Originally Posted by Django
Hey, don't knock Rocky IV! lol! That was a true cinematic masterpiece!
In your grand tradition of meaningless smilie-based replies:
Originally Posted by Django
Well, I've read Beowulf and much of the Bible, and nowhere do I find any mention of elves or dwarves or hobbits or wizards or giant eagles or walking trees! lol!
I said it takes from them, and it does. I'm guessing you haven't read the books, though, and therefore wouldn't know. A small example would be the creation story in
The Silmarillion, which explains that Middle-Earth was created by music, a concept touched upon in the Book of Job, which asks "where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?," and three verses later extends this with "when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" This is exactly what happens in
The Silmarillion, as Iluvatar (the God figure in Tolkien's mythology) creates the Ainur; angels of sorts (they are the "sons of God"), who sing Middle-Earth into existence.
You'll find a similar creation account in C.S. Lewis'
The Chronicles of Narnia, as well, wherein Aslan sings as a means to create the titular world (you can find this near the end of
The Magician's Nephew,which was the sixth published, but would be the first in those awful chronologically-ordered sets).
And, as anyone who knows anything about Tolkien's life story would also know, it was his horrific experiences in WWI that inspired a great deal of the story. The hobbits are reflective of the orindary young men who were thrown into battle, and ultimately rose to the occasion. They are farmers and sometimes borderline children, tossed into a violent conflict, giving themselves over only because they believe they must to protect their home. And some of them, like Frodo, ultimately never recover.
A story is a mirror; you get out of it what you put in, to some degree. You went in expecting a "fairy tale," and you, looking at everything through that uninformed expectation, found just that.
Originally Posted by Django
What I'd like to know is why wasn't Tinkerbell the fairy in it too! Anyway, about root words... "Bilbo Baggins"? "Took"? "Frodo"? "Gandalf"? "Smeagol"? "Sauron"? etc., etc. What are the root words?
No, Tinkerbell isn't in it. No fairies are, to my recollection, which is partially the reason for my insistence that it's better classified as a mythology. Fairy tales do not contain entire invented languages, nor do they take twelve years to write. Tolkien was an
extremely learned man, and any attempt to dismiss his vast, epic work so off-handedly speaks far worse of the speaker than his target.
As for root words; a good example would be Mordor, which derives from the Old English word "morthor," meaning "murder." The word "hobbit," also, is said to have come from the Old English words "hol" and "byldan" -- meaning "hole" and "builder." As one word, it is "holbytla," Notice the "holl-bit" it begins with, and how very like "hobbit" it sounds.
Gollum comes from "Golem," a figure in Jewish lore, described as robot-like and sometimes lacking speech. Theoden is Old English for "lord of the people," and Sauron comes from Icelandic/Old Norse stems meaning "unclean" or "filth." Tolkien often named characters in meaningful ways, though sometimes he simply spat something out. Being a philologist, however, his more impulsive names were still generally rooted in some sort of applicable source. He is also said to have subjected his chosen names to a rigorous linguistic cross-examination, to ensure that they held up under real literary scrutiny. Being a professor, he was more than capable of this.
"Hardly a word in its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered. And the placing, size, style and contribution to the whole of all the features, incidents and chapters has been laboriously pondered."
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, 1950
Still waiting for so much as a single example of arbitrariness, by the way.
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