h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I didn't notice any extra eoywn bits in TTT extended edition but i'll have to watch it again. There is however, a fantastic boromir/faramir/denethor sceen, which shows the conflict between faramir and denethor, something which doesn't come across in the normal editions

I ordered the Seamus Heaney translation for no better reason than I'd heard of it. It won a prize for something - might have been the Booker. Winning the Booker prize would normally have put me off. After all, The Satanic Verses won one year and that was indescribable ... and not in a good way.

Is TTT extended version in the post to you Sho? Ooh, you lucky person. You're in for a treat!

How could you have missed a whole funeral scene and Eowyn singing Asmodai? I'm worried about you. You're not paying attention. Your exams and your future may hang in the balance. Now wake up and apply yourself young Jedi! What would Master Yoda say?!!

Isn't there a scene with Eowyn cooking soup for Aragorn too?

Whoops! yeh theres the funeral scene which is good (you get to see the royal guard there too) and you do see her make some soup for aragorn.

I was watched it with soeone and i got a bit distracted from the film... i'll watch it tonight

oops again meant

The only way I'd get distracted from TTT (or any other LOTR film for that matter) is if there was an elf sitting on my knee...

but that is lowering the tone of this thread!

Apparently that nice Mr. Amazon will send my TTT to me this week.

AND there's an extra bit where Eowyn's having a whinge about being sent back into the caves with the women instead of being allowed to fight alongside guess-who. AND the she's in the extra bit in the stables with the taming of Brego. Now, no more canoodling and having a good time Asmodai. This is serious business! You have to keep at least one eye open and on the screen.

Mr A's sending me Beowulf. He's pretty efficient. Have you looked under his "software" or "gifts" sections for elves that can be applied to the knees?

oh, never thought of asking that Nice Mr. A to send me an ...


of course, I don't actually have a DVD player, so when I do get round to watching TTT it will be on my notebook... so I will almost literally have an or two on my knees.

My Beowulf's arrived. Had a quick flick through it in the couple of moments I didn't really have to spare and was relieved to note that it looks as though it's written in plain(ish) English. Now I'll be in a quandary. I started reading Volume 1, Part 1 of Tolkien's Lost Tales last night and quite got into it. It doesn't seem the sort of book you can just rush through so it might take a while to get onto Beowulf. Soon as I have anything to report though, I'll let you know Recumbentman. What does yours look like Sho? Does it look readable? I've seen snatches of Beowulf from other, presumably earlier, translations that look just impossible for the uninitiated (such as myself) to understand.

So has your TTT turned up yet? Let us know what you think of it. It's a shame you have to watch it on your notebook. The first DVD I bought was the Perfect Storm and it arrived before my DVD player so I tried watching on my computer screen. I gave up after about 1/4 of an hour and decided to wait for the player to be delivered. Fortunately it came the next day. But maybe your notebook screen's better than my computer screen. Mine gives me a headache.

Did you get round to watching the extended TTT properly Asmodai? Hope you took special note of all the extra bits this time

Ref. "Lost Tales" and "Unfinished Tales" - these won't mean a thing until you've read both the Silmarillion and LOTR(particularly the Appendices) and have a grasp of the events in the major Middle-Earth opus.

If this helps, don't see "Lost Tales" as something to be read end-to-end, or "start-to-finish" in any linear manner.

I see these books as something to be dipped into, whenever you need more background information on a theme that finds its final expression in LOTR. Either for more background on the characters / events, or to study how an idea evolved over the years into the version that made its way into the primary opus.

Take "Unfinished Tales", for instance:- Gandalf, talking to I think Faramir in LOTR, says that his name in a long forgotten-youth was Olorin.

Look up "Olorin" in UT, and you will discover ideas and concepts that really fire the neurons and make new connections re. Gandalf's origins and background. (For instance, why he is powerful enough to take on a Balrog and win - just about - but he is not nearly powerful enough to go head-to-head with Sauron).

