Lord of the Rings

Petition to have Clamavi de Profundis compose for Amazon's LOTR series.

Probably won't amount to anything, but it's a nice thought.

It would be awesome

That would be amazing!

Edited by Galadriel on Aug 19th 2019 at 11:08:18 AM

If anything they should at least get a cameo in some form.

The Song of Eärendil part 3.

Im gonna do a comic adaptation of the rise and fall of Angmar.

Seems like a pretty ambitious project.

Draw or write? or both?

Both. Ive only started though. I really like the Witch-King as a villain and i love the Angmar story. Im going to base it somewhat on the Rise of The Witch King RTS game by EA. Best game ever.

Yet another great original Dwarven song of Clamavi de Profundis, this one about Dwarves and their rivalry with dragons. Interestingly, despite being wholly original, you could say this song tells of one of Tolkien's lesser-known and most vague conflicts, the War of the Dwarves and Dragons in the Third Age (basically a prequel to the more famous incident of the whole Smaug business), which may be where the Dwarves lost four of their seven rings (as it is said they were lost to dragonfire), but also where the great-drakes got basically wiped out in Middle Earth with the exception of Smaug (as Gandalf says he's the last one).

Some lyrics would fit, such as: "Seven deadly dragons stand / Between our past and future peace / They drove us from our Sacred land" (the loss of the Grey Mountains is the most emblematic period of the war).

My favorite lyric though would be "We sail to pay the score / Dwarves detest the sea / We hate these dragons more!". Just hilarious and amazing.

Edited by Gaon on Sep 30th 2019 at 9:28:04 AM

Christopher Tolkien, the man behind the publication of so many of his father's posthumous works, passes away.

To quote my favorite final words of a work he published:

We owe a great deal to Christopher. Without him there would never have been a published version of The Silmarillion, and I have very much enjoyed his other works on his father's writings.

Edited by Redmess on Jan 16th 2020 at 9:34:56 PM

Fair journeys, Christopher.

He has gone to the Halls of Mandos.

Christopher Tolkien was the first and greatest LOTR fan. RIP. We owe him a lot. Most of the Legendarium had his involvement somewhere.

Clamavi de Profundis's recording of Bilbo's famous "I sit beside the fire and think" poem.

Over in the My Little Pony thread, we were talking about the negative impact of too much world building, and Tolkien keeps popping up as an example (because it probably is the biggest one), and opinions seem to be divided on whether or not Tolkien has too much world building.

Also, this blog post popped up about something called worldbuilder's disease. Do you guys think this could apply to Tolkien? And is it really such a bad thing?

Edited by Redmess on Feb 19th 2020 at 12:20:24 PM

Definitely. How many drafts did he do before he was finally ready to publish it? And even then he kept making up new stuff after the books came out.

I would say the setting has too much worldbuilding, but the stories themselves don't. The Hobbit and Lot R basically limit themselves to the relevant details, it's the 15 extra books of poems and lore that really bloat it all out, as opposed to, say, the Wheel of Time or Honor Harrington, where books will stop dead for chapters at a time to go over technical details or in universe legends.

Edited by Krory on Feb 19th 2020 at 4:46:59 AM

Yes. I mean, worldbuilder's disease is a big problem for aspiring authors because they need to get the book written and published, right? The worldbuilding is usually a secondary activity done in order to supplement the primary activity - writing a story.

I think for Tolkien, the worldbuilding as much of the primary objective as the stories. He was writing mostly for himself and a small group of friends after all, what we might call beta-readers today. Therefore, he could quite justafiably spend a lifetime worldbuilding in order to create literally four books that were published during his lifetime, which is not a good career goal for anyone trying to make a living as a writer (to be fair, Tolkien didn't). But that downside didn't matter as much to him.

However, Tolkien's worldbuilding disease shows strongly in how many amendments he made to his world and to the stories over the 5 years or so some of them were in development. The newly released Fall of Gondolin expounds on this topic somewhat, about how the version of that story Tolkien first wrote in a field hospital during World War 1 differed to the later versions he jotted down, and of course the parts of the world he never settled on, like his dissatisfaction with the Always Chaotic Evil orcs.

The big problem of worldbuilders disease that Tolkien fell into was that he never really finished it. The Legendarium was a work in progress throughout Tolkien's entire life, and a work in progress is what he left when he died. Hence how Christopher made it his career in essence to try to decipher and decode his father's work and reconstruct the stories and world his father had created into a more cogent final draft of sorts. In the end, Christopher did manage to get out the Silmarillion and the "main three stories" of the First Age into published forms (Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, the Fall of Gondolin). And by doing so, he largely accomplished his father's aim of publishing the entire story - Tolkien actually wanted the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings to be published at the same time since he considered them to be two parts of the same story, but eventually conceded to the publishers and accepted that only the Hobbit's sequel would be published this time.

But yeah. Tolkien had such a bad case of worldbuilder's disease, he died before finishing it. Now, he could mostly afford to do that, given that he had one hugely successful project he could devote all his time to (whereas it's rather rare these days to have authors who have one series or setting to their name only, and no-one is a second Tolkien) and he's really not an example for anyone to emulate these days.

I think Wheel of Time at least slips those bits in somewhat seamlessly - I remember reading On Basilisk Station and man the sudden stops to the story to explain how space marine power armour or spacecraft propulsion works were horrific! Meanwhile I've read the WOT series at least thrice the whole way through and my main gripe is inner monologues and characters being annoying.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Feb 19th 2020 at 12:49:37 PM

I mean I feel like worldbuilders disease is far more prevalent with A Song of Ice and Fire, then with Lord of the Rings. I feel like this is especially prominent with the Silmarillion compared to the supplementary The World of Ice & Fire and Fire & Blood, most specifically because Silmarillion was published after Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Edited by jjjj2 on Feb 19th 2020 at 8:03:30 AM

I think overall he did a pretty good job of it, though there are some more questionable choices. Opening with that prologue on Hobbit genealogy was a bit much, and I wonder how many people stopped reading right then and there...

I think you mean hobbit history; the genealogies are in the appendices. That said, I've definitely seen new readers be advised to skip the prologue and only come back to it after you've read the whole book, especially if you've already read The Hobbit. It's been a while now, but I'm pretty sure I didn't read the whole prologue myself until I was already done with the book proper.

I think Tolkien's love for world building is part of the reason his works are some of the greatest(if not the greatest) fantasy stories in history. Granted this is both a benefit and a detriment. However while he never did finish I think he left enough writings that it's possible to reconstruct the basic outline of what happened even if the details may not perfectly align.