Tolkien's universe is a quite depressing one. It's a series of stable periods interspersed with cataclysmic events that permanently lower the quality of life. All the great things in-universe come from a previous age and it's essentially unheard of that any contemporary art surpasses what the ancients could do.
Tolkien was a British person in the early 20th century so the cultural context in which he lived was one of an empire in decline, 2 world wars, and as the series was written a Europe and UK in relative ruins. Romanticism about the power, influence, justice, and luxury of the empire was a driving propaganda technique during the wars.
If you look at Brexit, you will find that romanticism about the power, influence, justice, and luxury of the empire is still a driving propaganda technique...
Ok, maybe not nostalgia for the Empire specifically, but nostalgia for the "good old times", when the EU didn't meddle in the UK's business and force it to e.g. display the hated metric measurements besides the beloved Imperial ones (ha! there you have the Empire again!).
> Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the European Union was "the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK". ("in the UK." meaning: "by the UK." logically implying: "on behalf of 66 million UK citizens not 508 million EU residents.")
And really the history of Europe more broadly. If you think Britain had it bad look at the history of just about any of the small eastern and central European countries in particular. I was in some history museum in Budapest, and it's account was basically we got invaded by so and so, and then laid siege to by another so and so, things were pretty good for 50 years, and then a third so and so invaded, etc.
A bit of a rabbit hole led me to this, a commentary by tolkien on his thoughts after drafting several pages of a book set about 100 years after the end of LoTR and Aragorn's death
> I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men, it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would have been just that. Not worth doing
I find that writing process fascinating. Begin writing about your world a few generations later. Find you've added some satanists and other assholes to it. Get upset because the world sucks now. Stop writing the story because it wouldn't be a good one to tell.
It would seem he didn't control his own sense of canon and direction. He just had a genuine vision of it all and it was either going to be exactly that or nothing at all.
I am fascinated by Tolkien's writing process and mind as well. I recently read the article about "Bamfurlong", its a place in the books that didn't really need a name. Nothing about the name influences the story at all, the name didn't even appear in the first edition.
But he HAD to go back and add that name in later editions because this place and its history was SOOO real to him.
For every story we got from him, he must have built a hundred more in his imagination of that place.
> Bamfurlong was a farm in the boggy region of the Marish in the eastern Shire. It was the home of Farmer Maggot
> Tolkien says that the name "Maggot" was a Hobbitish name whose meaning has been lost in history. Maggot should not be understood as the English word maggot or larva. The similarity is coincidental.
Another frankly incomprehensible example.
"This guy's name was Maggot. Readers will probably mistakenly assume that's an artistic choice, but unfortunately that's his name and I, as the author, have no agency to change that"
It's an imagined mythology for rural England, so follows the same historical outline. For most of the last many thousands of years civilisation was all happening far away (Greece, Rome). Bits of those civilisations made their way here but our civilisation and high culture is based on the leavings from distant past glories. All the action long ago was far away from this green and pleasant land, but now is our time to step up and take responsibility for history.
It’s also kind of an explanation for why England has no magic left. As you move forward in time the magical races and beasts all slowly die out. In the Hobbit the last dragon dies. In LOTR we see the elves leaving Middle Earth, the last march of the Ents, the end of the rings of power, the end of the wizards, the killing of a Balrog.. setting up the age of Men. And as you go further back in time it gets even more magical and outlandish.
Claiming a lineage back to impressive forbears is a pretty common thing - didn't the Roman's claim ancestry back to Troy, even the Scots claimed ancestry back to the Scythians...
Not to mention the whole British Israelite thing—where there is the claim that the Brits are descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. Then there's the hymn Jerusalem which speculates that Jesus himself came to Britain.
Meanwhile here in Scotland we've just got a rock that someone used as a pillow - but we do have a cool footprint and a nice island with "its cargo of mouldering kings".
Billions of years of conflict and selection lead to you. Anyone alive today is the product of a crazy amount of competition over time.
That is a pretty impressive lineage, no matter who you are. I know why people see a direct line to this or that ancient tyrant as special, but it is a ridiculously fine distinction, comparatively.
"Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead."
Cryptonomicon
Edit: I was going to say that the name of the book isn't referencing that kind of crypto, but then I remembered that it actually is!
