This post is many days after the fact, but I didn’t want to leave the finale of Season 1 of The Rings of Power unremarked upon! I’ve been taking the time to sit with the episode for a while in my head, as well as the season as a whole, before finally writing up my thoughts about it.
So here are those thoughts.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Crossposted from annathepiper.org. Original post: https://www.annathepiper.org/2022/11/01/much-belated-the-rings-of-power-1-8-alloyed/
I know, the finale aired last night! But I didn’t get around to doing a post about the previous episode, so here’s that. I’ll cover the finale in the post after this one.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Crossposted from annathepiper.org. Original post: https://www.annathepiper.org/2022/10/15/the-rings-of-power-1-7-the-eye/
Got a lot to think about from this episode, and on the verge of episode 7 airing, I still have a lot to think about!
( Read the rest of this entry » )Crossposted from annathepiper.org. Original post: https://www.annathepiper.org/2022/10/06/the-rings-of-power-1-6-udun/
Found episode 5 of this session shakier than previous ones, for issues I’ll get into after the fold–because I’m finding my ability to not get cranky about Tolkien canon being broken challenged hard by this episode. (But there are also several high points I’ll talk about too!)
( Read the rest of this entry » )Crossposted from annathepiper.org. Original post: https://www.annathepiper.org/2022/09/29/the-rings-of-power-1-5-partings/
Yeah I better get this posted before episode 5 airs tomorrow, shouldn’t I! :D
But holy crap this episode. Other than one weirdly edited bit at the end, and a distinct lack of Harfoots, this one was stupendous.
Spoilers and portents behind the fold!
( Read the rest of this entry » )Crossposted from annathepiper.org. Original post: https://www.annathepiper.org/2022/09/23/the-rings-of-power-1-4-the-great-wave/
This post is several days after the fact, but I kind of needed several days to ruminate on what this episode dropped on us!
Spoilers behind the fold.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Crossposted from annathepiper.org. Original post: https://www.annathepiper.org/2022/09/13/the-rings-of-power-1-3-adar/
Since episodes 1 and 2 of Rings of Power were released simultaneously last week, we watched the first one on Saturday night and the second one Sunday. I continue to be intrigued!
Invoke the appropriate ancient dwarven rite to access the spoilers beyond the fold.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Crossposted from annathepiper.org. Original post: https://www.annathepiper.org/2022/09/06/the-rings-of-power-1-2-adrift/
My household watched the first episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power tonight. Spoiler-free picoreview: I liked it!
Fair warning to my fellow Tolkien nerds, particularly if you know anything about The Silmarillion: yes, it is absolutely taking liberties with the way events played out from the First Age leading into the Second, particularly in regards to Galadriel.
However, it’s taking liberties in ways that so far I don’t actually mind. It’s helped that I very deliberately set my expectations here to “very pretty, very expensive Tolkien fanfic”, to give myself permission to not be bugged by any discrepancies between this story and what Tolkien actually wrote.
It also helps a lot for me to keep in mind the quote out of Tolkien’s own letters, about how his vision for Middle-Earth was as a mythic milieu with room for stories by other creators. The key word here being myth.
If you know anything about Greek mythology, you’ll know that that entire mythos contradicts itself all over the place. And with that in the back of my brain to establish precedent, I’m pretty at peace with the idea of other Middle-Earth stories contradicting Tolkien’s canon… as long as they hold true to the spirit of what Tolkien wrote, and do not actively break the world.
So far, as of episode 1, they do not appear to have done so. So far, so good. We’ll see how this holds up as we proceed through season 1!
Some spoilers behind the fold!
( Read the rest of this entry » )Crossposted from annathepiper.org. Original post: https://www.annathepiper.org/2022/09/04/the-rings-of-power-1-1-a-shadow-of-the-past/
Geez, this post was sitting in my drafts section of my WordPress for ages. Oops. Let’s see if I can get this finally posted, okay?
