Middle-earth Journeys

My brain has been working this evening! I'll PM you.

Merry wrote:My brain has been working this evening! I'll PM you.

I'm thrilled we have a new Shippey book of his collected essays. That's a must have ! Another one to add to the 'must read' pile under my coffee table.

Just received my copy of Shippey's Roots and Branches yesterday along with that bargain copy of The Ring of Words. Am now hoping for a snowstorm and power outage so that I can get away from this computer and snuggle up by the fire (I can read by candlelight ) and do some good reading.

We expect a full report!

I just cracked open Shippet's Roots and Branches, and the Table of Contents alone whets the appetite!

Roots and Branches

Table Contents

The Roots: Tolkien and his Predecessors

Tolkien and the Beowulf-Poet
Tolkien and the Appeal of the Pagan: Edda and Kalevala
Tolkien and the West Midlands: The Roots of Romance
Tolkien and the Gawain-Poet
Grimm, Grundtvig, Tolkien:

• Nationalisms and the Invention of Mythologies

The Problem of the Rings: Tolkien and Wagner
Goths and Huns: The Rediscovery

• of Northern Cultures in the Nineteenth Century

Heartwood: Tolkien and Scholarship

Fighting the Long Defeat:

• Philology in Tolkien’s Life and Fiction

History of Words: Tolkien’s Ruling Passion
A Look at Exodus and Finn and Hengest
Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy
Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Now

The Trunk: The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion

Light-elves, Dark-elves, and Others: Tolkien’s Elvish Problem
Indexing and Poetry in The Lord of the Rings
Orcs, Wraiths, Wights: Tolkien’s Images of Evil
Heroes and Heroism:

• Tolkien’s Problems. Tolkien’s solutions

Noblesse Oblige: Images of Class in Tolkien
"A Fund of Wise Sayings": Proverbiality in Tolkien

Twigs and Branches: Minor Works by Tolkien

Tolkien and 'The Homecoming of Beorhtmoth'
The Versions of ‘The Hoard’
Allegory versus Bounce:

• (Half of) an Exchange on Smith of Wooten Major

Blunt Belligerence: Tolkien’s Mr. Bliss
Another Road to Middle-earth: Jackson’s Movie Trilogy

Even before reading these, I continue to think that the subject matter here annoints Shippey as the quintessential Tolkien scholar.

More after I have read them.

I agree: Shippey has both the big picture and the details.

Thanks for the contents, RR. I'm particularly looking forward to the one on images of evil and the one on heroes!

Thanks Riv! I've placed my order for Roots and Branches AND Ring of Words. Pretty soon, I'm going to need a bigger set of shelves for my Tolkien library.

Lindariel wrote:Pretty soon, I'm going to need a bigger set of shelves for my Tolkien library.

Te he he! I have just moved into my fourth shelf of Tolkien!

Oy! Riv, I'm double-stacked on my current 3-shelfer, and I don't even have all of HOME yet!

HOME takes up a LOT of room.

I went through my Tolkien stuff last month and actually got rid of volumes that weren't keepers. Most of those movie picture books went, along with a couple of poor biographies and a collection or two of superficial essays. But that was a hard thing to do!

I dipped into Roots and Branches and decided to start at the last chapter with the movies.

This is a fascinating analysis of why the movies are as they are. For me the most interesting and most compelling argument was for why Faramir (and Denethor to a lesser extent) had been changed so much from the original.

To summarise: Faramir is changed to be more obviously a son longing for love, from a father who will not acknowledge that he loves him until it is too late. This change is explained as appealling to perceived audience enjoyment of this sort of plot line in the USA.

Denethor is made much more unsympathetic and less wise than he is in the books so that he appears as a stereotypical (old-world) " chateau general", who lives comfortably while sending his men to useless and unneccesary deaths. This is again analysed as appealing to American taste by making Denethor stand for everything Americans dislike and distrust in the old-world.

I can't comment on whether those are the sort of plots that appeal to American audiences, I'm English! I can say that the "chateau general" image is very strong for British viewers who know anything about World War I and the trench warfare. It's chilling partly because it echos the attitudes of generals such as Haig and French so precisely.

This does seem to be a convincing, economic justification of plot changes that have been very contentious. Maybe they ARE so contentious because we subconsciously recognise them for what they are - not specifically to do with the books but to do with making money.

I'm finally reading Shippey's J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century - I bought it ages ago but have had a huge pile of Tolkien books to get through and it somehow worked it's way to near the bottom.

His discussion on the Council of Elrond and the linguistic styles of all the speakers there is masterly. I never appreciated before how much variety there is in the way each character talks and how much it says about their age, their culture and who they are. I've appreciated it in the main characters but it runs right through all the minor characters too. The thought Tolkien put into this and the way it keeps this long chapter interesting is miraculous really and Shippey is, of course, uniquely able to appreciate it and point it out to us.

I've never noticed before how Boromir's speech patterns are always at a level that fits his station, whereas Aragorn can talk 'up there' with him and also use common idioms and very plain speech. It says everything about the background of both of them.

And his point that Saruman's speech patterns are the most modern of all (despite his great age), full of equivocation, double speak and talking a lot but giving away nothing is really interesting. I'd caught the double-speak (of course) but Shippey's placing of it as 'modern' - very like current politicians but nothing like anyone else in Middle-earth - is really insightful.

Should have read this book months ago.....

The speech patterns are clever, aren't they!

I remember when I read Shippey's book, thinking that at some level I'd been aware of them when I first read LOTR, but I'd never seen them analysed so succinctly before.

Glad you finally got around to reading the book!