Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (LotR), etc.

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Something that occurred to me while watching Lord of the Rings. (piefed.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 day ago by queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/tolkien@lemmy.world

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The fact that it takes forever to watch all three movies is part of the charm for me, and I think it is for others. It is something of a commitment that has to be planned for. I think it's similar to the tactile slowness of listening to a vinyl album vs. just pulling the songs up on your phone. The length of the movies necessitates a mini-ceremony and that itself becomes part of the fun. But it struck me that it's the kind of story that should seem like it takes forever. Like, getting through it and feeling like you've struggled a little bit to achieve something that at times feels impossible is very on theme. Fighting Sauron is hard and it feels like it takes forever and there's no guarantee that you'll actually make it to the end, even if you do somehow manage to make some progress sometimes. Your fellowship might break up. Hell you might not even have a fellowship to begin with. You might also be alone, in a place full of people who, if they saw you, would happily see you dead if not kill you themselves. You might have to be there for a long time, and it's gonna suck almost the whole time. That's what it can feel like when you're fighting Sauron.

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[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

that it’s the kind of story that should seem like it takes forever

I mean, that's literally the point of the books...

For all the talk of Sauran's eye, he had to have ring wraiths track them and rely on such primitive methods as harassing crotchety old hobbits at their turnip farms.

Throw Frodo on the back of an Eagle, fly over the volcano and toss it in before anyone knew what was happening or it started to corrupt Frodo.

Like, the big excuse was always Frodo needed the journey to toughen up, but the reality is the journey took like fucking years and in the time it would have taken to fly there he'd never have used it to or had it long enough to be corrupted. Because by the end of it Sam basically had to do it.

But if an eagle can carry armored Dwarves or a full grown Gandalf, Sam could have rode bitch on the same eagle.

The real reason the story is so long, is Tolkein was a linguist who made up a language to stay sane in WW1, then after the fact wrote some books to justify the effort.

Which meshes with the excuse. The books aren't so long because the story needed them to be. They're so long and vivid because Tolkein needed them to be. He dealt with the absolute horrors of WW1 by sinking into this fantasy world. Coping methods don't go away when the situation does, so after the war getting lost in Middle Earth was preferable to PTSD before we knew how to treat it.

He'd spend 10 pages describing a door, because that hyper focus on his fantasy world kept out the images of WW1 that were literally and figuratively haunting his entire generation.

[–] queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 5 hours ago

I don't think escaping the trauma was his intention, not when his books deal so intimately with the corrosive effects of power. I think he was processing the trauma by telling a story that describes the feeling of those traumatic events, and tries to make sense of how regular people can talk themselves into such senseless violence. I think it's fair to describe that as coping, but I don't think his cope was just ignoring it by describing a nice door for 10 pages. I also don't think it's really fair to say he just wanted "a" story to go with his fancy languages. He had a real point about what evil is, and he wanted to tell it in a story.