Also, they had mayors and stuff, a VERY clear class division and were technically under the rule of Gondor after the Northern Kingdom fell but Gondor didn't really have the resources or urge to do any ruling over there. Once Aragorn was in they were essentially an autonomous zone under military protection in exchange for maintaining the local roads and bridges.
This tickled something in my brain, and I finally figured out what: Последний кольценосец
The Last Ringbearer is a 1999 fantasy fan-fiction book by the Russian paleontologist Kirill Yeskov. It is an alternative account of, and an informal sequel to, the events of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. […]
Critics have stated that the book is well-known to Tolkien fans in Russia, and that it provides an alternate take on the story. Scholars have variously called it a parody and a paraquel. They have interpreted it as a critique of totalitarianism, or of Tolkien's anti-modern racial and environmental vision coupled with a destruction of technology which could itself be called totalitarian. The book contains sections of Russian history, and while it says little directly on real-world politics, it can be read as an ironic riposte to American exceptionalism. In 2001 the book earned the Strannik Literary Award in the "Sword in the Stone" (Fantasy) nomination.
They have interpreted it as a critique of totalitarianism
jesus christ the western brainpan is absolutely cucked
in fairness the author's not a dyed-in-the-wool marxist by any means but jesus christ that's not what the book's about
I've really gotta read that. I'm a giant Tolkien nerd and interact with some of well known Tolkien academics online and have added 'Do normal spiders exist in middle earth or are they all descendants of Ungoliant?' To the discussion with a degree of pot stirring. I'm also generally a pretty sympathetic to the orcs and have some criticism regarding elves.
It's a page-turner, but what no one ever says about it in the summaries is that it's like a geo-political spy thriller set in middle earth after the books. It's so good and not at all what I thought it'd be going in.
while it says little directly on real-world politics
fucking baby-brained summary I expect nothing less from natopedia
on the plus side like 85% of the book is set in Umbar, and it's a pretty cool characterization of the city
I like how it turns some life into the Middle Earth because originals really portray it as the mostly uninhabited wilderness, and both the numbers of troops at Pellenor and the analytic works like Atlas of Middle-Earth support this initial feeling.
I remember also one other Russian writer, Nick Perumov, wrote a trilogy placed in the 4th era, which present way less dreary and boring picture than official endings are suggesting. Worth the read.
Nick Perumov
do you have any idea if his books are translated somewhere?
No idea about English. They were translated to Polish, but it was long ago and didn't see any of them for years.
I was positive that regular spiders do exist and were servants of Vairë the Weaver, but I guess I was extrapolating from a line that refers to her weavings as "webs".
The 'spiders' that descend from ungoliant can make webs. But shelob for example is said to have compound eyes, a thick hide (weird way to describe an exoskeleton) and a stinger on the thorax. Spiders don't have these
Shelob herself is only ever described as "most like" a spider.
I guess it's fair to say that because Middle Earth is a fictional time and place in our world that real spiders do exist, but that they don't appear in canon
I'm guessing the intent is they gradually diminished into the lil guys we know and Tolkien just didn't know much about bugs. Whether he was afraid of spiders was addressed by him in a letter, since both of his really popular books have giant spooky spiders. I guess he didn't have any specific fear of spiders, he wasn't a fan but wasn't bothered by them. He just had a rough idea for the whole ungoliant thing, the broad strokes came into The Hobbit spiders and then Shelob kinda reconnected it to the greater mythology.
‘Do normal spiders exist in middle earth or are they all descendants of Ungoliant?’
I also once wondered about it so guess this isn't such weird question if we came to it independently. Both the existence of Shelob and spiders in Hobbit seems to support it as clear hierararchy of decline of spiderkind, like other species in Tolkien universe also decline in time and generations. Maybe Tolkien just hated spiders, i do know that fragment in Hobbit is the hardest part to read for me out of entirety of his works.
i've heard of it and it does sound interesting, but i've always been somewhat wary of the LOTR extended universe since being burned by the silmarillion (its so long and my dyslexic ass has a job 😭) - how knowledgeable about middle earth do you have to be to enjoy it? i loved the original books but i'm a bit of a noob when it comes to fingolfin/feanor/etc
the book gives you the rundown in the first chapter, if you know the og story you're good
Hobbits can better resist the One Ring because they operate within a greater evil.
