Maybe-Mathematical Musings

"Why do all gender-bent characters have names ending in -a, that's such a fanfic trope" buddy, the "girl names end in -a" trope is so old that JRR Tolkien invented a Hobbitish dialect of Westron in which "-a" is a masculine name affix, then turned around and "localised" those names to end in "-o" in the published text (e.g., Bilba > Bilbo, Maura > Frodo, etc.) so they wouldn't sound feminine to Anglophone readers.

Also isn’t that trope just derived from the fact that a lot of the Romance languages are gendered and that has influenced European linguistics and naming conventions to sound like that?

In part, yes, though the majority of personal names in most English-speaking cultures are not descended from Latin; this is one of those situations where you need to be cautious about leaping from "this influenced the situation" to "this is The Cause of the situation".

I was curious so I looked this up.

Apparently in Old English, -a was a typically masculine suffix. (Which may be how Hobbitish Westron wound up that way?) But I think that's unusual in Proto-Indo-European, which had -a as a typically feminine suffix. Which would explain why it's common and not just from Latin names.

It does raise the question of how it became a masculine ending in Old English, though.

The Silmarillion > The Lord of the Rings (films) > The Hobbit (book) > The Lord of the Rings (books) > The Children of Húrin >>>>>>>>>>>> The Hobbit (films)

This list is from 3 years ago, but I’ll stand by it. Pound for pound, the Hobbit book is better than the LotR films, but the movies win on quantity. Unfinished Tales is worth reading, but can’t be properly ranked here.

The Silmarillion and The Hobbit are both great literature, at least within their genres, but Tolkien was too weak a traditional novelist for The Lord of the Rings to make the cut on its own merits. The world building is superb, but too much of that is extraneous to the books themselves. The Lord of the Rings movies aren’t great art, but they are great cinema, if that makes sense. Some of the best.

This is a bad opinion; the books are far, far better than the films.

It’s true that, sentence for sentence, Tolkien is not a great prose stylist. But he does, fundamentally, have a mostly-coherent model of how his world works, so all the things he writes make sense.

In contrast, Peter Jackson was basically working to maximize scene-by-scene drama. He never misses a chance to change things around so that the scene he’s shooting is more impressive and dramatic, but makes way less sense in the context of the broader story.

There’s a film-introduced plot hole in basically every single scene of Return of the King.

I disagree with this statement. Tolkien is not a modern prose stylist. But his prose (and his narrative structure) is inline with older (and only slightly older) taste, especially for a novel with the combined length of the entire trilogy. Modern convention is for more telegraphic prose and much tighter plot structure, which I think is why many readers find him relatively boring.

My beef with the films is exactly that: they felt the need to key up drama in key places (Saruman possesses Theoden, not merely uses Wormtongue to sway him with bad advice; the army of the dead comes all the way to Minas Tirith, rather than being instrumental at seizing the Corsairs’ ships; the unnecessary detour to Osgiliath) in ways that didn’t make sense given the sensibilities of the narrative, and which detracted from the overall plot and pacing. There’s also weird visual compression (I think in one scene Barad Dur is nearly visible from MInas Tirith’s walls??) which is a lot less defensible than the narrative compression in the beginning that’s inevitable given how slowly paced The Fellowship of the Ring is.

My ordering of the books would be slightly different, but that’s something reasonable people can disagree on (as long as they agree that The Silmarillion is the best, natch).

Reading Dickens or Austen or Twain is enjoyable, on a sentence-by-sentence level, in a way that Tolkien is not.

You can get away with slow and moderately florid prose if the prose is also rewarding to read. Tolkien's is not, really. It's not hideous. It's just a little verbose without being good enough to justify the verbosity.

The Silmarillion > The Lord of the Rings (films) > The Hobbit (book) > The Lord of the Rings (books) > The Children of Húrin >>>>>>>>>>>> The Hobbit (films)

This list is from 3 years ago, but I’ll stand by it. Pound for pound, the Hobbit book is better than the LotR films, but the movies win on quantity. Unfinished Tales is worth reading, but can’t be properly ranked here.

The Silmarillion and The Hobbit are both great literature, at least within their genres, but Tolkien was too weak a traditional novelist for The Lord of the Rings to make the cut on its own merits. The world building is superb, but too much of that is extraneous to the books themselves. The Lord of the Rings movies aren’t great art, but they are great cinema, if that makes sense. Some of the best.

This is a bad opinion; the books are far, far better than the films.

It's true that, sentence for sentence, Tolkien is not a great prose stylist. But he does, fundamentally, have a mostly-coherent model of how his world works, so all the things he writes make sense.

In contrast, Peter Jackson was basically working to maximize scene-by-scene drama. He never misses a chance to change things around so that the scene he's shooting is more impressive and dramatic, but makes way less sense in the context of the broader story.

There's a film-introduced plot hole in basically every single scene of Return of the King.