Tag Archives: Rings of Power

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Poetry

Have We Forgotten Too Much?

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Peter Hitchens blogged about memory a couple months ago, noting Orwell’s 1984 naturally, pointing out “Orwell’s description of the sort of things people actually do remember: ‘A million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago.'”

He spent half of the post on the former Communist novelist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). He said at one point everyone with a decent education on world affairs knew about Koestler and the novel Darkness at Noon. “It was perhaps the most devastating literary blow ever aimed at Communist tyranny,” Hitchens said. Important because it exposed truths the world didn’t want to believe. In WWII, Stalin joined the Allied forces, and people wanted to forget any crimes he may have committed before that. Others wanted to believe Marxism was a force for good in the world, so they waved away evidence to the contrary.

“For a large part of my life,” Hitchens wrote, “this potent political novel, and its accompanying volume Scum of the Earth were vital parts of human knowledge and understanding.” Those who had read them were “the undeceived, and the hard-to-deceive.” Where are those people now?

“What if the past has already disappeared?”

Rings of Power: In far more trivial news, reviewer Erik Kain argues that defending Amazon’s ‘Rings Of Power’ by claiming Tolkien had no canon “would make Sauron proud.” A professor with ties to the show has said, “Tolkien’s ideas were ever evolving,” meaning all of his notes and drafts demonstrate none of his ideas, even the published ones, are fixed.

Poetry: To end on cheerful note, read this delightfully modern love poem by Daniel Brown. Here are the first three lines.

A first “I love you” still implies the start 
Of serious, but we moderns also have 
Recourse to a preliminary move; ...

Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash

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The Word Salad Days of America

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The word salad comes to us through the fourteenth century Old French word salade, which developed from the Latin salata. The term was derived from the Latin word for “salt,” originally referring to salted vegetables. It may be an American habit to use this word to refer strictly to garden salads. Something like chicken salad was invented in the mid-1800s (but that’s an entirely different, um, animal).

The 1953 Webster’s New International gives salad an alternate definition of “an incongruous, heterogenous, or haphazard mixture or collection.” That could fit many things, and for the last couple years, you may have run across the curious term word salad in your esoteric reading. It’s an immediately recognizable term; no definition required. Its use has sharply increased over the summer. It comes from psychiatry referring to the incoherent speech sometimes observed in dementia patients. I found this example in a textbook of notes taken in 1914: “Then again he made extremely affected speeches of incomprehensible word salad.”

It would take a while to research how the term came into popular use before 2022. I found a 1999 Billboard review of a rap album that notes “the schizoid nature of his word salad.” A 1997 issue of New York Magazine mentions “word salad” as a psychiatric term. Perhaps the breach was made by the writers of Boston Legal, who released an episode on Mar 28, 2006, entitled “Word Salad Days” in which a character develops a gibberish-talking syndrome.

But today, when we think of word salad, it’s important to remember the significance of words and salads, okay? Words are the bits and pieces of our sentences, right, and salads, you know, salads are green. Like kale. And lettuce. And don’t forget collards. I used to be sought out for my collard greens recipes. It was the best of the neighborhood. I had a reputation for greens, okay? But word salads, word salads remind me of growing up middle class, just like the American voters who will be voting for me if they want to Democracy to live to fight another day. Democracy is what this is all about. And what it’s all about is voting for me.

Sorry. What was I saying?

By the way, “salad days” is a Shakespearean turn of phrase in Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra says at the end of Act 1, “My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood …”

What links can we share?

Rings of Power: The second season of Rings of Power has been coming out, and I haven’t cared to give it chance. I found a new YouTube channel from a guy who says he can’t stand it anymore. That was for episode six. Here’s the review of the first episode.

Fighting the Terrorists: “Meet the people risking their lives to speak out against the brutal terrorist group. Today: A Hezbollah fighter who became a voice of resistance.” Here’s a trailer for it.

(Illustration by Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator)

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Rings of Power Have Returned to Assail Us All

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Season two of Rings of Power has begun on Amazon Prime, and I have no plans to watch it. The first season was enough. I didn’t dislike the first season from the start, but it wasn’t a Tolkien story as claimed. It was LOTR fan-fic and not a good one. It wasn’t good enough to give a boat the hope it needs to float, if you know what I mean.

The second season appears to be more of that and worse. Sauron was styled as a returning king to Mordor, but now he’s appealing to the orcs and their father-figure to accept him. The orcs are styled as misunderstood foreigners who just want to live free of tyranny. What?

