Apt.

Of course, after that impressive-sounding speech, he got his butt kicked by a three-foot tall hobbit and a girl with serious identity issues.

Odd, that.

OK, the analogy has limits. That doesn't make it a bad analogy.

PS. You can spell 'Nazgûl' correctly by using 'û' for the û. This suggestion brought to you by PedanTech International.

MKK

By the way, why are Republican-leaning states referred to as Red States. I'd have thought that Red would be associated with Democrats since we apparently hate America and would most willingly turn the whole country to the Kremlin if it were still around.

(Randomly, in the UK, party colours - so I am told - got fixed in the mid-seventies, after colour television came out. Previously local parties chose their own colours, but this confused viewers when the television news interviewed Conservatives wearing red or Labour wearing green - their local colours, sure, but the rest of the country was baffled)

Maybe arrange them into a group picture, and call it "Pickman's models".

In 2000, the incumbent was a Democrat, and the incumbent's color was blue that year. In 2004, the incumbent was a Republican, and the incumbent's color was red that year. So for two very contested elections, red has been the Republicans, and Red State/Blue State has become established as a meme.

Now in 2008, the incumbent is still a Republican (always assuming there won't be a bunch of impeachin' goin' on, and we end up with President Pelosi after a saner 2006 -- hey, I can dream, yeah?) and so states who go Republican will be blue and those who go Dem will be red, and blogtopia (yes, skippy invented that term) will melt down entirely.

Or maybe they'll just keep red as Republican, who knows? I have no idea how entrenched the Red/Blue State meme is in the general populace.

Lila: And at that point, the Witch-King realized that, perhaps, he ought to have paid a *little* more attention to certain ancient prophecies...

We are not all evil.

An Okie.

Oh, and yes, Senator Corzine was on the gubernatorial campaign trail. Clearly, his vote wasn't needed.

Red = Republican

At least we sent a Democratic to the Senate last election.

Not my city, though. Unfortunately my city hosts the real power in this country: Focus on the Family.

Why is it that Bush and Rove don't feel they have to give Congress privileged information on their Court pick, but James Dobson has veto power?

I must say, I was awfully surprised to see that Jon Kyl had voted for the anti-torture amendment. Must have been part of a deal with McCain.

Isn't it ghastly that our representatives have to bring up whether or not torture should be used? I'm old-fashioned. Maybe it's because of all those World War 2 movies I grew up with, but I always thought it was bad guys like the Gestapo who casually use torture.

---L.

It's not as if they haven't voted differently in the past.

All the talk of long-standing standardized conventions smells like an ad hoc explanation after-the-fact to me. My guess is that different outlets had different and arbitrary standards -- some alternated, some were consistently red for Reps and blue for Dems, some were vice versa, and some were entirely different color schemes. It was the post-2000 navel-gazing about the geographical/cultural divide that had people using the phrases "Red State" and "Blue State" the way we do now, especially an article by David Brooks in the Atlantic.

I would be highly surprised if the networks followed the alleged "standard" and reversed the colors for the 2008 election.

Serge: if the House goes Dem in 2006 and both Junior and Smirk are impeached (or Junior is impeached and the stress makes Smirk's shrivelled heart gasp its last), then yeah. President Pelosi. Stranger things have happened!

And as to the witch king? The pointy hat isn't big enough to fit most of their heads.

Three rings for elven kings under the sky
Seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone

So the dwarves did have rings.

MKK

Only the Second-Age elves and Sauron had ring-making capability. The elves -- specifically, Celebrimbor -- made the Three: Sauron seems not so much to have inserted backdoors as to have hacked their code ("he learned all their secrets, and betrayed them") to produce the One. He didn't teach men to make the Nine but handed them out: "Nine he gave to Mortal Men ..." says Gandalf in chapter 2. Likewise, when Glóin tells the Council of Sauron's offer to the dwarves, he indicates that the Seven were also gifts: "Rings he would give for it, such as he gave of old."