Acquired from Kobo during the end of 2020:
Pre-ordered from Kobo during 2020:
Acquired from Amazon during 2020:
Acquired from Kobo during 2021:
Acquired from Amazon during 2021:
Acquired as birthday gifts this very weekend as I write this post:
161 total for 2020. 11 so far for 2021.
Crossposted from annathepiper.org. Original post: http://www.annathepiper.org/2021/01/24/rest-of-2020-and-into-2021-ebook-roundup-post/
Welcome back to my Bilingual Silmarillion Reread! Previous posts in this series are Part 1 and Part 2.
In this post, I’ll begin talking about the Quenta Silmarillion, the part of the book that deals with the First Age of Middle-Earth. This is the section that has all my major favorite bits, too. But I’ll get to those in due time!
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbird and I joined the Planet Fitness gym down the hill from our house, and I've been doing weekend workouts there, in the name of trying to get my metabolism and weight back under control. Also because next year, Big Fish will be moving offices and this will directly impact my commute. I'll still be taking the same bus, but will have a much shorter distance to walk from where I need to get off to where the office will actually be. So I won't have the nice long walk anymore as daily exercise. Therefore a new exercise regime is called for.I finished my re-read of The Silmarillion over the long weekend, so here are some more thoughts about what I noticed this time through!
Tolkien Re-Used Names, Like, A LOT
Here is a short list of names I totally recognized from The Lord of the Rings, and which still to this day cause me a little cognitive dissonance when I see them outside that story:
And hell, even within this specific book, the name Míriel shows up twice: once as the mother of Fëanor, and once as the last ruling Queen of Númenor.
The First Age Was Surprisingly Short
A big chunk of the book is devoted to the Quenta Silmarillion proper, which is the part of it easily conflated with the overall title. It’s in this part that the big highlights of the book happen–notably, the tale of Beren and Lúthien, and the tale of Turin. And, of course, the First Age is all about the Silmarils, as well as the smackdown eventually finally delivered to Morgoth.
But given this, if you look at the overall timeline of the world of Arda (which is what the world Middle-Earth is on is actually called), the First Age is surprisingly short compared to the other ages of the world. It’s only about 590 years long, compared to the multiple thousands of years that lead up to the First Age, and how the Second and Third Ages are both over three thousand years in length.
Yep, Still Love Me Some Beren and Lúthien
This really goes without saying, but I’ll say it again anyway. 😀 Here are the things about which Lúthien has zero fucks to give:
And she is delightful from start to finish. It was a joy to be reminded as well about how friggin’ powerful she is–she uses her “arts” to grow her own hair Rapunzel-style to break out the high tree-house her father locked her up in, and then for good measure takes that hair, slaps a sleep-spell on it, and makes herself a cloak that she uses a bunch later to take down anybody in her way.
And she pretty much sings Morgoth’s crown right off his head, since she knocks him out with her power. Fuck yeah, daughter of Mélian!
Speaking of Mélian
I noticed and appreciated her more throughout this re-read. She’s on record as being the only one of the Maiar to fall in love with one of the Children of Iluvatar, enough that she bothered to physically incarnate herself so that she could be with Thingol. She is also on record as being the major power in Middle-Earth that Morgoth actually fears. Which is impressive, given that he’s a Vala on the order of Manwë himself, and she’s a Maia, and in theory of “lesser” degree.
Shoutout to the Women of the Silmarillion in General
This time through I noticed way more women having active things to do than I really remembered. Mélian and Lúthien are obvious, as is Nienor/Niniel in the tale of Turin and Elwing in the tale of Eärendil. But there are other women of note scattered all throughout the story, and who, even if they’re only passingly mentioned, clearly have an impact on the events that unfold:
And Emeldir as well as Galadriel are examples of Tolkien’s making his bolder females get nicknamed in ways that invoke masculinity–Galadriel’s mother names her Nerwen, “man-maiden”, in reference to her height and strength. Part of me is irritated at this conflation of strength and masculinity, I must admit, and yet!
