It's always fun to read about things that have come to be believed about famous authors, without a basis in fact, whether through hoaxes or by more innocent means.
The following line from the linked blog post stood out to me: "As a Tolkienist I would love [for] many cities A, buildings B or persons C to have some sort of link to my favourite author…"
That reminded me of the hoax surrounding a purported 1862 meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, which came to light in the early 2010s.[0] The story gained legs because of how badly many Dickensians wanted to believe it. It was a less sentimental Dostoevskian who took it upon himself to unravel the whole thing.
There has been some discussion on HN of the Dickens-Dostoevsky affair.[1]
The blog post currently says: "I would love a many cities". I would guess that "a" should be replaced with "so" rather than "for". Perhaps the author will correct it and we'll find out.
I can see why the comment seems, prima facie, inappropriately nit picky for HN, but there’s a link in the article to another article where the author dissects the details of rhyming meter in the “Not all those who wander are lost” poem, and, having read that heroic exercise in pedantry, applaud this courageous commenter for epic drollery.
One I read was Galileo visiting Harvard. Apparently they were co-temporal (overlapped anyway; Harvard is old) and it would have been possible during his house arrest, should friends have spirited him to the New World.
As well as misplaced quotes, a lot or people like to identify connections between places that Tolkien lived in or visited and places in Middle Earth. Clearly, there are likely inspirations, for example, young Tolkien's walking holiday in the Alps may have informed some of his descriptions of the Misty Mountains, and World War one battlefields may have inspired the Dead Marshes and Mordor. But did 'The Hollies' park in Leeds [0], where Tolkien was a professor, inspire Hollin, just outside the gates of Moria? Who can say?
Incidentally, I have lived in two of the cities that Tolkien did: Leeds and Bournemouth. As a post grad at Leeds University, the small office (just east of the current Student Union building) that I shared for a while had reputedly been used by Tolkien long before I was born. We joked that it was the inspiration for the damp, dark, twisty caves of the goblins in the Hobbit.
[Edit - just checked - Tolkien explicitly references his Swiss walking tour as an inspiration for parts of the Misty Mountains]
I'd love if someone fact checked whether the salt mine of Wieliczka was really the inspiration for Moria (the guides do imply so, based AFAIK on a visit by Tolkien there). It does seem to fall under the "likely inspiration" case (if you ever visit Wieliczka, you'll get it :D)
> salt mine of Wieliczka was really the inspiration for Moria (the guides do imply so, based AFAIK on a visit by Tolkien there)
Hmmm. Not heard this one. That said, I've read quite a lot of Tolkien biographic material, and I'm not aware that he ever visited southern Poland before writing the Lord of the Rings. He wasn't particularly well travelled before he became famous, and as far as I know he had only visited South Africa (where he was born and left as a very young child), Switzerland (walking holiday) and France (WW1) before the bulk of the LOTR writing occurred. After 1939 a trip to Wieliczka would have involved him entering a WW2 war zone or crossing the Iron Curtain, something I'm certain he didn't do before LOTR was published in 1955.
The suggestion was that he visited it on a trip before WW1, possibly related to the Switzerland trip? And most importantly, it would be marked as Austro-Hungary territory at the time.
> The suggestion was that he visited it on a trip before WW1, possibly related to the Switzerland trip?
Again, I don't think so. I just re-read the relevant chapter in Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien. The 1911 Switzerland trip (when he was aged 19) was just that; and the group of 12 returned to England as soon as the walking was done.
Seeing the salt mines was one of my highlights of my trip to Poland! On my tour any Tolkien connection or inspiration wasn't mentioned, fwiw. Would love to go back when travel is reopened.
I visited Wieliczka and some visual similarities are striking enough that the hypothesis that Wieliczka inspired at least the filmmakers of the series seems plausible to me.
But there is AFAIK no record of JRRT himself visiting there and Poland would be a very untypical vacation destination of a British guy in the interwar period.
I may consider myself a Rowlingologist (because of JK Rowling), and it is a constant fight. A lot of places in the UK claim to have inspired JK Rowling, just because they are similar in the way they were portrayed in the films (which is very different from the books).
There is also the case of Livreria Lello, in Porto, Portugal, who spent years claiming JK Rowling visited it and got inspired for Hogwarts (they seem to have a similar staircase). They even held a Harry Potter event with signed books (most of them fake, probably the bookshop didnt know it, but they didnt do their dilligence).
Fortunatelly, Rowling denied knowing that place at all on Twitter [1], but as far as I know, the Livreria keeps telling its visitor about Rowling connection.
