating animal popsicles, but would still starve before Orome could show up.

And if the logic knots can’t sway you, the text itself should really give you flat world doubts. How do we explain why the Quenya and Sindarin terms for the sun and moon are nearly identical, if they don’t come from a common ancient root? Where do meteorites like the one Eol used to forge Anglachel come from if there’s no outer space?. And Melkor hides in ‘the outer darkness’, in some versions called the ‘Walls of Night’, after Tulkas descends and that sounds an awful lot like space to me too. Varda made the stars – so why would she not make Middle-earth a sun?

Later in his life Tolkien came to agree with me that Flat World is dumb, and wrote a Round World version (History of Middle-earth vol X, Morgoth’s Ring). He explained the discrepancies between the two cosmologies with the fact that the tales of Middle-earth are filtered through human eyes. The High Elves were taught by the Valar themselves and knew perfectly well that the earth was round. The flat world story was an Edain myth passed down to us through the Númenoreans. Versions with a flat world “are Númenorean, blending Elven-lore with human myth and imagination,” but the loremasters of Númenor would know that “the making of the stars was not so, nor of the sun and moon. For the sun and stars were older than Arda.” But this new round world mythology did not get published because it wasn’t as well integrated with the Silmarillion’s plot. So one of my side projects is stitching the two together into a coherent whole, and me being me I add a dash of science. Prepare for half-assed natural science.

When the Ainur shaped Arda according to their visions of Eru’s plan, Varda created a sun and other stars before they created the new, round planet. Melkor tried to destroy the proto-Arda by hitting it with another planet-sized object about the same size; he was unsuccessful. Arda just became larger and absorbed most of the other planet, while a small portion of debris coalesced and became the moon. I am cool with this process taking mere thousands of years as long as it happens in the right order.

However the light of this unhallowed sun was “weaker” and had no effect on Melkor’s creatures. The holier light of the lamps solved this problem; Melkor destroyed them and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Then the Valar withdrew to Aman and made the Two Trees. In Valinor, the Valar maintained a thick, impenetrable, permanent dome of clouds as well as the high mountain fence to keep unhallowed light and the spies of Melkor out. 

Arda gradually recovered from this ecological disaster and the new climate and fauna of Middle-earth resembled the Pleistocene. Middle-earth was still largely in darkness, due to thick clouds and residual gloom of Morgoth dimming the sun and stars. At the exact time of the Eldar’s awakening, in the early twilight before dawn, the clouds were miraculously blown aside, allowing the Elves to gaze up at the stars in wonder. The Quendi “were ever moved most in heart by the Stars, and the hours of twilight in clear weather, at ‘morrow-dim’ and at ‘even-dim’, were the times of their greatest joy. For in those hours in the spring of the year they had first awakened to life in Arda.” (“Cuivienyarna”, Appendix to Quendi and Eldar, The War of the Jewels: 423).

Morgoth’s attacks, the promise of a great holy light, and a desire for a better life led the elves to journey to Valinor. After Morgoth destroyed the Two Trees, he also caused huge volcanic activity to darken the sky when he returned to Middle-earth; this ash was infused with his power and would not have fallen naturally. The Two Trees’ last fruits were carried up to the sun and moon to hallow them to be untouchable by Morgoth and cause his creatures pain, as well as break the ash cloud’s spell. The planet entered a warming period with a climate analogous to the Holocene; Men awoke during this time at sunrise. Numenor’s fall in the Second Age simply removed Aman from the real world’s dimension in an already round world.

Tldr; The world has always been round, stop messing up the biosphere Melkor.

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Thranduil & his wife by  雪鱼 (http://bcy.net/illust/detail/14922/531475)

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Postcards from Middle-earth

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Tolkien Dark Lord Chart (Revised)

A little personal guide I use for the various incarnations of Dark Lords when I’m illustrating the Silmarillion Project.  While Sauron and Morgoth are the only *official* Dark Lords, I included the Witch-King of Angmar, because 1000+ years of being the chief antagonist in Middle-Earth deserves an honorable mention.

Left to Right:

Morgoth in the First Age- essentially a rogue god, I wanted him to come off as an imposing demon, indestructible and primal.

Sauron (as Gorthaur the Cruel)- Morgoth’s number two, ruling over an island fortress of werewolves. He needs to look like the sort of guy who can turn into a bat.

Sauron (as Annatar, Giver of Gifts)- this is the “fair” form he took to give out his Rings of Power. I have him in a more nordic style, as to better mingle with the Elves, Men and Dwarves of the West. He’s also the only one here of normal Elf/Man stature, as his goal wasn’t to intimidate.

Sauron after the Fall of Numenor- at this point he ruled through “terror and might,” so his stature is greatly emphasized. Given that he spent much of his time dominating eastern and unknown realms, I went with more exotic stylings, bordering on Frazetta.

The Necromancer of Dol Guldur- a dark sorcerer, hiding in the shadows until he could regain his strength and openly declare himself as Sauron once more. I decided to make him almost the visual foil of Gandalf, who was also wandering the wilderness at this time.

The Witch-King of Angmar - while also a sorcerer like Sauron, the Witch-King is much more hands-on, and is a seasoned military commander. He’s also a Numenorean king, so I put him in traditional Numenorean battle armor.

Sauron during the War of the Ring- although Sauron did indeed have a corporeal form during Lord of the Rings (don’t believe the movies), I went with something more visually abstract, as only Pippin really ever sees him (through the Palantir) and was too shocked to describe what he saw.

Anyway, I hope you like them!