Amph One Thread To Rule Them All: The Rings of Power + The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings Trilogies

The Fall of Gondolin to be the last Tolkien book to be published by Christopher:
https://winteriscoming.net/2018/08/...r-tolkiens-stories-published-son-christopher/

 

He's in his mid-nineties. I think he's done plenty.

 

True, but it's still the end of an era...

 

He will be succeeded by his nephew, J. R. R. Tolkien Jr., Jr.

 

Maybe J. R. R. Tolkien Jr., Jr. will be hired as a consultant on the Amazon series.

 

I'm not sure if there's much left to even publish. The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, the Fall of Gondolin are kind of just composed of everything that came before.

 

True that. Somehow Chris Tolkien managed to extend his father's output another forty years, which is incredible and much appreciated, but it has to end sometime, and it's kind of fitting that it ends with his (long overdue!) retirement.

 

So you guys might remember this more than me, because I'm only a passing Tolkien fan and don't religiously follow this stuff as much as Star Wars:

Reading The Fall of Gondolin (which 100 pages is in excellent; I like the way Christopher Tolkien went about assembling this one and Alan Lee's art is top-notch as always), the narration seems pretty negative on the idea that the orcs/goblins we once elves. This reminds me of a disagreement some time back, some years ago, where this came up... I feel like maybe Chris Tolkien raised this before? I remember reading it somewhere, and I'm pretty sure it involved Chris, but I can't find it in the sea of Tolkienfandom online.

I know JRR, like George Lucas, changed his mind about things a lot, and the Wiki page reaffirms my memory that the Silmarillion was sort of vague ("maybe it's this, maybe it's that, dunno"). But so far twice now in the first 100 pages of FoG Chris is like "Some people say the orcs were once elves. And that is a no." Perhaps JRR wrote that and Chris is just repeating it, but I wonder if it was something he added for clarification? I don't know how much he adjusts when he transcribes this stuff. It sounded like a lot of this came from a document his mother recorded from JRR some time back based on the prologue, but the narration in this book is so flawless that I imagine Chris has taken pains to clean it up and change stuff here and there.

So yeah, if anyone remembers Chris having an issue with the orcs-are-elves bit, I'm curious. I feel like it's a memory I definitely had, but it was a long time ago. And it might not have been Chris -- maybe someone else close to JRR?

 

Love the Death Star as the Eye of Sauron.

Dooku would be Saruman (for obvious reasons), with Sidious as the human form of Sauron?

 

I want this on my wall.

Well I haven't read The Fall of Gondolin, so bear with me, but my understanding is that the origin of the orcs is one of the things Tolkien was never able to fully settle on while he was alive. I know that Morgoth is explicitly unable to create life in the way that Eru can, and can only twist and corrupt it. I also know that Tolkien was always uncomfortable with the idea of an inherently or always evil race, and implied that there could be good orcs somewhere. However the orcs as corrupted elves explanation is the most prominent and accepted one and what I think most people go by.

 

i was going to answer similarly. the wiki article basically says the same thing, but goes into a lot of interesting detail.

 

I didn't know about the transformed beats theory. That's interesting, though I don't think I like it as a real possibility. I think the orcs have to have some degree of independence from their masters.

 

I prefer the transformed beets theory, wherein nature's candy, the delicious beet, was corrupted by Melkor to create the orcs, the least delicious of the races of Middle Earth.

 

Well I'm only a hundred pages in so maybe he'll explain it more later. It seems odd because he's done it twice now, like a wink-wink hey those orcs? Not elves. He might be leading somewhere with it. This book is a lot more like a lengthy scene-by-scene narrative of certain parts from the Silmarillion than the fragments of drafts in Children of Hurin and Beren and Luthien (more CoH than B&L). And Sil covered the orc/elves connection more than anyone, so maybe he'll (er, they'll) get to it.

Beet theory is a good explanation of whatever it was we saw in the LotR films.

 

Not all the orcs where elves once, for thousands of years after there first appearance, they did breed amongs each other. I wished in the hobbit trilogy Peter Jackson would go into details explaining the difference between orcs and goblins, even thou in the books they are one in the same.

I just hope the tv show does not become a sjw project, diversity is not the issue.

 

See my signature.

 

OK we can agree to disagree, done making my point. But I still want to talk about my Orcs and goblins reference

 

Agree with first paragraph, *likes*

Reads second paragraph, *unlikes*

 

Thanks and everybody is entitled to there opinion. Lets also talk about the new lord of the ringd online universe game similar to Warcraft.

 

I thought the most reasonable interpretation of orcs by JRRT was twofold:
1) that the original 'orcs' were lesser Maiar that joined with him - sort of a few steps down from balrogs.
2) When humans appeared, those that fully fell under Morgoth's control were infused with his corruption and became orcs. The original orcs became their leaders.

It's hard to fathom immortal orcs, or that they would be sent to Mandos upon their death. Other sources seem to indicate that he could never full subjugate elves, so it seems unlikely. (The discussions that Christopher has on the topic, collecting the changing views of JRRT, was - I believe - in Morgoth's Ring or The War of the Jewels).

As for The Fall of Gondolin, there's something beautiful about Christopher Tolkien's final book being about his father's original story regarding Middle-Earth.

 

Future Balrogs

 

Let's all tip our hats to Christopher Tolkien and his incredible work ethic and dedication. The man has continued to preserve and promote his father's work forty five years after his death. That's just incredible.

He deserves his rest and retirement-I only hope future stewards of the legendarium are as passionate, prudent, and dedicated as he was.

 

I’ll just leave this here...