Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

[Deledrius]

I don't perceive any of those things as "limits of his vision". One point where I DO think Tolkien had a failure of vision was his later insistence that Middle Earth had to be our world and its history had to conform to realistic scientific knowledge, and tried to rewrite what would later become the Silmarillion to make it consistent with astronomy, geology, and similar fields of knowledge.

This, from the man who wrote about the power of adjectives to free the mind and fantasy, using "green sun" as an example. (There can't be green suns, certainly not naturally, because of the nature of the blackbody radiation curve - I suppose a sufficiently advanced society might find a way to color a sun's light green.)

I think there's a lot of fun to be had in synthesis, at least when it's used to spur the imagination and lead down new paths. Of course it can also be used to stifle, but I don't feel he did that.

[Beastro]

I don't perceive any of those things as "limits of his vision". One point where I DO think Tolkien had a failure of vision was his later insistence that Middle Earth had to be our world and its history had to conform to realistic scientific knowledge, and tried to rewrite what would later become the Silmarillion to make it consistent with astronomy, geology, and similar fields of knowledge.

This, from the man who wrote about the power of adjectives to free the mind and fantasy, using "green sun" as an example. (There can't be green suns, certainly not naturally, because of the nature of the blackbody radiation curve - I suppose a sufficiently advanced society might find a way to color a sun's light green.)

He did that with LOTR too.

He had the story entirely plotted out to the cycles of the moon as well as the daily progress of the story from the moment the Frodo sets out. As anyone who read the novel knows he loved description and would occasionally mention what shape the moon was. He had to correct a few mistakes where he was off.

It caused issues, but it also revealed his strengths in that the military aspects of the story are perfect. The movement of armies, their delays and their weaknesses are perfectly tied to the passage of time. There is no plot convenience around those beyond bits like Shadowfax running faster and longer than a normal horse.

The result is that one can easily dissect the military operations taking place in the novel even if they're hidden in the background and missed by most. This is revealed in how incompetent a military leader Saruman is.

If you've got time to kill: https://acoup.blog/2020/06/19/collectio ... f-saruman/

Like I said, he loved history as much as mythology and tried to wed the two in his Legendarium. Also keep in mind that he's a Modernist like we are and was constrained in his visions as we are by the pervasiveness of materialistic and realistic thinking (Compared to Medieval or Renaissance artists who saw no problem in producing art showing people and places from Biblical events dressed up in contemporary style; Legionaries at Calvary dressed as 15th Century Condottieri for example).

[Frustration]

I don't think there's a problem with initially insisting that the two worlds are one and wanting to make the Moon's behavior accurate - because at worst, that makes the Moon's behavior plausible.

Ditching the entire "Moon and Sun were later developments to a Flat World that was made round after-the-fact" is another matter entirely.

[Frustration]

I think there's a lot of fun to be had in synthesis, at least when it's used to spur the imagination and lead down new paths. Of course it can also be used to stifle, but I don't feel he did that.

He nearly stifled himself and discarded the entirety of the Silmarillion, in order to remake it in an astronomically-correct fashion.

His son Christopher, when he assembled the Silmarillion out of his father's various writings, ended up leaving out the attempted alterations, because he couldn't make a coherent narrative by combining the two versions or using the astronomical one by itself.

JRR was a huge proponent of the idea that Myth was important, and not merely a beautiful or narratively-satisfying lie, but then he tried to junk the myth he created for something 'realistic'. I wonder why he lost his nerve.

Nowadays people have no problem making completely fantastical worlds, largely due to his example. Perhaps, as a trailblazer, he felt there would be more pushback than there is today?

[McAvoy]

I think there's a lot of fun to be had in synthesis, at least when it's used to spur the imagination and lead down new paths. Of course it can also be used to stifle, but I don't feel he did that.

He nearly stifled himself and discarded the entirety of the Silmarillion, in order to remake it in an astronomically-correct fashion.

His son Christopher, when he assembled the Silmarillion out of his father's various writings, ended up leaving out the attempted alterations, because he couldn't make a coherent narrative by combining the two versions or using the astronomical one by itself.

JRR was a huge proponent of the idea that Myth was important, and not merely a beautiful or narratively-satisfying lie, but then he tried to junk the myth he created for something 'realistic'. I wonder why he lost his nerve.

