674 upvotes, 31 direct replies (showing 25)
View submission: Lord of the Rings still amazes me
There's nothing like it. There may be books you enjoy more, sure, but there's never been any series as...weird...as The Lord of the Rings. It's the same weirdness that turns a lot of people off (compare The Lord of the Rings to any random book you might pick up at the airport or the grocery store) that causes people to fall in love with it.
Most fantasy authors are...authors. They are professional writers. They grew up on fantasy, they want to write fantasy, they work to get an agent who gives them advice, they get a book deal with an editor that gives them advice. They work to sell their book. They work to write something saleable. They care about what their agent thinks. What their publisher says. What fans like.
Tolkien was never that. He was never a professional author. He never really cared what anyone else, including his publisher, thought. He had a job as a teacher, writing was his side-hustle.
Except...not really! What Tolkien did was something very embarrassing for himself and any other proper Oxbridge don. He wrote a smash hit. He wrote a generational work. Everyone knew these guys didn't make any money and so they'd sometimes write in their spare time to make some money, and that was fine. **As long as they wrote mystery novels, or detective fiction**. Something cheap and quick with no pretension. You were *not supposed* to write a smash hit that invents a whole genre and attracts decades of literary analysis. That was very much not the done thing.
There's a great quote from John Cleese talking about how all the Pythons sort of supported each other? But not really? "We all want to see each other succeed, we really do. Just *not too much*! Don't embarrass the rest of us!" That's the sentiment.
A lot is made of Tolkien's statements that he only wrote these books so there would be a place where people spoke his languages. I don't think most modern readers understand that this was Tolkien's way of apologizing for his embarrassing success.
In reality, I think he wanted two things. He wanted to give his culture, English culture, something like the mythic bedrock he felt they were denied. He was in many ways trying to *reconstruct*, like a good linguist does, resynthesize a Myth for England. Imagining "what if 1066 never happened? What stories might the English be telling their children?"
That's why there's so much Beowulf in there! Basically all the Rohan stuff is just lifted wholesale from Beowulf, but he didn't stop there! There are tons of placenames in Middle-earth that are taken right out of the places Tolkien walked past on his way to work. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, he was an *expert* on where English placenames come from. It must have annoyed the hell out of him to be accused of writing escapism with no basis in reality when our actual reality is all over Middle-earth!
And, whether he intended to or not, I think the books are very much the process of Tolkien trying to come to grips with the apocalypse he survived called World War I.
It sucks because no one these days really knows what genre The Lord of the Rings belongs to, because it took so long to write. People put it in the Fantasy Genre but...I dunno, does it seem ANYTHING LIKE the other fantasy you read?
To me, the books have a lot more in common with stuff like Parade's End and Her Privates We. Goodbye To All That. The books the WWI generation wrote trying to understand what just happened. Trying to fathom evil, industrial evil.
There's a great bit in the books where Sam and Frodo are crawling through Mordor and there's a Nazgul on a whatever-it-is evil bird and it mirrors **very closely** the language used by a WWI vet talking about No Man's Land and the seeking airplanes and warning sirens. That stuff is all through the books.
Tolkien and his three best friends signed up for WWI because they thought it would be a great adventure. They were all of the same class of citizen as the four hobbits. English gentlemen. Are we meant to see the four Hobbits going through all the same shit Tolkien and his friends went through, and think this is just a **coincidence?**
He gives the hobbits the ending he couldn't give his friends. They all come home. But do they? Does Frodo ever get to go home? Isn't what happens to Frodo exactly what happened to thousands of survivors of WWI?
Folks don't see it this way, I think, because the books took so goddamned long to write. Ford Madox Ford didn't have to *invent a whole universe* to write his book!
It's exactly because The Lord of the Rings came from a completely different generation that folks in the 60s glommed onto it. It felt real to them in a way the other junk they were reading did not because it was written by someone who had lived through a real-world apocalypse and that reality infuses everything that happens in the book. Even the stuff in the Shire at the beginning, when he wrote that stuff he didn't know what the book was about. When they were halfway to Rivendell he wrote his publisher to say "Almost done!"
