The Good and the Bad and Ugly

I spent the morning browsing Tolkien stuff on the web. I found two things, one horrifying and one piece of truly great news.

First the horrifying thing. Shortly before the infamous Ace paperback edition of LotR was published, a guy named William Snyder bought the film rights to The Hobbit for peanuts. His screenwriter was not aware of the Lord of the Rings and introduced some rather horrid changes into the script, including the creation of a princess for Bilbo to marry. The film's financing fell through the project seemed to be doomed. Snyder had to produce a film by June 30 1966 in order to retain the rights. With the growing popularity of LotR and The Hobbit, he realized that he had a more valuable property than he had thought, so in the last month he had the screenwriter reduce the screenplay to 12 minutes, spent a month animating it and released to a single theater in on June 30, 1966. He kept the rights, which he later sold for a significant profit. This lead to the Rankin/Bass Hobbit and ultimately to the Peter Jackson films coming out this year.
Behold the first film version of the Hobbit.




And now for the great news.

A NEW TOLKIEN BOOK IS COMING OUT!!!!

The Fall of Arthur a 900 lines of alliterative verse on the Matter of Britain that Tolkien wrote on the 1930s is available for pre-order on Amazon with a release date in May 2013.

The Silmarillion, The History of Middle Earth, The Children of Hurin, The History of The Hobbit, The Legend of Sigurd and Gurun, and now The Fall of Arthur. It seems that Tolkien's files are gift that keeps on giving

Undying

As you can see, I got Ulael, my hunter, to level 20 without dying. I got all of the quests through the level 14 quests done at about the same time. This means that, except for festival quests and deeds, I have essentially completed The Shire, I have done every regular quest and all of the regular deeds except for Ally and Kindred of the Mathom House. Those will come as soon as start spending time in the Barrow Downs and start getting mathoms as drops from dead things.

Whither now? I've spent the last two months chasing this and thrown away a half dozen or more earlier versions of Ulael, and I'm at a bit of a loss. I thought while I was chasing the Undying title that I might run her to Trestlebridge and leap to her death, just to relieve the pressure. I might still, but I also might see how far I can go without dying. I'm certainly not going to play her a little more aggressively though.

Ulael, I suppose, is technically an alt, with my Champion being the main, but I find that I enjoy playing the hunter more, so Ulael may get promoted.

As for other characters, I probably will start leveling my minstrel who has been languishing for the last several months. A couple of weeks ago, I bought another character slot and I might start  at Hobbit burgler, and let the minstrel languish some more.

Living Hunter

The latest incarnation of Ulael is still alive! Probably because I haven't had a lot of play time. She's level 14 and working on the level 9 quests.

Names: Calder Cob

SPOILER WARNING:
This post discusses material from the Bree-land introduction and the Epic Quest Bree-land Prologue.


Tolkien was the master of names. Almost all of his names were well thought out, for those that weren't he created elaborate retro-cons to explain them. I would imagine that his created a real challenge for the developers of LOTRO; they couldn't just slap together some cool-sounding syllables and move on. They had to make certain that the names match Tolkien's legendarium. The men of Bree-land are one good example. Tolkien, in the FotR describes there thus: "The Men of Bree seemed all to have rather botanical names, like Rushlight, Goatleaf, Heathertoes, Appledore, Thistlewool and Ferny (not to mention Butterbur)." Later, in the Return of the King, Barliman Butterbur adds another name, Pickthorn when telling of those killed in the troubles in Bree while Frodo and company were away.

LOTRO uses all of these names. Bill Ferny and Harry Goatleaf, of course, are named characters from the novel and show up in game, but the developers also used the rest of theses surnames for characters scattered around Bree. Seven surnames, however, would not do for the large number of NPCs in Bree-land, so the developers had to invent names. For the most part they stuck to the "botanical" rule. Thus we see Thistlewool, Pruner, Henseed, Oakleaf, and the like. We, however, also see a fair number of non-botanical names, such as Brackenbrook. One of the most prominent of these is the first villain of the game, Calder Cob.

"Calder Cob". The name has a nice alliteration to it, but where does it come from? The surname is easy "Cob" is an archaic term for "spider" which survives in the word "cobweb". So the first villain, the guy who sets you up to be ambushed, the guy who betrays his home village, is named "spider". Nice job developers. Furthermore, spiders are everywhere in this game. Not just as mobs, but as the focus of several quests, from the spiders of the East Path, to the Chetwood, to the Midgewaer marshes, spiders are a standard mob. One of the early boss fights is against an giant spider, Iornath. Later an even bigger spider, Morin is a surprise boss in the epic storyline. Every area I've been in has spiders. Naming the first villain one encounters "Cob" is great foreshadowing.

