JRR Tolkien reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)

While we’re at it, Christopher Lee’s narration of Children of Húrin deserves a mention.

Or for most of human history for that matter, stories have been listened to rather than read. It might be fun to participate in this tradition.

Some audiobooks also seem to gain over the book; for instance, IMO, James Saxon's narration of "Blandings Castle" is truly excellent and gets out the most of Wodehouse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsViudXaSe8

same, I do it whenever I oil the trebuchets.

> I typically do something mindless with my hands (weave chainmail, cross stitch, sew)

For me, that's exactly the sort of "something else" I interpreted the previous comment to refer to.

Reading is faster - a reason not to do it! There’s a reason that rituals across time and space have had readings from time immemorial- and not just because of the cost of printing.

Especially with a work like LotR it can be very tempting to skim parts; the audiobook will just continue on, which can help you encounter passages you’d normally have skipped over.

I really wish I could make myself listen.

The times I have just sat and listened to a well-told, well-paced story have been magical.

But the dopamine hit of reading -too quickly- competes; the pressure to "be busy" wins and makes me impatient for the spoken word by default.

The defaults are too high. I'd be better off reading less but reading more slowly, and listening sometimes.

But this is not the highest priority problem to fix, either, and I can't fix everything.

To be fair, Tolkien probably have more in common with audiobooks and reading of works than reading them from printed pages - given his scholarly pursuits were of oral traditions.

I suggest people should live their life in a way that makes them happy rather than complying with your expectations.

Wow hyperbole and personal attack, all in a single post.

It is crazy to me how captivating and immersive text-based games can be. I've been exploring them for fun in recent years, the roots of modern mmorpgs. Fun to come across stuff you still have in modern games. :)

Even the LOTR adaptation is questionable. Gandalf kicking Pippin (the exact opposite of what happens in the book), the lack of the scouring of the Shire, and super-Legolas right out of a Marvel movie...

Like the sibling comment remarks, Tolkien never fully embarked on this path.

He had a problem: as a Catholic [1], he thought every creature deserved pity and second chances (you can see this when Gandalf rebukes Frodo when he says "it's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum"). If the Orcs are really "fallen Elves", they deserve pity and maybe mercy; they are worthy of redemption. Yet Orcs in LotR are to be killed on sight; there's only one passage in all of LotR where the Hobbits reflect on the corpse of an Orc with any kind of attempt at insight.

For Orcs to be a thing to be destroyed without mercy, unworthy of redemption, they must have not be corrupted souls. Yet here Tolkien found another stumbling block: according to his Catholic-influenced vision, Evil cannot create, only corrupt and destroy. So Morgoth couldn't have created Orcs, he must have used existing souls as raw material.

Tolkien never resolved this conundrum.

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[1] someone in another comment argued quite convincingly that Catholics at times had no trouble murdering other Christians over doctrinal affairs, so let's add a qualification here: "Tolkien's Catholic-influenced morality, which was his own nonetheless".

> I've not seen Rings of Power and I don't plan to

i say this as a die hard Tolkien fan, having read (most of) HOME: i enjoyed Rings of Power quite a lot and i'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys the extended world of middle earth. the casting is great, i actually did enjoy the picking at the question of orcish morality, and because amazon was willing to throw millions at it, it looks fantastic for a tv show.

it doesn't follow canon (some weird squashing of timelines re: ringmaking, the akallabeth etc) which seems to upset a lot of geeks. however, one thing to keep in mind when interacting with extended works based on Middle Earth is that Tolkien didn't necessarily set out to codify everything perfectly (and what was there was definitely the result of his obsession and great care for the world he built). one of his stated desires in writing LOTR was to establish a modern mythology that other people could write/create within, so the fiction could take a life of its own. maybe he wouldn't always like the ways people built on his work, but that's the risk he took when he explicitly set out to invent a mythology for others to interact with.

we're still going to ignore the hobbit movie trilogy, though.

And as this wiki article posted in other comments very nicely explains, Tolkien never came to a good and final conclusion on how this all really worked, with different explanations in different works of his. The "they were just evil force that could be killed without remorse" theme is the dominant one, because it works in the context of the story and the worldbuilding that he did for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma

In the book the Palantir are technically neutral devices for Seeing things, that, it turns out, are inherently prone to misuse and once used for Evil, are incredibly difficult to use in any other way.

A better metaphor (accidental or not) for surveillance technology I've never seen.

