/lit/ - Literature

>>23508779
>>23509504
Tolkien > Wagner

Scruton is wrong. Tolkien's ending is superior. The triumph of a fool's hope > gotterdammerung. The Christian ending is superior to the pagan ending.

>>23235039
Good post. People really do need to realize that there's a lot going on in Tolkien that just isn't there in a lot of the later fantasy writers that imitated him and piggybacked off his success. He was certainly a lot smarter, and a lot wiser, than a lot of the later writers that followed in his wake.

"Flotsam and Jetsam" in The Two Towers is a highly underrated chapter, and it features a lot of really fun interaction between Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Merry, and Pippin. It's yet another chapter proving that Merry, and Pippin as well, are actually quite clever and observant, Merry in particular, rather than the comic relief they've been memed into being in popular culture.

I also think it's very effective to recount the Ents' attack on Isengard after the fact, through the words of an observer. The descriptions are really vivid and I think they convey the raw destructive power of the Ents better than actually writing out the action as it took place would have.

It's also fun how delighted Gilmi and even Aragorn is to have a smoke again.

>And what should be the name for this villain who is even more gothic than ole' Sauron? Gazooks, I got it!

Tolkien actually did find some ancient shit in Oxford's archives and his Middle-Earth stuff is at least partly based on something that actually happened in Earth's distant, antediluvian past.

People forget how old Oxford is, and how much stuff has found its way there over the centuries.

>>22260475
>"Touching your cap to the squire may be damn bad for the squire but it’s damn good for you"

Aesthetics, basically. Tolkien loved languages so much that he got extremely autistic on how languages sounded, and preferred some to others.

Did the trope of the past being more wild and magical the further back you go start with lord of the rings or does it have a different origin?

>>21917688
>makes up a world so deep and detailed that it defines a whole new literary Genre just as an excuse to write cheesy poetry
Based.

>If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

>>21736262
Because some people just have a sense of that sort of thing, Anon.

How did Dante have such a vivid imagination without the aid of psychadelics, and such inttense command of Italian poetic language?

Some people are just geniuses and they can make things work.

>>21684284
>Joyce
>Tolkien
>Melville
>Tolstoy

If you want to tell a huge story, on the grandest of scales, it seems to pay to have a bit of the 'tism.

Where do I start with his stuff? The Hobbit? Lord of the Rings? The Silmarillion?

You can be a great right-wing writer but you cannot be a fascist.

All the great right-wing writers, poets, and critics were monarchists at heart. They supported hereditary aristocracy and an established religion. These are the preconditions for being right-wing but also being creative.

>b-but Pound

Pound was fundamentally a monarchist. he was not truly committed to fascism as an ideal.

>>21310936
He found it a bit dry.

>rips off Wagner
how did he get away with it, bros?

I'm In a way he understood Europe's plight better than Spengler, or Evola, or anybody. And he explained it in a normie friendly way

Most successful poet of the 20th century right here.

How did he have such a gigantic imagination?

>appropriates norse mythology for his britbong christcuck fantasy

>Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!
From the Master himself... litfic bros I don't feel so good...

>Frodo: 'I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.'
>Gandalf: 'So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”

Is there a more kino LOTR moment than this?

And so Lord Fiddlymoár, noble king of South shaarting goblins, bestowed upon his sons an heirloom to rue the world. The magical rock of Pringlesnug, and if you owned it, it did uhhh, you know.. it did stuff an... yeah.... You could put it in your pocket if you wanted, or maybe keep it in your hat.... and you could even look at it too if you wanted I guess. But in depths of the earth churned the bitter fires that would counter this splendid stone. By the corrupting machinations of Moärthunzel, the devious prince of the penis monkeys, a bottomless bag was made in which he would hide the stone, forever, for 2 years

Do we appreciate the beauty of Tolkien's world on /lit/? I feel like middle-earth has to be the most impactful setting ever imagined, possibly. I've never seen Christianity transposed and conceptualized onto fantasy so well before. His books make you want to live there.