I can't help but see a parallel between your conclusion and the philosophies of absurdism and existentialism. Albert Camus once said something like this : "the universe and our lives don't have any inherent meaning, and this is why we have free will. But people are scared of this free will because they fear to face the void that is the absurdity of it all, so they believe in big ideas of the ultimate purpose of life, the afterlife and so on. In actuality, it is our duty to be free, to have the strength to face the absurdity and set our own ultimate purpose, thus not letting ourselves be lifeless cogs of society dictated by our surroundings". In short, it's acknowledging nihilism but fighting the pessimism that comes with it. This 'fear of the void' that we fill with religion and society is in my opinion the same as the frustration we feel when we try to convince ourself that lotr doesn't have any inherent meaning, and we fill this frustration with allegories the same what that we fill nihilism with religion and society. And when you talk about making your own allegories about you grandfather and stuff, it's like Camus creating his own meaning and purpose in life. To sum everything up, I think Sartre's quote "existence precedes essence" applies to fiction as well as to reality. Our free will prevails over any purpose imposed by the outside world, and our interpretation of a piece of art prevails over any explanation given by the author or anyone else.
If you want a 'literate' view of something you love, be careful what you wish for. I had the misfortune of studying Tolkein too young at school and while I can write a dissertation on its themes and mythology and why it's an important work of literature, I also found it tedious and it put me off fantasy forever. I can appreciate it but I can't enjoy it. I feel robbed because his stories are so magical to so many people. I totally understand why he said he hates allegorical readings of his work. It's purely academic, in the worst sense of the word.
When Tony gilroy was talking about how he was inspired to write Andor, in a nutshell he just said he was a history buff so he took a bunch of historic events and applied how they functioned to his story. A perfect example of applicability over allegory. The way I interpret Lord of the Rings, is just be nice when you can, and strong when you have to be. A simple message.
I think the issue with trying to find allegories is that it contains universal truths. Take the crack of doom for example, what we see is a string of failures, our hero gives into temptation, loses his finger and the ring to gollum, and then gollum loses his footing, distracted by finally having the ring. What we have there aren’t allegories, but commentaries on the nature of good and evil. Without bilbo and Frodo showing gollum mercy, Sauron wins, so there’s statements there about the value in mercy and gentleness We have even the most pure hearted characters falling for temptation, which looking at Tolkien’s catholic upbringing, is exactly how believers talk about sin. No human is sinless, we all fall to temptations sometimes, and we see an example of that. And then in the struggle between Frodo and gollum, all driven by the lust for the ring that it itself creates, we see evil destroy itself. None of these are exact allegories, but throughout the story we see examples of virtue and truth’s about good and evil. There’s something innately human in it that we all resonate with. Or at least that’s my take But I will say, I 100% believe Tolkien drew the scouring of the shire from his experiences coming back from war.
I have the feeling that you investigated what everyone else considered allegory without investigating what Tolkien means when he says allegory. In my opinion, backed up by what Tolkien is complaining about when he writes that forward or writes in letters, that Tolkien is talking about allegories like Nathanial Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown. A story where there is a one-to-one connection between things in real life and things in the story. But that doesn't preclude Tolkien using the Dead Marshes to show people the horrors that follow in the outcome of war, influenced and informed by his own experiences in WW1. It isn't allegory to write about dead men mired in mud and water when the author has seen dead men mired in mud and water for himself. That's just writing about what you know. Just because The Lord of the Rings isn't an allegory doesn't mean that there is no meaning intended by the author behind a little man doing great things. Just because the ring isn't the bomb doesn't mean it can't represent the corrupting influence of power. There are messages in the story. There have to be to make stories engaging. But what Tolkien is saying (as far as I can tell) is that you can take those messages however you feel like. It isn't that he didn't put those messages into the story. It's just that he isn't telling you how to interpret them. You can do that for yourself. The ring isn't an allegory since power doesn't have its own will. Power isn't trying to get into any one being's hands. The ring is doing that. But on the other hand, Saruman wants the ring because it represents power to him. Gandalf and Galadriel both refuse the ring because its power greatly tempts them. They see it as power, so the audience is also meant to see it as power. But again power isn't worn and it doesn't have a will of its own, so it isn't allegory. I think that taking several people's definition of allegory and applying it to Tolkien makes a person get lost in the weeds. There are a lot of author-intended messages in the story. Some of them, like the idea of "lesser men," you might want to ignore. There are some that you may think are author-intended, and they aren't. But if they're good messages, I don't see any harm in that. Getting your own meaning out of his story is what Tolkien explicitly wanted.
"Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good." Sorry if that's become a hackneyed meme now, but I can't think of another quote that so accurately sums up the general malaise of the 21st century western experience.
LOTR strongly conveys the theme that the small, simple things in life are what matter the most, which is why two small hobbits motivated by the love of their home were able to overthrow an all-powerful dark lord. A theme isn’t the same thing as a 1 to 1 equivalence with real life events, though.
It's basically Abstraction vs Immanence. The common way to analyze anything in the world, is to abstract it from itself, and then break that abstraction into parts and relating them to other more academical or theoretical models. Immanence, on the other hand, is when you analyze something on its own merits, without doing the abstracting part. So in film analysis, you can take the parts and themes of a movie away from the movie itself, observe the parts in isolation and then apply other things on them, but by doing that, you aren't really analyzing the movie as a whole, you are analyzing the parts of the movie. So immanently analyzing a film means you don't try to take it apart, you let the film show you what it is from its own merits, without relating it to something external. There's Hegel for you.
The answer to the whole allegory problem was right in the video. When I watch the movies or read the books, I imagine that the story is a translation of a translation of a story about event that actually happened in the real world in a far distant past. This solves everything. You wouldn’t say a movie about WW2 is an allegory for the Korean War of the 50’s. No. It’s a more or less factual retelling of events that happened. No allegory needed
Reality and our world is complex, it's chaotic, it's not an allegory. Why do so many want or feel our stories have to be? -Audiance and writers included. Why can't a story within a fictional reality be just the telling of events within that fictional realities chaotic environment free from our own. Hearing that these fictional groups represent these real world groups in this real world conflict feels immediately disappointing to me, throwing me out of that fictional world and now thinking about ours.... The one that I want to escape through watching these movies.
Because Tolkien used the word "applicability" in his letters, I think he was suggesting that readers often project their own experiences onto what they read. Just as we might look at the clouds and see shapes like dogs or symbols, or look at a map and notice that Italy resembles a boot, we tend to find meaning in stories based on our personal experiences. For example, a political scientist friend interested in politics, so I often interpret Tolkien’s works as being about loyalty and leadership (like a royalist theme). A friend who is an architect might see the story as being about craftsmanship and preservation, while a feminist reader might interpret it as a rise of female power (though I don't have a girlfriend to verify this!). Personally, I think Tolkien's works are about duty and coming-of-age, almost like a teenage fantasy novel. But in reality, it’s possible that Tolkien simply wrote The Lord of the Rings because he was bored and wanted to create something amazing.
You see this same problem a lot with CS Lewis as well, although that case is also a bit unique - he saw Narnia not as an "allegory" for the Christian story, but straight up a "what if" for The Son descending upon another world, and how his journey would be in that fantasy world.
One of the most beautiful things about the intent of Tolkien's writings are that they are left open for the reader to imply their own allegory. Phenomenal video!
I think I know what The Lord of the Rings means. I think you got close, but I think you came just short. Given the framing of the story as an in-universe history text, and given just how on-the-nose it seemed to me, I am convinced that it was very likely intended meaning by Tolkein. Intended or not, I am disappointed by how little discussion I've seen of this interpretation of his work, which hit me like a brick as I was reading the books myself: The Lord of the Rings represents a mythologized and revisionist history text, published mainly as propaganda for the purpose of better legitimizing the rule of Aragorn and his descendants. The trilogy is, in fact, allegory. Not in the details of its narrative, but in its narrative structure. Not for any one historical event, but for a pattern in history. I think there is a lot to support this, but in very brief: The enemy combatants are dehumanized in a very literal way. The enemy's special military units are portrayed as demons. Phenomena easily attributed to nature, like a volcanic eruption, become the deliberate and nefarious acts of a supernaturally powerful enemy. And then there's Aragorn, who competes with the Christ for how heroic, perfect, miraculous, and messianic the text portrays him as being. Even if this meaning wasn't intentional, I think this is the most significant meaning of the trilogy. If it wasn't explicitly intended, I feel certain it must have been a product of the trilogy being modeled after and inspired by real-world histories, many of which are also mythologized propaganda to one degree or another. And I feel that the uncritical way readers and adaptations generally received and interpreted this work, failing to interrogate the motives of what is explicitly stated to not be an impartial narrator but a fictional historian, just like they uncritically receive the real-world histories written with real-world agendas, only makes this meaning more pertinent.
