"For all that he has inspired many a mediocre imitator, the power and legacy of Tolkien, and the high fantasy he invented, cannot be understated."
The correct phrase is "cannot be overstated." I cannot overstate how common the erroneous "understated" variant has become, to the point it now seems likely to replace the original. The problem seems to arise from the trifecta of overstated being less familiar than understated, the difficulty of parsing the meaning of the phrase (which is basically "impossible to exaggerate") and—with apologies to Doug Piranha—litotes.
I was actually confused by that for a moment when reading the article.
I think rants such as yours are good and important. Despite not being a native English speaker, I think English speakers should strive to hold to their language rules and not let globalism and less informed people like me take their rich vocabulary and correct grammar away from them.
With English as a true lingua franca, I think us non-native speakers should feel some ownership too. It is the language we are required to speak when communicating with foreigners in a globalized world. I think we should see it as our language as well.
I’m guessing that the bastardised “could care less” is an Americanism that is endemic to Internet discourse. Thankfully, I’ve never heard anyone say it out loud on this side of the Atlantic.
Never cared for the many linguistic convolutions of over/understatedness, as I feel I always need to solve an equation in my head to gain a basic piece of information. It’s no wonder even authors get tripped up.
Also “nonplussed”, which is its own antonym at this point, and needs to be sanctioned.
I don’t usually worry about misspellings, my spelling and typing isn’t great, but it seems like here particularly Site instead of Cite as in citing a source is painfully common.
Or teach people what it actually means. But i agree, it is one of those words who's uses in Modern English make me grind my teeth - and i'm not all that fussy.
Decimate is already fixed. It means to destroy a large number. It meant killing one in ten in Latin. But there are lots of words that have different meanings in the original language and have changed over time. This meaning is centuries old and the dominate one.
I don't know why decimate gets this pedantry. Maybe because it has interesting source but why not talk about the source. It is especially weird coming from online people who use new definitions all the time. Nobody is like the real definition of computer is person who computes. Or hacker is somebody who chops.
Think about it if asked you to overstate Tolkein's achievements if they were great enough, no matter how hard you'd try, you wouldn't be able to over state them.
I do not think this is a typo. Tolkien is very old school. Many people today do not share his opinions and world views.
Most old books, movies... were subverted and reinterpreted today, just look at starwars or Witcher. Huge corporation spend billions just for an opportunity to defecate on Tolkien's grave. But his legacy seems to be resistant to this sort of damage!
> The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”.
Can we please fucking stop pretending that every work of fiction must be about several factions in shades of grey fighting one another in a universe where Objective Good and Evil aren't a thing?
I also isn't accurate. The Elves are generally good but don't help at all costs, they are fairly self-serving (or seem to be). Gollum is a swing b/w pity and anger. Gandalf and Aragorn tend to hide information (for the betterment of the mission it seems). Plenty of other "characters" are self-serving, Eagles, Beorn, Mr. Bombadil. Even Sauron was once good and there's hints that people believe he isn't pure evil or had some good to do.
Ironically, there are very few characters in Tolkien who are consistently and unwaveringly good -- the huge majority, including some of the central figures like Frodo and Sam, had at least some moments of darkness, however fleeting.
> the huge majority, including some of the central figures like Frodo and Sam, had at least some moments of darkness, however fleeting.
Yes, but not due to their own inherrent greyness, but because of the corruptive influence of evil they fought against. That's a huge difference to my eyes.
True, but it's always obvious what the good thing is and what the evil thing is at any point. The characters themselves may falter but what they should be doing is immediately clear.
This is why I tapped out of breaking bad about half way through.
Brilliantly done show, blah blah. But no one in it was sympathetic anymore after a certain point. Everyone was a horrible human being - I find it hard to watch that.
It is valid thing to point out for a critic. Just like unrealistic physics or one dimensional characters are.
Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common.
> It is valid thing to point out for a critic. Just like unrealistic physics or one dimensional characters are.
That presumes that Objective Good and Evil are somehow just as unrealistic. That's very much debatable, though I'd not be surprised if right here on HN people can't see that.
> Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common.
Yeah, so is grey and grey morality. Hacks like GRRM make bank with objectively bad people on all sides, and it's tauted as 'realism'.
It's a story about a world where God and deities objectively exist and interact with it in visible ways, it makes sense everything turns around being for or against them.