Dave

Now is the time to write to your senators (assuming they aren't numbered among the Nine), thanking them for voting for the anti-torture amendment.

You are right, Jim, but I have to say it pisses me off that I should have to stroke senatorial ego for doing what is so evidently THE RIGHT THING TO DO. Of course, it pisses me off even more that such an amendment should have to be presented to Congress, and that Bush should even consider vetoing the bill it's attached to. But then, I needn't worry about that. It won't end up in the bill Bush sees -- it'll get dropped in conference, because the House won't pass it.

Sauron took all the rings but the Three in a war, and gave nine to men.

The Dwarves claim that at least some of their rings were given directly to them by the Elves without Sauron's intervention, which may or may not be true.

At any rate, Sauron eventually took them all back, apart from those destroyed by dragons.

Hmm, I might have been misremembering. While I reread TLOTR on a regular basis, I haven't read the Appendices in some time.

I remember that being mentioned, but not if it was confirmed or denied.

(On topic: torture == Bad. I thought the Dems had given up making a fuss about it. Nice to see I was wrong.)

One would think that if Sauron learned how to make Rings from the Elves, then the Elven-Rings would be more powerful than, or at least not affected by, a derivative Ring. (What a Lot of Capital Letters.) But OTOH it doesn't seem like the Elves were interested in designing rings that had power over other rings. Perhaps Sauron designed his ring to be backwards-compatible.

Yes, many of the management in Valinor appear to suffer from being Lawful Stupid.)

Sauron then went around in a fair form calling himself 'the Lord of Gifts'; Gil-galad (and Elrond, Cirdan, and Celeborn and Galadriel) would have nothing to do with him and forbade him from coming into Lindon, the elf kingdom in the remnant of Beleriand, west of the Blue Mountains. (This is where the Havens are in The Lord of the Rings.)

Celebrimbor of Hollin, on the other hand, had his curiosity get the better of him; son of Curufin and grandson of Fëanor, one supposes that he's disadvantaged in showing sense.

What Celebrimbor wanted was to be able to 'heal the hurts of Arda' -- to slow or stop the damaging effects of time, to, in effect, make areas of the creation un-marred.

What Sauron -- in his fair, persuasive, "Lord of Gifts" guise -- told him and showed him and helped him to do produced the lesser rings of power and the twenty Great Rings.

Aside from other characteristics, any of the Great Rings allowed the exercise of will to affect the environment, but did not set limits on what or how. (Think of it as an early command line interface...)

Of those twenty, three were made by Celebrimbor alone, and these are the ones he considered the actual master-works. (These are the eventual, 'unsullied', Elf-rings.)

When Sauron made the One Ring in secret, he effectively used the knowledge of how the rings were made to create a controlling, master ring that would allow him to use the existing Great Rings to enslave their wearers and anybody under the sway of their wearers.

"But the elves were aware of him, and took off their rings."

Sauron attacked Hollin to take the Great Rings, captured Celebrimbor, and tortured him to make him tell him where the three, purely Elven, rings were.

Celebrimbor didn't, though he did surrender (or Sauron found) the seventeen rings Sauron had had a hand in making; Sauron's forces used Celebrimbor's naked, mangled body as a battle-standard for some while thereafter.

Galadriel got away because she (and her children) went through Khazad-dum to Anduin; Celebrimbor, keeping the long grudge over the sack of Doriath, refused to enter into a dwarf dwelling and lead a remnant of the people of Hollin north, where they met Elrond and a force out of Lindon.

This is when Imladris -- Rivindell -- gets founded; the survivors of Hollin and Elrond's force aren't enough to fight Sauron's forces in the open, so they get besieged, and Sauron, thinking to make himself master of Middle-Earth, attacks Lindon and Gil-galad.

They're just holding the passes in the Blue Mountains, and in a state of increasing desperation, when Tar-Minastir, King of Numenor, sends a great fleet to their aid. Sauron makes it back, just, to Mordor and Mount Doom, after a very bad campaign season that involves the first battle of Dagorlad with only a tithe of his bodyguard.