TBh Lord of the Rings is really about how the USA is pure evil and only communism can take it down. Likewise it's also about how Communism consumes all and only the heroic USA can defeat it. And of course it truly is about how aliens are out to destroy us and thus humanity must unite against them and destroy the moon. Death of the author is a funny thing: stripping away what the author's view is on something just means you are attempting to supplant them with your own meaning and value.
As Tolkien said, I prefer history: allegory (n.) "figurative treatment of an unmentioned subject under the guise of another similar to it in some way," late 14c., allegorie, from Old French allegorie (12c.), from Latin allegoria, from Greek allegoria "figurative language, description of one thing under the image of another," literally "a speaking about something else," from allos "another, different" (from PIE root *al- (1) "beyond") + agoreuein "speak openly, speak in the assembly," from agora "assembly"
I really admire the philosophy of Tolkien and his intention to give more freedom to the reader to interpret his stories in different ways depended on how they were impacted by the work, I do see the religious influence on his reading, maybe Tolkien wanted people to scape into that world and his characters but I do see at least the similarities in general on how he writes his characters, very complex but righteous and most of them end updoing what is right, which is not critizism, there is always some inspiration we can see from other works, and even if it isn´t the author intention, it help us at least learn more about his environment, cultural and historical context
I think Tolkien's environmental message isn't really allegory so much as it is a blatant statement. So perhaps it can't really be counted in that sense. For one, all the good places in his world are green and natural and full of growing things (and Legolas even restores natural growth to Minas Tirith after the war is won, because it wasn't whole without it), while the bad places are barren, ravaged wastelands, destroyed by evil. Then there's the whole thing with Saruman and the ents, as you said - and the continuation of that plot that was omitted from the movies, the ravaging of the Shire. In the books, Saruman doesn't die on his tower, and instead, he flees - and because the characters have a more important conflict to focus on, they lose track of him. Unbeknownst to them, he fled to the Shire, which he conquered while the War of the Ring was wrapping up. So when the hobbits return home, they find their beloved Shire deeply changed and industrialised. To make a somewhat long story short, with all the character development they've had over the course of the story, they bravely lead a resistance and drive Saruman out - and tear down all the industrialisation he wreaked, and return the Shire to its prior state. So Tolkien was _very_ definitely anti-industrialisation. He loved the natural environment. That's why I say he probably wouldn't have considered this allegorical at all - to him, it would've probably been a simple statement of fact.
Why do people think that the ring is its own character? I would like to discuss this topic. If anything, should the ring not be an extension of Sauron himself? It is said that Sauron poured his cruelty and malice into it. Meaning it is an extension of his will. "In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a Master Ring to control all others. And into this Ring he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life." Taken from the Fellowship of the ring. How does someone come to the conclusion that the ring is seperate from Sauron?
Meaning is created in the eye of the receiver. Similarities in meaning represent similarities in people. - understanding these help to understand our position relative to others. Similarities in interpretation to the author's intent represent similarities between the viewer and the author. More interesting is how we construct meaning and apply confidence in that meaning. A framework for analysis is a method by which we communicate confidence in our interpretation, to others. An interpretation of the validity of a framework operates similarly to the interpretation of meaning (see above and repeat...) Which on the one hand is how we have an academy of nonsense going further and further down the rabbit hole of interpretation and meaning. And on the other is, I think, the whole point. Discussing the meaning of things, and the validity of the frameworks by which we interpret the meaning of things, and so on, is how we communicate ourselves to the void, in the hope that someone reflects ourselves back at us.
2:05 Ah. So you think of "Really mean"-ing as a single term, not an intensified version of "mean"-ing. As in "not a correct, intended meaning, that you are wrong for missing". Gotta hand it to you, good clickbait, but it put you on borrowed time when I opened. I won't expect most to be as understanding, and I say that as someone who was review bombed by a much lesser misdirection.
