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The Lord of the Rings


Kpnut

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No images in this one unfortunately just some musings mostly about The Lord of the Rings (hence the title) shouldn't be a long entry.

 

So I started re-reading The Lord of the Rings recently (starting with the Fellowship of the Ring, obviously) and since it's been so long since I read the books or watched the movies (I was 10/11 when I last read the books and I kinda skimmed them if I'm honest) I'm essentially going into this with a fresh perspective and holy shit reading this book as a 27 year old as opposed to a 10/11 year old is completely different since the book is actually holding my attention now which is making me think that these books are actually for more mature readers not in their content (I actually quite like how Tolkien doesn't go into his character's sex lives especially in the modern day where people are constantly inserting pointless and unnecessary aspects into their stories) but more in how Tolkien writes his stories and the language he uses (I actually find it strange that these books couldn't hold my attention when I was a child as the Hobbit was the first novel I ever read unaided) which can be hard to get through for a child, a teenager probably could but I personally was more into dark fantasy as a teenager (and also I really liked Raymond E. Feist's work so I didn't actually have time to re-read Tolkien if I wanted to as I was too busy consuming every one of his novels I could get my hands on) do here I am at 27 getting increasingly tired of modern authors and so I'm going back to the classics.

 

Another point I noticed with the books is that they differ quite drastically from the movies in some parts (or at least the Fellowship of the Ring does) which is understandable, if everything in the books were adapted to the movies you'd end up with a movie that's about 8 hours. for example in the movie Frodo's journey takes place pretty much the day after Bilbo's 111th birthday whereas in the books it takes place 17 years after Bilbo's birthday, there's also Frodo's meeting with the travelling Elves and his meeting with Tom Bombadil that aren't present in the movies. The former isn't a big deal but the latter could have done with being in the movie as Tom Bombadil was a character Tolkien originally created for his children.

 

Finally I also noticed that Tolkien will use brackets for his parenthesis, something I've noticed other authors whose works I've read don't do they prefer using commas for parenthesis which makes sense in dialogue but there's no reason not to use them out of dialogue. Although Tolkien does use them in dialogue as well, I'm no great writer so I might not be qualified to talk on this but it does genuinely puzzle me as to why so many authors seem to have an aversion to brackets. In my own attempts at writing I use them to add in extra pieces of unimportant information.

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Using commas instead of parenthesis is more of an American grammatical thing. We Brits are painfully aware of Americans using commas instead of many punctuation signs that we would normally use in the same situation (even if we can't remember which ones we actually should be using at the time due to being overwhelmed with American literature).  It's particularly noticeable in old rpg handbooks from the 80's. You can generally tell which side of the Atlantic they came from based on the amount of commas used (we're looking at you mr sea of commas Gygax :)).

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