My daughter once said she wasn't sure if she wanted to have kids. I told her she's the end result of an unbroken chain of 4 billion years of successful reproduction, with zero failures, and it would be a shame to break it now. No pressure.
World War 1 had a massive effect on him. My grandfather who served in WWI aged 16 or 17. He saw things he couldn't unsee, and wasn't what you would ever call "cheerful". That generation had a very different world view.
"My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself."
Hmm, all of the old powerful things come from the past. Good and bad. Sauron for example. But if the "era of men" has come, as the elves say, perhaps the Middle Earth dwellers are doing something ok?
I suppose the Middle Earth in Frodo's times are a reflection of early medieval times. And to some extent that's how it was. Collapse of Western Roman empire was a time of terrible economic downturn.
The Western empire ended with a whisper, not a bang. The estate system was already firmly in place, Diocletian's reforms were the foundation of feudalism, "nations on the march" (Franks, Vandals, Goths) had long ago settled in the empire en-masse.
The fall of the West was changing the name on the door. Theodoric could have been a western emperor for all intents and purposes. Even the institutions remained pretty much unchanged.
The only real distress was that the loss of Northern Africa as the breadbasket for Rome meant that Rome itself continued to shrink/decline (a process which had been underway for a long time by the end), and that was only because of the lack of a grain dole, which had been in place for 500ish years anyway, because even the late Republic had significant problems with wealth inequality.
If you want to talk about economic downturns, currency devaluation after mining all of the silver in Iberia, the crisis of third century, independent administration of the East and concentration of the wealth of Egypt/Syria into Constantinople, and the amount of wealth which went into keeping up auxillia/mercenaries are better targets, and those all long predate the fall of the west.
This is only true for mid/southern Gaul, Iberia, and Rome, and to a lesser extent to the North of Gaul.
To Briton the Western Roman empire fell hard. There was a marked collapse of urban life, a shut down to bulk trade networks which were relied on for a great amount of the economic activity. Students were no longer sent to "Rome" (or the other metropolitan areas) for education. And worst of all the Roman Military left.
This led to a complete collapse of the system, people went back to sustenance living with the drop in living quality that this, suffered raids from the Picts, Irish and Germanic people's. There was a huge power vacuum that led to local 'warlords' rising in power and a politically fractured island. This also led to the Anglo-Saxon invasion.
It is from the perspective of (comparatively) modern scholars that we get the story of the "Collapse of the Roman Empire" because from the perspective of the British isles is was a collapse.
This aligns with what (little) I know about this historical period. For an accessible – albeit fictional – depiction of the collapse of 5th-century Roman Britain, Stephen Baxter does a good job of it in Coalescent¹. In the first part of the book, he describes how the crossing of the (frozen) river Rhein in 406² precipitated the political and economic destabilisation of Northern Gaul and then Roman Britain.
The focus on the Crossing of the Rhein and the Romano-Briton contenders for the throne seemed a little too conveniently dramatic. Having said that, I haven't read any more scholarly books on this period of history that contradict Baxter’s narrative and reading Coalescent book was a great way to learn about the various factors that caused the collapse of the Empire on the western fringes of Europe.
Public opinion is where the commonly held "Collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire" == "economic disaster" comes from, and it's only very recently that mass market history has started to move the needle way from Gibbons' nonsense.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (dubious as it may be sometimes), Gildas, and archeological evidence from Essex really don't agree with "fell hard". It very much appears that the empire didn't have enough resources to continue propping up a fringe border province from the death of Julian the Apostate onwards, and that Brittania brought in Anglo-Saxon foederati to help out, who filled a power vacuum after Constantine III left (and possibly invited others to settle).
Particularly under Honorious, fighting between the Vandals and the Franks tied up almost all of the Roman resources in Gaul, which mattered in a way Brittania did not, and the population started to move into fortified settlements, especially after Constantine III took most of the legionary troops off in rebellion. This isn't really that different from what was happening in Gaul.
Fifty years before the "fall" of the West, there was no meaningful military presence in Britain which was not foederati, and before that, the situation was so precarious that troops revolted, leading to its abandonment. As early as the crisis of the third century, Roman Britain's economy shifted to become far more regional, since long supply chains through Gaul were untenable.