The same happens in Edinburgh (JKR city for the last 30 years), where if you do a tour, the guide will try to make a Harry Potter connection on every corner. Which is not completely true.
> The Drakensberg in South Africa ... are sometimes cited as an inspiration to Tolkien.
Tolkien returned to England with his mother aged 3 and never went back. Tolkien himself claimed "to have few memories of South Africa, except for a vivid encounter with a large spider, an experience he put to good use later in his writing. The grave of his father, Arthur Tolkien, is still identifiable in Bloemfontein’s President Brand Cemetery" [0] So probably not a big influence, if any.
What I find interesting is just how well the Lotro of the Rings Online (LoTRO) brought all this to life...
14 years later, the graphics are a bit dated, but still very pretty. Moria remains my all time favorite zone in an MMORPG. The atmosphere, the scale ... its just _is_ Moria.
If you're a Tolkien fan, I highly recommend at least checking out some of the youtube videos - or even better, give the game a try (it has a free to play option).
I didn't realise how many fake quotes he had attributed to him. Reminds me a bit of the many fake Buddha quotes that do the rounds. Some are obviously just the sort of guff you'd read on Instagram hovering over a naff picture of a sunset. Others are harder to detect and may be a subtle distortion or sloppy transcription rather than a total fabrication.
Goes to show how sceptical we must be when reading things online, even when they sound plausible. As the late great Abraham Lincoln once said according to something I read recently... "The problem with quotes found on the internet is that many simply are not true".
A related quotes found on the internet subgenre is quotes which are actually real and correctly attributed but were a lot less cool than they look over a naff picture of a sunset
At the beginning of this century, speechwriters for a struggling British Conservative Party leader gave him the line "do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man" to try to turn his dullness into a virtue. Media generally found it amusing, he was greeted on his return to Parliament by shushing from the opposition, and within the year he'd been replaced without even being given the chance to lead his party into an election.
But it was a pithy enough line to find its way onto inspirational quote lists, and fifteen years later was improbably adorning the Twitter profile of Colin Kaepernick (complete with correct attribution to a politician Kaepernick almost certainly hasn't paid any attention to, never mind been inspired by). Can't wait for British civil rights icons to be inspired by the words of Jeb Bush!
>Can't wait for British civil rights icons to be inspired by the words of Jeb Bush!
"When the Women's March feminist organisation tweeted "Rest in peace and power, Barbara Bush" to mark the 2018 death of the conservative political matriarch, Twitter users criticised the organisation harshly for abandoning its radical beginnings"
Of course Smaug does get referenced (in Fellowship, Frodo actually meets Glòin, i.e. Gimli's dad and one of Bilbo's fellow adventurers in The Hobbit). But still, it's fair to say that there are no actual dragons anywhere in LOTR.
It seems to make people happy to attribute pithy, compassionate, vaguely new-agey sentiments to prestigious writers. Another example that comes to mind is the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, whose works have been...reimagined in the last few decades [1] into little things you can superimpose on a photo of a beach sunset.
Coleman Barks at least has a sense of rhyme, but when it comes to the original Rumi, it is indeed very different. It’s hard to find good (accurate) Rumi translations,
I don't know what it says about me, but I've never heard any of these before, with the exception of the misquoting of "not all those who wander are lost"
My tower is the highest tower. And I have the best lamps. I have the best Orcs!
And I don't want to hear your fake news about how I have no body. Fake! ... Now, the folks at One Guldur Network, they're the kind of people know how respect a leader.
And if you spite me, I will summon my loyal Nazgul: The Witch-King, Khamul and Covfefe.
Well, when I was in college back then, I heard that Tolkien and his friends were really into D&D. One long weekend, after consuming too much, umm, "pipeweed", they had such a memorable adventure that "we should write this down" kept coming up. Tolkien, as he was a professor and so good with writing grant requests, was given the assignment... And, as they say, the rest is history.
55 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadThe following line from the linked blog post stood out to me: "As a Tolkienist I would love [for] many cities A, buildings B or persons C to have some sort of link to my favourite author…"
That reminded me of the hoax surrounding a purported 1862 meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, which came to light in the early 2010s.[0] The story gained legs because of how badly many Dickensians wanted to believe it. It was a less sentimental Dostoevskian who took it upon himself to unravel the whole thing.
There has been some discussion on HN of the Dickens-Dostoevsky affair.[1]
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/07/true-sto...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21150906
How many syllables in “fire”?
How do you pronounce “again”?
Huzzah!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061637
Coincidence?