Then when he realizes what he's writing...he could have cut all that Shire stuff, or at least cut it down, but he couldn't. He couldn't give himself permission to do that, even though the book had changed a LOT since he wrote that stuff, because the Shire was his attempt to preserve, record, his own perception of the world, life, before World War I. The kind of England he dreamed of as a little kid in a British colony.
You can't tell the story of how war **destroys** people, whole ways of life, unless you first show what life was like before.
Anyway. We're never going to get another series like that, because we're never (hopefully, um...) going to see an author like that emerge from circumstances like that. It's sort of ridiculous to compare it to anything else in the genre. I don't say that as a good or bad thing, just a thing that is true.
Comment by Evolving_Dore at 03/03/2025 at 01:45 UTC
127 upvotes, 9 direct replies
Reading this, I just realized my response to the sentiment that "LOTR is hard to get into because of all the unnecessary details about hobbit culture at the start, just skip to when they meet Strider" or whatever.
Going through all the slow paced slice of life stuff, the party and the pleasantries and the tea and conversation and little jokes and descriptions of Frodo living in the Shire...if you skip if, you won't be hit so hard in the end when the four return to the Shire and find how it's all turned out. And you won't be hit so hard by Frodo's inability to readjust to "normal" life after he's seen "the truth".
Comment by TheNerdChaplain at 03/03/2025 at 01:47 UTC
55 upvotes, 4 direct replies
Love this comment because so much of it is true. However, let me push back a little bit about how we'll "never see another like it". Off the top of my head, I can think of two SFF authors whose books were *profoundly* shaped by their wartime experiences - Joe Haldeman and "The Forever War", and Robert Jordan and "The Wheel of Time". (And granted, neither of them were as good as Tolkien - who is? - but still they were quite good.)
I'm more familiar with WoT, and this is /r/Fantasy, so I'll discuss that. Please be aware I'll be discussing some overall plot points and themes of the book, and anything spoilery I'll try to tag. However, you should have at least finished The Eye of the World (or finished the first season of the show) before reading further.
Rand, Mat, and Perrin all parallel parts of Robert Jordan himself in different ways, but Rand most closely. They are both called up out of nowhere, told they must save the world from an existential threat, but only given tools of destruction that will drive them insane. What prices must be paid, what costs incurred, in order to achieve victory? And is it worth it?
Jordan wrestles with themes of duty through the three boys. Rand meets his duty head on - after all, "Duty is heavier than a mountain, death is lighter than a feather." Mat does his best to avoid duty - he's no bloody lord - but still ends up meeting it anyway, and Perrin initially meets his duty, but still does his best to avoid it after. He doesn't want to be (End of Shadow Rising on spoilers) >!Lord of the Two Rivers, he just wants to be with Faile and his forge.!<
Jordan also wrestles with violence. How and why do people and cultures engage in violence, and what effect does it have on the perpetrators as well as the victims? This is shown in the very first book, when Perrin talks with Ila and Raen, the Tinkers. They talk about how an axe may cut down a tree, but in the process, the axe itself is chipped and dulled. Perrin's struggle between the axe and hammer is a running theme for his struggle with violence throughout the series. And while the Borderlanders, Aiel, Whitecloaks, and Seanchan all engage in violence, they all do it for different reasons.
Jordan also includes some scenes that could almost be straight out of Vietnam. While he largely avoided detailed descriptions of blood, gore, and violence, the end of Lord of Chaos is a unique exception. It's hard not to imagine him having flashbacks to napalm, bombs, and airstrikes writing that scene. Similarly, this epigraph at the end of Crossroads of Twilight hearkens back to Hueys and M-16s; it's practically Apocalypse Now[1] or (CW: blood and gore) We Were Soldiers[2] in verse form:
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE03Lqm3nbI
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXRf1Fuwvek
We rode on the winds of the rising storm,
We ran to the sounds of the thunder.
We danced among the lightning bolts,
and tore the world asunder.
