Comment by bombcar
7 days ago
The book and movie didn’t (and was better for it - The Annualized Return of The Kings Fields would be dry reading) but Tolkien clearly did (both in his notes and in his thoughts). If I want these people to live here and go to the bar here, where would they have to work, and what kind of work would it entail?
“Real world” stories don’t need to dwell on it much because you can just use history and real life - if you base a story in 50s Detroit it’s going to be much different than 2020s Detroit. And if you mess it up and claim 2020s Detroit is a bustling hub of automobile manufacturing it’s going to feel off.
But fiction, especially fantasy and sci-fi, needs a lot of these details to be at least thought about. Then the references and glimpses will feel correct and real.
> The book [...] didn’t
You mean the book that has a 40(?)-page chapter in which characters you never hear from before or afterwards describe what's happening in their home lands didn't go into the day-to-day? :)
Lord of the Rings (the book) is obsessed with this kind of detail to the point that many people find it difficult to read.
Assuming you are referring to The Council of Elrond, I think perhaps you're misremembering.
The only characters who speak at length at the Council are Glóin, Elrond (whose account is mostly skipped over), Boromir, Gandalf (the longest account), Aragorn, Frodo and Bilbo.
All of these are previously known characters except Boromir and he is certainly a major character. Plus they all add either new backstory about the ring or foreshadow something later, like Moria has been reoccupied and there is something evil there.
So there really isn't any information given that doesn't bear on the story at all.
Glóin is Gimli's father, but it's true that he does really only appear in that chapter (if you've not read the Hobbit, you won't know much about him). Afterwards, though, Gimli travels with the Fellowship.
Tolkien could have (and I believe in his notes he has versions) written the entire council, but he elides the parts that are "told elsewhere" - Bilbo, much of Gandalf and Elrond, and anything directly already told of the Hobbits.
1 reply →
Most people get tripped up in the descriptions of flora and landscapes or the poetry; The Council of Elrond is one of the easier parts and moves along quickly.
A book is different. Part of the appeal is that sort of attention to detail. It definitely filters people who can deal with it.
My dad was a literature nerd. He loved Tolstoy. Personally, I’d rather be tortured by the Czars secret police than suffer through that. :)