Tolkien 2019 movie

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I hadn’t heard about it, thanks for posting! I will be going to watch it!!
 
Must agree with you about the adaptations of his works on screen. Fellowship had its moments, but from there the plunge was pretty steep; I can hardly bare to watch Return of the King, and have stayed far, far away from Hobbit films.

As for the OP, thank you for the heads up. I might go and see it!
 
Regarding the LOTR films, Joseph Pearce and Peter Kreeft have commented on how they drastically diluted the character of Faramir. He is presented as just a nice guy, but in the book there are crucial distinctions of morality and virtue.

But I don’t complain too much. If a small fraction of the viewers go on to read the book, that is a blessing.

I just wish they had not eliminated the Scouring of the Shire.
 
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My understanding is that the rights to adaptations of the Sillmarilion, Unfinished Tales, etc have not been sold yet
 
As a long-time Tolkien fan, I find the movies pretty dreadful, and the Hobbit was even worse.

I just can’t imagine how a movie about the man himself would be interesting. His childhood was very difficult, his mother raised him and his brother as a single parent, and it was with a great deal of help from a Catholic Priest (whose name I forget), and I suspect that is why Tolkien was a very strong Catholic his whole life. He fought in WWI, and spent a great deal of time in an infirmary, though those experiences shaped his writing, and his view of warfare (his battles in the mythos are often quite detailed).

But as an adult, he was an Oxford professor, chummed around with other writers and professors, wrote a lot of letters, raised a family, and wrote books and essays. His was not exactly a life filled with adventure, in fact, he didn’t seem to like adventure at all (which probably informs Bilbo’s response to Gandalf at the beginning of The Hobbit).

What I’d love to see is one of the stories from the Silmarillion; perhaps the Turin saga (though it does have unintentional incest). I think those stories, which are less complex in narrative and plot structure than The Lord of the Rings, would translate well.
 
The Silmarillion could be episodic in nature, but how would you ever make a visual version of the Ainulindale (and really, it’s just a variant of the Fall of Satan, except the action focuses on Melkor’s rebellion in Heaven, and not on Earth).
 
niceatheist said:
As a long-time Tolkien fan, I find the movies pretty dreadful, and the Hobbit was even worse.
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I enjoyed LotR but the Hobbit movies were indeed dreadful…the only redeemable part was the very ebginning of the first one with Frodo and old Bilbo and the song Over the Misty Mountains…that is beautiful!
niceatheist said:
What I’d love to see is one of the stories from the Silmarillion; perhaps the Turin saga (though it does have unintentional incest). I think those stories, which are less complex in narrative and plot structure than The Lord of the Rings, would translate well.
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I’d love to see the Akallabeth…Numenor has always fascinated me!
 
Tolkien admired that Lewis series, though I recall he didn’t like the last one very much. He found Lewis dipped too readily into allegory, which Tolkien disliked. I know Tolkien didn’t much like the Narnia series, precisely because of the Christian allegorical elements. Tolkien stated LotR, and indeed his whole mythos, was Catholic in nature, but he rarely made it obvious. The Fall of Man was intentionally left “off-screen”. The most that the first Men could or would tell the Elves when they encountered them was there was a darkness in their past that they were fleeing. The Elves, themselves, were something of an image of unfallen man, more like the Ainur (angels) than men, though obviously quite capable of very human emotions; like hatred and arrogance.
 
niceatheist said:
The Elves, themselves, were something of an image of unfallen man,
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Perhaps, but what of Feanor? He was definitely something else lol!

I enjoyed reading the History of Middle Earth and the part about the Fall of Man…I wish that he would have expounded on it and their Gift of Death. He seemed to allude to the fact that it (Death) was the better of the gifts to the Children of Eru simply b/c it allowed the Men to escape the confines of Ea which bound the Ainur and Elves.
 
The original intent of the work that would become the Silmarillion was to give England a mythology. That got obscured by the 1930s as his vision of the mythos changed. Fundamentally, though, he was reworking German mythology, and I think felt less attraction to Celtic mythology, though, ironically, Welsh was one of the original inspirations for the Elvish languages; he loved the look of the words and the sound of the Welsh language.

What many people don’t realize is that Tolkien spent as much time developing the Elvish languages as he did writing any of the mythical works. He had started constructing the language at least as far back as his student days at Oxford, and even after he had largely abandoned attempting to finish the Silmarillion in the mid-1960s, he continued developing the languages. The Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings are really a sort of applied linguistics; his view was that a language required people to speak it, so he created a mythology populated by people who spoke the languages he invented.
 
As I recall, Christopher Tolklien was rather astonished about the passage he found when working on Morgoth’s Ring that had a recounting of how Melkor, corrupted the first Men. It was out of character for Tolkien, who had specifically not given an explanation for Men, their mortality and their ultimate fate. But that came from a later phase of his work, where he was literally reworking the entire mythos. It was that reworking in the 1960s that essentially lead to him not completing the Silmarillion during his lifetime.

But what I do like about Morgoth’s Ring is that it makes clear how Morgoth corrupted the world; how he put forth the larger part of his native strength so that it became a part of the world itself; the reference to the Ring is of course that Sauron would do something similar on a smaller scale with the One Ring, but Morgoth was so powerful in his beginning that he could do it to all Creation. I imagine that is how Tolkien imagined that Satan had perverted the world in to its Fallen state, so that’s where I’d say his mythos came as close to allegory as possible, but I don’t think he viewed it as allegory, he viewed it as the way that Satan had corrupted Creation.
 
Yes his books seem to exist solely to serve his constructed languages…he was a linguist after all. (I love languages too which may explain why I’m such a Tolkien geek! lol)
 
niceatheist said:
But what I do like about Morgoth’s Ring is that it makes clear how Morgoth corrupted the world; how he put forth the larger part of his native strength so that it became a part of the world itself; the reference to the Ring is of course that Sauron would do something similar on a smaller scale with the One Ring, but Morgoth was so powerful in his beginning that he could do it to all Creation. I imagine that is how Tolkien imagined that Satan had perverted the world in to its Fallen state, so that’s where I’d say his mythos came as close to allegory as possible, but I don’t think he viewed it as allegory, he viewed it as the way that Satan had corrupted Creation.
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Honestly I wish he would have written a bit more on Sauron and how he was corrupted. He alluded to the fact that Sauron was definitely attracted to power but also to order…he seemed to have some OCD personality haha! However he was somewhat repentant after Morgoth was finally overthrown.

Sauron was definitely a more interesting character than Melkor ever was, at least to me.
 
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Well, he wasn’t so amiable about the changes to the Mass. He recited the responses in Latin till the end. I can’t confirm, but have read, that he regarded Worship in his writing (elvish) as requiring a different dialect if not language. He definitely would be attending a church approved Latin Mass if alive today.
 
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I’ll wait to see what critics have to say about the movie, but my initial impulse is to ignore it. Either it will be true to his laid-back academic life, which will make a terribly boring movie, or, if they try to make it an interesting movie, they will “adapt” his life story out of all reason.

D
 
I predict the movie will feature his experience in WW1, his romance with Edith, and his participation in the Inklings where they could focus on his friendship with C. S. Lewis.

I heard they filmed some of the movie scenes at Oxford.

I look forward to watching this film.
 
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