I mean, I really did actually enjoy reading it. But like with a lot of Russian literature - it does have a habit of spending several pages just monologuing here and there - but it is a "fun" read.

To me it sounds more like he really wanted to give them some agency and the ability to speak, but then was unable to resolve the moral dilemma that came out of it - with different works suggesting different "solutions" to it. As the Wiki article points out, Tolkien was a devout Christian and part of his world view included beings which were wholy and irredimably evil while still able to speak and reason on some level. When you look at Christian iconography, you don't really have theologians saying "well when you have angels slaying demons, are the demons really evil or are they just misunderstood". That's your orcs. Since Tolkien really cared about world building he wanted to make it fit neatly in the myth of creation but as far as I can tell - he was never able to do it neatly.

wink wink

the tolkien metal world continues: One of Nine put out a killer record on Profound Lore last year. https://oneofnine.bandcamp.com/album/dawn-of-the-iron-shadow (skip the first track if you don't care for "dungeon synth"). i'm not a big fan of keyboards in metal but the rest of the instrumentation is so good i can forgive it :)

There is band called Silmarils as well

I mean, I did leave a role because the things we were doing clashed heavily with my principles (ad-tech adjacent). I had the luxury of doing so - an opportunity arose somewhere else, I could afford to make the move, etc.

But it's also hard for me to imagine someone that today, chooses to interview and take a job at Palantir, and not know what they're up to, who Thiel is and what he stands for.

Your criticism of Catholicism is valid, but regardless: this dilemma of Tolkien is real, and well-documented (e.g. in his letters, etc).

He really did struggle with this, re: the origin of the Orcs, whether they had souls, whether it was ok to default to massacring them without second thought, etc. He never really resolved it.

Most Tolkien fan communities are aware of this dilemma, it's one of those well-known things, along with "did Balrogs have wings?", "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" and "why did Sauron need to put his power within a ring, anyway?".

Ah fair enough. I just couldn't see it. Thanks for explaining.

As many of you no doubt know, some people (did you know even 3 days after Hiroshima?![1]) likened Tolkein's One Ring to the power of the atomic bomb developed in the same era: a technology molded by hidden genius, capable of unspeakable power so deadly it must actually /not/ be used, but instead, must be carefully guarded by a small band until it can be destroyed. So that true peace is possible again.

Tolkein of course denied this[2] .... and the timing wasn't right[3] and ... he wasn't a big fan of allegory[4], right?

However, perhaps he foresaw, however unconsciously or through shadow knowledge shared by others or Bentham's Panopticon[5] or seen too by Orwell' 1985[6], the coming surveillance state.

After all, in the trenches of WW1 he took his place managing signals communications in a battalion[7] and when WW2 arrived was approached to be a cryptographer, (even taking four days of preparatory courses on the subject![8] Before getting turned down[9].).

Foresaw what and shared how you ask?

That other, subtler, great Tool of Power to come out of WW2 -- the use of, and covert exposure of, signals encryption.

Encryption exerts its power in a manner not unlike one of the key functions of the rings... Anyone bearing the One Ring or the nine, who then puts on the ring -- like using encryption -- instantly makes themselves "hidden" to the mortal fellows around you.

But tragically, the prolonged use and reliance upon such power deepens and ensures ever increasing temptations and corruptions.

And such ring (encryption) use -- most unintuitively and dangerously -- makes you more, not less visible to the maker of the rings.

(Just as cyphertext stands out in a sea of plaintext.[10] (See Tor today[11], or in WW2 the then-novel phenomena known as radar traceback.[13] Or the then-novel-but-even-more-covert encryption traffic analysis[14].)

Perhaps he saw. And knew.

...

And why too the numeric gap between 1 ring, 3 for elves, 7, and the 9? Nobody knows for sure[15].

Perhaps too some linguistic colleague had whispered to the maker-of-languages (languages as obscure at that time as those of the Apache Code Talkers[16] and similarly perhaps unappreciatedly utilitarian) that... we already had "5 Eyes"[17]??

Perhaps then Tolkein knew? And passed on the word, for those willing to hear...

Poor Tolkein, he became beloved by the very Morlocks[18], err, 'easily corruptible men of middle earth" he warned about.

...

[1...18] Out of time! References available upon request. Or web search... Don't get me started on how this all connects to the Eye of Providence[19] or the Eye of Horus[20]! ;)