All of the forces Sauron had arrayed to take over the world, or at least Eriador and Lindon, are destroyed; Eriador is ruined, and takes a thousand years or more to recover as much as it will; Sauron starts to turn his attention to Numenor, and for two thousand years, there is war between the Elves and Sauron.

During the start of that war, Sauron can still take fair, persuasive guise -- he only loses this ability in the Whelming of Numenor, when his naked spirit has to flee back to Middle-Earth, over the angry sea, and re-embody itself -- and he uses the seventeen Great Rings as ways to win influence by giving them away.

The ones he gives to men get him mighty undead servants, for fear of death defines man; the ones he gives to dwarves can make them proud and greedy, but little else, because Aulë the Smith made the dwarves to resist dominion, and it is very likely that dragons ate four of those seven.

(Note that the last of those seven was in dwarf hands almost up to Bilbo's day; it was taken from Thorin Oakenshield's father.)

So, anyway, the three elf-rings were made for the elves; the other seventeen weren't made for men or dwarves, they were Celebrimbor's practice pieces and distributed by Sauron for his own advantage after he took them in the sack of Hollin.

According to my grandfather, a former NBC news president:

In 1972 on election night, a subordinate of my grandfather [name removed; it's not important] wanted a big map on the wall with each state colored in for which way they were voting. My grandfather shot it down, saying it would give the wrong idea and make, for example, Montana seem more important than Rhode Island.

By 1976 my grandfather had left and the subordinate did it anyway. He (the subordinate) and John Chancellor jointly decided to make red the color of Republicans because red is the color of radicalism. It was a swipe at Republicans.

Of course, a few times it has switched up. My grandfather remembers Geraldine Ferraro bemoaning a "sea of Republicans"--all colored-blue states--in 1984 during the Reagan reelection.

Now, of course, red/blue has entered the vocabulary, even independent of elections, and my grandfather still likes to tell his (former) subordinate, "Look what you did."

What is it that makes Tolkein so cool?

He did this kind of self-consistent worldmaking and he did it for more than just humans.

I did some research on this fairly recently [failed attempt at alt-LOTR fanfic where Frodo falls into Moria, rather than Gandalf.] I don't think I can live up to Graydon's post but I am apparently incapable of shutting up. . .

The three Elven Rings were fundamentally different from the rings of Men, Dwarves, and Sauron. The rings Sauron made with Elf-smiths [unnamed?] were rings of dominance, for lack of a better word- they allowed the user to force his will on others. The Three did not make the user invisible [or otherwise bring them into the 'worlds invisible to mortal men']- Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel can all be seen while wearing their rings. Also, their powers do not seem to revolve around pure dominance- Galadriel apparently uses hers for concealing Lothlorien, Elrond for securing Rivendell. It's not clear to me how Gandalf uses the Ring of Fire, aside from minor onscreen tricks and [possibly] Balrogproofing himself.

A deep understanding of the difference between allegory and applicability is one thing, I think. The Nazgul are not strictly an allegory for anything -- but they are a handy and highly applicable tool for thinking about people so eaten up by proximity to power that they have no moral center. And this ability to create applicibility rather than allegory probably stems from wide reading and experience -- as a deeply thoughtful person who had read Homer and The Battle of Maldon in the original and fought in WWI and had children fight in WWII, Tolkien had great insight into the recurring themes and essential samenesses of human nature when faced by war and the struggle for domination. But narrow experience and thought might be more likely to lead to allegory -- the one-on-one correspondence between what you write and very specific referents in the real world.

In any case, note that the good guys in Middle-earth follow the Geneva Conventions for the treatment of prisoners pretty strictly...the only things I could think of as questionable are Strider 'taming' Gollum by denying him food and drink ("Council of Elrond"), or Gandalf putting "the fear of fire" into him to get information on the Ring ("Shadow of the Past").

Oh, and Sandy -- Gandalf used the Ring of Fire more to kindle hope in others -- that was to be his job in Middle-earth, to "oppose the fire that devours and wastes with the fire that kindles, and succors in wanhope and distress" (Unfinished Tales).