God I really wish I loved LOTR the way you and everyone else seems to. Personally I just don’t really “get it”… I’m the biggest fantasy fan in the world and read 100 books a year, but LOTR just does nothing for me. I prefer the movies to the books. And I find the books tedious, childish and frustratingly unengaging. I think my issue lies in not having read them as a kid. I didn’t read LOTR until adulthood, by which point I had already picked up and read much better works of fantasy than Tolkien. And by that point I had also recently found and finished the single best fantasy series out there-a series so unique and epic that it’s completely unparalleled and I know there’s almost 0 chance I ever come across a better series of fantasy books to my dying day. Since nothing else compares, I’ve reread the 10 book series 10 times now lmao. So having recently read the perfect fantasy series, I think that made reading LOTR look even worse in comparison. It sucks cause I want to join in on the fun and love middle earth but the books just lack any sort of magic or spark or excitement for me. I obviously appreciate Tolkien for literally pioneering the modern fantasy genre, AND for popularizing world building as a core fundamental pillar of writing fantasy. But in terms of his actual books, they spark no joy, and I find that sad.
@@qmkt Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson! It's written by an archeologist%anthropologist and was largely based on his table top RPG Campaigns from when he played with his friends in college in an original world.
I can't help but see a parallel between your conclusion and the philosophies of absurdism and existentialism. Albert Camus once said something like this : "the universe and our lives don't have any inherent meaning, and this is why we have free will. But people are scared of this free will because they fear to face the void that is the absurdity of it all, so they believe in big ideas of the ultimate purpose of life, the afterlife and so on. In actuality, it is our duty to be free, to have the strength to face the absurdity and set our own ultimate purpose, thus not letting ourselves be lifeless cogs of society dictated by our surroundings". In short, it's acknowledging nihilism but fighting the pessimism that comes with it.
This 'fear of the void' that we fill with religion and society is in my opinion the same as the frustration we feel when we try to convince ourself that lotr doesn't have any inherent meaning, and we fill this frustration with allegories the same what that we fill nihilism with religion and society. And when you talk about making your own allegories about you grandfather and stuff, it's like Camus creating his own meaning and purpose in life.
To sum everything up, I think Sartre's quote "existence precedes essence" applies to fiction as well as to reality. Our free will prevails over any purpose imposed by the outside world, and our interpretation of a piece of art prevails over any explanation given by the author or anyone else.
If you want a 'literate' view of something you love, be careful what you wish for. I had the misfortune of studying Tolkein too young at school and while I can write a dissertation on its themes and mythology and why it's an important work of literature, I also found it tedious and it put me off fantasy forever. I can appreciate it but I can't enjoy it. I feel robbed because his stories are so magical to so many people. I totally understand why he said he hates allegorical readings of his work. It's purely academic, in the worst sense of the word.
Or in short: You will see all the symbolisms but you won’t be able to enjoy the story anymore
I found it tedious from just reading it. Studying it academically was meaningful and gave me a new appreciation.
@@nont18411you’re inserting your own nonsense into the words of others. That’s disgusting. How dare you.
When Tony gilroy was talking about how he was inspired to write Andor, in a nutshell he just said he was a history buff so he took a bunch of historic events and applied how they functioned to his story. A perfect example of applicability over allegory.
The way I interpret Lord of the Rings, is just be nice when you can, and strong when you have to be. A simple message.
And always take the wizard's stick away.
I think the issue with trying to find allegories is that it contains universal truths.
Take the crack of doom for example, what we see is a string of failures, our hero gives into temptation, loses his finger and the ring to gollum, and then gollum loses his footing, distracted by finally having the ring.
What we have there aren’t allegories, but commentaries on the nature of good and evil.
Without bilbo and Frodo showing gollum mercy, Sauron wins, so there’s statements there about the value in mercy and gentleness
We have even the most pure hearted characters falling for temptation, which looking at Tolkien’s catholic upbringing, is exactly how believers talk about sin. No human is sinless, we all fall to temptations sometimes, and we see an example of that.
And then in the struggle between Frodo and gollum, all driven by the lust for the ring that it itself creates, we see evil destroy itself.
