Shadow Of War Helm Hammerhand
This subreddit is a space for the Tolkien nerds of reddit to debate and discuss the whole Tolkien mythos.We emphasise serious discussion here over jokey/meme-based posts. That's not to say you have to be a LOTR scholar or Tolkien academic to post or enjoy this subreddit, but that we'd prefer not to have image macros or movie gifs filling up this forum.Wondering what books there are to read?.Subreddit guidelines:.Avoid posting memes, image macros, gifs or other 'funny' submissions. This isn't because we're humourless and don't think Tolkien's work should invite humour (of course it does!) but there are a lot of other Tolkien/LOTR subreddits which welcome this kind of content – please take it there!.Be respectful and friendly to your fellow posters. This should go without saying, but treat people as you wish to be treated.
War of the Ring is one, the Lord of the Rings LCG, to a lesser extent, too. Shadows of Mordor was not, and Shadow of War, from what I've seen so far, won't be, either. Middle-earth: Shadow of War: In which Tolkien's grave provides more power output then the sun. Discussion in 'Games & Gaming' started by ZeldaFan, Feb 26, 2017.
If someone is wrong about something, don't downvote them, but politely and helpfully show them what's wrong. We're all fans of Tolkien's work and it's hard to be canonically correct all the time.We're (mostly) fans of the LOTR/Hobbit movies here, but there are specific subreddits for those things so use them for movie-related posts! Comment threads simply bashing the movies will be deleted.Same goes for photos of your Tolkien books (there's for that) and for Tolkien-themed artwork ( for that too!).We're currently self (text) posts only to prevent spam and encourage discussion and conversation. If you want to share a video or photo or other link, just include it in your self post!Try searching before posting a new thread: odds are we've already covered some of the 'classic' questions ('Who is Tom Bombadil?' , 'What happened to the Blue Wizards?' , 'Why couldn't the Eagles just take the Ring?'
Shadow Of War Helm Hammerhand
We're looking at starting a wiki for these common ones.We're no longer the only Tolkien-themed subreddit! Say hello to our friends in the following places:. I like to think I'm a pretty serious Tolkien fan. I've read the silmarillion quite a few times, and a good bit of the history. I saw the shadow of war trailer (I fucking loved shadow of mordor) and I was giddy. It looks glorious, and it captures the darker spirit that is sometimes missed out apon in the film's.
But it is what it is; a glorified fan fiction. It's easy to tilt your head during the trailer trying to figure out when in the hell it takes place or the massive amount of continuity errors, but just casting it aside as non canonical would be a huge mistake, especially considering what a great peice of work Shadow of Mordor was. Personally I think putting continuity and canon aside and just enjoying it as a stand alone peice is the way to go. That's just me. Also wondering what everyone's opinion on the game is. I think it looks rad.
The answer is yes and no.The reason this can't be answered with one word and left to sit in a way that makes sense is because a lot of secondary works of Tolkien have been reinterpreting his works with piss poor care for skin color since day one. I say skin color, not race, because they aren't the same thing, even if you don't want to accept that the latter is a social concept.Tolkien talks about skin color and he talks about nationality or heritage.
When he talks about darker skin color, he mostly talks about 'brown' or 'swarthy'. There's actually only one line about black skinned humans in LotR, at the Battle of Pelennor Fields.Now, swarthy doesn't mean black. It comes from the Old English meaning 'black', but words don't always mean their literal parts (or whole), and the word means 'dark-skinned'. But remember that it's an English word, used by the English, and they've been known to apply it to Italians at the drop of a hat. But Tolkien uses it to describe both southern Gondorrians and Haradrim.
Tell me the last time you saw art or a movie or a game that showed the men attacking Gondor as having the same shade of skin as its defenders. If you have, it's few and far between, and not from the most popular sources.' Brown', on the other hand, is most frequently used by Tolkien to describe Sam. And despite people who claim that's because he's working class, he keeps using it for the whole journey, alongside Frodo's continual 'pale'. Sam packed rope, if I recall, but I don't think Frodo packed a parasol. The prologue also say that the Harfoots were 'browner of skin' than the other Hobbit branches.But we generally don't see that in the derivative media, because whitewashing is a hell of a drug.