The primary exports were extracted minerals. It was, at best, colonial exploitation in antiquity. Raids from the Caledonians had never stopped, ever. Britons convincingly repelled an Anglo-Saxon invasion in 490, and it was primarily peaceful after that (and before that). Balkanized, yes, but hardly subsistence living with roaming bands of invaders.
This isn't any different than northern Gaul, or southern Gaul as the Burgundians, Visigoths, Franks, and Vandals cycled through. Or Illyricum. It happened earlier, but not like you describe.
It's incredibly telling that Gildas had both the time and education to write a somewhat polemical history less than a century after a "complete collapse of the system, (where) people went back to sustenance living", in classical rhetorical style, wherein he mostly seems to regard Britons as still being Roman (despite the "fall" of the West by that time, and the abandonment of the province 100 years earlier), as a Christian, which also tells us that Christianity had not been abandoned yet.
This is utterly at odds with your views. Where and from whom did Gildas receive his education? Why should we disregard his accounts of Mons Badonicus? Why should we disregard the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and archaelogical evidence from Essex, Wessex, and Kent?
Thanks for the long reply. This take on the impact of the "Fall of Rome" in Britain is not one I have much exposure to. You obviously have read a good bit about this. Do you have any recommendations for reading?
I'm a historian by training. The primary sources can honestly be hard to read through.
I always think of history as kind of a tapestry, and filling in pieces (neighboring states, for example) can be reasonably informative.
If I were working backwards, since you're into podcasts, The History of Rome is obviously quite good, and The History of England essentially picks up the historical narrative with the Anglo-Saxon states prior to the Norman invasion. Having a good, digestible background (through these) makes the "missing middle" easier to fit in. There are very few easy/readable histories of it, but there are good histories of the Merovingians, for example, which can inform a lot about the neighboring region.
Yeah, we never really got to see the third age at its prime. We just know that the rise of Gondor came with a millennia of peace and prosperity for the west before things stalled. In the same way the period just before and after the collapse of Rome was not the best, but that doesn't mean it was worse than ancient civilisations at its peak.
The Third Age was roughly 1000 years of growth followed by 2000 years of war and decline. In some of Tolkien's writings, you can clearly find the idea of immortals fighting the long war that slowly wore the Numenoreans down over the millennia.
Nonetheless, the immortals (including Ilúvatar, but mostly their underlings) messing with the world was a lot more prevalent in the first and second age. The third age was kind of a transition to the age of men, which finally came by in the fourth. So for humans progress was definitely positive overall if you don't just look at the cataclysms.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Tolkien's cosmology is clear that, by the time of The Lord of the Rings, elves are not able to live outside Valinor. If they leave the protected enclaves created by the rings of power (Elrond maintains Rivendell by using Vilya; Galadriel maintains Lothlorien by using Nenya), they will be overcome by ennui and "die".[1]
Elves do not physically die, but they will enter comas and their souls will appear in the house of one of the Valar. The Silmarillion records this happening to one elf whose comatose body is maintained (but unresponsive) while their soul can be visited and conversed with.
[1] This fails to explain how the Mirkwood elves can live there. But the answer appears to be that they can't, since they leave along with the other elves.
That seems... accurate? The elves leave Middle-Earth because, when they stay in Middle-Earth, they are prone to spontaneously dying because they just can't bear to deal with being alive. "Losing the will to live" is a literal description of what happens to them, but "depressed suicide" isn't far off.
> Tolkien's universe is a quite depressing one. It's a series of stable periods interspersed with cataclysmic events that permanently lower the quality of life.
I've been sitting in this comment for a day or two now, trying to figure out what to say, because I totally get it. In a moment of serendipity, I was reading another book that illustrated I think the core conviction: humanity is not a machine, and while machines progress, people do not.
Tolkien sees in man a great capacity for both good and evil, rejects the notion of man's inherent goodness (borne of his Roman Catholicism and first-hand experience of WW1), and asserts that Good, while perhaps much diminished with respect to evil, is inherently the stronger force. (I think he's essentially Augustinian here--evil is an absence of Good or a mimicry of it, but cannot actually create. It only perverts.)
