[ SECRET POST #3861 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3861 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #553.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

07. http://i.imgur.com/yq1QRCE.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

Has Tolkien fandom ever done tomato wank? It seems like something they/we would do.

[(Anonymous)]

What a weird thing to get hung up on.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe Denethor was watching his figure. :P

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know what foods would be fitting for that table, but I will say that this scene was pretty offputting and uncomfortable. Something about those close-ups...

[(Anonymous)]

I'd say it was entirely intended to be. I felt the same way as you.

[(Anonymous)]

For being an alleged medievalist who was aiming to write a British Isles myth, Tolkien wasn't too bothered about realistic or historically-inspired world-building.

[(Anonymous)]

He was not trying to do "world-building" in the modern, post-Tolkienate sense. And especially not "realistic" world-building. Nor would his works have been better if he had been trying to do that. They would have been worse.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't really care what he was trying to do, but either way, Middle Earth doesn't follow a whole lot of logic and Tolkien was a studied medievalist.

I don't think the books would have been worse, by the way, if they included historically-sensitive crops and foods. I agree that the story isn't one that benefits from real world-building, but at the same time, fans are constantly creaming themselves over Tolkien's world-building and it's undeserved. Making up a language doesn't mean you are a master world-builder.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that (at least in my opinion) Tolkien fans who strongly focus on world-building are missing the point themselves.

I don't think historically-sensitive crops would make one iota of difference to the quality of the crops, and any time spent caring about that would have been wasted by Tolkien. The kind of logic involved in the concept of "realistic world-building" in general doesn't have very much literary value, in my opinion.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

For being an alleged medievalist who was aiming to write a British Isles myth, Tolkien wasn't too bothered about realistic or historically-inspired world-building.

That's because he was a medievalist who staked his career on the premise that pre-modern fiction and myth was fiction and not to be interpreted literally as history, in either the modern or pre-modern sense.

[(Anonymous)]

potatoes are canon, anon. it's right there in the book.

idk about tomatoes though, I don't remember and I'm so jaded on Tolkien fandom that I can't even bring myself to stretch over and grab the book.

if non-British produce is the hill you want to die on, go right ahead. I for one could not possibly be "taken out" of the amazing worldbuild over a few potatoes.

[(Anonymous)]

Don't forget the maize!

[tree_and_leaf]

The maize was particularly silly because it's not a traditional British crop, even in the more generous sense that potatoes and tomatoes are. It's not grown much in the UK even today, and it certainly wasn't grown in the thirties and and forties - so it looks wrong to me because the Shire is so heavily based on an idealised late nineteenth/ early twentieth century rural England (but minus any kind of mechanised agricultural equipment).

I mean, it didn't destroy the film for me, but it looks weird.

[type_wild]

If we're supposed to read Middle Earth as some mythical medieval England, then tomatoes belong no-where in it. But The Hobbit created a world that's more like fairy-tale 19th C England, complete with both potatoes, tomatoes and tobacco being mentioned in the books.

[greghousesgf]

I don't think that was just tobacco, hehe

[(Anonymous)]

Hemp is totally legit in medieval Europe, though!

[mimi_sardinia]

If you dig into the LotR appendices, it does mention it being a plant named something like "nicotina", so yes, it was tobacco.

[(Anonymous)]

LotR is set in very ancient times, in lost civilisations, not in the European Middle Ages. It is 'translated' into a sort of modern English with bits of archaic English for effect. But the actual cultures could be very, very different from medieval Germanic, Roman, or Celtic cultures, and implicitly were.

[(Anonymous)]

Denethor was fucking weird, man.

But the elephants didn't bother you?

[(Anonymous)]

I guess I feel like it's a strange thing to get hung up on with a fantasy series that didn't really try to pin itself to reality.

Re: But the elephants didn't bother you?

[tree_and_leaf]

(a) They're fantasy elephants.

(b) War elephants turn up fairly frequently in actual mediaeval stories/ manuscript illustrations. I blame Hannibal. They may not have been a feature of mediaeval European war, but they were still a feature of the mediaeval European imagination.

[tree_and_leaf]

I dunno, what bothered me about that scene was just the obsession with making eating a tomato look gross and vaguely vampiric (they could at least have turned down the noisy chewing, it took away from Billy Boyd's lovely singing).

We get it, Denethor's heartless. But he's also a cultivated man with good manners -making him look like a noisy eater was a really odd choice.