And it can be the other way round, too. People often show the Woses as dark-skinned, which has always seemed a bit racist to me, because they're named after the, and making them darker of skin because they are primitive is, well, what it is.
People don't do their due diligence, and suddenly all the good people are white and all the common bad people are shades of brown, and then because the Haradrim are a bit brown and are 'bad', the Dunlendings, who are from nowhere near the same place and more akin to the Breelanders than any other group are now 'dark' (what it currently says on Tolkien Gateway), even though nothing to that effect is ever said. The facts escape people who make a mix of dumb and biased assumptions, and then we get to the point where people rebel.While it is good to rebel against the bad, it can also be bad.
My prime example is how Jackson, after whitewashing the LotR films (if you shave the heads of the extras from Gondor and Rohan in the movies, you can't tell them apart), threw a more varied assortment of skin colors into Laketown, where logically it makes less sense for them to be than Gondor. When you do that, not only are you not being accurate, but you make it look like Tolkien was responsible for the initial problem, when it has more to do with you. That's a pretty shitty thing to do.Part of this is that society is so overly concerned with race. Black, White, Asian, etc., are not old and stable concepts.
Some of my ancestors belonged to a nationality that, while now considered firmly 'white', a couple hundred years ago most certainly did not get that distinction, and in fact were the subject of propaganda seeking to show they had 'negroid' features. 'Race' doesn't have a good track record of meaning anything real. If the whole of human civilization could get its collective head out of its collective ass, the idea of race would disappear overnight, it being a drastically simplified and muddled bastardization of multi-axial ethnographic blob that is the human race. But people do believe in it, and so it means something, if only that you have to pay homage to it when you talk with them.Tolkien's error, if anything, is in not playing that game, of not calling his characters capital-w White, capital-b Black, capital-other-letters etc. Because people in general need that now. So frequently have people told me the Woses were brown-skinned, I have spent hours across the years rereading their (and all Druedain-related) passages. When the whole world is mad, you start to doubt yourself.Tolkien likes writing 'red tongue', I think.
He uses it once as a metaphor for fire (from Gollum), and in the first draft of Gandalf's confrontation with the Balrog, which also showcases his tendency to say when something has long arms (how long is long? Reading Tolkien's descriptions of things, it sometimes seems like he's just randomly choosing a body part and describing it.
You know we don't know Legolas' hair color? We're pretty sure it's not red, because when someone wrote to him suggesting the meaning 'fiery locks' for the name, he ranted.As to 'like trolls', it's absolutely pejorative. I think it's meant as pejorative from the perspective of Gondor more than the perspective of Tolkien. People have a hard time separating the perspectives of characters (and characters' cultures) from the perspectives of authors.
If they made reading comprehension tests for empathy, that would be a whole section.I think if Tolkien held the idea that black men (more than white men or any other sort of men) were actually like his idea of trolls, we'd probably see him express this idea more than once. We'd probably see him express this idea at length, often, even going well out of his way to try and convince us of it. We'd see the insertion of black men into the story as individual characters for us to learn firsthand how awful they were.
A more Lovecraftian approach, if you will. We don't see that.Is it the best line? Would it be advisable to publish it today? Probably not without a whole lot more context that would needlessly spend time and effort that could be better served avoiding this completely and focusing on other sentences. Was 'black' meant as 'Black' and the reader meant to apply it globally to real world populations and racial divides? Certainly not.
My interpretation of the 'black men' line is that Tolkien was describing men of greater than normal stature (rather like Xerxes in the movie 300), and that troll-like indicated size while black indicated colour, not necessarily 'negroid' features. Which also isn't to say that Tolkien necessarily didn't have typical black features in mind for these men.There have always been myths about giant men from distant lands and I think this was Tolkien playing out that mythological trope, like many others, in his writing. The answer is yes and no.' Go not to the Elves for counsel.' Excellent post. Race as it relates to Tolkien's works is one of two criticisms of literature that gets my blood boiling, as it generally shows the thoughtlessness and chronological snobbery of the critic.The other such topic is claiming C.S.