Let me rephrase my question. It's not just what makes Tolkein "cool," it's what makes him different from all the other British men of his generation, who received a classical education and lived through two world wars?

What made him more than just another Oxford philologist who contributed to the OED?

Maybe it is the "deeply thoughtful" part that makes the difference.

I have been wondering about this ever since I read LOTR for the first time as an adult (one of those "let's see if the book is still any good" moments) and thought to myself, "Damn, this guy can write!"

And yes, the man could write. Isn't the word "wanhope" wonderful -- don't you just want to go out and use it right away? He could write both on the superficial level of stringing wonderful words and exciting scenes together, and the deeper level of saying many meaningful things. That's truly rare.

I really don't think there's anything terribly unique about Tolkien's characteristics. Thought, intelligent, well-educated men of a certain era exist in sufficient numbers -- and so do such men who write good books, really, since we've got all this literacy and technology going on.

I think I'm trying to de-sanctify authorship, here. Which might mean that I'm sideways to this part of the conversation, and reacting to my own little triggers and not what people actually said, though that's not my intent.

He puts the heart first, not the mind. Sauron and Saruman are both extremely intelligent, cunning, cold-blooded people. The Hobbits, being the true heroes of the book, are smart enough, but not "intellectual" in any way.

Another question that seems related to me is: Why have there been so many Tolkein imitators, or would-be imitators, and what makes them less good? I mean, the process for making beer, or honey, or even books, is fairly well-understood and straightforward. But everybody combines the ingredients in different ways and comes up with different stuff.

I think most Tolkien imitators spend an afternoon drawing up a worldmap, another one making a list of funny names, and they're ready to go.

I knew that. Really I did.

MKK

It's possible to do a comparable amount of work without anything like the same quality of result.

My take on it is that if you're asking that kind of question, you need to go read "On Fairy Stories" and "Smith of Wottan Major".

Two other things -- there is a shedload of not only primary experience but primary emotion in there; the inevitable, crushing loss of much that is good and beautiful comes through as a matter of lived experience; and, secondly, the genesis of the story was history, and the genesis of the history was language.

That last is the thing that's really hard to duplicate; everybody has primary emotion and primary experience and there's always a way to use those, but starting, not with the story, but with the language, so that the story arrives out of the necessity for history in the shape of a language, is to start not with the force of nature but with the primeval conditions which create the forces of nature.

That's not an easy thing to do; it requires no small learning, and a particular cast of mind.

Galadriel got away because she (and her children) went through Khazad-dum to Anduin; Celebrimbor, keeping the long grudge over the sack of Doriath, [....]

"Celebrimbor" should read "Celeborn"? Otherwise, that would be rather a neat trick for a guy whose mangled corpse is being used as Sauron's battle standard. And which volume of HoME were these bits in? I mainly bought the ones with recognizable similarities to the Silmarillion as first published, and so don't recall any of the above except a vague draft of Amroth as Celebrian's brother from, er, somewhere or other.

(Whereas Celeborn did live there, and was Thingol's nephew or something, and is the poster boy for Sindarin anti-Dwarf discrimination even by the time of LOTR.)

[0] I always found it funny that when the Silmaril gets to Doriath the sons of Feanor are all over it, and again when it's taken to Arvernien, but they never even considered taking it off Luthien during the 50 years or so that she wore it. Sure, they'll pursue with vengeance and hatred to the ends of the world, etc.--but they're not that stupid.

Julie -- I don't honestly recall. I might well be out of Unfinished Tales.

You are right, Jim, but I have to say it pisses me off that I should have to stroke senatorial ego for doing what is so evidently THE RIGHT THING TO DO.

You don't write your senators to simply to stroke them. You write to them to let them know you're paying attention. If you can get to them before there's a vote, so much the better. "Not only am I watching what you did, I'm watching what you're doing."