Let it also be noted that before it finally fell, some of Númenor’s rightful rulers were in fact women.
Tuor and Idril Don’t Get Nearly Enough Camera Time
After the awesomeness of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, the second recorded joining of an Elf and a Man, Tuor and Idril, seems regretfully anticlimactic. Tuor basically shows up in Gondolin, hangs out for a few years, and gets permission to wed Idril, Turgon’s daughter. But there’s very little there to show why these two characters loved each other to begin with, and Idril’s marrying Tuor is mostly contrasted to how she doesn’t want to marry Maeglin.
Plus, at least for me as a reader, their story is eclipsed by the fall of Gondolin in general. Maeglin’s part of this I get, just because it’s his being captured by Morgoth’s forces that leads to Gondolin’s location being revealed. Maeglin’s motivations aren’t exactly complicated, but in contrast to him, Tuor and Idril are even less well sketched out. And that does a disservice, I feel, to the second recorded joining of Elf and Man EVER, not to mention the parents of Eärendil.
I do at least like that Idril had some agency in encouraging Tuor to make a secret way out, in case disaster befell. (Which it did.) And I also like that Tuor and Idril apparently eventually went into the West and were allowed to stay, despite Tuor being mortal, which I had forgotten. Tuor managed to get himself counted among the Firstborn, which, well done there.
Elwing: Also Pretty Awesome
Eärendil gets a lot of the press in his tale, as well as repeated mentions over in The Lord of the Rings–but re-reading his tale this time through, I had renewed appreciation for his wife Elwing. This woman, rather than give up the Silmaril she possesses to Fëanor’s remaining sons, tosses herself into the sea to escape. At which point she is transformed into a great white bird, which lets her fly to Valinor and eventually catch up with her husband.
Thus she gets to carry on the tradition of women being awesome in the family tree of Beren and Lúthien, as seems entirely befitting for the mother of Elrond.
More to Come
All of these thoughts are for events in the First Age–but I’ve got more to come regarding events in the Second Age. So I’ll put that into another post!
Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
So since I have this lovely new Beren and Luthien book to go through, it seemed to me that before I dive into it, it would behoove me to remind myself of the version of the tale I’m most familiar with: i.e., the one that appears in The Silmarillion. Which, of course, means that it’s TOTALLY time for a re-read of same!
(By which I mean, I’m just going to read it again–not actually do a Reread series of posts–at least for now. I may change my mind later! Persons who want to argue in favor of me doing a formal Silmarillion Reread, you are welcome to do so. I may hold on this though until I can score a French edition!)
I’ve just barely started but here are a few things I have been reminded of, or never really noticed before, now that I’m going through the book again:
The ebook’s got some formatting issues for chapter titles, which is a bit irritating; I may have to crack into the ebook and fix those titles, just for my personal reading satisfaction.
Also, given that I’m about to go to Quebec next month, I may have to see if I can hunt down a French translation! Because I have French translations now of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, so clearly I need one of The Silmarillion for my collection. 😀
Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
Noting this as I actually bought a couple of print books from Third Place the other day–things that fall into the general category of Authors Who Are Absolutely Vital For Me to Have In Print. The people for whom a lack of access to their books would make me sad, whether due to power outage or loss of reading devices or what have you.
The first of these purchases was In the Labyrinth of Drakes, Book Four in Marie Brennan’s excellent Memoirs of Lady Trent series. I’ve actually already read this and I did indeed love it immensely, but I definitely wanted the Lady Trents in print. And this one finally was available in trade now that the hardcover of Book Five is out.
Beren and Luthi
Much more importantly, I acquired a hardback copy of the new Tolkien release, Beren and Luthien!
Y’all know my love of Tolkien, and you’ll probably also remember that I’m particularly fond of the tale of Beren and Luthien, which is hands down my favorite thing in the whole of The Silmarillion.
Relatedly, when Christopher Tolkien released the excellent Children of Hurin version of the other big tale from The Silmarillion–the tale of Turin Turambar–I nabbed that in hardback. I’ve said before how I had to have that in hardback just for the gorgeous illustrations, and out of general appreciation of the beauty of the work that went into putting that book together as an object.
