Aldandil
-
Posts
410 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Aldandil
-
-
All I can say is
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
The LotR movies had some serious problems -- not being familiar with the LotR myself, I didn't notice them, but more Third-Age-focused fans have pointed them out to me. I do NOT want to see the distant, mythological setting of the Silmarillion portrayed on the silver screen. Leave the beautiful book's visual images where they belong -- in our heads, and in paintings!
It may be fun to speculate how one would do it, but I don't want to see it actually made.
-
Finrod Felagund, absolutely is my favorite character in Arda. Noble, generous, wise, kind, Friend of Men, artist and musician and linguist, and he's telepathic. What's not to love?
-
That is really sad, Red. You should try biking to a library every weekend, or going to your school library for an hour every day, and read it that way.
Hello Felagund,
This may sound like a strange question, but did you used to be a member of a certain Tolkien mailing list? I'm pretty certain there was a former member in the archives with the names "Felagund" and "Jon".
-
I didn't know there was an introduction thread, I already started posting over in TLA discussions.
Hello people. I am a Middle-Earth fan and (supposedly) Tolkien scholar. I've been looking at your project a bit and it looks like it will be very awesome. What you have so far looks excellent. Maybe I'd like to help a bit.
-
There is another example of what Morgoth did to captured Elf strongholds: in the sack of Nargothrond, the Orcs rounded up all of the women and children and herded them away as slaves.
Regarding surrendering: It is said specifically, although I'm not sure where, that Orcs almost never surrendered and NEVER to Elves. Basically, Morgoth had convicend them that Elves were even more sadistic and cruel than them, and only took prisoners "for sport" or to eat them. Which is of course what the Orcs did to all their prisoners, those that they didn't enslave. I doubt very much Orcs had much concept of mercy at all, and probably it would not even occur to them that somebody would spare them if they surrendered.
Regarding enslavement: I agree very much that looking at what happened to Gwindor and Thrain, Elves and Dwarves *could* be enslaved, broken, etc. But that they rarely ever served *willingly* the Dark Lords. Yet there is mention of Dwarves in the East who served Sauron, in "Dwarves and Men" in the book Peoples of Middle-Earth.
-
I haven't looked at it, but the Druedain art is quite good.
-
I don't think Orcs were stupid. I've never had the impression they had any less intelligence than Elves and Men and Dwarves.
Tolkien did write that Orcs are short-lived, even more so than Men, and that they are mortal and dying, are held "in prison" in Mandos. You can take these statements with a grain of salt, though -- they came from the Myths Transformed texts, which are kind of funky and not terribly reliable.
I would certainly not say that the Edain of the First Age were "biologically" any different from other humans. It was only when the Valar created Numenor that they gave the Edain longer life-spans -- and incidentally, in the same stroke they apparently made them take about 50 years to reach adulthood, much like Elves.
I agree that the genealogies of the Edain don't necessarily show every birth -- some might have died in infancy, others may have been left off of the lists because they were obscure, or female, or whatever. The only mention of a child death is Lalaith, daughter of Hurin. There were probably many more. I have read that the populations of the Second and Third Ages were repeatedly decimated by diseases and wars -- even in industrialised societies, if you look at population growth charts, the two World Wars are *dips* in the population. And these people were certainly not industrial, I doubt they had the population growth capacity that we do today with all of our medical technology.
The almost complete lack of female descendants of Finwe is pretty hard to believe, though.
-
Hello TLA Community!
I'm a new member here at the forum. I'm posting to tell you there is an error in the concept-art for the Dwarves. There's a picture of a beardless Dwarf-woman! But Dwarf-women have beards just as much as the males do, in fact Dwarves already have beards when they are born. War of the Jewels p. 205:
"For the Naugrim have beards from the beginning of their lives, male and female alike; nor indeed can their womenkind be discerned by those of other race, be it in feature or in gait or in voice..."
Which might even imply that they lacked breasts! Or rather, like most mammals except for humans, that the breasts only showed when they had nursing children. Visible breasts seems like it would be a "feature" that could be used to tell them apart, unless they were just very flat-chested.
-
Hi, I'm new to the forums here, and I thought this might be a good thread to introduce myeslf on.
I am of the purist school of thought. Although it may be possible to fill in the gaps, so to speak, where Tolkien left things out, I think it should be done very VERY carefully. Above all I think that Arda should not be treated as a "fantasy" universe, because that invites additions that are based on D&D or somesuch -- spellcasting, 12 new breeds of dragons, magical items, dungeons filled with gold coins, manticores, and all sorts of silly stuff. I think somebody would have to be very careful, and approach Arda as more akin to Nordic and Celtic mythology than today's fantasy, in order to have any chance to introduce something that is not completely foreign to the spirit of Arda. If you let the fantasy point of view seep into your conciousness, your vision of Arda may start to look very inauthentic.
As to magic, I think it was rare and difficult in Arda to use magic, and it did not consist of spells or magic staff-waving or any of that rot. Gandalf was a Maia and he had a Ring of Power, his abilities do not reflect on those of normal incarnate beings. I suspect his "magic" staff was a prop, and certainly not the source of his powers. The "magic" of the Elves and Dwarves was not anything like the magic of fantasy genres today. It was based on, and dependent on, the arts and crafts, and extended directly from that. Glowing blue swords, Noldor-lamps, songs of power, Silmarils, isildin, magic passwords on doors, moon-runes, even Felagund's illusions, all these are based directly on art and crafting, that is subcreation, in which Elves and Dwarves excelled far beyond mortal abilities. Galadriel's divination was connected to the Elvish proclivity for prophetic foresight, which even mortals posess. But mortals are explicity (in Letters) said to be unable to use the kinds of Arts and Crafts based "magic" that Elves and Dwarves used. Beorn's abilities were pretty much the limit of mortal "magic" and I think his shapeshifting was not magic but something he was born able to do -- for one thing, his kids inherited it, and for another, changing the body of an incarnate being would harm its spirit if the spirit wasn't also "matched" to the new form. This is the reason Tolkien rejected re-birth in new bodies as the mode of Elvish reincarnation.
Unless you consider the "The Faithful Stone" story to be true and not hearsay... that would be some impressive mortal magic. But again, it is based on Crafting, not on spellslinging. And all the "magic items" that I listed are rare things! Fireball-slinging adamantine staves of Doom are right out!
I don't think it was magic that allowed Glorfindel and Echthelion to kill Balrogs. They were just incredible warriors. Balrogs apparently stay "dead" once slain, so I think that like Morgoth and Sauron, they had become "stuck" in their bodies, more-or-less incarnated, and unable to reform once those bodies were destroyed. When demons become incarnated they are vulnerable to physical harm -- even Morgoth got beat up by Fingolfin.
~Ellen
Gil-galad - Son of Orodreth
in History of Middle Earth Series
Posted
That's quite an essay!
I must add one thing concerning the name Ereinion: It does in fact appear again, in the Shibboleth of Feanor written in 1968, which post-dates the name Rodnor. The endnote atatched to that sentence states that Christopher Tolkien chose the name Ereinion from that passage, because it was the last name he gave the guy.