Then again, the Abu Ghraib scandal came up before the Elections and still it didn't make a damn bit of difference. Or maybe it did, considering how narrow Dubya's victory was, but not enough of a difference.

Makes one wonder what's wrong with the People...

We can't easily draw lessons from the 2000 and 2004 elections because we don't know, can't know, will never be able to know, what the actual literal vote was on either occasion.

However, it is the case that there are entirely too many people still saying nice things about the regime of cronyism,corruption, incompetence, dishonesty, and torture.

There was some guy on the radio saying that the reason Bush sounded like an idiot is because he's an excellent doer. There's a bitter pun there somewhere but I don't have the heart for it.

Karl Rove and Diebold plotting,
The districts with hours-long lines,
The questions of ballot tamp'ring,
Vote fraud in Ohio...

"You can fool all of the people some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time...." However, when there is fraud and those committing fraud are in the top 1% of the population controlling what, 40% of the wealth in the country, versus more than half the population many of which aren't even near the poverty level, let alone having yhe resources and clout and energy and time and wherewithal and backing to even start -looking- for justice, much less be able and empowered to get any justice and relief provided to them/us, against the overprivileged oligarchical robber baron plutocrats and their associates and apologists and promoters and facilators.

They have lots of power and lots of control and lots of money to on one side encourage/reward/promise considerable benefit and opportunity and comfort to those who support them, and on the other to discriminate against/disempower/make miserable/harm those who oppose them.

Personal consequences are one thing, but when the viciousness and vindictiveness range to the results in the Plame affair, or worse (rumors alleged in at least one of the books about Bush that there are people who fear for their lives and their families' lives, not merely their well-being and livelihoods and reputations if they stand up publically with their charges of hypocrisy and malfeasance and lies regarding the Schmuck and his history), most people find themselves in the position of having to stop their opposotion, in order to continue to survive with an income and without harassment and defamation and slander.

I remember going to vote that morning and the localc classical station was playing Copland's Our Town and that more than anything else gave me hope for what lay in the People's true soul. Pretty silly of me.

While I'm at it, I may as well mention that I accidentally poisoned the original song for my husband by suggesting its use for slash songfic and/or a hemorrhoids commercial.

And also:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel
Yodelayee yodelayee yodelay hee-hoo
Silivren penna miriel
Yodelayee yodelayee yodelay

It's possible to do a comparable amount of work without anything like the same quality of result."

I wholeheartedly agree with that statement. I may not have been clear enough that it was only one part of what made Tolkien's work great. I suppose I highlighted the world-building because it's something I know a little of, and it's something I could never do as well as he did.

The idea of someone doing 30 years of work and still ending up as a Tolkien imitator is . . . depressing.

1) Gandalf implies, in talking to Frodo, that there were rather more than the twenty Great Rings -- that there were many other "essays in the craft", some of which were repossessed by Sauron and some of which might have been floating around at the time of the War of the Ring.

2) It always seemed to me that (aside from the defence of the realm aspects) the principal use made of Vilya by Elrond was that of preservation of the experience of the First Age as memory; the principal use of Nenya by Galadriel was preserving the experience of the First Age as experience. Narya's use by Cirdan, and then by Gandalf, seems to have had less to do with preservation and more with healing/rekindling.

On the "what sets Tolkien apart" topic: he grew up and lived inside a worldview (or a set of worldviews -- (a style of) Catholicism, pastoralism, pursuit of knowledge for its own sake) which was already old-fashioned by his own day -- and that was before he steeped himself in the poetic world of the early Germanic poets, and this was all tempered by his experience of the War. In some ways the closest parallels are to David Jones, except that Jones' mythos was that of his Welsh heritage and his focus was more on poetry than fiction, and the whole mythos which Tolkien developed can be seen as an attempted end-run around the problems of "the gap" as discussed by Jones (if there's been a break between us and our past, create an alternate past to work with).

That's also why while there may be good or even great writers who learn from Tolkien and show his influence, there are (at least to my mind) no really good Tolkien imitators: being a good imitator would require being like Borges' Pierre Menard in relation to Cervantes.