Lewis is sexist for his treatment of Susan in The Last Battle! It always tells me that the critic didn't really pay attention to what's happened in the story - Susan didn't die, so we don't know whether or not she ultimately ends up in Aslan's Country.Anyway, my point is when I see such a thoughtful post on one of these topics that really shows the understanding of the poster, it's such a huge treat for me. Well done, and thanks for sharing.:). The other such topic is claiming C.S. Lewis is sexist for his treatment of Susan in The Last Battle!I think this is a little unfair to many arguments of this kind, which don't treat it as the sole piece of evidence for sexism on Lewis's part, but see it as part of a larger tendency in Lewis's works. There's plenty of basis for such an argument in That Hideous Strength alone, for example. I'm generally fond of Lewis's writing, and I agree that an argument for sexism based solely on his treatment of Susan in that particular book isn't very strong.
But to say that there's no evidence of sexism in his writings, or that an argument to that effect is incorrect simply because it discusses Susan as part of that larger picture, is misleading. One example of such a nuanced discussion might be Gretchen Bartels' article 'Of Men and Mice: C.S. Lewis on Male–Female Interactions' ( Literature and Theology 22, 2008). She examines 'The Shoddy Lands' and That Hideous Strength in particular as instantiating different sides of the 'odious emancipated woman' stereotype in Lewis.
On the non-fiction side, she also quotes from Lewis' own letters, and from 'Modern Man and his Categories of Thought' and The Four Loves.Bartels' discussion is not entirely condemnatory, and is fairly aligned with my own stance on Lewis: she sees in him 'a complex combination of unease with women and respect for them,' but also maintains that 'even within the bounds set by traditionalist thinking, Lewis's portrayal of specific women is problematic.' (She identifies the source of this problem as the perceived equivalence between the relationship between husband/man and wife/woman and the relationship between God and man; hence the 'emancipated woman' is a favorite kind of straw atheist for him, representing humanity's lack of proper subservience to God.) She also cites e.g. Till We Have Faces as an example of a more nuanced and less stereotyped text, which I agree with; I think his marriage to Davidman did alter his views somewhat, or herald an alteration.
But it's hard to look at the passages and works listed in the previous paragraph and not to see a peculiar, and peculiarly sexist, kind of disgust there. This may be the best thing I've ever read on this masterpiece of a subreddit. Have you considered taking these ideas and writing a short essay on the general topic of race and ethnicity in Tolkien's works, and its interpretation in later media?
This reads like the thesis of a really good paper that would likely benefit that modest majority of the Tolkien community that doesn't frequent Stormfront.Edit: I'm adding on a few questions. Does Tolkien ever specify, or is there a clear interpretation of Sam's skin color that we should interpret from the description of him and the Stoor population as 'brown'? I'm intrigued by the notion of a film/TV Sam played by a non-white actor, but I may be missing the point of Tolkien's words.On the same note, how much detail does Tolkien ever go into about different ethnicities in Gondor? Surely the Numenorians appear differently from the majority of people living in the region? What percentage of the Gondorian population is ancestrally Numenorian? What are some of the other native ethnicities and cultures of Gondor, and does Tolkien ever describe them?.
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I suppose I could give something like that a go. There's a few topics off the top of my head I know are relevant to this.
I have an absolutely insane backlog of shit to write though, and I dare not think I could do anything comprehensive about this until I tore my way through all the issues of Parma Eldalamberon (because it would absolutely be up Tolkien's alley to go into a relevant tangent in the middle of his linguistic writing and then allude to it nowhere else ever). And that's a trial, if ever there was one.With Sam, no, nothing's clear. We just know that he's described differently than Frodo, who, being an upper-class Hobbit, would have considerably more Fallohide heritage. And as the Harfoots are said to be browner, the Fallohides are said to be fairer of skin.