So given all of these things together, you better believe I had to jump on the Beren and Luthien release.
Fair warning though to fellow Tolkien fans who may be covetously eying this release too: it is not cheap. (I got the hardback for $30.00, and while I could have gotten it for substantially cheaper at Barnes and Noble, I made a point of buying it from Third Place instead because local-to-my-house indie bookstores are love.) If you want that hardback and you’re more budget-pinched than I am, be aware you’ll get it for much cheaper on Amazon or with B&N, both of whom are showing prices for it around $18.
Likewise, the ebook is stupidly expensive right now. It’s clocking in at $16.99, and that price is the main reason I haven’t already nabbed this release as well in digital form. Do not mistake me: I will also be buying this book in digital form, because a) Tolkien pretty much would top the list of authors I require in both formats, and b) under no circumstances am I taking the hardback out of the house. But that price annoys me, as it’s yet another indicator of the return of agency pricing, and I have an ongoing gripe with the publishing industry seeming bound and determined to piss off digital readers by making ebooks as expensive as possible.
I’m genuinely torn, though, as to whether Tolkien is worth it to me to shell out for the ebook at that price anyway; if any author merits doing that out of all my favorites, it’s Tolkien.
Either way, the ebook edition will eventually be joining my collection too. And that’ll likely be the way I read it, just because I do most of my reading on commutes.
For now, that’s two additional book purchases to add to the tally this year, which has been quite small. (I’m actually trying to make an effort to put a dent in the backlog of books I actually own, doncha know.) 17 for the year.
Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
Finally, another post in the Bilingual Lord of the Rings Reread series! This post provides my commentary on the French edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, and specifically on Chapter 1.
As I get into the bilingual commentary on these chapters, I’m going to be following a similar format to what I’m doing in the Harry Potter Reread posts. So I’ll be borrowing many of the same headers I’m using on that series!
Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
Welcome back to my reread of The Lord of the Rings! As I’ve posted in my previous post, this reread is now bilingual, since I’ve been regretting not doing that properly for a while. And since I do have French editions of this trilogy, though not German editions yet, so it’s bilingual instead of trilingual.
To refresh your all’s memories, my commentary post on the Prologue of Fellowship is here. To this, I will now add some commentary about what it says in the French edition! I’m going to do this similarly to how I’ve been doing the Harry Potter reread posts, limiting the lingual commentary a bit so that I can keep the length of the posts down to something manageable.
So here we go! This is mostly going to be a bunch of commentary about various worldbuilding terms, given that they’ll be important once we get into the story proper. Once I’m past the prologue I’ll kick into the format I want to use for these posts.
Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
Y’all may have noticed that I’ve been dragging my feet on doing the Lord of the Rings reread posts. This is because I’ve also got the trilogy in French, and I’ve been vexed at myself for not doing a proper bilingual reread since I’ve got the French versions available!
So I’m waking these posts up again, but I’m going to do it moving forward with covering what I can pick up out of the French editions as well. I’m going to format the posts similarly to what I’m doing in the Trilingual Harry Potter Reread–i.e., limiting the lingual discussion to “five general things noted in the French edition” and “five worldbuilding things noted”. This will be in the interests of trying to keep the post lengths down to as reasonable a length as possible, and also to help me actually try to do them in a reasonable time frame.
My next post is going to be a catchup to get to the point where I left off in the English edition, which is to say, the hobbits are about to meet Tom Bombadil.
For the interested, my French edition of The Fellowship of the Ring is this one, or at least has this cover; the ISBN on my copy doesn’t match this one on Goodreads:
Now that I’ve completed another rewatch of the movies, though, I am now totally in the mood for this. So let’s do this, shall we? Next post is about to drop!
(And the only reason this isn’t a full Trilingual Reread, by the way, is that I don’t own copies of the trilogy in German. YET.)
Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
I am quite behind on doing this, but I’ve finally gotten a chance to watch all of the Extended Edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. And I can report with distinct satisfaction that it is definitely a more coherent cut of the movie than the one which was released in the theaters, which makes a clean sweep of my preferring the Extended Edition of all six of Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies.
As a general reminder my review posts for the theatrical cut are here and here, two posts since I saw it twice in the theaters. And by and large my overall opinion of the movie hasn’t changed much. So I’m going to focus instead on what the EE version brings to the table in this post.
Obviously, there are spoilers in this post for both versions of the movie, so if you haven’t seen Five Armies at all and you think you might want to, you might want to hold off reading this until then. Spoilers behind the fold!
Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
It has been far too long since I’ve done a post in the LotR Reread, and it’s high time I did something about that. I’ll admit to some reluctance to slog through Tom Bombadil, mind you. But still, no particular excuse for letting it go this long! So let’s get to it, shall we?
Back at the end of Chapter 4, we’d finally gotten Merry to show up, bringing all four of the main hobbit characters on camera at last. And as Chapter 5 opens, the good Meriadoc takes charge of things and brings the others right into…
… an infodump about the history of Buckland. Mercifully, though, it’s a pretty short infodump even by Tolkien’s standards. And I rather do like the namecheck of Gorhendad Oldbuck. Which is a pretty magnificent name, I gotta say. It sounds exactly like the name a hobbit patriarch and founder of a family line should have. Though I also wonder what he got called when he was young. Gorry? Henny? Also curious as to why he renamed himself Brandybuck, unless it’s for the obvious reason of “little dude liked his brandy”, which would after all be very hobbit-like.
Then we cut back to actual action. Comparatively speaking. We briefly have Sam wishing that “Mr. Frodo could have gone on living quietly at Bag End”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: oh my dear Sam. You have no idea.
Worth also noting, particularly after the last couple years that I spent re-reading The Hobbit: it’s Sam here wishing that Mr. Frodo could have stayed at home, not Frodo himself. Which is a bit of a refreshing change of pace from Bilbo constantly wishing he was back in the Shire, innit?
And why hello there Gollum. I’d forgotten that Gollum, following Frodo and the Ring, shows up this early in the story–my last several visits to the tale being in movie form rather than with the actual text. Not that Frodo actually seems to know who or what is following; only that something is. Nor can I blame him for not cluing in, given that it has after all been some years since his last conversation with Gandalf. He can be excused for not immediately realizing that Gollum could still be at large. Especially since he’s had much more recent reason to be wary of Black Riders, enough so that he’s anxious about whether horses can cross the Brandywine.
Though ha, spoke too soon. As soon as the hobbits reach Frodo’s new digs at Crickhollow, Frodo does in fact wish he was really getting to stay there.
I cannot resist my inner MST3K voice putting in “no one will be admitted during the exciting bathing sequence”, ’cause that part of me’s all cripes, can we get on with the actual plot already? Still, it’s pretty charming thinking of Pippin singing at the top of his lungs while he’s taking a bath. Particularly now that Pippin’s voice will be forever provided by Billy Boyd in my head.
One big thing, though, saves this chapter from being useless to me–Merry and Pippin both being all “well duh of course we knew you were about to leave the Shire.” This is not something we get in the movies, which play Merry and Pippin as being way less on top of things at the start of the journey. Movie!Merry and Movie!Pippin pretty much stumble into the quest. Book!Merry and Book!Pippin, on the other hand, are very much on top of things. Merry even knows about the Ring. And to top it all off, Sam is totally in on the plotting, and the three of them together are no match for Frodo’s wobbly resolve to head off all by himself.
We get a second little song in this chapter, and this one’s explicitly a callback to the Misty Mountains song from The Hobbit, and explicitly set to the same tune. Which means that now of course I try to read it and set it to the tune that the Hobbit movies used. I’m not entirely sure that works for me, either. The lyrics don’t quite scan to that melody, and the melody itself is too somber to quite fit the mood of the scene as written.
