Post by Martin Stett on Jul 9, 2022 9:43:01 GMT
My position on Tolkien is that he's... fine? The Hobbit is fine. The Lord of the Rings is fine. I don't think he's good at actually writing characters, but his descriptions and action scenes are pretty solid. I told my dad (who is more into LotR than I am) that Tolkien should have been writing video games, as he seemed more interested in the lore than in the actual narratives being told. The lore tidbits were often pretty fun, I'm not complaining about those. (Except for anything about Tom Bombadil, the useless, boring bastard. But even then, I'm more upset with how he brings the narrative to a screeching halt.)
My favorite video game is Dark Souls, and a big reason for that is the storytelling method used in the game: it is built around the player digging up lore and piecing together the history of Lordran and every character met along the way. It is assembled like a jigsaw puzzle: the game's story is dumped out all around you and it is up to the player to work out what happened in the Demon War or why Lautrec's plotline advances the way it does. You get to be an archaeologist, looking at each piece and trying to fit it into the bigger picture of Lordran's history.
I saw someone describing The Silmarillion in a very similar way just now. He stated that the book is something that you read and piece together the history of Middle Earth through its various accounts and stories, that none of it is straightforward. That got me intrigued. It sounds like a very rough read, but if it can deliver an experience akin to Dark Souls and the many hours I spent arguing over lore videos and the history of Lordran (Hawkshaw's insights into the Demon War were revolutionary and changed an entire community's view of Izalith, but his video on The Complete History of Lordran reeks of conjecture that ignores huge chunks of history we ACTUALLY know), I'd be game for attempting it.
So the question is this: Is The Silmarillion dry, boring, linear history, or is it... a sort of puzzle, a series of disconnected events that the reader can try to link together and try to make sense of?
My favorite video game is Dark Souls, and a big reason for that is the storytelling method used in the game: it is built around the player digging up lore and piecing together the history of Lordran and every character met along the way. It is assembled like a jigsaw puzzle: the game's story is dumped out all around you and it is up to the player to work out what happened in the Demon War or why Lautrec's plotline advances the way it does. You get to be an archaeologist, looking at each piece and trying to fit it into the bigger picture of Lordran's history.
I saw someone describing The Silmarillion in a very similar way just now. He stated that the book is something that you read and piece together the history of Middle Earth through its various accounts and stories, that none of it is straightforward. That got me intrigued. It sounds like a very rough read, but if it can deliver an experience akin to Dark Souls and the many hours I spent arguing over lore videos and the history of Lordran (Hawkshaw's insights into the Demon War were revolutionary and changed an entire community's view of Izalith, but his video on The Complete History of Lordran reeks of conjecture that ignores huge chunks of history we ACTUALLY know), I'd be game for attempting it.
So the question is this: Is The Silmarillion dry, boring, linear history, or is it... a sort of puzzle, a series of disconnected events that the reader can try to link together and try to make sense of?
