[Edward C. Patterson]

Not anymore. The books, separately available for 9.00 each were available as of 6:00 PM EST and o  my Kindle shortly thereafter. Even though I have have read the work annually since High School, which would be 37 times, my Kindle is happy now that the Fantasy bible is where it should belong. I have a dozen LOTR's in print, including some expensive illustrated ones. I have it on audiobook. I would have it tattoo on my . . . well, let's upper thigh, and I have a wide upper thigh, if I didn;t have a low threshold for pain. Hallelujah! And The Hobbit will download authomatically tomorrow. Now if Rowling's publishers will wake up, we could avert the end of the world in 2012 a la Maya caledar.

Edward C. Patterson
a Tolkien disciple

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

I just took a peek at the formatting. Cover (the original cover in fact as published in 1954), front page sports the original first page, complete with tengwa characters. Full Table of Contorts with hyperlinks. I am truly happy. Pippa passes, and All's well with the world.

Edward C. Patterson
Shireling under the skin

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

The hobbit was on preorder for about an hour, and it just arrived on my kindle. Sigh -----

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."

JRRT: (from a tape recording I have of the Don) "And I sid to myself - A Hobbit? Why, what's a Hobbit? And why would he e living in a hole?"

Edward C. Patterson
who is also the oldest male member of the Elijah Wood fan club (A&E Forever) - and Elijah has signed a broadside of The Jade Owl.

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

The Hobbit is a book for children - written as such, and developed from Tolkien's own storytelling to his own children. It was published by pure accident, but that's another tale and I won't bother anyone here about it unless requested . . . I'm a bit of a Tolkien scholar - I even write tengwar "get a life - Ed"). Lord of the Rings, which started out as a sequel and a children's book imploded into Tolkien's lifelong obsession with his Silmarillion writings and his translation of the Finnish sagas. It's not the easiest of reads and a strangely structured novel (Tolkien never claimed to be a novelist), and it is certainly not a children's book. However, LOTR gets into the blood until it becomes your blood. It is so visceral that it has become the most read book of the 20th century (discounting the Bible and, strange bedfellow, Dracula - speaking of blood and visceral).

Edward C Patterson

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

Forster:

Silmarillion is an acquired taste and should be read like . . . The Bible . . .in bits and pieces. Tolkien is cursing me. It's a massive backstory for thousands of novels he never wrote, and the one he did. There are few things as beautiful in the Enlgish language than the opening creation of Silmarillion. Then it get . . . well, biblical, and since it's not religion, only the brave go forward. I mean, in order to understand Silmarillion, you need to read C. Tolkien's 13 volumes. What fun is that except for the Tolkien scholar.

Ed Patterson

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

An interesting tidbit about Lewis and Tolkien. Although the best of friends (until late in their lives, when they became estranged), Tolkien thought the Narnia books "twaddle" and publicly trashed them as unworthy of ink. On the other hand, Lewis wrote the forward in the original FOTR, praising it as manna from heaven. Go figure.

I personally don't quite agree with Tolkien's harsh condemnation of his friends efforts, but I have never liked the Narnia books. When I saw Prince Caspian (the movie) it was one of the few times that the film was far superior to the book, which is structurally flawed and overwrought with allegory. Perhaps it was this Bunyanesque allegory that Tolkien detested. He often stated his dislike for allegory. Then again, he also hated Lewis' space books.

Edward C. Patterson

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

mwvickers:

I think some of Tolkien's frustration with his colleague was their various competitions (wagers, if you will) to complete stories, where Tolkien, the niggler never could, while Lewis accomplished in a flash.

As for tengwar, there's a course on-line in the writing - even a character set and a typing aid. There is also a Quenya course and one in Sandarin (although Tolkien never fully finished Sandarin as a language). Tengwar can be applied however to any spoken language. For example, the tengwar on the LOTR book covers is English written in Tengwar, not Elvish tongue(s). There are people who have mastered quenya (sandarin is as difficult as Cherokee - which I do know), the high speech, but although printed out the course and the various dictionaries (how many trees died for that effort, forgive me Fangorn), its slightly less useful than Cherokee (which I only use in my own literature). Tengwar is fun, especially if you use a calligraphy pen. But, of course, I'm a sinologist by degree and have worked with original 12th century Chinese texts. In fact, there's a reverse similarity between the Chinese written character and tengwar. While you can use tengwar to write any language, Chinese characters serve many different languages. The simplified Chinese character now deployed by the People's Republic is fast destroying that basic inherent pan-literate nature of the Chinese languages. Did you ever ask why in a Chinese movie, there are subtitles in Chinese characters? China has 12 separate languages (they're not dialects - but languages), but while Mandarin (kuo-hua - lit. country speech) is spoken by the actors, the written language is shared by all the languages (wen being the written language), so a person in Shang-hai (Wu-hua - Wu speech) may not understand the actor, but they can follow the bouncing ball, so to speak.