Nowadays people have no problem making completely fantastical worlds, largely due to his example. Perhaps, as a trailblazer, he felt there would be more pushback than there is today?

Wasn't that Tolkien's whole history when writing about Middle Earth and the Lord of Rings? That he was constantly altering it and would go back and redo other elements? Except in his day, he would physically have to redo it as in typing a whole new page.

Who knows what the early stuff really looked like for Lord of the Rings.

[Fianna]

Part of his motivation for his Middle-Earth work (besides being an extension of his invented languages) was to create "a mythology for England", which he felt was lacking in the real world (at least in surviving accounts). So the cultures he wrote about were meant to be the ancestors of what would become the first Englishpeople, something that would be lost if Middle-Earth was a whole other universe entirely.

[Riedquat]

The result is that one can easily dissect the military operations taking place in the novel even if they're hidden in the background and missed by most. This is revealed in how incompetent a military leader Saruman is.

If you've got time to kill: https://acoup.blog/2020/06/19/collectio ... f-saruman/

Well there goes a lot of my time, reading through all of those!

[McAvoy]

Part of his motivation for his Middle-Earth work (besides being an extension of his invented languages) was to create "a mythology for England", which he felt was lacking in the real world (at least in surviving accounts). So the cultures he wrote about were meant to be the ancestors of what would become the first Englishpeople, something that would be lost if Middle-Earth was a whole other universe entirely.

Well yeah. There are other parts of it that reflects his viewpoints at given times too. His experience with WW1 and its aftermath for one.

He was always changing what he wrote during the writing process.

I still stand by Tolkien being a world builder than a novel writer.

[Frustration]

Originally Elvenhome was going to be the British mainland. He abandoned that level of prosaicness. Then he tried to introduce it again.

[Beastro]

He nearly stifled himself and discarded the entirety of the Silmarillion, in order to remake it in an astronomically-correct fashion.

His son Christopher, when he assembled the Silmarillion out of his father's various writings, ended up leaving out the attempted alterations, because he couldn't make a coherent narrative by combining the two versions or using the astronomical one by itself.

JRR was a huge proponent of the idea that Myth was important, and not merely a beautiful or narratively-satisfying lie, but then he tried to junk the myth he created for something 'realistic'. I wonder why he lost his nerve.

Nowadays people have no problem making completely fantastical worlds, largely due to his example. Perhaps, as a trailblazer, he felt there would be more pushback than there is today?

An issue Tolkien had, like many writers (especially of web browsers...) is that they can't leave something alone and continue to tinker incessantly. In Tolkien's case he kept on with a few things and were ruining them.

He constantly wrestled with Galadriel's role in the Nolder trying to have her both be one of the most important and influential of them very much tied to their fall, but also still good and removed from their sins like the Kinslayings. He created her originally as someone very much culpable in their fall who encouraged and supported them leaving for Middle Earth but wasn't around for the First Kinslaying. Then he began to rewrite her as always opposed to Feanor and actively trying to stop it with Celeborn, her husband, being rewritten as a Telari she married in Valinor as opposed to a Sindar she later met when she arrived in Beleriand.

Even then he went so far as to remove pretty much all of her folly and struggled with why she didn't return to Valinor after the War of Wrath. Originally she was arrogant and haughty and was banned from returning then by the Valar, something she didn't care about because she didn't want to return anyway. She hated living in Valinor as she felt she was the least of the greatest and wished to go to Middle Earth to be greatest of the least. That was central to her temptation in LOTR around the Ring: it was the culmination of her journey and her redemption. It is why she says she'll "Diminish and go into the West". She humbled herself abandoning all her ambitions. She accepted her return to being the among the least there rather than becoming a third dark lord and everything she had always wanted to become.

The issue there I feel is that Tolkien grew too fond of Galadriel as a character and simply didn't want her to be as nasty as was needed for the story kinda like if a parent could deliberately alter a child's personality to get them to stop being the bad things the parent knows will cause them problems.

Back to his whole realism vs mythology thing. I think he couldn't leave it in balance and kept tinkering more and more. The good thing with Christopher maintaining things the way they were is that it maintained the balance between the two that kept his world very Biblical. The Bible itself has the same style of progression from the distant and dream-like of mythology in the first bit of Genesis to when Abraham pops up and can be seen as the beginning of history from the Biblical perspective.