• starlingukEnglish
    28·
    1 month ago

    Tolkien pilfered that universe from already existing myths and legends.

      • Goodeye8@piefed.socialEnglish
        17·
        1 month ago

        Taking real world history and adapting it into your world is also cool but the meme still looks down on GRRM.

      • early_riser@piefed.socialEnglish
        8·
        1 month ago

        I read a quote somewhere that “creativity is the art of hiding your influences.” The scene in The Hobbit where Bilbo steals the goblet from Smaug is yoinked straight out of Beowulf. There’s a good reason Germanic mythology sounds so Tolkienesque to someone who first read LOTR. I don’t think there’s any shame in that. Nihil sub sole novum.

        My own worldbuilding can be summed up as “That sounds cool, but it would be even cooler with mechs.”

        • Limerance@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          Tolkien took several names straight from the Edda. Gandalf is the most famous, but several dwarven names as well.

      • starlingukEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        I’m not looking down on it, but other people are looking down on other writers for doing the same thing.

    • emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      6·
      1 month ago

      So did pretty much every myth and legend. And religions for that matter. That’s how stories are built, it’s putting the pieces together in a new interesting way that makes a good one.

  • glimseEnglish
    13·
    1 month ago

    Our Glorious Inspiration

    Their Barbaric Theft

    • XaphanosEnglish
      10·
      1 month ago

      It was never turned into a consistent storyline. He partially rewrote it several times, and never completed any one of them. Each section (Gondolin, Luthien, Turin, etc.) was still in draft mode when he died, and his son was left to try to make sense of it.

      • early_riser@piefed.socialEnglish
        14·
        1 month ago

        IMO that makes it even better. It’s not meant to be a single coherent narrative in-universe either. It’s a collection of texts on different subjects written by different authors at different times. Granted I don’t blame anyone who can’t sit through it for that very reason. Perhaps approaching each section as its own story would make it more palatable.

        • dustyDataEnglish
          3·
          1 month ago

          I love it because it is akin to studying ancient texts. Commercial publishers put out highly curated versions of the popular classics that rewrite or reconstruct most of it. But studying the actual text, or as close as one can, in archeology books that contextualize the texts and annotate what we know and what we assume, and the different sources of each piece. It is so fascinating how much is like detective work. Lots of things are incomplete or only make sense by using assumptions from elsewhere in historical evidence. That’s my approach to the Silmarillion.

  • VindictiveJudgeEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    To be fair, The Hobbit didn’t start as a Middle-earth story and was retconned into being one after he started writing the sequel. Which is why the only mention of Hobbits in The Silmarillion is a line at the very end about Frodo destroying the One Ring even though The Shire either was a client state of Numenor before it sank or is the last remaining part of the Numenorean government.

  • taiyangEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    I didn’t recognize the third until I read the comments and… yeah I guess that’s a children’s book.

    I was hoping for a crazy TIL about R.L. Stein or E.B. White something.