Jordan also wrestled with the larger political context of mid-century America. Certainly, the Dark One is analogous to Soviet Communism, but not every antagonist in WoT is a Darkfriend. Some are just foolish, selfish, or greedy. Most tellingly, I think the story of Shadar Logoth is informative. You may recall that it used to be known as Aridhol during the Trolloc Wars. Yet its people became so suspicious of each other being Darkfriend spies that the city turned on itself, *Mashadar* was born, and the city became a grave. This was Jordan's way of discussing McCarthyism and the Red Scare - it was evil, but it was an evil diametrically opposed to the Dark One's evil. This is why the Shadowspawn can't enter the city, and it's also why at the end of Winter's Heart, >!Rand is able to use the evil of Shadar Logoth to cleans the Dark One's taint from *saidin*.!<
I'd add one more point that most closely ties Rand to Robert Jordan's wartime identity. This is a story that Jordan told himself at a con in 2001, about the kind of person he became in Vietnam. This is thematically very spoilery for the end of the series, so unless you've finished all the way to the end of A Memory of Light, don't click this spoiler.
> !I had two nicknames in 'Nam. First up was Ganesha, after the Hindu god called the Remover of Obstacles. He's the one with the elephant head. That one stuck with me, but I gained another that I didn't like so much. The Iceman. One day, we had what the Aussies called a bit of a brass-up. Just our ship alone, but we caught an NVA battalion crossing a river, and wonder of wonders, we got permission to fire before they finished. The gunner had a round explode in the chamber, jamming his 60, and the fool had left his barrel bag, with spares, back in the revetment. So while he was frantically rummaging under my seat for my barrel bag, it was over to me, young and crazy, standing on the skid, singing something by the Stones at the of my lungs with the mike keyed so the others could listen in, and Lord, Lord, I rode that 60. 3000 rounds, an empty ammo box, and a smoking barrel that I had burned out because I didn't want to take the time to change. We got ordered out right after I went dry, so the artillery could open up, and of course, the arty took credit for every body recovered, but we could count how many bodies were floating in the river when we pulled out. The next day in the orderly room an officer with a literary bent announced my entrance with "Behold, the Iceman cometh." For those of you unfamiliar with Eugene O'Neil, the Iceman was Death. I hated that name, but I couldn't shake it. And, to tell you the truth, by that time maybe it fit. I have, or used to have, a photo of a young man sitting on a log eating C-rations with a pair of chopsticks. There are three dead NVA laid out in a line just beside him. He didn't kill them. He didn't choose to sit there because of the bodies. It was just the most convenient place to sit. The bodies don't bother him. He doesn't care. They're just part of the landscape. The young man is glancing at the camera, and you know in one look that you aren't going to take this guy home to meet your parents. Back in the world, you wouldn't want him in your neighborhood, because he is cold, cold, cold. I strangled that SOB, drove a stake through his heart, and buried him face down under a crossroad outside Saigon before coming home, because I knew that guy wasn't made to survive in a civilian environment. I think he's gone. All of him. I hope so. I much prefer being remembered as Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles.!<
Comment by zaminDDH at 03/03/2025 at 00:42 UTC
130 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Anyway. We're never going to get another series like that, because we're never (hopefully, um...) going to see an author like that emerge from circumstances like that. It's sort of ridiculous to compare it to anything else in the genre. I don't say that as a good or bad thing, just a thing that is true.
That, and because of that quote from GNU Sir Terry:
J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.
Basically everything is a) derivative of Tolkien, b) deliberately *anti*-derivative of Tolkien, or c) flavored in some way by Tolkien. And this is because Tolkien took so much from ur-fantasy like Beowulf and stuff like that, and between The Hobbit, LOTR, and The Silmarillion, he covered *so* much ground that it's hard to not stand on his giant shoulders.
Comment by NorthStarZero at 03/03/2025 at 12:25 UTC
19 upvotes, 3 direct replies
As an aside:
I recently had reason to write something in Tenguar, Tolkien's system of writing for Elvish. The writing on the Ring, for example, is in Tenguar.
So I dove into some references.
Broadly, Tenguar characters are formed of loops and stems. Loops can go left or right, there can be one or two. Stems have different lengths.
If you arrange Tenguar consonants in a grid, where one axis is the position of the tongue in the mouth and the other axis is how the consonant is vocalized, the resulting rows and columns are logically consistent with how the characters are written.
So for example, if it is voiced, it gets two loops; unvoiced gets one. Stops have a descending stem, fricatives get an ascending one.
The exact pattern isn't important - the key concept here is that *the shape of the characters encodes how to say them*.
