From EW, "
By Gilbert Cruz
In the 33 years since Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien passed away, his youngest son Christopher has relentlessly plugged away at deciphering and organizing his father's voluminous notes into further tales of Middle Earth. On April 17, the release of The Children of Húrin — begun by the elder Tolkien in 1918 — will bring those tales to a close.
According to the Tolkien estate website, The Children of Húrin ''takes the reader back to a time long before The Lord of the Rings, in an area of Middle Earth that was to be drowned before ever Hobbits appeared, and when the great enemy was still the fallen Vala, Morgoth, and Sauron only his lieutenant. This heroic romance is the tale of the Man, Húrin, who dared to defy Morgoth's force of evil, and his family's tragic destiny, as it follows his son Túrin Turambar's travails through the lost world of Beleriand.''
Quite a mouthful, huh? If the only word you recognize in that paragraph is ''Hobbit,'' then you probably shouldn't even think about picking up this book without first reading the other books Christopher Tolkien has worked on over the past three decades — The Silmarillion (1977), which contains both the Middle Earth creation tale and beautiful love story of Beren and Luthien; Unfinished Tales (1980); and The History of Middle Earth (a 12-volume set released between 1983 and 1996). It's a lot. You'd best get started now."
By Gilbert Cruz
In the 33 years since Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien passed away, his youngest son Christopher has relentlessly plugged away at deciphering and organizing his father's voluminous notes into further tales of Middle Earth. On April 17, the release of The Children of Húrin — begun by the elder Tolkien in 1918 — will bring those tales to a close.
According to the Tolkien estate website, The Children of Húrin ''takes the reader back to a time long before The Lord of the Rings, in an area of Middle Earth that was to be drowned before ever Hobbits appeared, and when the great enemy was still the fallen Vala, Morgoth, and Sauron only his lieutenant. This heroic romance is the tale of the Man, Húrin, who dared to defy Morgoth's force of evil, and his family's tragic destiny, as it follows his son Túrin Turambar's travails through the lost world of Beleriand.''
Quite a mouthful, huh? If the only word you recognize in that paragraph is ''Hobbit,'' then you probably shouldn't even think about picking up this book without first reading the other books Christopher Tolkien has worked on over the past three decades — The Silmarillion (1977), which contains both the Middle Earth creation tale and beautiful love story of Beren and Luthien; Unfinished Tales (1980); and The History of Middle Earth (a 12-volume set released between 1983 and 1996). It's a lot. You'd best get started now."
10 comments:
It's all crap. Silmarillion, it's like, yeah, I'm glad HE DID IT (since otherwise Lord of the Rings wouldn't be as good) but I don't actually want to READ it.
Sometimes clever set designers (for movies and television) figure out how to drastically increase the realism of the sets they build by means of a clever technique: they build a set in such a way that it affords a view (through windows or a doorway or in the background somehow) of ANOTHER set. Sometimes the background set is built solely for this purpose; sometimes it's just a clever re-use of a set built for something else.
Original Star Trek was great at this. For Season 2 they invented the "Emergency Manual Monitor," a special area in Engineering that you needed to get into in order to do something crucial. The EMM set was built nine feet off the floor (on a wooden scaffolding) with a big opening in the back wall that showed a view of the original Engineering set from up at that altitude (as it would look when viewed through a high window like the ones that look down on high school gyms or trading floors. Any other view of the EMM set looked ridiculous; it's a big three-sided box on stilts, in front of a tall one-sided set. But the effect was incredible, watching the episode ("Mirror, Mirror," others): suddenly the Enterprise was so much more real, because through a window was a whole huge area where all this stuff was going on, and it was obviously REAL, not a painting or some crap.
The Silmarillion is the same thing. It's the Engineering set in the background. It serves the same purpose, looming behind Lord of the Rings to make it look more real.
Excellent post! Great to see you crossed over to the new board. Hey Jordan, do you have a picture of that ST shot you refer to?
I do indeed! It's going to take me a few moments to get the coordinates from the navi-computer...stand by.
Take a look here.
Not such an impressive image but it is in fact from Mirror, Mirror The episode for which they first built this.
Obviously this is nothing by today's standards (and the modern Trek shows all use contiguous multi-level sets in this way, particularly in Engineering). But this was mid-Sixties television!
Damn, ask and you shall receive! Thanks for the link. That's amazing that they would go through the trouble to flesh out the realisim of the ship that way. I wonder how much they spent to achieve that effect?
By the way, I caught part of Doomsday Machine over the weekend and it was terrific! The photos posted on the blog don't do it justice. There was a TON of added fx including the machine's explosive gun.
I think Matt Jeffries (the original Trek design guy/genius in my opinion) looked at scripts that asked for new Enterprise locales and thought them through in terms of future benefits to the show's atmosphere and storytelling.
For example, I think the Mirror, Mirror script probably just specified some "Engineering room" where Scotty and Bones had to do their clandestine maneuver. Jeffries probably thought, "If we're budgeted to build something, let's build something we can use again (and, obviously, something cool).
The EMM was used many, many other times in subsequent episodes, and it always looks great and helps sell the Enterprise's cavernous interior. You see it in other stories and completely forget that the original point was just that Scotty and Bones are sneaking around and going somewhere that's off limits, risking getting discovered by those guys way back there.
It's all cobblers!
Boy, nobody comes in at the end with a meaningful, carefully-crafted response like octopunk! It seems we are all very small men indeed, with our meager rhetorical skills, that with a mere three words octopunk can cause the entire puzzle to fit together into a vibrant image.
Awesome! I thought I was copping out because by the time I got here there was a big point already put out there with dialogue and a picture and everything, but instead I was doing...that thing Jordan says I did.
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