So yes, there is a sort of depressing aspect of his universe: a rejection of inherent goodness and of progress. People don't change, but their technology unleashes a capacity for evil on a massive scale. At the same time, there is an obvious thread of hope in the series, too. Evil cannot exist on its own, and the nature of the Good is to create anew. There are those touched from the outside whose goodness triumphs over the evil within and without. The eucatastrophe is real.
His central idea is that living like Tom Bombadill is the joyous, uncomplicated foil to Sauron's world conquering evil. He was writing about a fantasy world 8000 years ago that was particularly dark and had yet to see 'the light'.
THe movies were mostly Disney-field twaddle that ignored or overwrote many of the central themes and characters in the Lord of the Rings. Their only redeeming feature was that some of the actors delivered excellent performances, within the limited scope created by the director and screenwriter, and the landscape was kind of pretty.
The list of atrocities is long - the entire character of the Ents, the entire character of Faramir, the conversion of Saruman from a master propagandist and manipulator to a cartoon villain... Then there was the addition of unnecessary comic and action scenes, and the exclusion of critical scenes (Scouring of the Shire).
The Shire was a pretty bucolic place. Life was good, the beer was good, tobacco was available and corn was easy to filch. It was the place the Hobbits knew they wanted to return to, regardless of the wonders they saw or the horrors visited upon the world.
That would only really map onto the fall from the garden of Eden. Of which there is evidence for I think. (Evidence that the idea influenced Tolkiens Middle Earth)
Any general romancing of past times is not Christian specific.
It's likely that the author was writing though a period of intense instability. Something like a major world war or two. That would for sure be an influence.
If you read the Old Testament, you'll find people living for centuries, miracles happening, and God intervening in matters all the time. But then people's lives grew shorter and life became boring and mundane.
The Christianity we know today was the state religion of the Roman Empire. It's core doctrines were agreed on in a council summoned by Constantine the Great. But then the great ancient empire fell. It was replaced by many lesser kingdoms, which tried to keep some old traditions alive, and the Church was the unifying force. But then the Church itself split apart, and the last remnants of the old empire fell to infidels coming from the east. And then the Church split again.
The idea that the world becomes lesser over time used to be a core part of Christian worldview. Industrialization changed that, but Tolkien considered the consequences of industry and technology a great evil.
This is true of many mythologies, it's far from exclusive to Christianity.
Roman/Greek mythology:
> Both Hesiod and Ovid offered accounts of the successive ages of humanity, which tend to progress from an original, long-gone age in which humans enjoyed a nearly divine existence to the current age of the writer, in which humans are beset by innumerable pains and evils.
> Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred, or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.
Was going to say the same. China was consistently in this state for most of recorded history, looking to past Dynasties for solutions to current problems. Or maybe more on point, the Yellow Emperor. Egypt had Horus in a very analogous role.
Your Roman and Hindu examples are spot on.
Progressive thought really is the exception and not the norm when I look at recorded history. You really only see it develop thematically as part of the Western Enlightenment. I think that primarily impacts so-called Western cultures, and in a sometimes contradictory way between sociopolitical and religious beliefs.
Caveat: I am not an expert in any of these topics. Just a hobbyist history/religion guy. I may be way off more thorough academic thought.
This is true of all mythology. Giants roamed when the nature of the world was obscure enough to make it plausible. I think that is what Tolkien was doing with Middle Earth: write a story set in a historical period where the fantasies born out of ignorance are actually real. Time marches on, the world continues to modernise and the fantasies fade until they only exist in books (red or otherwise).
In traditional Christianity, and in Tolkien's writings, the decline is not just a matter of myths and legends, but it extends to history. There used to be a great ancient empire, but it fell apart. You can still see its remains everywhere you go, because nothing that came afterwards managed to reach its greatness.
The success of European colonial empires started challenging that worldview, but some of the ideas remain strong. Especially in the parts of the world where the dominant church still claims it's the one universal Christian church. Of course, if you are a descendant of Protestants who fled Europe, your ancestors deliberately left that world and that culture behind.
There are plenty of stories in the Bible where people move from a past in slavery, exile or sin into a future of freedom, returning home, or salvation. Christianity is pretty big on Hope.