None of these are exact allegories, but throughout the story we see examples of virtue and truth’s about good and evil. There’s something innately human in it that we all resonate with.
Or at least that’s my take
But I will say, I 100% believe Tolkien drew the scouring of the shire from his experiences coming back from war.
I have the feeling that you investigated what everyone else considered allegory without investigating what Tolkien means when he says allegory.
In my opinion, backed up by what Tolkien is complaining about when he writes that forward or writes in letters, that Tolkien is talking about allegories like Nathanial Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown. A story where there is a one-to-one connection between things in real life and things in the story.
But that doesn't preclude Tolkien using the Dead Marshes to show people the horrors that follow in the outcome of war, influenced and informed by his own experiences in WW1. It isn't allegory to write about dead men mired in mud and water when the author has seen dead men mired in mud and water for himself. That's just writing about what you know.
Just because The Lord of the Rings isn't an allegory doesn't mean that there is no meaning intended by the author behind a little man doing great things.
Just because the ring isn't the bomb doesn't mean it can't represent the corrupting influence of power. There are messages in the story. There have to be to make stories engaging. But what Tolkien is saying (as far as I can tell) is that you can take those messages however you feel like. It isn't that he didn't put those messages into the story. It's just that he isn't telling you how to interpret them. You can do that for yourself.
The ring isn't an allegory since power doesn't have its own will. Power isn't trying to get into any one being's hands. The ring is doing that. But on the other hand, Saruman wants the ring because it represents power to him. Gandalf and Galadriel both refuse the ring because its power greatly tempts them. They see it as power, so the audience is also meant to see it as power. But again power isn't worn and it doesn't have a will of its own, so it isn't allegory.
I think that taking several people's definition of allegory and applying it to Tolkien makes a person get lost in the weeds. There are a lot of author-intended messages in the story. Some of them, like the idea of "lesser men," you might want to ignore. There are some that you may think are author-intended, and they aren't. But if they're good messages, I don't see any harm in that. Getting your own meaning out of his story is what Tolkien explicitly wanted.
I think it was Tolkien himself that said it was about the ability of the most ordinary of people to overcome insurmountable odds.
It's "about" many things. He's also said it is about life and death.
It's not "really about" anything because it's about everything
The power of fiction lies in the potential meanings it can have for its audience - detached from whatever the author might have intended.
This is so needed right now, so sick of people trying to compare real world conflict to this trilogy
"Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good."
Sorry if that's become a hackneyed meme now, but I can't think of another quote that so accurately sums up the general malaise of the 21st century western experience.
It's basically "don't overlook the little guy," and it's pretty on the nose.
LOTR strongly conveys the theme that the small, simple things in life are what matter the most, which is why two small hobbits motivated by the love of their home were able to overthrow an all-powerful dark lord.
A theme isn’t the same thing as a 1 to 1 equivalence with real life events, though.
It's basically Abstraction vs Immanence. The common way to analyze anything in the world, is to abstract it from itself, and then break that abstraction into parts and relating them to other more academical or theoretical models. Immanence, on the other hand, is when you analyze something on its own merits, without doing the abstracting part. So in film analysis, you can take the parts and themes of a movie away from the movie itself, observe the parts in isolation and then apply other things on them, but by doing that, you aren't really analyzing the movie as a whole, you are analyzing the parts of the movie. So immanently analyzing a film means you don't try to take it apart, you let the film show you what it is from its own merits, without relating it to something external. There's Hegel for you.
Fuck I’m 8 minutes in and I already ate all my food
The answer to the whole allegory problem was right in the video. When I watch the movies or read the books, I imagine that the story is a translation of a translation of a story about event that actually happened in the real world in a far distant past. This solves everything. You wouldn’t say a movie about WW2 is an allegory for the Korean War of the 50’s. No. It’s a more or less factual retelling of events that happened. No allegory needed
Reality and our world is complex, it's chaotic, it's not an allegory. Why do so many want or feel our stories have to be? -Audiance and writers included. Why can't a story within a fictional reality be just the telling of events within that fictional realities chaotic environment free from our own.
Hearing that these fictional groups represent these real world groups in this real world conflict feels immediately disappointing to me, throwing me out of that fictional world and now thinking about ours.... The one that I want to escape through watching these movies.