Army of orcs outside Gondor. "Sire, the orcs are here," someone says. "Well, don't be racist. Let them in."

Erik Kain describes other story points like this: “We need Conflict Between Main Characters, after all, even if it doesn’t really make sense,” and “nothing here is even remotely based on Tolkien’s lore.”

Brett McCracken notes another common complaint. “The series feels bogged down by overwrought dialogue. Sometimes the dialogue is great; often it’s cringey.” Plus, there’s excessive exposition and many opportunities for viewers to ask how a character would have known whatever they just said.

You can get it a feel for Rings of Power season two in this mostly positive IGN review, which according to those who pay attention to IGN is remarkably critical. Don’t those rings look cheap?

And props to Echo Chamberlain for this video recap of the first two episodes that quotes several lines, because you can’t understand the fundamental nonsense of this show without hearing some of these lines. For example, “A rumor is like a songbird; it may sound filling from afar but up close it’s an empty feast.”

Novel Adaptions: Johnathan Boes writes about adapting Tolkien’s work with some remarkable specifics from the Rings of Power showrunners.

Reading into the Text: Ukrainians have long referred to Russian soldiers as orcs and apparently Soviet leaders did too. “Comparisons between Mordor and Russia go back to the Soviet era, when the regime considered Tolkien’s literature politically threatening. The USSR banned Tolkien’s books because they saw the orcs as an analogy for the Soviet people.”

(Photo by Marc Szeglat on Unsplash)

Fiction, Reviews

Can’t Recommend Pathetic Rings of Power

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Last month, one of the showrunners for Amazon’s The Rings of Power enthused about the series, saying it wasn’t their story but Tolkien’s. I think that’s how deeply deceived fan-fiction writers feel about their stories. This isn’t Tolkien’s story by a far cry.

I watched the remaining episodes of The Rings of Power yesterday, and all the wind has been taken out of my sails. Reading a bit from the showrunners has depressed me. Hearing from a few critics has soured me. Spoilers ahead.

I wasn’t hoping or expecting the show to become awesome in the last three episodes, but some errors hit you differently than others. You can roll with some lines of dialogue, some character motivations, and with others you can’t. Others just rattle the wheels right off your wagon and leave you on the hillside, wishing Santa would make things that last for a change.

They make up an origin story for Mithril to compel Elrond to push Duran IV to mine for it, because King Duran III believes it’s too dangerous to continue digging for it. They say a tree with the light of a silmaril is fought over by an elf and a balrog, is struck by lightning, and creates mithril by sending all the light into the rocky mountain earth. The elf king pulls out this story in episode 5 to say another tree that’s tied to the life of all elves is dying all of a sudden and if they don’t get that mithril stuff, all elves will be forced to flee to Valinor. It was a point in which the king seemed deceptive and manipulative. And the whole thing was dumb.

At the end of episode 8, they handle the creation of the elfin rings like any other TV drama. A main character, regardless of supposed skill, has to suggest the solution to the master craftsman. They hint that this craftsman is being manipulated, but please. There’s no strategy working here. It’s a line, a plot point, a touch of authenticity to say they know Tolkien’s history and are telling his story. The rings themselves look like trinkets (image via LOTR Fandom).

In episode 7, there’s a battle, and the “good” villagers give up their most defensible position for one that trained solders would have difficulty defending. And in doing so, they give the enemy the freedom to unlock an old plan that would nonsensically ignite Mt. Doom. Which is a big problem, but it doesn’t come before they mop the floor with their enemies because the elves and Númenórean men, whom Galadriel has been attempting to rally for half of the series, finally show up on the horses they brought overseas. How this cavalry knew the Southland village would be under siege at that moment is not important. What is important is that had the villagers stayed in the defensible outpost they fled to days ago, the cavalry would not have been able to charge in like they did.

A Kodak moment, I tell you.

Continue reading Can’t Recommend Pathetic Rings of Power →
Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Reading

The Powerful Rings So Far, Libraries, and Freedom in Commitment

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Someone in our house picked up Amazon Prime, which means we’ve watched five episodes of The Rings of Power. If you remember what Lars said about not watching it, those reasons still stand. After the first two shows, I told the rest of my family it was not a Tolkien’s story, but a good fantasy that leaned heavily on Tolkien’s established world. It could have been independent of Middle Earth, but then it wouldn’t have gotten all of the hype, fans of Tolkien wouldn’t have come out of the woodwork to comment, and it wouldn’t have disappointed viewers as badly as it has.