The closest thing to it is the Elves' veneration of Elbereth, but I don't think that is ever clearly explained (rather, there is a brief explanation that I don't clearly recall). Even in the Silmarillion, I don't think that Elbereth & Co. are described as deities. They recognize the existence of a god who created them . . . but that god is not worshipped by the Elves or anybody else?

I wonder if that has anything to do with the idea that Tolkien was creating an English mythos? (I don't know if he said that or if it is just speculation on the part of commentators)

And there is worship of Melkor in the latter days after Sauron was taken captive and introduced it.

Internally to the story, I think that Tolkien would have said that the Elves, being made for this world in a way that Men aren't, weren't built for religion as we would recognize it. Externally, he didn't want to saddle "good" characters or peoples with pagan observances, and developed Judaio-Christianity except in the form of an abstract belief compatible with them on a cosmological level wouldn't work, as Christianity and Judaism are heavily and essentially historically-conditioned religions.

Religion as such wasn't important to Tolkien; Christianity was.

Elves were immortal, and many of the eldest among them had seen the Valar face-to-face

That does remove the "religious" aspect somehow.

he didn't like allegory (and thought Lewis's Narnia too painfully, obviously allegorical)

Me too. I have had that same thought many times during this discussion.

Religion as such wasn't important to Tolkien; Christianity was.

And yet he avoided doing the Narnia thing, thankfully.

But I remember clearly that all the networks that year showed the Republicans (Bush père) in blue and the Democrats (Clinton) in red. Being fond of both blue and Clinton, I reversed the colors on my own map. Thus I am greatly amused that my choice (of colors, if not of candidates) now seems to be the defacto one.

The military intelligence (MI) people who I work with and supervise are still very upset over this entire affair. They want to see people held accountable, all the way up the chain of command. Most of them are politically conservative in their outlook, to say the least, but the professional soldiers among them look at this as a stain upon this country's honor.

For my stand, I have been called 'old-fashioned' and 'quaint,' among other things. My patriotism has also been called into question. My experiences in the Bosnian war are held to be 'not-relevant.' I note that in almost all instances this has been done by people who have never served in the military, have never heard a shot fired in anger, and in general are totally clueless. Note that it was civilian lawyers with no military experience, rather than military jurists with much better knowledge of the law, who stated that the rules could be set aside in the name of the War on Terror.

The fact that there are more incidents being revealed is even more disheartening. The Army Field Manual is explicit. None of this conduct is to be tolerated. Yet we continue to hear of poorly-trained officers and enlisted personnel abusing and torturing detainees who are bound and can't fight back, doing it for the sheer pleasure of it, and what is more, being directed to do so by shadowy figures in MI who have yet to be fully identified.

The main question is: who authorized this treatment? Who gave the orders? Where did people get that idea that they could abuse and torture detainees and not be held to account? These are questions that very badly need to be answered.

An impartial, totally independent investigation needs to be done, with the power to hold people accountable up the chain, no matter now high it goes, no matter whose political ox is gored. Full disclosure and accountability are vital in order to remove this stain from our country's honor.

This, and the debacle in New Orleans, have caused me, a life-long Republilcan, to finally switch my party affilation to the Democratic Party. There it will remain until the Republicans get a clue and run someone competent for the nation's highest position.

By the way, Molly Ivins has a few words to say about our representatives feeling they have to vote on the issue of torture.

Don't forget there was probably a process of elimination involved as well. Green and orange were already associated with the Catholics and Protestants of Ireland respectively in the 19th century. White implies surrender (or earlier the Bourbon monarchy, hence ultra-monarchical conservatism) and black mourning or anarchy. Brown and grey are just a bit drab and boring. Doesn't actually leave many colours to choose from.

[pokes] Hmm. The usenet post on the matter I was vaguely remembering was here.

Before I go patting my local Republican on the head for not being completely venal, at least not today, at least not on one side -- who was the 100th, non-voting senator? Or are we down by one at the moment?