As I said before, how brown is brown? No clue.But yeah, I think you're somewhat missing the point of Tolkien's words. No doubt he thought of Samwise as European, because he (Sam, not Tolkien, I realize I should make perfectly clear, upon scanning this over right before I post it) is from Europe, and his people are from Europe, and they still live in Europe at the end of the Third Age. I should probably note here, for anyone unaware, that Tolkien's world is not some other planet or alternate dimension Earth-analogue. It is Earth, set in a mythological point in the history of our planet; like how Norse, or Greek, or any other mythology is set on our planet and yet doesn't have to obey all the rules of geographical fact.
And in that scheme, the parts you find on the map in the back of your copy of LotR is the Europe bits.Now, currently, at this precise point in time, everyone of native European stock is considered White. So in that sense, if you want to map the current setup of the social construct of Race onto Tolkien's works, Sam would be White and an actor for him ought to be White. But that would be you asserting that social structure. If you don't apply that structure, if you forego binding everything you do to race doctrine, in order to follow Tolkien's descriptions you just have to see what Tolkien writes and follow those descriptions.And Sam, of European stock, is 'brown'.
The southern Gondorrim, stated explicit in the men of Lossarnach, are 'swarthy'. These are descriptions of appearance, not classifications into some scheme of categorizing entire groups of peoples. While 'swarthy' has fallen out of use, 'brown' hasn't, but it's gained that capital-letter type of use, where it has more to do with where you or your ancestors come from than the actual color of your skin. People of European heritage really aren't called brown anymore.Which doesn't mean they aren't still of browner hue. If you're just looking at skin color, there are plenty of people who aren't White with just as pale or paler skin than many of the actors in the trilogy.
I like to read the comments sections on new movie trailers just to see people put their feet in their mouths when they accuse actors of stealing roles from people of the proper nationality, which the actors in question typically are. Or, if you want, in an adaptation, you could just ignore all that completely if you felt like you wanted to ignore it completely, and it wouldn't be a crime, because Norm Lewis is the best Javert there's ever been and it doesn't fucking matter exactly where in the interior decorating section of your local Home Depot he could hide the best.Tolkien doesn't describe that much about the different populations in Gondor. Early on, we know the Numenoreans appeared different than the majority of the people, but Tolkien's focus on that difference is mainly concerned with height and length of life.
Those differences, of course, disappeared over time. Even Aragorn is a foot and a half shorter than Elendil. We should expect other differences to disappear as time went on. We know they did for the Numenoreans living among the Haradrim, because that's stated explicitly.Speaking of Numenor, that island was equatorial, you know.
For more than three thousand years, its people lived far closer to the equator than anything in The Lord of the Rings. Now, you may say, 'ah, but they came from the North before that. Their population was all people who were in Beleriand, at latitudes similar to the north half of Europe.' But in LotR-era conceptions, they were there (and on the path to there) for a scant six hundred years. Which brings up the question of why there are even different skin tones among humans in LotR.
There's not enough time for (and we can't expect Tolkien to have been familiar with) the way it worked in the real world, with selective pressure between nutritional requirements and protection over the course of tens of thousands of years. So how did it work? Did Men awake in their ultimate range of colors and then segregate and spread out into a nice gradient? Did melanin production optimization work overdrive for the first few hundred years after the Awakening and then go back to what we would consider bog-standard natural selection? We have no idea how any of this works.Now, I should (even though it pains me to feel I need it) should give the disclaimer that I'm not saying Tolkien was creating a speckled crowd of characters that you would see in a college brochure. I'm also not saying he was creating an Aryan wonderland.
I'm saying he did not appear to have the preoccupation with the simple and stupid idea of Race that is the common denominator to both those lines of thought. If you let that run the show, you're always going to get something mangled when you look at how he describes populations. I'm saying he did not appear to have the preoccupation with the simple and stupid idea of Race that is the common denominator to both those lines of thought. If you let that run the show, you're always going to get something mangled when you look at how he describes populations.I think that's the most important takeaway from this, to be honest, and really needs to be taken into consideration by the people who make these Games (and any new films or whatnot, if that should ever be the case).