I can’t say I’m in the most disappointed camp yet, though I have my complaints. Straight out of the gate, the writers tell us there was a time without darkness, which I took to mean evil had yet to come into the world, but they follow those words with little Galadriel getting bullied over her toy boat. Then they say, you know why a boat floats and a rock sinks? It’s because a boat has hope and keeps it head up. If the dialogue had maintained that level of inanity for the whole first episode, I would have dropped it, but it improved. Not before arguing that Galadriel, who had bent her life on stamping out Sauron, was in danger of sustaining the evil by seeking it, because if evil isn’t out there, but you think it is, then you could become the very thing you seek.

Those were meta level reasons I said the story wasn’t Tolkienesque, but it still seemed okay as we moved along. Characters weren’t doing stupid things until maybe episode five. A wizard-like character who fell from the sky has not been explained–he’s interesting. The Sylvan elf is the only one fighting at this point and has gotten in some good Legolas moves. The Duran-Elrond storyline is good overall.

But with episode five, things have begun to turn sour. There’s a laughable fighting tutorial that suggests swordmen should fight with their feet, not with their arms. An actor with stage fighting experience has a couple videos in response to this part of the show, in which he explains how actors swing weapons to appear lethally aimed when they aren’t and what the camera must do to make a battle look real.

  1. Fight Scene Autopsy
  2. How Fights Tell a Story

I could say more, but many others have said many things about this show already. I should just move on with blogroll links.

Bookcases: “We’re so enamored of digital technology we often presume its superiority; worse, we sometimes forget its alternatives even qualify as technologies.” Joel Miller recommends a bookcase as the most underrated user interface we have.

Coffee: Artist Alyssa Ennis paints detailed architecture and landmarks of Northeast Ohio using pencils and coffee. Her dad sculpts wildlife models from wood.

Liberty: Peter Mommsen writes about our love of liberty, fear of commitment, and the freedom found in making good vows. “I soon discovered that being bound [by a vow] didn’t feel like a loss of liberty. On the contrary, once the step had been taken, paralyzing daydreams about other possible life paths disappeared . . .”

Libraries: The Palafoxiana Library in Puebla, Mexico is the oldest public library in the Americas. “On the first floor, there are more than 11,000 Bibles, religious documents and theological texts. The second level is dedicated to the relationship between God and people — chronicles of religious orders and the lives of saints — and the third contains books on physics, mathematics, botany, language, architecture, even carpentry.” (via Arts Journal)

Photo: Springfield Library, Springfield, Massachusetts. 1984. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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Death and decline in England

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The late queen.

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Queen Elizabeth II, by the grace of God Queen of England, died today at the age of 96. She was the longest reigning monarch in English history, and the second-longest reigning in any country that we know of. Old and full of days, as the Bible says.

It’s yet another melancholy landmark in the lives of us oldlings. I was alive before Elizabeth reigned, just as I was alive during the Truman administration, but I remember neither. I recall being a child, and never having known a president other than Eisenhower. Today, in my dotage, I have no memory of a world without Queen Elizabeth.

What do I think of monarchy? I’ve flirted with monarchism as a political cause from time to time in my life, but I wouldn’t want it for the US. However, I’m an anglophile and a Norgephile (I don’t think that’s an actual word, but I mean a lover of Norway), and they’re both monarchies.

There’s an old conservative argument that monarchy is a stabilizing institution, one that binds a country to its traditions.

But I’m leery of what the new generation of monarchs will do.

Ah well, it’s all in the hands of God.

Speaking of England, everybody’s talking about the new Rings of Power TV series on Amazon Plus. I’m surprised, honestly, at the number of my Facebook friends who speak highly of it, so far.

Will I watch it? No, I don’t think so.

Here’s why.

I’m willing to watch a Middle Earth movie that’s based directly on a Tolkien story. I’ll give the producers the benefit of the doubt until I learn better (as you may recall, I liked the LOTR trilogy, did not like the Hobbit movies).

But if what I understand is correct, this series is based only on general outlines of events in the Silmarillion. That – in my view – grants the filmmakers too much freedom to pursue their own agendas.

Let’s not forget, Tolkien was a Catholic writer. His whole purpose in creating Middle Earth was to recreate a lost English mythology. Because he believed that mythology prefigured Christian truth (C. S. Lewis was converted on this argument), he believed that a faithful mythology would lead hearts to the Christian faith. He and Lewis invented the concept of “mythopoeia” for that very purpose.

The Amazon Plus series has not been conceived for that purpose. Therefore, in my view, it cannot be faithful to the author’s vision.

I’ll be happy to be proved wrong.