Because Tolkien used the word "applicability" in his letters, I think he was suggesting that readers often project their own experiences onto what they read. Just as we might look at the clouds and see shapes like dogs or symbols, or look at a map and notice that Italy resembles a boot, we tend to find meaning in stories based on our personal experiences.
For example, a political scientist friend interested in politics, so I often interpret Tolkien’s works as being about loyalty and leadership (like a royalist theme). A friend who is an architect might see the story as being about craftsmanship and preservation, while a feminist reader might interpret it as a rise of female power (though I don't have a girlfriend to verify this!). Personally, I think Tolkien's works are about duty and coming-of-age, almost like a teenage fantasy novel.
But in reality, it’s possible that Tolkien simply wrote The Lord of the Rings because he was bored and wanted to create something amazing.
You see this same problem a lot with CS Lewis as well, although that case is also a bit unique - he saw Narnia not as an "allegory" for the Christian story, but straight up a "what if" for The Son descending upon another world, and how his journey would be in that fantasy world.
Many different parts of this video hit so hard. Extremely thoughtful, well researched and endearing.
One of the most beautiful things about the intent of Tolkien's writings are that they are left open for the reader to imply their own allegory. Phenomenal video!
it means friendship (power of)
I think I know what The Lord of the Rings means. I think you got close, but I think you came just short.
Given the framing of the story as an in-universe history text, and given just how on-the-nose it seemed to me, I am convinced that it was very likely intended meaning by Tolkein. Intended or not, I am disappointed by how little discussion I've seen of this interpretation of his work, which hit me like a brick as I was reading the books myself:
The Lord of the Rings represents a mythologized and revisionist history text, published mainly as propaganda for the purpose of better legitimizing the rule of Aragorn and his descendants. The trilogy is, in fact, allegory. Not in the details of its narrative, but in its narrative structure. Not for any one historical event, but for a pattern in history.
I think there is a lot to support this, but in very brief: The enemy combatants are dehumanized in a very literal way. The enemy's special military units are portrayed as demons. Phenomena easily attributed to nature, like a volcanic eruption, become the deliberate and nefarious acts of a supernaturally powerful enemy. And then there's Aragorn, who competes with the Christ for how heroic, perfect, miraculous, and messianic the text portrays him as being.
Even if this meaning wasn't intentional, I think this is the most significant meaning of the trilogy. If it wasn't explicitly intended, I feel certain it must have been a product of the trilogy being modeled after and inspired by real-world histories, many of which are also mythologized propaganda to one degree or another. And I feel that the uncritical way readers and adaptations generally received and interpreted this work, failing to interrogate the motives of what is explicitly stated to not be an impartial narrator but a fictional historian, just like they uncritically receive the real-world histories written with real-world agendas, only makes this meaning more pertinent.
TBh Lord of the Rings is really about how the USA is pure evil and only communism can take it down. Likewise it's also about how Communism consumes all and only the heroic USA can defeat it. And of course it truly is about how aliens are out to destroy us and thus humanity must unite against them and destroy the moon. Death of the author is a funny thing: stripping away what the author's view is on something just means you are attempting to supplant them with your own meaning and value.
As Tolkien said, I prefer history:
allegory (n.)
"figurative treatment of an unmentioned subject under the guise of another similar to it in some way," late 14c., allegorie, from Old French allegorie (12c.), from Latin allegoria, from Greek allegoria "figurative language, description of one thing under the image of another," literally "a speaking about something else," from allos "another, different" (from PIE root *al- (1) "beyond") + agoreuein "speak openly, speak in the assembly," from agora "assembly"
I really admire the philosophy of Tolkien and his intention to give more freedom to the reader to interpret his stories in different ways depended on how they were impacted by the work, I do see the religious influence on his reading, maybe Tolkien wanted people to scape into that world and his characters but I do see at least the similarities in general on how he writes his characters, very complex but righteous and most of them end updoing what is right, which is not critizism, there is always some inspiration we can see from other works, and even if it isn´t the author intention, it help us at least learn more about his environment, cultural and historical context
I think Tolkien's environmental message isn't really allegory so much as it is a blatant statement.
So perhaps it can't really be counted in that sense.