The Lost Tales, I think, are concerned with the evolution and development of the mythos from its earliest form - you can see the main themes of the Silmarillion are there from day one, but they develop and evolve and take a deeper, less "superficial" form (if such a word could ever be used). They also tie Middle-Earth more firmly into English myth and folklore: the starting point is an idea common to Celtic and Anglo-Saxon mythology, of a lone traveller lost at sea who stumbles upon fantastic lands and islands in the far west. This myth exists in various forms in Welsh and AS/Norse folklore: Tolkien fleshes out what the traveller finds as the lands of the Far West, Elvenhome, which live on still, their inhabitants having withdrawn from contact with mankind.

In Tolkein's concept of the world, we are now (in the 20 - 21st century) in the sixth or seventh age of the world, a long way down the line from the Third Age of LOTR. But contact with the Elven realm still occurs spasmodically or (as osme would have it) with the grace of the Valar.

Incidentally, another "background" reference worth reading that offers more detail on Middle Earth is "The Collected Letters of JRR Tolkein" - most definitely worth reading! Somewhere in the Collected Letters, JRR explicitly makes the remark about our now being in the Sixth or Seventh Age, and that God will call an end to the world at the conclusion of the Seventh Age. (Millenial thinking, the Roman Catholic concept of the Eschaton?)

As a final thought: in one of the Unfinished/Lost Tales collections is a fragment of a story written by Tolkien sometime circa 1945, where he postulates a meeting between the Lands of the West and Middle Earth which is precipitated by a great storm, the greatest England has ever seen, which sweeps over Southern England causing great ruin to the nations of the trees.

The date that JRR gives to this great storm? October 1987. (eery accuracy!)

To whoever doesn't have a DVD player: I bought a DVD player for my bedroom a couple of weeks ago - £30 of Amazon. That particular one is sold out now but check in the January sales and maybe you'll find something good.

I reckon at £30, you really don't have much excuse for not getting one. Well, check the region thing (many single region ones can be made multiregion by putting in a code on the remote, although some still won't work with some region 1 encoding). Also check that you have a socket that will go with it on your TV. I think pretty much anything other than the standard analogue aerial socket will do.

Im watching it tonight Agpov, spent the day listening to the soundtrack trilogy back to back while i do some college work.

I will definitely read the Silmarillion! There's never any shortage of Tolkien books in any NZ bookshop now (50 different editions!
I am glad to have the scarf thing clarified - (I really *don't* see very well, do I?)

Ah, AgProv! You might be just the person to help me out. I've been puzzling mightily over which "Unfinished Tales" to get. There's just plain old "Unfinished Tales": 592 pages (6 April 1998), paperback, quite cheap. And there's "Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle Earth": 472 pages (1 Sept 2001), paperback, considerably more expensive. The problem is, Ama*on use the same reviews for both books so it looks as though it's the same book. Is it the same book, do you happen to know? Ama*on can't be trusted on things like that. When I bought "Lost Tales" I accidentally got part 2 first because they used the same reviews for both as though they were the same book. Very confusing. No point in asking them either because they take weeks to respond to any questions, if indeed they bother to respond at all.

I agree with you by the way. You'd wonder what on earth you were reading if you started "Lost Tales" without reading "The Silmarillion". And you'd wonder why you were reading The Silmarillion if you hadn't read LotR first.

However, although I'm a dipper after the fact (after the fact of having first read a book from cover to cover), I seem to be hooked now that I've started "Lost Tales". The idea of putting it down before I've finished it is out of the questions. It is slightly text-bookish but not enough to put me off reading it, yet. Actually, it makes me feel a bit like a nosey-parker because Christopher Tolkien puts in so much detail about the original scripts: his father wrote this very quickly and his writing was hard to read; his mother copied that piece out; his father wrote over the other pencilled story in ink completely obliterating the original, and so on. Fascinating. And who would have thought he envisioned Kortirion, at the centre of Tol Eressea located at Warwick - not that far from where I live! Wow. No, I'm sorry. I just can't use it as a dry old reference book. It's far too interesting.