But Christ is born because the world needs saving. and the world keeps degrading after Christ ascends (returns, in a sense) to heaven. Prophetic activity ceases, miracles become more and more rare, etc.
After Christ, the world still tumbles towards hell, but now it has a hope to not completely end up there.
After the fall there’s not much of a trend. Sometimes things seem better sometimes worse, but generally people are looking forward to rest, not backward to halcyon days.
> Any general romancing of past times is not Christian specific.
Quite true. OTOH, the "popular version" of recent Christian theology and myth has the quite un-enviable task of reconciling an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent God, who loves the humans who He created...with the actual (often horrible) reality that humans are stuck living in. Trying to do that generally requires a lorry-load of depressing plot twists, lawyerly double-talk, etc.
The Book of Job (c. 500BC) in the Old Testament discusses this at great length.
The "accuser" (Satan) says people only worship God because they get good rewards. If God doesn't reward them, they'd stop worshipping. God disagrees, and allows Satan to test his theory by inflicting great suffering on a righteous, blameless person (Job). Job's friends say "obviously you've sinned, and this is punishment from God", which Job denies. Job eventually demands God justify his suffering, and God takes him on a walk through all creation, effectively saying "you'll never understand divine justice, because it's way too complicated".
So this is not just a recent Christian question, but one that dates back to early Judaism.
It's not just romancing. It's pretty much required for your belief system to overcome the challenge of standing still because everything's so comfortable and idyllic where we are. Having a golden past and still choosing to walk into the uncertain future is hard a idea to avoid for a faith to exist past a few generations.
Well, certainly you have to think you can make a significant contribution that won’t be shadowed by everything from the past that is irremediably unbeatable in term of quality, to produce some masterpieces like the one JRRT delivered to the world.
That's entropy for you. On a cosmic scale, we are currently living in the universe's First Age. Maybe even Second Age. Stars are still being born, we still have supernovas, the light of distant galaxies still reaches us.
On the other hand, Population II and III stars, the ancient supermassive stars who fused the metals that enabled the birth of Population I stars and the formation of planets, are all extinct now. Only the light of distant specimens, which has traveled for more than half of the univere's existence, still bears witness to their reign.
But at one point, we will enter a Third Age. Light from distant galaxies will dim. Light from the earliest moments in history will grow too far to reach us as the universe unceasingly expands faster and faster. Still, our own little corner of space is still alive, stars still emerge. But they are dim and weak compared to the stars of old. When they die, they bloat and fizzle out. The last supernova in the galaxy was billions of years ago. It will remain like this for a long time.
And then we enter a Fourth Age. The universe is dying. Fuel has ran out for new star formation. Even on the best nights, the majority of the night sky is pitch black. Black holes outnumber everything else. Except for a few galaxies, the rest of the universe is out of reach. The expansion has reached such a velocity that even travelling at the speed of light you will never reach another region of the universe ever again. Every day, another light goes out in the night sky, never to be replaced. This process is slow. The universe's death is immensely slow and dragged out. But it's not inhospitable to life. The vast majority of stars in this age are small, but exceptionally long-lived. They can support planets, and all the elements necessary for life. Seeing as life will eventually arise if the environment supports it, the universe will be booming with it. The overwhelming majority of all that will ever live will live in this Fourth Age. Cosmologists call it the Degenerate Era. To the species living in this age and their civilisations, the mysteries of the universe will forever be inaccessible. They can only observe the diminutive, extinguishing fragment of the universe, now spread out across distances many orders bigger than they are today. It will be a very populated, yet lonely universe.
Eventually, the universe will die. Stars will flame out one after another. Planets will freeze. This phase dwarfs even the Fourth Age. It lasts seemingly forever. Slowly, the atoms in all that exists decompose as even their age starts to show. The universe itself becomes fundamentally incompatible with life. Only black holes seem unaffected.
But even they are slowly dying. Ever so slowly. Not that it matters. Once time itself has lost all meaning, they start to slowly evaporate, until the universe is just a dead sea of energy, with naught but tiny ripples born from quantum randomness.
After that, it will take an infinity of time for anything to happen. But anything can happen, and maybe, eventually, by pure quantum randomness, all the energy in the universe may coalesce into one point, and it can all start over again.