There isn't much of an economy or progress in general, with magic being a thing. The only sin the good guys are allowed is Pride.
This is relevant for some fantasy worlds, but not for Middle Earth.
Morality in Middle Earth is clearly not derived from divine mandates. Magic is relatively rare and not used to support economic activities all that much. It is in fact on its way out by the end of LoTR.
> The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”.
Yeah, I love The Lord of the Rings: read and re-read it as a teen (read it to my daughters when they were young — twice because the younger one was too young the first go-through). But I don't disagree with a lot of the criticism of the book.
I don't know the term that the critics would use, but I tend to say that I like "small" stories in general. A small story is more like the film "The Last Picture Show". A story where the entire world is saved from the embodiment of evil by a handful of determined but powerless good guys is the opposite of what I would call a "small" story.
But I forgive Lord of the Rings because I put it on a different shelf and in another corner. Tolkien wrote perhaps the second best "fable" of all time. It seems strange to me to hold it up to 20th Century literary trends.
Anyone remember the EA Battle for Middle Earth series? There's a small group of people trying to resurrect it, but they might need a hand: https://github.com/Ravo92/Patch-2.22-Launcher
I played that as a kid. It was fun, but even as a dumb kid who did not understand depth it seemed unbalanced. I would be greatly amused to hear from someone more informed what the more mature community has concluded about it as a competitive RTS.
As a dumb kid, unlike many RTS games where I would likely get trounced, I found myself entering random battles where we would get stale mated and bored because both sides felt unending.
I run Gnooks, a self-learning literature recommendation experiment which has been used by a few million people so far. According to their likes, Tolkien is the 3rd most popular author:
Scifi isn't a particularly big seller (biggest genre fiction by a huge factor is romance and thrillers). Frankly the top entries do suggest a disproportionate amount of old S.F fans.
Most users probably come over from https://www.gnod.com after discovering one of the other recommendation projects. The music one is pretty popular. Or they come via googling for "author recommendation engine" or something like that.
Clarke is at position 293:
...
#292 John Flanagan
#293 Arthur Charles Clarke
#294 Augusten Burroughs
...
Very interesting. Do you track any sort of demographic data, such as age, gender and location? Looking at the top authors I would wager millennials are the biggest users?
The users only rate authors and enter no other data. So the only demographic data I have is the list of countries Matomo outputs. For last month, the top 10 countries look like this:
United States 46.4%
United Kingdom 8.1%
Canada 5.2%
Australia 4.3%
Russia 3.9%
Germany 2.9%
Italy 1.9%
France 1.9%
India 1.8%
New Zealand 1.3%
Bit of an aside, but this means we are now only 20 years from now the copyright on all his books published in his lifetime expiring, right? I wonder what effects, if any, that will have on the use of his works. Right owners of Sherlock Holmes and Conan for instance have kept fighting to control those works even after (some) copyrights expired. Otherwise will the market be flooded, for better or worse, with new movies and video games and other adaptations of Tolkien's works around January 1 2044? That is less than 21 years from now. The first of the Peter Jackson movies came out 22 years ago.
Yes, 2044 is the year when Tolkien’s best-known works enter the public domain (unless laws are changed in the meantime).
By then, AI can probably generate Jackson-quality movies with these recognizable characters in near real-time. It should be a fertile era for Tolkien fans who will finally get to tell their own visual stories within this universe.
> Where many modernists greeted the Great War as a moment of disenchantment and disillusionment, a young Tolkien, who fought in it, took it as a spur to a mission of re-enchantment for a world desperately in need of myth.
The anti-war sentiment of Tolkien’s work isn’t even highlighted explicitly enough I find.
Dead Marshes echo WWI trenches and WWII fascism casts shadows over Sauron's dominion.
Frodo's scars mirror war's enduring trauma.
Myth making for himself, his children and general world (re-)building.
Readit News
The correct phrase is "cannot be overstated." I cannot overstate how common the erroneous "understated" variant has become, to the point it now seems likely to replace the original. The problem seems to arise from the trifecta of overstated being less familiar than understated, the difficulty of parsing the meaning of the phrase (which is basically "impossible to exaggerate") and—with apologies to Doug Piranha—litotes.