That was a very unusual storm we had in 1987. Michael Fish was in a right flap about it. I remember it well. Nothing like it had been recorded. It swept so many trees away. If Tolkien predicted a storm like that in that particular year .... well, what are the odds of such a prediction coming true, I wonder. Must look out for that bit.

BouncyBitInTheMiddle: your DVD player does indeed sound like a bargain and if I didn't have one, I wouldn't hesitate to look for a similar steal at Amazon. I notice you refer to Amazon openly and haven't been zonked. Things must have relaxed around here since I first h2g2ed.

Asmodai: we may be asking you questions later so I hope you've been concentrating.

Della: 50 different editions? No! Really? Good grief!

Then there's the movie merchadise tie-ins... the cuboid box containing a luxury leather set of the three books, the ones which have a large figure of Gollum packaged in the box... Then there are all the associated books, the LotR location guide, which details exact which bit (or bits) of country did duty as which bit of Middle Earth. It's all incredibly cheesy, and I can't help but think Tolkien would be distressed by the money-grubbing tackiness of it all. The radio advert., for the third film, has a portentious American voice urging people to see the film *on the grounds that the first two made umpty-million dollars at the box office*! It reminded me of Oscar Wilde's remark about those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing...
That's why although I get truly wrapt up in the films whilst watching, by and large I regard the LotR 'industry' a bit more cagily. When the business news has someone mangling Middle Earth place names and character names in an execrable New Zildamerican accent, and talking about the $$$,$$$$ to be made, it feels like sacrilege!

See what you mean Della. I've just searched for Lord of the Rings under "books" on Amazon and it's fetched up 449 results - and that's just books. It must be even worse in NZ where the government and people in the tourist, film, book, toy and memorabilia industries are all beavering away, churning out the goods and dragging in the folks. Fewer than half the books on page 1 of the search results were even Tolkien's books. It might be enough to put some people off. You have to search back through a page or so to find a cheapish paperback copy of the whole trilogy.

I'll come back to "Lost Tales" and the Tolkein apochrypha later, as I think it deserves a fuller reply. Reading the postings about merchandising and film tie-ins, and earlier postings about how Tolkein could be interpreted as "racist" in modern eyes, there's an aspect to all this that hasn't really been covered yet.

Having a life and other hobby interests outside computers (as I think we all do!), I'm an unashamed "anorak" who rediscovered the joy of a childhood interest, some years ago after I got knocked about a bit in a road accident and needed something to occupy my time as I was getting better.

Up until about age eighteen, I was a collector and modeller of "toy soldiers" (for want of a better phrase) and a builder of model kits of the Airfix generic type.

Then real life, career, and a healthy interest in women got in the way, and I didn't rediscover my childhood collection until a few years ago. The bug caught again, and I've been rebuilding and expanding my collection as time and cash allow.

Just now, I was glancing through a hobby magazine - "Wargames Illustrated" - and looking at full-colour spreads of the latest model figures being released.

Not unsurprisingly, one of the biggest names in the hobby, Games Workshop, has won the merchandising battle to create and market the "toy soldier" figures that go with the films - these are really impressive miniature reproductions of the characters and the armies from the movies. This isn't really my kind of wargaming, I'm a strictly conventional "real history" enthusiast, but this doesn't take away from the stunning visual impact of these figures.

I'm inclined to compare the latest generation of Lord of the Rings military figures with the ones my friends at school were seriously into in the 1970's.

The current generation (I'm looking at full colour photos of "Mordor Orcs")show a whole hue of skin colours - leprous white, corpse-pallid-grey, zombie green, sickly yellow - but there isn't a black or brown face amongst them. Comparing this to the Orc model figures available in the 1970's and 80's, which were uniformly black or very dark brown, this has to be a step forward - there is no way any adverse racial interpretation can be made from these lads, unless you're racially prejudiced against grey or green! (The "painting instructions" for the bare metal figures in the 1970's were simple and explicit: an Orc may only be black or brown of skin. No deviency is permitted. The hobby press at the time was very firm on this rule, as I recall.)

Very interesting - you've read the book, you've seen the films, now buy the models and some dice and recreate the battles!