I just realized that I've been spelling Tolkien wrong all this time. I am mortified. I will correct it wherever I can. Please use the address "trollkien.blogspot.com" instead of "trollkein.blogspot.com". Unless it breaks. So far, it seems to be working.
Thursday, April 18, 2002
Incidentally, I started that little last post because I've finished with the Two Towers, which is much better than I originally thought. Unrelated to the betterness, I'm really struck by how hopeless the tone is. Not the "up against impossible odds" stuff as much as a "not only is the mission hopeless, even if you succeed, we'll still lose" mentality. And yet it's interesting to read. Very weird.
Tuesday, April 16, 2002
I've actually got an email about this blog -- you have no idea the thrill. So here's what Jacob had to say:
In re D&D-LOTR: The inclusion of halflings & orcs makes it hard to see much else going on in D&D-- and wasn't there some IP issue over that with the Tolkien estate at some point? But it's nice how eclectic D&D rapidly became in its source material. In LOTR wights & wraiths are the only undead; the undead in D&D are a major category and include nasties from lots of mythoi (mythoses?)-- banshees, vampires, and so on. Bilbo's burglary hardly suffices to create a whole character class of thief or rogue. D&D grabs wholesale from Greek mythology, which Tolkien had no apparent interest in. Ditto for the Arthurian stuff that Tolkien seemed to view as a pernicious French import. (There are no paladins in Tolkien.) Even critters that are major parts of the celtic and/or germanic/norse myths that Tolkien loved, like giants, are missing from Middle Earth (though in the Hobbit Gandalf refers to giants, none is ever seen or heard of, and it's probably just one of those offhand kid's story comments that never got edited out of the Hobbit to make it consistent with the rest.)
And, of course, Tolkien woefully neglects that crucial D&D monster, the giant rat.
Reread the Hobbit in December, and was struck by something. If Orcrist and Glamdring have been lost for so long, if even Gandalf didn't know of them until they were named by Elrond, how the hell did a bunch of Misty Mountain goblins identify them the very instant they saw them?
_____________________________________________
Good points, all. Here's my reply. (Maybe if there are more emails, I'll adopt the ">" quote style and go point by point.) There was a HUGE copyright/trademark fight between TSR and the Tolkein estate for a while. I don't know much of the details, but the scuttlebutt is that "hobbit" worked out to be trademarked, which is why they're just called "halfllings" in D&D. Also, both sides claimed more than is reasonable, and TSR was trying to trademark "elf" at some point. If I get some more of the story from a more reliable source than an overheard conversation in the comic book store, I'll put it up here.
Curiously, TSR (now owned by Hasbro, btw) now has an "Open Game License" for the "d20 system", so the mechanics of D&D, which were once furiously protected, are now kinda like Open Source Software. But enough about that, until I get my "Intellectual Property" website going.
Undoubtedly, the full-blown D&D has a breadth that goes way beyond the critters and story of the Lord of the Rings. However, as the MM, FF, and MM2 make clear, putting more critters in the game system just isn't that hard. The core bits of D&D, the character races and classes, the fundamental rules and structure, are strongly LOTR-based. With some exceptions. The treatment of magic and spells, for example, is a huge part of the game system, and is completely absent from LOTR, where there really isn't all that much magic, and the dynamics of what there is are totally unknown.
Incidentally, in my copy of the Hobbit, there are stone giants. They are described briefly as one of the hazards during the storm that drives the dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf in the cave where the Goblins originally capture them.
Ah, Giant Rats. Every door I open, it seems there's 3 more giant rats. Sometimes, I'm surprised just by the intensity of the deja vu.
It does bring up a bit of a weakness in D&D, I think. There aren't enough low-level monsters. Convincing players to start at level one and grow their characters is hard enough, without the endless stream of goblins, orcs, giant centipedes, and those fun fun giant rats. Check it out some time: 1HD monsters and below are few and far between in the list of monsters, and all the cool, exotic monsters are just too tough to face until at least 4th level. And what's really the difference between kobolds, goblins, orcs, gnolls, and troglodytes, anyway? They pretty much all come off as devolved humans, basically.
As for the swords: Gandalf not knowing about them looks like an indication that J.R.R didn't have the whole thing thought out when he was writing the Hobbit. In the later books, Gandalf is downright Aslan-powerful, but he's much less all-knowing in the Hobbit. For him not to be able to read the runes on the swords that give their names suggest they are not one of the two alphabets Tolkien describes, both of which Gandalf can read about 77 years later in the Fellowship of the Ring. Maybe he learned to read in those 77 years, but if so, you have to wonder what he did for the over 1800 years he lived before the events of the Hobbit, when he should have been in school.
Elrond, incidentally, appears at least 4400 years before Gandalf does, so it's not so surprising he would know stuff Gandalf wouldn't. Elrond's great-grandfather was King of Gondolin, where the swords come from. Otherwise, Gondolin is not mentioned very much, and so we can't tell how recent the swords might be.
