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04-30-2021, 04:00 AM | #11 | |||||
A Voice That Gainsayeth
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: In that far land beyond the Sea
Posts: 7,431
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The Giant Episode
A few observations about the first adventure...
Quote:
Another side-remark: what is the deal with there being specific effort to remark that Giles has a ginger beard when he is being introduced? (However is it exactly phrased in the original? Because obviously it seems like a super-random remark that gives me the vibe that it is either just there to provide some artistic imbalance to the sentence, or does it have some other significance? Also because the way it's phrased in my translation makes it sound somewhat derogatory, but that may come with the peculiar cultural element that if you talk about people with that colour of hair using that particular word, it has a somewhat negative tone. But is that a reference to something in the English culture that I am not aware of?) Quote:
Garm is a little more "crude" than Roverandom, perhaps, but the similarity is there. If I exaggerated a little, I would say that all Tolkien's dogs could happily be the same character and it would not be a problem. So is that it? Does Tolkien have an "archetypal dog" figure? That made me think: I am aware of his opinion on cats, but what about dogs? Did he have any close relationship with any dogs that we know of? The family didn't own a dog, right, or did they? (I actually only now just noticed that Pitchwife has already asked this question, and it hasn't been answered.) Did some of Tolkien's closest friends have one? In other words: is Tolkien's writing of dogs pure fabrication, or could it have been inspired by some specific dog(s) that he had had the chance to get to know more closely? Quote:
Quote:
More strikingly, there is the same progression in The Hobbit and Giles with "upping the challenge" of Giants(trolls)->Dragons (->greedy individuals of royal bloodline). Quote:
I have one more remark about the first adventure. So we have painstakingly analysed the "real historical period" of when this takes place, figured out that it goes maybe into around 7th century or somesuch, and then we have Giles using a muskette. Um...? Talk about "suspending disbelief", Mr. Tolkien! And speaking of that, there is one little joke I enjoyed - now again, like I said, I have only a translation, so I would like to know how it goes in the original - there is the part where Tolkien supplies a quote from "four wise men" from, obviously, Oxford (in my translation it literally says Volský Brod, "Ox Ford", something that evokes the idea of some average muddy village and therefore fits the rural setting of the story while at the same time pointing to the famous university; but how does it go in the original? Is it something along the same lines?). And was this just a generic nod to Oxford as the centre of science, or was this perhaps even a specific referrence to him and some of his friends among the Inklings, a self-insert, if you will?
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"Should the story say 'he ate bread,' the dramatic producer can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own." -On Fairy-Stories |
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