<End rant>
I think rants such as yours are good and important. Despite not being a native English speaker, I think English speakers should strive to hold to their language rules and not let globalism and less informed people like me take their rich vocabulary and correct grammar away from them.
Deleted Comment
Also “nonplussed”, which is its own antonym at this point, and needs to be sanctioned.
Wait a minute…
> Tolkien's whole output has been less important than a single episode of Rick & Morty.
There, I understated his influence. See how easy that was?
“Are not great”
Sorry, I had to correct somebody for something in this critique festival. You happen to be the unlucky winner :)
Another think, not another thing!
And it's harebrained, not hairbrained.
personal pet peeve of which i’ve written about before:
loose vs lose
two completely different meanings and pronunciations.
I don't know why decimate gets this pedantry. Maybe because it has interesting source but why not talk about the source. It is especially weird coming from online people who use new definitions all the time. Nobody is like the real definition of computer is person who computes. Or hacker is somebody who chops.
This is an overly simplistic statement about a great achievement, which has had a long-lasting cultural effect.
I'm a little confused about why "cannot be overstated" fits better when the preceding phrase is an understatement. Can you explain?
Most old books, movies... were subverted and reinterpreted today, just look at starwars or Witcher. Huge corporation spend billions just for an opportunity to defecate on Tolkien's grave. But his legacy seems to be resistant to this sort of damage!
Can we please fucking stop pretending that every work of fiction must be about several factions in shades of grey fighting one another in a universe where Objective Good and Evil aren't a thing?
Yes, but not due to their own inherrent greyness, but because of the corruptive influence of evil they fought against. That's a huge difference to my eyes.
Brilliantly done show, blah blah. But no one in it was sympathetic anymore after a certain point. Everyone was a horrible human being - I find it hard to watch that.
Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common.
That presumes that Objective Good and Evil are somehow just as unrealistic. That's very much debatable, though I'd not be surprised if right here on HN people can't see that.
> Objectively angelic vs evil was extremely common setup in cheap literature. It is easy to write and people used to consume tons of it. Be it detective stories, adventures, westerns, goodly good vs badly bad was common.
Yeah, so is grey and grey morality. Hacks like GRRM make bank with objectively bad people on all sides, and it's tauted as 'realism'.
There isn't much of an economy or progress in general, with magic being a thing. The only sin the good guys are allowed is Pride.
Morality in Middle Earth is clearly not derived from divine mandates. Magic is relatively rare and not used to support economic activities all that much. It is in fact on its way out by the end of LoTR.
Yeah, I love The Lord of the Rings: read and re-read it as a teen (read it to my daughters when they were young — twice because the younger one was too young the first go-through). But I don't disagree with a lot of the criticism of the book.
I don't know the term that the critics would use, but I tend to say that I like "small" stories in general. A small story is more like the film "The Last Picture Show". A story where the entire world is saved from the embodiment of evil by a handful of determined but powerless good guys is the opposite of what I would call a "small" story.
But I forgive Lord of the Rings because I put it on a different shelf and in another corner. Tolkien wrote perhaps the second best "fable" of all time. It seems strange to me to hold it up to 20th Century literary trends.
The trick is that he rarely uses words of Latin origin.
The Direct Object he would write first, and it was followed with a different word order, and still further, ere his sentence was complete.
Patrick Rothfuss does this too, which is why his works also sound so pleasant and poetic.
As a dumb kid, unlike many RTS games where I would likely get trounced, I found myself entering random battles where we would get stale mated and bored because both sides felt unending.
https://www.gnooks.com/top
OTOH, your users probably aren't a statistically random sample of old S.F. fans...
Most users probably come over from https://www.gnod.com after discovering one of the other recommendation projects. The music one is pretty popular. Or they come via googling for "author recommendation engine" or something like that.
Clarke is at position 293:
Can't be worse than The Hobbit and the Rings of Power films.
By then, AI can probably generate Jackson-quality movies with these recognizable characters in near real-time. It should be a fertile era for Tolkien fans who will finally get to tell their own visual stories within this universe.
The anti-war sentiment of Tolkien’s work isn’t even highlighted explicitly enough I find.
Dead Marshes echo WWI trenches and WWII fascism casts shadows over Sauron's dominion.
Frodo's scars mirror war's enduring trauma.
Myth making for himself, his children and general world (re-)building.
To mend, yes.