Tom Bombadil is the grillpilled wife guy and is therefore unaffected by the the threat of Sauron, the temptation of the ring, or the plight of the Fellowship.
They ALWAYS fucking erase Bombadil. Not in even a single screen adaption. The movies even inserted a bunch of junk about Radagast, and Aaragorn's love affair, negating the common notion that it was "because they were already too long". SMH.
Who would fear someone like Sauron after witnessing American Empire.
Oh god, I could make a really sectarian take right now, but I can't
I could call you a spineless weasel who's trying to imply an insult to our anarchist comrades without getting in trouble, but I won't.
It was not just any honey-pot. It was a Fed honey-pot, and that meant comfort.
Thing is, the Shire was a hereditary monarchy, they just didn't call their ruler a king - it was Thane. Pippin was in line for and did eventually inherit the title.
There's also Buckland, the small offshoot of the Shire ruled by the Master of Buckland, and of course this title was inherited by Merry.
I'm a little more sympathetic to the Hobbits. Here you had a stable kin-based society in a part of the world that nobody cared about until some Fed from a far off Western Superpower (that destroyed an entire continent and sunk another island nation under the sea, mind you) is meddling around.
they're settler colonists. where are the original inhabitants of the shire? bit suspicious, eh?
The timeline says they were "allowed" to move there by original settler-colony of Arnor, which suggests displacement since Tolkien is a known Western sympathizer.
Gondor had kings, they just hadn't had one in a long time because they thought the line died out. That's why Denethor sits next to the throne and not on it, he was just the Steward. As Isildur's heir, Aragorn had the "rightful claim" to the throne. It's actually encouraging that he waited until after the evil threat was destroyed to take power.
aragorn spent his youth travelling in the east, stirring up discord against denethor. he also spent time in gondor, learning its ways.
then he used the war he stirred up to coup the rightful steward.
Rightful King > Rightful Steward
A King can't coup a Steward, that's like saying your regular teacher "got the sub fired", when all they did was come back from vacation. And besides, Denethor has only Denethor to blame for his fate, the dude was a prick and a psychopath who killed himself while trying to kill his own son.
lol who says he's the rightful king? where's the proof he's even descended from the last king? denethor can point to an unbroken line of rule from kings to ruling stewards, all in minas tirith, all witnessed and documented. aragorn? well, some scruffy old hobo says he's the direct male line descendant of the last king of arnor. which went tits up more than a thousand years ago. now, if someone walked up to your city claiming they were the rightful king cos his great-great-great-great-... granddad used to be king of some other kingdom (that he lost, lol) but he swears it was a high king, so it counts as a king of your kingdom too... uh, you'd tell them to fuck off. him and his hobo friend. and dont get me started on elrond, he's absolutely CIA. pulling strings from far away.
aragorn got to be king cos he "won" the fake war he himself instigated and his "friends" just happened to arrange the death of the current ruler. there's no proof sauron even exists, wake the fuck up.
what you have to realise is that ALL the texts we have from the period are actually from aragorn's reign, and he's obviously falsified a lot of it to make it look like he had a legit claim for his coup. it's just propaganda.
Then where's Denethor's proof of lineage? Remember, you can't reference anything in any of the texts, since they're all falsified.
i didnt say you cant trust anything. obviously stuff that ordinary citizens of gondor could verify had to be correct
Yeah, cuz I'm sure the ordinary citizens of Gondor are doing a lot of reading, lololol. However I am actually sure there were plenty of witnesses to the fucking ghost army Aragorn controlled by rite of the oath sworn to his ancestors, not to mention his unnatural age and healing abilities. Denethor couldn't even heal his own fractured psyche (another thing I'm sure many people in Gondor were actually well aware of).
Is posting that any better? Everyone knows you're dogwhistling a dogshit take.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Hmm. IMO it's kind of weird to assume all hobbits were ideologically identical. They clearly didn't establish a completely anarchist society for themselves, but there was also a lot of resistance to and outright ignoring of authority among them. They didn't really give a shit if they were technically under the rule of some empire, and at least some of them didn't seem to give a shit about what the Mayor had to say. I don't think we got much of an insight into their economic relations.
It's true the ones who went adventuring were—or turned into—some pretty gross bootlickers, though.
