I’m re-watching Fellowship with a first-time watcher and I’m just amazing at how fucking wrinkly the dialogue is. Not only are there antiquated constructions that would have been ironed out by some fuckstick studio executive, there are these little brief conversations that do NOTHING to advance the plot but EVERYTHING to put you inside that world.
From the movie (from memory):
Aragorn: Sam, do you know the athelas plant?
Sam: The what now?
Aragorn: [thinking] Kingsfoil.
Sam: Aye, it’s a weed.
Aragorn: Look for it; it may slow the poison.
Implied from this dialogue:
Elves exist. They have their own knowledge and language. Aragorn is steeped in their culture first and is somewhat a stranger to the “common” world.
Samwise is a gardener and knows about plants, but does not know shit about healing morgul blade wounds.
Here’s how the dialogue would look if LoTR was produced today:
Aragorn: I’m going to find some plants to help Frodo.
What we would learn from the modern dialogue:
Aragorn is going to get some plants to help Frodo.
Also, the books were an afterthought. His primary motivation was to create languages.
He was so into it that he quickly realized that to really create a language, with all the little fractal nuances he loved about real languages, he would need a web of dense, ancient and modern connections. So he started building that history full of minutiae. Finally, at the end of the journey he realized he had enough of a universe that it was almost trivially easy to just stitch stuff into stories.
The lotr books, in all their densely meaningful beauty, are just fluff, extra, lagniappe, the savory drippings of an entire universe he had birthed and nurtured inside him, just for the love of creating and understanding.
After finding out that Tolkein was simply populating his languages to aid in their culturally-grounded creation, I’ve quietly wished that Genghis had thought up a secret tongue so the world would’ve had its first khanlang.
XD You been sitting on that one a while?
Sadly both Genghis and Noonian Singh let the world down with their lack of lingual leadership.
😜 Nah, that silliness came to me in the moment, but yeah, I forgot abt ol’ Noonian. Damn. Would’ve been cleaner that way. 🤌🏼
It was spectacular just the way it was🫶🏽