Although that is the most consensual scenario, given our current most tested theories, the fact is there is still so much we don’t know. Certainly, no one know what will be the dominant humankind representation of the universe in two centuries, let alone what interpretations will be given about them.
So let's hurry up and get all the hydrogen we can reach and clump it together into one region so we can burn it controlledly at whatever rate fits our needs.
The scale of time over which this will happen will be soo great that we humans most likely wont need to worry about it. We will either die out or evolve many times before then.
Other way around: we're the only part of the cosmos that is even capable of worrying about it. It falls to us. Every second we waste is another few civilizations' worth of energy irretrievably lost.
I think the average person living in today's world has it way better than 99% of humans in history, it's easily the best time to be alive. Infant mortality, life expectancy, chances of dying to violence or starvation or preventable disease, all kinds of gruesome things have drastically declined over the course of history and civilization. When else was it possible for most healthy people to live to 70, to travel the world a few times, and to live in relative peace and harmony?
And entertainment, joy in the arts, categories of aesthetics have vastly improved as well. Look at art and film and music in the past five hundred years. Look at the works of Bach and anyone before him, he's clearly the greatest musician known in the world up to 1750, and since him in just 275 years, we've had hundreds of phenomenal musicians that outrank any before Bach. This is one mere slice of culture which is evidence of the vast improvement in human capability in modern times.
There are definite arguments to be made in favour of pre-industrial / pre-agricultural society, shorter lifespans and lack of cures for various diseases notwithstanding.
Agriculture made us a lot unhealthier and shorter in stature (monoculture/unbalanced diets), and it also lead to massive power imbalances -- modern people spend more of their lives working.
This is a very mainstream observation -- it's also supported by Sapiens, the popular human history book of the last 5 years (recommended by Obama, Gates, etc.).
David Graeber's recent book argues that many early human societies purposely avoided agriculture, and then got "trapped" into the inequality of agriculture.
The argument is that there is enough for everybody, but agriculture leads to power imbalances, which make most people's lives miserable.
It's true that they were more miserable say in the 1500's in Europe than today. We have "recovered" from Europe of the 1500's, but that doesn't mean that this is the best time ever!
Eh, the Numenoreans reached a quality of life that was better than First Age Middle Earth inhabitants (don't mind the guys chilling @ Valinor, literal Paradise/Avalon), then we in the Sixth Age did it again. But yeah, the metaphysics of the setting, that all creatures no matter how great or small only have so much gas inside themself - not even Melkor was able to reach his greatness in the dawn of the world, or even during the First Age. He spread himself too thin in his monstrous creations - dragons, orcs, thousands other things, and into the soil and gold of Arda Marred.
Yeah the tone of LOTR is oppressive, reserved, alien, post apocalyptic. I read the novel many times as a kid and loved it, so I hated the 2001 film. Imo visually it was perfect, it literally looked like the books did in my imagination. But in every other respect it was completely off, especially the overall tone.
The 2nd biggest issue for me was the music, they had a great opportunity to do something interesting and alien with the music, but nah its just generic hollywood rousing adventure music that never stops playing.
As a New Zealander the movies always felt off. I'd read the books cover to cover multiple times by that point, and they'd transported me to a strange, beautiful and foreign world.
Then I see it on the big screen and the landscapes and flora were all familiar to me. If I hadn't seen similar stuff in person, I'd seen them on local TV advertisements for beer, butter and toyotas.
So I try and ignore them these days, and cling on to the LOTR that I first saw in my head that looks nothing like home.
Meanwhile every time I visit New Zealand, especially the south island, I keep pointing at the scenery and excitedly proclaiming: "Look! It's like the Lord of the Rings movies!"
My European relatives get equally excited when they visit Australia, but for me it's like... meh... I just work here.
I always wonder how Americans feel about their entertainment largely being set in American with Americans speaking American accents. How can you imagine a different world?
America is big, you only get the “this movie was made in my home” vibe if it was filmed quite close and there’s a lot of “not close” in America.
There is a lot of regional variation, but the difference is quite a lot smaller than in other places in the world.
It is indeed harder to imagine a different world because we are culturally isolated, but our isolated world is quite a bit larger than I would bet would be easily imagined coming from somewhere else.