Aren't you glad you asked? I will see if I have the links to the tengwar and elvish sites still, and will post them. I am at work, and those links are on my home computer.

Edward C. Patterson

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

I knew where you were coming from on the discussion. There was no argument in the tone, and I didn;t take it that way.

Namarie
(Now you should know at least that much Quenya) lol

Edward C. Patterson

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

You got it. There's a famous poem (at least in the Tolkien world) called The Namarie. The original Farewell poem in Quenya can easily be found by googling, and it is truly beautiful (the poem, not googling), and written by Tolkien, who was a poet before he was a novelist. He translates his own work and includes it in LOTR in the scene that Peter Jackson calls "The giving of the gifts," but Tolkien calls The Namarie, and Galadrial has the poetic honors. (Even Jackson has her raise her hand to the travelers displaying Adamant and whispering "Namarie"). Tolkien's poetry horripilates. I love the three part eulogy that opens The Two Towers over Boromir's remains. "Where is the horse and rider," which Jackson transposes later in that film for Theoden's pre-battle speech. (I love this stuff, as you can see) I also love when in the Jackson film, the words of one character winds up in the other. Like Aragorn's soliloquy over Eowyn in the House of Healing ("The shadow clinging to the cold morning mist) turned into dialogue for Wormtongue. And Frodo's dream of the glass veil of death when at Tom Bombadil's transformed into Gandalf's explanation of the afterlife to Pippin. And that leads up back to Namarie, which of course is a poem about passing into the farlands and returning to Valinor. (Sigh). Any morning that I can discuss Tolkien and his wonderful work about life and hope is a good morning indeed.

Edward C. Patterson
Frodo Lives

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

I believe that the more you now about Tolkien's life, his letters and the copious content of his son's 13 volume work on his father's evolution, the better the LOTR read will be. For instance, most Tolkien fans know that JRR was in the trenches of WWI at the Battle of the Soame. In the trenches he started writing The Last Cottage, about a mariner arriving at the last Cottage, a haven at the edge of the sea, where he is told an epic legend. Of course, that Cottage evolves over the years into Rivendell. BUT I don't think people realize that when Tolkien describes the Dead Marshes, he's describing the Battle of the Soame - the rain soaked pits with the dead floating face up and ghastly forever to be recalled by Gollum who tells us (or at least the Hobbitses) to "Don't follow the tricksy lights." It's also fun to map the names of rivers and such in LOTR to the local forrest streams and landmarks in and around Oxford. I enjoy discovering various cross references to things like Giants (Ents in old English) and Woses (Forest gremlins). My favorite tidbit is the name Tolkien, which is derived from an old German word Tulkuen, which mean "half-wit," which in Old Welsh is . . .Samwise.To me there's not accident that Samwise closes the work, and that Tolkien patterned the duality between Frodo and Sam as that between a WWI Officer and his enlisted aide-de-camp, and that the roles are merged at the end of the book. Samwise, that is Tulkuen, Gamgee.

I'm puling now.

Ed Patterson

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

Having read the book 37 times, I can say that Jackson had little choice but to present it on screen the way he did. The spirit of Tolkien's themes are intact. Many of the changes were laudable and Tolkien would have applauded them, although he never wanted the books interpreted on film. Much of the added material came from other Tolkien works or the appendices. The Arwen insertions are mostly from the appendices and make sense if you were making a balanced film. The Scouring of the Shoe decision was a good call, as Tolkien never knew how to end he book (and this comment from a person who worships him), and the Old Forest sequences were vestiges of the original draft that Tolkien probably should have revised out with his 90th revision. The multithreading of the telling was necessary since Tolkien's 6 books are single threaded. It as colossal task to smash it altogether on a streamline. The production values matched Tolkien's niggling spirit. On the whole, INHO, the film was 85% Tolkien and 15% Jackson, and I would rather have the film (and my favorite Elijah Wood big blue saucer eyes) than not.

Edward C. Patterson

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

I would have paid $10.00 for each just to have them on my Kindle, where they belong.  Hey come to think of it . . . I did.

Edward C. Patterson
Who prides himself as a Tolkien scholar, which means I live my life a "faerie."

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

What's my bid for a Kindle version of The Philosopher's Stone for $30.00?  (Just kidding). Do send me money, just some prozac.

Edward C. Patterson

 

[Edward C. Patterson]

She dies all alone, because she was now a mortal and had given her passage to Valinor to Froddo. She says to Frodo in her Namarie at Isengard - "All my grace I pass unto you." Of course, the second Isengard scene is not in the film (as it is on the road back to the Shire) but Boyens moves the quote to Arwen in her attempts to save Froddo at the Bruinen.

Edward C. Patterson