It's a phonetic writing system, similar to the modern phonetic language used in dictionaries to convey pronunciation, but instead of just mapping characters to sounds the way the modern language does, it *tells you* how to pronounce the sounds in the construction of the character.
And this is offhandly mentioned (if not outright buried) in the Appendicies. "Oh by the way, the characters you see in a couple of illustrations and on the book cover is a radical new way to write English phonemes"....
The man was incredible!
Comment by Drake19842 at 03/03/2025 at 13:53 UTC
18 upvotes, 2 direct replies
He gives the hobbits the ending he couldn't give his friends. They all come home. But do they? Does Frodo ever get to go home? Isn't what happens to Frodo exactly what happened to thousands of survivors of WWI?
So. Much. This.
I absolutely 100% agree that LoTR - and especially *Two Towers* - should be right up there in the pantheon of WWI literature.
Because god, yes, hiding from the Nazgul...
But also Sam and Frodo and the dead marshes. Frodo staring down into the mire and seeing the dead bodies staring back up at him as Smeagol warns him not to even *look* at them or he won't make it is incredible. The whole of Shelob's lair - note it's not just a pass up in a mountain - it's a network of hideous *tunnels* - and Sam and Frodo are left terrified and hunted, crawling through the dark and filth with a hideous, monstrous, *poison* chasing them down and for a while as they try their best to flee they get trapped, hemmed in by thick, tangled, malicious nest of *wire* - or cobwebs, then - and they have to fight themselves free, cutting one strand at a time, wire, by wire, by wire with that hideous scuttling death getting closer and closer as Sam struggles to hack through with his knife.
But WWI is seared through the whole of the work, even in more subtle ways. Saruman's corruption, thinking he can achieve power if he goes along with Sauron's plan instead of resisting it like he's sworn to do - that's the Fantasy equivalent of "Why defend Belgian neutrality". And Theoden, old, battered, preyed upon by Wormtongue's malice to convince him to betray his allies and to hold back his forces while the reader sits there practically yelling at the page that it'd be suicide not to at least try
Or Saurman's mirror image, Denethor's despair because Sauron's convinced him that the only way to save his people is to surrender instead of subject them to the horrors of trying to hold the line as the hordes come on - and while we might loathe Denethor for being weak, it's coming from the same place as Faramir's misery when he, *the brother who stayed behind* gets word (even in the most poetic, the most beautiful, the least-like-a-telegram-way-possible) of Boromir's death, and realises *that he'd already known*, that he'd heard, like in a dream, the far off sound of his brother being killed.
Because, yes. If the wind was right, and the barrage was big enough, there were times when you could hear the explosions on the Western Front back home in southern England.
And you are absolutely right - it hits because it's also showing you what people are fighting for, and even then it's cut through with *loss*. Because to win in the context of LoTR, to destroy the One Ring, means to make a sacrifice that will rip away everything that was left of the old world, to obliterate the magic that kept the three elven rings working and preserved however imperfectly a shadow of the majesty and magic of the Second Age.
That's the test Galadriel passes, that's why she says she'll diminish and go into the West. She's been tempted by power, and she's understood its evil, and she *accepts the cost of fighting*. She knows she's condemning Lorien to fade, she knows the price her people will pay for winning the War. And she accepts it, because she believes that the war has to be fought and won.
And it is, and the Fellowship triumphs, the One Ring is destroyed, the Shire is Scourged, the Kings return to Gondor...
...And in the shadow of that victory, all the glory and hope and beauty of the past fades away, forever.
Comment by wanlu_r7 at 02/03/2025 at 23:49 UTC
35 upvotes, 2 direct replies
This is one of the bets comments Ive ever read here. Amazing!
Comment by ComicStripCritic at 03/03/2025 at 01:30 UTC
13 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Oh, damn, you’re THE Matt Colville! Yeah, I can see it t in the way you write. Thanks for so many great years of gaming insight!
Comment by CanopyOfBranches at 03/03/2025 at 18:47 UTC
11 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I also like to point out to fellow fans how subversive LotR is, especially for *the* foundational text of the fantasy genre. Nearly all fantasy books are about big brave heroes. Sure, maybe they started humbly, but they become powerful and wield powerful weapons and objects. Often this combines with an element of cleverness to hit the enemy where it hurts and win the day.
