Re: OT: Super OT: Re: CHAT: JRRT

On Saturday, March 6, 2004, at 01:26 AM, David Peterson wrote:

> Eek!  I started a (somewhat) OT discussion.  Sorry.  :(
I'd have thought it was pretty predictable.

[snip]
> Yeah, I think I was assuming too much when I said this.  I think I was
> assuming that Tolkien meant for his languages to be realistic,
What is it about his conlangs you find unrealistic? This is, after all,
the topic of this list. Where do the languages fall down?

I don't want to be told they are not properly or fully documented. JRRT
was not producing something for this list. We have to take what fragments
of the language are found in the LotR and other books as they are. In what
way are the fragments of these languages unrealistic or not naturalistic
for the setting in which they occur?
I'm seeking enlightenment as I've obviously been mistaken for the last 40
to 50 years.

[snip]
> ....I did give him a chance.  Quite frankly, I was surprised to learn
> that anyone really held him in any kind of esteem.  Maybe that just shows
> how removed I am from the sci-fi/fantasy community.
Eh? Tolkien - Sci-fi?  You have to be kidding - and I damned sure that if
he were alive today, JRRT would not be part of the "sci-fi/fantasy"
community.

Fortunately, I first read the LotR in the late 1950s before the what And
called (rightly IMO) the "ghastly sewage of imitators, plagiarizers and
travestiers that followed him" had got going. It never once occurred to me
that I was reading sci-fi fantasy! It was more like reading Homer - the
words epic & mythology came to mind, certainly not sci-fi.

And epic & mythology, I later learned, is what JRRT had in mind. The work
he really wanted to create was the Silmarillion and, I guess, it was a
failing on his part that he never completed it and it was left to his son,
  Christopher, to put it together in a publishable form after his death.
The inspiration for the Silmarillion was, I understand, in part, at least,
  the Finnish epic the Kalevala.  The LotR is only part of the bigger epic.

[snip]
> .........................  *That's* what I enjoy, and that's what I'm not
> getting from what I call "genre fiction", and I think it's because the
> point is the genre and not the writing.
I'm obviously missing something here. What's on earth has this got to do
with Tolkien? When his books appeared they were originals.  What genre did
the LotR belong to except, maybe, epic myth?

[snip]
> completely different criteria for judging what was publishable and what
> wasn't.  However, what Tolkien gave rise to (and some people have
> commented on this) is a whole host of followers that aren't trying to
> write, but they're trying to write something that can be thought of as
> Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy (plus the Silmarillion and the Hobbit)
> . 
I referred to And's "ghastly sewage of imitators, plagiarizers and
travestiers that followed him" - and I agree with And. Indeed, JRRT was
perturbed the way some people were treating his works in his own life-time.
  I think it is quite likely that if he had foreseen this "ghastly sewage"
he wouldn't have publish the LotR which, in any case, he had to be
persuaded to have published.

> So, whenever I think of Tolkien, there's immediately this negative
> association (i.e., "He's the one that started it all...").  Of course,
> this isn't fair:
You're darn right, it isn't. You might just as well blame A.A. Milne for
the way Disney have treated Winnie the Pooh & company. Those with a little
more discrimination might actually go back to the pre-Disneyfication of
the characters and find out about the originals.

[snip]
>
> The rest of the story is his actual writing.  His writing does not do
> anything for me at all.  It just seems like writing from the era and
> place.  Like Lord Dunsany (well, different era, but the same kind of
> thing).  I place no personal value at all on his writing.  And, I've
> already said that plot isn't going to do it for me (plus, I'm at turns
> bored by the content of, for example, the Lord of the Rings, or
> embarrassed by it, or
I've read it through at least three times now. Yet twice I've tried
Tolstoy's "War and Peace" - and twice failed to make it to the end. Maybe
Tolstoy too is "writing from the era and place" - but I'm humble enough to
think that the fault is not entirely Tolstoy's and certainly do not
belittle Tolstoy's abilities as a writer simply because his writing doesn'
t do much for me.

> offended by it).  Plus, since I can get all the content in a visual
> format now,
If you think that, you're sadly mistaken. All?? Half, maybe - no way
anything like all.