There are also things that I think people just tend to take for granted regardless of where they live, even outside of America.
"The Book of General Ignorance" talks about an example of this with frogs:
> There are 4,360 known species of frog, but only one of them goes "ribbit." Each species has its own unique call. The reason everyone thinks all frogs go "ribbit" is that "ribbit" is the distinctive call of the Pacific tree frog (Hyla regilla). This is the frog that lives in Hollywood.
> Recorded locally, it has been plastered all over the movies for decades to enhance the atmosphere of anywhere from the Everglades to Vietnamese jungles.
Frogs don't sound like that here but that's not something that ever seemed incongruous to me until it was pointed out in a book.
Even within the United States, different regions can feel like different worlds.
The most stark contrast I’ve seen is in the indie film Lady Bird where (SPOILERS) there is a setting change from a very small rural American town for most of the plot to New York City at the end of the film, with it’s subways, density, and architecture that felt familiar to any watcher from an urban area.
Similarly, the suburban Texas setting of the King of the Hill deliberately contrasts itself with New York-based shows (referring to Seinfeld as, “I'll tell you what, man, them dang ol' New York boys. Just a show about nothin,’” with other joked about the disdain of many Texans of New Yorkers).
I agree that in real life, Sacramento is no small town, and it was inaccurate to describe it as very small and rural.
However, I remember the depiction of Sacramento in the movie was intended to stand in contrast with a bigger city (which is why a major conflict is about the protagonist wanting to move away).
Reviews by several critics also described that setting as a small town, and I remember reading discussions around the release about how other perspectives of Sacramento could view the place as much larger and diverse.
The film’s writer and director Greta Gerwig more precisely described her view in an SF Chronicle article (https://www.sfchronicle.com/movies/article/On-location-How-L...): “It’s not rural, but it is not like a New York or a San Francisco either. It is somewhere in the middle.”
That's a choice people make, not an inevitable situation. Babylon Berlin for example, that's popular among people who aren't interested in a Hollywood-only diet. So is a lot of Japanese anime.
Sadly California media has crushed the world - even the US used to have very distinct regional accents but now most everyone speaks “American TV announcer”.
Just guessing, but I think that those more curious also have plenty of less US-centrist material available at hand, and if you are not, you don’t mind.
> they had a great opportunity to do something interesting and alien with the music
In their defense, as a film score alone, disregarding the source material, at least they had a score—unlike most subsequent action/adventure movies, e.g. 21st century DC and Marvel movies with some incidental mood sounds in the background but never a melody to be heard.
But yes, I've only read Hobbit and the first few chapters of Fellowship, but to me Bo Hansson's 1970 album better evokes Middle-earth than Shore's score.
yes, I'm finding this trope a little tired because it's like everywhere. It could be interesting to have a setting in the first age, like there's no ruins from previous civilization, you are building what would become those ruins instead.
And it's also not limited to fantasy, as it's also there in sci-fi
Definitely a tired trope, but I like the Witcher’s variant on that. Mostly different dimensions that are collidable and occasionally traversed. Still has a segregated fairly advanced Elven kingdom seemingly predating man.
But the observations that vanquishing threats to society dont necessarily raise the standards of living is some pretty well in the Witcher franchise. Very nihilist.
It helps making for example artefacts/weapons/anything else worth striving for much less obtainable. For example 'every good smith can forge top class dragon slayer sword', instead of 'this unique magic sword from 2nd era forged by legendary smith xyz from unobtainium pooped by long-extinct fire dragons'
There are plenty of stories you can tell that don't rely on tracking down a MacGuffin and plenty of ways of making a MacGuffin unique other than being from a lost golden age.
Not to mention the abysmal position of women in the book. Did you know that there are zero women in The Hobbit? Not to forget the thinly concealed racism.
I've read the book many times, but recently, I can't enjoy them anymore like I used to.
Nor was few women going on adventures the least bit odd for the era in which the books were written. And that being an age (WWI to WWII) where "men got to go out on exciting adventures" was often a rose-colored-glasses translation of "over 100,000 lucky men got to become casualties of war in merely the Second Battle of Ypres, in which the Germans first used poison gas on a large scale" grim realities...being a woman starts to sound like the better deal.
