/lit/ - Literature

I loved the songs in LOTR
What is some English or American poetry similar to that?

>>18257032
reject narnia
return to arda

what is his best song and why is it Song of Durin

Behold the final boss of all pseuds.
>bland reworking of mythologies with little invention of his own, save autistic grammars of conlangs, and no sense of moral complexity
>clunky English, any sense of beauty sacrificed for the turgid exposition of family trees of a subdivision of elves (who didn't see the light)
>works so generic and palatable among plebs that they get made into movies
>works spawn a "window display during summer at Barnes and Noble with acne-scarred teens holding cold Starbucks beverages peering in to observe in passing"- tier subgenre that teems with the same mediocrity of the original pustule.
Name a bigger a pseud. You cannot; you shall not pass.

I feel like Tolkien's early works (The Lost Tales and his earlier poetry in particular) aren't talked about enough.
Anyone here read them? What did you think?

>>14385705
Like other anons said, the series is a combination of a creative genius realizing his vision and one of the most important, horrifying and rapidly evolving times in human history

Tolkien real life romance and marriage is the best love story(fictional or real) of all times.

>At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road, Edgbaston. According to Humphrey Carpenter,

>Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham teashops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would sit and throw sugarlumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table when the sugar bowl was empty. ... With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love.[42]

>His guardian, Father Morgan, viewed Edith as the reason for Tolkien's having "muffed" his exams and considered it "altogether unfortunate"[43] that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman. He prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with her until he was 21. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter,[44] with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.[45]

>In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled:

>I had to choose between disobeying and grieving (or deceiving) a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most fathers ... and "dropping" the love-affair until I was 21. I don't regret my decision, though it was very hard on my lover. But it was not my fault. She was completely free and under no vow to me, and I should have had no just complaint (except according to the unreal romantic code) if she had got married to someone else. For very nearly three years I did not see or write to my lover. It was extremely hard, especially at first. The effects were not wholly good: I fell back into folly and slackness and misspent a good deal of my first year at college.[43]

>On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C. H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the brother of one of her closest schoolfriends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt "on the shelf" and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that, because of Tolkien's letter, everything had changed.

>>13863076

‘I don’t like anything here at all,’ said Frodo, ‘step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.’

‘Yes, that’s so,’ said Sam. ‘And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?’

‘I wonder,’ said Frodo. ‘But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.’

‘No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it – and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got – you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?’

>>13180530
blatantly foreign or foreign-derived words in a setting where those places don't exist
if a character in skyrim (as a /v/ example) calls a sword a katana, even if it blatantly is a katana, i get annoyed because "katana" is a japanese word and japanese doesn't exist in that series

>>13014514

Posted byu/Dalborghetti
1 year ago
J. R. R. Tolkien and G. R. R. Martin
Tolkien is to creative literary genius what Martin is to hack pulp idiocy. They both so far surpass anyone else in their field that they will be remembered 1,000 years from now as a kind of yin and yang of fantasy, a Manichaen duality of speculative letters. For every sublime, luminous beauty that Tolkien has gifted the world, Martin has cursed us with a tedious, banal ugliness. It is unfair to compare the two directly on any one point, because Martin is in every way the anti-Tolkien, patently sterile, parasitical, and inferior, but so much so that he becomes a monument in his own right, and counterbalances Tolkien. Could one exist without the other? Tolkien obviously could. But it is only by the contrast that Martin offers that we can truly appreciate the full depths and heights of Tolkien. Our understanding of Tolkien would be incomplete if Martin had never set pen to page. It is through only the abject failure and futility of Martin that we can approach an apprehension of the true scope and scale of Tolkien's hitherto inconceivable greatness. Perhaps this is what Tolkien had in mind when he wrote about the Music of the Ainur. If Tolkien is a subcreator in the image of Eru, truly Martin is like unto Melkor. It is only reflected in the awfulness of the one that we can fully see the goodness of the other.

Redpill me on Tolkien. Was he a genius or a hack?

Are there any fantasy authors that approach him?

>>11629079

Has anyone ever read the Tales from the Perilous Realms from Tolkien?
Is it worth reading?

>>10855362
>The country needs a reprieve from 30+ years of standardized test prep.
You're preaching to the choir. Standardized testing leaches away what little literary interest I instill within my students.

>wanting to be a dirty catholic

Stop writing allegories

We'll never get to see literary works like those inspired by people who lived through history in the 20th century again, will we?
Would it even be possible for someone to release masterpieces like those inspired by WWI, WWII and even Vietnman today?

>Armageddon happens
>Rise from the dead cuz your Catholic af
>Neckbeards start rushing you
>Apparently your magnum opus has been make into a film
>decide to watch it
>Where the fuck is Tom Bombadil?

It always amazed me that pic related was at the Somme and still wrote scenes of glorious battle against the forces of evil and romantic last stands