> with the movies (which many have said were as accurate as they could be
> [and I heard that the many scenes that didn't appear were actually filmed
> and reserved for the DVD's...?]),
I've seen the DVDs for the "Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers" -
there's still a lot missing (including some I consider important also).

>  why would I bother reading the books? 
Indeed, why bother reading any fiction? If it has any worth someone's
going to make a film of it some time or other. Let's all just view DVDs!

Trouble is some of us old dinosaurs still actually enjoy reading and don't
like leaving it to film-makers to edit the stories, decide what to include
and not include and put their own twist to the story.
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On Saturday, March 6, 2004, at 12:56 AM, And Rosta wrote:
[snip]

> on which there could be intersubjective agreement. Where Tolkien
> still stands out, even when judged only by his conlang products
> divorced from the historical circumstances of their production,
> is, I feel, in their profound meditation on Europeanness, and
> in their philologicality. Lots of other conlangs are inspired
> by this language or that, but there aren't many that amount to
> a kind of disquisition into the soul of geographical-cultural-
> linguistic-ethnic complex in the way that JRRT's work relates
> to a Europe centred on Mercia.
Yep - that's really got to the nub of the matter.

One sees examples of this or that conlang, and you can see immediately it'
s slav inspired, it's trying to ape Chinese, it's {groan} yet another
Romance-clone etc. OK - someone's going to say Sindarin's a Welsh-clone -
but it ain't. There is a superficial Welshness, may be, but even the
veneer is not Welsh. It would be so easy just to have taken Welsh sound
system and put a conlang behind it. JRRT doesn't. The vowel inventory of
Sindarin & Welsh are different. Look closely, you start seeing Old English
and you soon get into western Europeanness if not complete Europeaness.
Nor is the consonant mutation system of Sindarin that of Welsh or any
other single natlang. It is Sindarin's system and it is coherent in itself.

Quenya, which I much prefer, meets even more And's "disquisition into the
soul of geographical-cultural-
linguistic-ethnic complex".  When I first read Namarie - Galadriel's song
of farewell from Lothlorien - I was struck with the "wow factor" - that
was beautiful (that's before I read the translation).  But it was more
than just the beauty - I felt like a real, living natlang with all the
weight of cultural history behind it even tho I didn't know that history.

>  I say "there aren't many",
> because I am conscious of Tepa as a kind of paean to Uto-
> Aztecan.
Yes, indeed.  When I first stumbled upon Tepa several years ago, I thought
"Wow!!" - again I felt as tho I was confronting the living voice of
cultural-linguistic-ethnic complex.

Very few conlangs have had a similar effect on me. If asked what conlang I
praise most highly, I would be hard put to choose between Quenya and Tepa
(oddly, perhaps, I'd probably put Kinya next - no offense to anyone else
intended :)

> I don't think you can divorce his conlanging from the circumstances
> of its production, though. He was working at a time when -- at
> least until the last decade of his life -- he would have presumed
> (wrongly) that nobody would be interested in his languages and
> (rightly) that many would condemn him for wasting his time on
> such a frivolous and contemptible pastime instead of doing the
> research a professor ought to be doing.
Exactly so.

> That excuses the incompleteness of the languages, especially the gross
> inadequacy of their documentation.
Also he saw the work on these languages as only part of his larger
Silmarillion project - i.e. the "English Kalevala"

> And we need to ask ourselves what sort
> of state our conlangs would have reached if we had been labouring
> in similar circumstances.
Absolutely!

> Nowadays we know not only that we are
> not going to be despised for our Vice, but also that there will
> be a small but appreciative -- impatient, even -- audience for
> our labours, and we also have the stimulus of quotidian
> intercourse with people with similar interests (whereas JRRT had
> to make do with the oafish C.S. Lewis).
Quite so - clearly the main reason that BrSc lay dormant (practically dead)
  from my 20s until I discovered Conlang a few years ago is because there
was no audience & I knew that work on it would be considered by almost
everyone to be a waste of time. The stimulus to revive the project was
discovering the Conlang list.

Ray
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