For one, all the good places in his world are green and natural and full of growing things (and Legolas even restores natural growth to Minas Tirith after the war is won, because it wasn't whole without it), while the bad places are barren, ravaged wastelands, destroyed by evil.
Then there's the whole thing with Saruman and the ents, as you said - and the continuation of that plot that was omitted from the movies, the ravaging of the Shire.
In the books, Saruman doesn't die on his tower, and instead, he flees - and because the characters have a more important conflict to focus on, they lose track of him. Unbeknownst to them, he fled to the Shire, which he conquered while the War of the Ring was wrapping up. So when the hobbits return home, they find their beloved Shire deeply changed and industrialised. To make a somewhat long story short, with all the character development they've had over the course of the story, they bravely lead a resistance and drive Saruman out - and tear down all the industrialisation he wreaked, and return the Shire to its prior state.
So Tolkien was _very_ definitely anti-industrialisation. He loved the natural environment. That's why I say he probably wouldn't have considered this allegorical at all - to him, it would've probably been a simple statement of fact.
Why do people think that the ring is its own character? I would like to discuss this topic.
If anything, should the ring not be an extension of Sauron himself? It is said that Sauron poured his cruelty and malice into it. Meaning it is an extension of his will.
"In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a Master Ring to control all others. And into this Ring he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life."
Taken from the Fellowship of the ring.
How does someone come to the conclusion that the ring is seperate from Sauron?
Ending made me cry
11:21 my first thought was they were going to write Saw 6
ROBOTS (2005) MENTIONED BEST MOVIE/VIDEO GAME EVER
Meaning is created in the eye of the receiver.
Similarities in meaning represent similarities in people. - understanding these help to understand our position relative to others.
Similarities in interpretation to the author's intent represent similarities between the viewer and the author.
More interesting is how we construct meaning and apply confidence in that meaning.
A framework for analysis is a method by which we communicate confidence in our interpretation, to others.
An interpretation of the validity of a framework operates similarly to the interpretation of meaning (see above and repeat...)
Which on the one hand is how we have an academy of nonsense going further and further down the rabbit hole of interpretation and meaning.
And on the other is, I think, the whole point.
Discussing the meaning of things, and the validity of the frameworks by which we interpret the meaning of things, and so on, is how we communicate ourselves to the void, in the hope that someone reflects ourselves back at us.
Lotr is a wonderful popcorn movie. But it is not a film that lends much to the form. I wish people understood what makes an actual film vs a movie.
2:05 Ah. So you think of "Really mean"-ing as a single term, not an intensified version of "mean"-ing.
As in "not a correct, intended meaning, that you are wrong for missing".
Gotta hand it to you, good clickbait, but it put you on borrowed time when I opened.
I won't expect most to be as understanding, and I say that as someone who was review bombed by a much lesser misdirection.
God I really wish I loved LOTR the way you and everyone else seems to.
Personally I just don’t really “get it”… I’m the biggest fantasy fan in the world and read 100 books a year, but LOTR just does nothing for me. I prefer the movies to the books. And I find the books tedious, childish and frustratingly unengaging. I think my issue lies in not having read them as a kid. I didn’t read LOTR until adulthood, by which point I had already picked up and read much better works of fantasy than Tolkien. And by that point I had also recently found and finished the single best fantasy series out there-a series so unique and epic that it’s completely unparalleled and I know there’s almost 0 chance I ever come across a better series of fantasy books to my dying day. Since nothing else compares, I’ve reread the 10 book series 10 times now lmao. So having recently read the perfect fantasy series, I think that made reading LOTR look even worse in comparison.
It sucks cause I want to join in on the fun and love middle earth but the books just lack any sort of magic or spark or excitement for me.
I obviously appreciate Tolkien for literally pioneering the modern fantasy genre, AND for popularizing world building as a core fundamental pillar of writing fantasy. But in terms of his actual books, they spark no joy, and I find that sad.
What is that single best fantasy series? So curious!
@@qmkt Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson! It's written by an archeologist%anthropologist and was largely based on his table top RPG Campaigns from when he played with his friends in college in an original world.
Five to ten times? What really? Why?
9:30 Findlay, Ohio mentioned!!!
Thank you
oh hello
woah early