This is not the case in LotR. There is an all-powerful weapon and Middle Earth is filled with many big brave heroes. But none of them can carry the all-powerful ring precisely because their strength and savior tendencies will be quickly and easily corrupted. Instead the all-powerful ring is only safe in the hands of "simple" people who have no ambition beyond eating, drinking and being with friends and family. It's a moving idea and it's surprisingly subversive for such a foundational text of fantasy. Everyday people, widely considered weak and unimportant, are the only ones who can safely bear such incredible power. I find that a profound statement about how we perceive virtue and whose lives actually have it.
Also it's subversive in how much affection and physical acts of love there are between men. It's incredibly sweet. Physical affection between friends—hand holding, kissing, singing to each other, etc. Friends living together and being platonic life partners. The love between friends in LotR is a kind of love I rarely see in the world except among queer people. It's genuinely touching. And this love is literally what wins the day. Sam loving Frodo is how Sauron is defeated. It's not strength or cleverness. Just Sam loving his friend, saving him countless times, never giving up on him, dragging him to the finish line, ready to die with him if need be.
Comment by tligger at 03/03/2025 at 04:09 UTC
7 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I read and loved the whole comment before I realized who wrote it. I've been binge-watching all your videos on youtube recently, so i wanna say thanks for being a river to your people and sharing how you do what you love!
Comment by Cachar at 03/03/2025 at 12:56 UTC
8 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Regarding the intentionality of the similarities to Tokien's experiences of war, I think it's important to look at the much quoted and much misunderstood dislike for allegory. Here's the relevant paragraph from the foreword to the 1966 second edition (taken from https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings/Quotations[1]):
1: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings/Quotations
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
As we can see Tolkien does not seem to dislike readers finding that the adventures told of in the LOTR might be *applicable* to real experiences, but very much does not want it to be seen as the author, himself, purposefully forcing an allegory on the reader.
Whether the distinction of "applicability" and "allegory" as Tolkien used it here is sensical or not, I think reading the quote in full makes it more clear what he meant. And it gives us a clue that he likely did not consciously set out to write a fantasy book about his WW1 experiences. But he was, of course, clever enough to acknowledge that the parallels are there and that a reader is free to interpret them as they see fit.
Barthes' "The Death of the Author" was not published when Tolkien wrote this foreword. But neither Barthes nor Tolkien operated in an intellectual vacuum, so the parallels in their approaches - separating the text from the author and their intentions - are not entirely surprising. Of course this stretches Tolkien's brief words a lot, since a paragraph in a foreword does not constitute a full blown attempt at describing an approach to interpreting literature.
But one thing is clear: Tolkien wanted his works to be seen as 'feigned history' and not as a one-to-one mapping of fictional events to real events. History is complex, messy and historical situations are not repeatable - unlike scientific experiments that can be repeated under the same conditions. In my view Tolkien raising the "feigned history" illuminates what he means. You might find the history of the 19th century "robber barons" dominating industry and influencing politics applicable to our current world, but it is clear that so many factors are different, that a one-to-one mapping simply does not work. Similarly, you might find that experiences of Frodo and his companions applicable to Tolkien's war experiences. I certainly do.
Comment by gloryday23 at 02/03/2025 at 22:47 UTC
34 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Anyway. We're never going to get another series like that, because we're never (hopefully, um...) going to see an author like that emerge from circumstances like that.
Given the current state of world affairs, we should revisit this comment in about 20 years...
Comment by herefromthere at 03/03/2025 at 03:20 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Great comment, but it was three of the four hobbits who were gentlemen. Sam was a prole.
Comment by MigratingPidgeon at 03/03/2025 at 08:39 UTC*
6 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Does Frodo ever get to go home? Isn't what happens to Frodo exactly what happened to thousands of survivors of WWI?
Frodo "going to the west" does hit very differently when reading through that lens. It reads like a veteran that can't live with the memories, the trauma and effectively took his own life (or just wasted away) and went to heaven (since Tolkien was catholic I think Valinor in this case should be read as heaven)
Comment by tinysydneh at 03/03/2025 at 00:43 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I listen to the books to fall asleep, and this is where I've largely ended up as well, though I think there is likely some expansion into dealing with WW2 since most of his time writing it was either during or after the war
Sometimes when I'm laying there as I wait to fall asleep, something catches my ear that just *screams* that it's a war detail.