There are links on YouTube for the soundtrack from the 1977 Hobbit movie, including one for the Misty Mountains song, and that one scans better to the lyrics Tolkien gives in this chapter. Still, that tune is also rather somber given the determined cheer of Merry and the others pledging their assistance to Frodo.
But then, you could also make an argument for a somber tune being appropriate, too–because it’s not like Frodo’s holding back on warning the others that dangerous shit is about to go down. Hell, we even get a dire hint that poor Fatty Bolger isn’t going to be immune from danger either, and he’s the one on tap to stay behind and keep up the pretense that Frodo is inhabiting his new house.
We close with Frodo deciding that he’s setting out at first light in the morning, and everyone retiring to bed. Frodo has a disquieting dream, one which includes a tall white tower. It’s an interesting question as to what that tower is supposed to represent; googling for it, I find multiple links wherein Tolkien fandom discusses this very question. One such is on the Forums at TheOneRing.net here.
Next up: Chapter 6, in which the Old Forest demonstrates that yeah, actually, it’s about as scary as Fatty Bolger was making it out to be.
Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
As y’all know, I am partial to the whole Tauriel/Kili romance in the Hobbit movies, and I have this idea for a short piece in my head wherein Tauriel must go to Dís and bring her news of the deaths of both her sons and her brother. I’m seeing this as perhaps Tauriel’s last act before she bails for Valinor—or perhaps thinks she’s about to bail for Valinor. I can totally see her and Dís teaming up together to roam Middle-Earth for a while in shared grief and companionship. It could even be a parallel to Legolas and Gimli, later. And mostly I just have an urge to write about female dwarves.
But while I’m on the topic of Middle-Earth fanfic, Dara and I got into discussing a potential AU last night after I finished rewatching the first half of The Two Towers. I was struck anew by the scene in which Sméagol banishes his darker Gollum-self—and how for a very short time, he’s just so happy. “Sméagol is free!”
And then of course it goes back to hell after Faramir’s men are so harsh to him. Gollum becomes the dominant personality once more. But Dara and I wondered: what if that hadn’t happened? How would the scene at Mount Doom played out differently?
I can see Frodo maybe beating down poor Sam just before he proclaims, “The Ring is mine!”—but then, Dara and I decided, Sméagol would put a hand on his shoulder to stop him.
And he says, “I know. Let the Precious burn.”
I. Not we. Because now that I have finished my reread of the books, I am reminded that Tolkien did indeed use pronouns as a marker of Sméagol’s mental state. And in this version of the story, he would have become more stable than he’d been in centuries.
The Eagles would have had three small travelers to rescue, not two.
Dara and I think that perhaps Sméagol could not have handled going back to the Shire, and that perhaps Gandalf would have taken him into his care—properly this time, not as a prisoner. And as he is finally free of the Ring, I see Sméagol learning to welcome the touch of sunlight once more. Remembering the taste of fresh bread. Maybe even being able to touch things made by the elves without pain.
But Sméagol, much, much older than Bilbo, would quickly start to age and draw near to his death. And he would have been on that final boat to Valinor, ancient, wizened, and so fragile that he might not even have been able to walk. Perhaps Gandalf would have carried him.
Yet he would have been granted a place on that boat. And a place in Valinor. Because at the end of the day, he too was a Ringbearer. And he paid his penance for the slaying of Déagol, for all the many long, dark years that he kept the Ring under the Misty Mountains.
As the Fourth Age began and the War of the Ring passed into the legends of Men, Sméagol’s name would have been spoken alongside that of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. He would have been hailed as a hero for having kept the Ring from Sauron—secret and safe, for five hundred years, even though it nearly destroyed his mind.
Don’t get me wrong; I would not trade a single word of the narrative as actually written.
But this makes for one hell of an AU. Sméagol. Sing his name, sons and daughters of the free peoples of Middle-Earth. Remember him with honor.
Mirrored from angelahighland.com.
branchandroot