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The J.R.R Tolkien Discussion Thread


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Har-di-har har BB. Har-di-har-har.

Then again JWFan has always been a place where we laugh at typos.

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Ah quite right, quite right. I have to say I am at times a bit bewildered by the nomenclature of all these "phases" and "drafts". :)

I am re-reading through the History of the Lord of the Rings (Part 1: The Return of the Shadow) in the History of Middle-earth series at the moment. It is very interesting to follow the way Tolkien initially constructed the story and text and how much was actually changed and revised and surprisingly how much was retained from the early versions of the tale in the final text. I am very glad Marmaduke (Meriadoc) and Bingo Bolger-Baggins (Frodo) and Odo Bolger/Took (Pippin) were left by the wayside as names for the protagonists and Tolkien supressed much of the "hobbit-talk". Also Trotter is quite a character at this point.

I thought the capture of one of the Hobbits by the Nazgul was an interesting development, and it is a shame Tolkien did not set down what happened before he abandoned the idea.

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  • 3 months later...

Man they are really scraping the bottom of the Tolkien's unpublished works barrel with this one. Still it will be interesting to see how Tolkien adapted the storyline of Kullervo poems from the Kalevala in his own treatment of the legend.

I am expecting a release of all the grocery store lists Tolkien left behind in the foreseeable future. They will unravel the buying habits of the author and give a luminous inkling to his literary inspirations and relationship with food.

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I am sure he'll suddenly find interest in our national epic and start systematically tearing it down.

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It was available in the Tolkien Studies journal in Volume 7 (2010). So yeah it was previously published but I guess not that accessible.

I too will get this release though.

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IMHO the only members of the "old crew" I would want near a Silmarillion film are Alan Lee, John Howe, and Howard Shore.

Amen!

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IMHO the only members of the "old crew" I would want near a Silmarillion film are Alan Lee, John Howe, and Howard Shore.

I wouldn't really mind the Weta Workshop guys either, but that's it.

The whole crew can stay. It's just PJ that needs to go!

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IMHO the only members of the "old crew" I would want near a Silmarillion film are Alan Lee, John Howe, and Howard Shore.

I wouldn't really mind the Weta Workshop guys either, but that's it.

The whole crew can stay. It's just PJ that needs to go!

What about Boyens and Walsh?

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

Got the Art of the Lord of the Rings yesterday. It's a very nice book and it's great to see so many hand drawn maps by the professor.

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Got the Story of the Kullervo today as well as The Lays of Beleriand.

Yeah got myself a copy of Kullervo a few days ago with some of the Tolkien miscellanea like The Tolkien Reader and Unfinished Tales. My Tolkien collection is now just about complete if you do not count art books for LotR and the Hobbit.

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I still have loads of gaps but... Unfinished Tales? That's kind of a big one man!

I'd have it completed if I didn't keep buying copies of The Hobbit.

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I still have loads of gaps but... Unfinished Tales? That's kind of a big one man!

I'd have it completed if I didn't keep buying copies of The Hobbit.

I had The Unfinished Tales in Finnish but decided to get it in the original language now.

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A friend of mine has found Guillermo Del Toro the perfect scapegoat for everything that went wrong with the Hobbit films.

Heh, everyone knows Peter Jackson is the goat!

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I really don't. I am looking at getting a nice hardback copy of the Silmarillion though.

I suggest a Ted Nasmith illustrated one. That version also contains a preface with a lengthy letter Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman in 1951 (Also found in The Letters), which pre-dates Silmarillion but which lays out the whole mythology in one succint examination by Tolkien himself, which also shows how aware and deeply mindful he was of all the connections, layers, meanings and themes interlaced in his work.

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I've seen that and I definitely will get it at some point but I'm trying to get a set of hardbacks that are uniform in size. I've got the 50th anniversary edition of the trilogy (lovely one volume edition with the red and black fold out maps), and then the hardbacks of S & G, Arthur, Beowulf, and Kullervo.

So I need, Sil, Unfinished Tales, Hobbit, and Húrin.

I have the Annotated Hobbit, an illustrated hardcover, and about 5 or 6 paperbacks but I want to get the lovely hardcover with the original dust jacket design.

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Ah I managed to get the Alan Lee illustrated Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Nasmith illustrated Silmarillion in the same hard cover size. Only blemish on the series is the fact The Hobbit and LotR are published by Houghton Mifflin and Silmarillion by Harper Collins so there are different logos on the back of the four books compared to the Sil. ;)

Otherwise I managed to get the whole History of Middle-earth in the same black paperbacks with John Howe cover art along with most of the other ancillary material like The Letters, Beowulf Monsters & Critics and Finn & Hengest etc. The few latest releases from Sigrud and Gudrun onwards in hard backs that are alas were not all printed in the same size. But I think I'll manage.

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Ah I managed to get the Alan Lee illustrated Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Nasmith illustrated Silmarillion in the same hard cover size. Only blemish on the series is the fact The Hobbit and LotR are published by Houghton Mifflin and Silmarillion by Harper Collins so there are different logos on the back of the four books compared to the Sil. ;)

Otherwise I managed to get the whole History of Middle-earth in the same black paperbacks with John Howe cover art along with most of the other ancillary material like The Letters, Beowulf Monsters & Critics and Finn & Hengest etc. The few latest releases from Sigrud and Gudrun onwards in hard backs that are alas were not all printed in the same size. But I think I'll manage.

Working on my History of ME collection too. Have 1,2,3, and 6 and I think they're the same as the ones you just described and they do match my copies of Letters, and Shipey's Road to ME.

I need to focus on filling gaps rather than buying multiple editions of the same book!

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I have all the Histories of Middle-Earth, the sil, Hurin, Unfinished Tales, Hobbit both normal and annotated, Lord of the Rings, History of the Hobbit, and the Music of the Lord of the Rings films.

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