Incidentally, I have lived in two of the cities that Tolkien did: Leeds and Bournemouth. As a post grad at Leeds University, the small office (just east of the current Student Union building) that I shared for a while had reputedly been used by Tolkien long before I was born. We joked that it was the inspiration for the damp, dark, twisty caves of the goblins in the Hobbit.
[Edit - just checked - Tolkien explicitly references his Swiss walking tour as an inspiration for parts of the Misty Mountains]
[0] https://www.headingleyleeds.com/parks-hollies
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien#Youth
Hmmm. Not heard this one. That said, I've read quite a lot of Tolkien biographic material, and I'm not aware that he ever visited southern Poland before writing the Lord of the Rings. He wasn't particularly well travelled before he became famous, and as far as I know he had only visited South Africa (where he was born and left as a very young child), Switzerland (walking holiday) and France (WW1) before the bulk of the LOTR writing occurred. After 1939 a trip to Wieliczka would have involved him entering a WW2 war zone or crossing the Iron Curtain, something I'm certain he didn't do before LOTR was published in 1955.
Again, I don't think so. I just re-read the relevant chapter in Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien. The 1911 Switzerland trip (when he was aged 19) was just that; and the group of 12 returned to England as soon as the walking was done.
But there is AFAIK no record of JRRT himself visiting there and Poland would be a very untypical vacation destination of a British guy in the interwar period.
There is also the case of Livreria Lello, in Porto, Portugal, who spent years claiming JK Rowling visited it and got inspired for Hogwarts (they seem to have a similar staircase). They even held a Harry Potter event with signed books (most of them fake, probably the bookshop didnt know it, but they didnt do their dilligence).
Fortunatelly, Rowling denied knowing that place at all on Twitter [1], but as far as I know, the Livreria keeps telling its visitor about Rowling connection.
The same happens in Edinburgh (JKR city for the last 30 years), where if you do a tour, the guide will try to make a Harry Potter connection on every corner. Which is not completely true.
[1] https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1263377779338481665
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shire
If this is accurate or not is another question, but a google of "Tolkien Drakensberg" certainly shows that it is widely known.
Tolkien returned to England with his mother aged 3 and never went back. Tolkien himself claimed "to have few memories of South Africa, except for a vivid encounter with a large spider, an experience he put to good use later in his writing. The grave of his father, Arthur Tolkien, is still identifiable in Bloemfontein’s President Brand Cemetery" [0] So probably not a big influence, if any.
[0] https://www.southafrica.net/gl/en/travel/article/jrr-tolkien...
14 years later, the graphics are a bit dated, but still very pretty. Moria remains my all time favorite zone in an MMORPG. The atmosphere, the scale ... its just _is_ Moria.
If you're a Tolkien fan, I highly recommend at least checking out some of the youtube videos - or even better, give the game a try (it has a free to play option).
Goes to show how sceptical we must be when reading things online, even when they sound plausible. As the late great Abraham Lincoln once said according to something I read recently... "The problem with quotes found on the internet is that many simply are not true".
Churchill: "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."
-Apocryphal
* ᵇʸ ˢᵒᵐᵉᵒⁿᵉ ᵒᵗʰᵉʳ ᵗʰᵃⁿ ᴬᵇʳᵃʰᵃᵐ ᴸⁱⁿᶜᵒˡⁿ
At the beginning of this century, speechwriters for a struggling British Conservative Party leader gave him the line "do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man" to try to turn his dullness into a virtue. Media generally found it amusing, he was greeted on his return to Parliament by shushing from the opposition, and within the year he'd been replaced without even being given the chance to lead his party into an election.
But it was a pithy enough line to find its way onto inspirational quote lists, and fifteen years later was improbably adorning the Twitter profile of Colin Kaepernick (complete with correct attribution to a politician Kaepernick almost certainly hasn't paid any attention to, never mind been inspired by). Can't wait for British civil rights icons to be inspired by the words of Jeb Bush!
"When the Women's March feminist organisation tweeted "Rest in peace and power, Barbara Bush" to mark the 2018 death of the conservative political matriarch, Twitter users criticised the organisation harshly for abandoning its radical beginnings"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rest_in_power#cite_note-24
> It simply isn’t an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons
...since, you know, Lord Of The Rings does not feature any dragons! (The "fell beasts" that Nazguls ride are not dragons, not even close)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman_Barks
And I don't want to hear your fake news about how I have no body. Fake! ... Now, the folks at One Guldur Network, they're the kind of people know how respect a leader.
And if you spite me, I will summon my loyal Nazgul: The Witch-King, Khamul and Covfefe.
----
(... Things I was expecting to read at the link.)