Goblins are way smarter in Tolkien, particularly the Hobbit, than their image in D&D. I don't know if their memories are long enough to remember swords that are thousands of years old, though. Here's the evidence of their advancement and possible longevity: in the Hobbit, they are described as having "cities, colonies, and strongholds" (Hobbit, Ch. 17, p.266 of my edition) The orcs of the North and the Misty Mountains are described as older tribes than other orcs. Also, Bolg, king of the Northern Orcs, was older than 142 when he was slain at the Battle of Five Armies. Orcs were supposedly created as evil imitations of elves, so conceivably they could be immortal, though I doubt it.
In re D&D-LOTR: The inclusion of halflings & orcs makes it hard to see much else going on in D&D-- and wasn't there some IP issue over that with the Tolkien estate at some point? But it's nice how eclectic D&D rapidly became in its source material. In LOTR wights & wraiths are the only undead; the undead in D&D are a major category and include nasties from lots of mythoi (mythoses?)-- banshees, vampires, and so on. Bilbo's burglary hardly suffices to create a whole character class of thief or rogue. D&D grabs wholesale from Greek mythology, which Tolkien had no apparent interest in. Ditto for the Arthurian stuff that Tolkien seemed to view as a pernicious French import. (There are no paladins in Tolkien.) Even critters that are major parts of the celtic and/or germanic/norse myths that Tolkien loved, like giants, are missing from Middle Earth (though in the Hobbit Gandalf refers to giants, none is ever seen or heard of, and it's probably just one of those offhand kid's story comments that never got edited out of the Hobbit to make it consistent with the rest.)
And, of course, Tolkien woefully neglects that crucial D&D monster, the giant rat.
Reread the Hobbit in December, and was struck by something. If Orcrist and Glamdring have been lost for so long, if even Gandalf didn't know of them until they were named by Elrond, how the hell did a bunch of Misty Mountain goblins identify them the very instant they saw them?
_____________________________________________
Good points, all. Here's my reply. (Maybe if there are more emails, I'll adopt the ">" quote style and go point by point.) There was a HUGE copyright/trademark fight between TSR and the Tolkein estate for a while. I don't know much of the details, but the scuttlebutt is that "hobbit" worked out to be trademarked, which is why they're just called "halfllings" in D&D. Also, both sides claimed more than is reasonable, and TSR was trying to trademark "elf" at some point. If I get some more of the story from a more reliable source than an overheard conversation in the comic book store, I'll put it up here.
Curiously, TSR (now owned by Hasbro, btw) now has an "Open Game License" for the "d20 system", so the mechanics of D&D, which were once furiously protected, are now kinda like Open Source Software. But enough about that, until I get my "Intellectual Property" website going.
Undoubtedly, the full-blown D&D has a breadth that goes way beyond the critters and story of the Lord of the Rings. However, as the MM, FF, and MM2 make clear, putting more critters in the game system just isn't that hard. The core bits of D&D, the character races and classes, the fundamental rules and structure, are strongly LOTR-based. With some exceptions. The treatment of magic and spells, for example, is a huge part of the game system, and is completely absent from LOTR, where there really isn't all that much magic, and the dynamics of what there is are totally unknown.
Incidentally, in my copy of the Hobbit, there are stone giants. They are described briefly as one of the hazards during the storm that drives the dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf in the cave where the Goblins originally capture them.
Ah, Giant Rats. Every door I open, it seems there's 3 more giant rats. Sometimes, I'm surprised just by the intensity of the deja vu.
It does bring up a bit of a weakness in D&D, I think. There aren't enough low-level monsters. Convincing players to start at level one and grow their characters is hard enough, without the endless stream of goblins, orcs, giant centipedes, and those fun fun giant rats. Check it out some time: 1HD monsters and below are few and far between in the list of monsters, and all the cool, exotic monsters are just too tough to face until at least 4th level. And what's really the difference between kobolds, goblins, orcs, gnolls, and troglodytes, anyway? They pretty much all come off as devolved humans, basically.
As for the swords: Gandalf not knowing about them looks like an indication that J.R.R didn't have the whole thing thought out when he was writing the Hobbit. In the later books, Gandalf is downright Aslan-powerful, but he's much less all-knowing in the Hobbit. For him not to be able to read the runes on the swords that give their names suggest they are not one of the two alphabets Tolkien describes, both of which Gandalf can read about 77 years later in the Fellowship of the Ring. Maybe he learned to read in those 77 years, but if so, you have to wonder what he did for the over 1800 years he lived before the events of the Hobbit, when he should have been in school.
Elrond, incidentally, appears at least 4400 years before Gandalf does, so it's not so surprising he would know stuff Gandalf wouldn't. Elrond's great-grandfather was King of Gondolin, where the swords come from. Otherwise, Gondolin is not mentioned very much, and so we can't tell how recent the swords might be.
Goblins are way smarter in Tolkien, particularly the Hobbit, than their image in D&D. I don't know if their memories are long enough to remember swords that are thousands of years old, though. Here's the evidence of their advancement and possible longevity: in the Hobbit, they are described as having "cities, colonies, and strongholds" (Hobbit, Ch. 17, p.266 of my edition) The orcs of the North and the Misty Mountains are described as older tribes than other orcs. Also, Bolg, king of the Northern Orcs, was older than 142 when he was slain at the Battle of Five Armies. Orcs were supposedly created as evil imitations of elves, so conceivably they could be immortal, though I doubt it.
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