Comment by Ariadnepyanfar at 03/03/2025 at 12:09 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I think of LOTR as not the first big Fantasy novel (although it inspired the entire genre) but the last of the Great Epics. Same as you noting the Beowulf etc influences.
I believe Tolkien when he denies the One Ring is a metaphor for nuclear bombs, but I agree with you that Tolkein’s war experiences pervade the book.
Comment by helm at 03/03/2025 at 06:46 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Don’t forget that Tolkien was a professor of Nordic languages and had read other myths too, such as Snorre and Kalevala.
Comment by hoochiscrazy_ at 03/03/2025 at 13:59 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I've always found it interesting because Tolkien explicitly said he doesn't like allegory and Lord of the Rings is not allegory. He literally says it in the preface to Lord of the Rings (as you and other readers will know). Yet Lord of the Rings seems very clearly to be full of allegory to wars he lived through.
Comment by darkbloo64 at 03/03/2025 at 15:41 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Interesting point about the post World War I generation, and I just wanted to chime in with my two cents on the matter. I'm not sure if *Parade's End* is the postwar mini-genre I would liken *Lord of the Rings* to (in other words, it's a good comparison, but not the one I gravitate towards). I'm tempted to put it closer to Alan Sillitoe's postwar (ie, WWII) surrealism, which was ostensibly grounded in the real world with no supernatural elements whatsoever, save an intense, unspoken, but omnipresent frustration and listlessness of the protagonists. The same way that the Fellowship has a distinct goal and the story is about the winding path to it, Sillitoe's work is about the kids that missed the WWII boat for one reason or another, and stuck in the world it left without much initiative, and how they wind their own path to nothing. Or meaning. Or meaning that turns out to be nothing.
It's not that I would consider Tolkien a particularly old member of the Angry Young Men, but something in me is connecting the desire for meaning and purpose in that movement with Tolkien's fantasy world that takes its time, but always inches closer to a meaningful end.
Comment by QuickAltTab at 03/03/2025 at 16:50 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Tolkien and his three best friends signed up for WWI because they thought it would be a great adventure.
crazy how naive that is
Comment by kylejacobson84 at 03/03/2025 at 17:29 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I never thought of how my time spent reading Vonnegut is akin to my time spent reading Tolkien, but this really connected the dots for me. Where Vonnegut gives us blips (emotionally conflicting, hard-hitting blips), Tolkien gives us the whole meal, and each experience is more complete having partaken in the other. Fantastic writeup.
Comment by Anaevya at 03/03/2025 at 23:26 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You made some great points. I want to add that Tolkien never had a proper editor. His publishers just let him publish Lotr like it was, because they believed in it as a work of art. He actually tried to publish Lotr with a different publisher because his old ones didn't want to publish the Silmarillion, but went back to his previous publishers, because the other wanted to make substantial cuts to Lotr.
Comment by romanemperor2 at 03/03/2025 at 00:14 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This was wonderfully written, thankyou for sharing your thoughts.
Comment by azaza34 at 03/03/2025 at 15:05 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Speaking of writing as a side hustle, Priest was and still is a fucking banger. Any chance the third one is slowly cooking up in there :)?
Reverse-Shilling aside, I wonder if it tying so closely to his own life and that trauma was why he didn’t want to think of it allegorically, despite the (as you say) obvious parallels.
Comment by Neren1138 at 03/03/2025 at 15:27 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I grew up Sephardic conservative.. so no tattoos 😂
Nevertheless when I was 18 I wanted the runework from LOTR & elvish script from the Silmarillion inked to my arms. I didn’t get them but for years that’s what I wanted because if I was going to really piss off my mom it had to matter! And Tolkien mattered. His poems called to me.
Even now at 50 I’ll tell my partner take me to Tol Eressa and she’ll be like wtf are you talking about and I’ll say I want to go to blessed elevenhome. It’s silly but yeah to this day those books changed me
Comment by SilentBob890 at 03/03/2025 at 15:48 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I dunno, does it seem ANYTHING LIKE the other fantasy you read?
the only thing that comes close, to me, is the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Giant scope, and explores humanity in a way that I find incredible.