But what about "Calder". Calder is not a common given name in English. It is however a surname, which derives its name from several Calder Rivers in northern England and Scotland. Where the rivers got the name is less certain. Several possible derivations from ancient Welsh and Old Norse have been proposed. My favorite is the Old Norse "Kaldr" meaning "cold". If you accept this then "Calder Cob" reads as "Cold Spider", which is a nice name for a villain.

There is one final tidbit. Many prominent people have had the surname "Calder" including athletes, politicians, and a rather famous family sculptors. Amongst these is James Alexander Calder (1915-1990) a prominent Canadian botanist. Turns out it's a "botanical" name after all.

Another Dead Hunter

Ulael died, yet again. Sadly, she did it in the most embarrassing way ever. I had made it to Level 16 and was cleaning up some quests in the Chetwood. By level 16 the Chetwood is practically a walk through, but only if you don't just stand there. I had to run an errand and closed the game. When I fired up the game again, rather than stare at the ads, I pulled up Firefox and went poking around the interwebs. Unfortunately, I got distracted and spent too much time, when I looked at the game Ulael was standing there dead. Ouch.

On the positive side, I think I have hit on the stategy to get to level 20 without dying. Quite simple really. I'm playing all four of the intro areas. I do all of the quests at certain level in Bree-land, run to Bree, catch a quick travel horse to the Shire, do all of the same level quests, and move on to Celondim and then the Great Hall doing quests, then use my travel skill to go back to Bree-land and work my way through the next level of quests. I usually level twice on any given level of quests, so by the time I got to the level ten quests, I was level 16, and things were becoming a walk-through, unless I just stand there and let a wolf eat me.

This strategy plays into another goal for all of my characters, which is to complete all of the available quests, deeds, etc. I figure running Chetwood quests will probably be more satisfying at level 16 than following a more traditional path and then coming back and picking them up at level 30.

Anyway, I'm off to save Archet from the Blackwolds. Again.

More dead hunters.

Here I go again. I restarted the damn hunter AGAIN. I think it's three times since the last time I've posted here. Each time I figure out how to get pass the thing that killed me before, just to make new mistakes. This is going to be the last time, I swear.

I'm probably lying though.

Dead hunters

It is inevitable. I start I project, such as a blog, that requires a regular time commitment and life jumps in and starts sucking all of my time away. Between car troubles, work and what-not, I've had very little free time. I spent most of it playing LOTRO rather than writing about it. The sad part is I haven't accomplished anything in game. I keep getting Ulael killed and re-rolling her. I may have to give up the idea of earning "The Undying".

But not yet. Off to run through Archet. Again.

On LOTRO

I've been playing LOTRO about four months and it is my first MMO, so there has been a duel learning curve for me. First I've had to figure out the mechanics of the game, while at the same time figuring out the conventions of MMOs. For example, I kept seeing player characters standing around marked "AFK", found myself marked AFK during bathroom breaks. I realized that "AFK" meant "inactive, but logged in", but it took seeing it defined on "The Big Bang Theory" to realize figure out that it means "away from keyboard". I'm sure that there is a lot I don't understand about both still.

I'm playing as a premium player right now, and probably will be forever. I dislike the idea of an ongoing cost involved in the VIP membership and prefer to be able to time my expenditures. I also prefer the idea that once I buy content, it's mine forever and not dependent on continually paying more. So far I have shelled out Turbine Points for the Lone Lands, the North Downs, Evendim, and the Trollshaws. combined with the three starter areas, this gives me plenty of content for the present, although I am excited about exploring the other areas eventually.

I'm playing on the Landroval server. I run three characters, a 33rd level Human Champion, a 7th level Elven Minstrel and a 1st level Human female Hunter. I created a few other characters and discarded them before I settled down to leveling up the Champion. I only recently started to play alternate characters. I started the minstrel as a means of getting easier access to all of the instruments for the music system. (More on music in a later post), and the hunter as a means of getting access to other crafting goods. I also have decided that I'm going to get the Hunter to level 20 without dying so that I can have the "Undying" title. Accordingly, this is my fourth creation of the hunter. First time she died at level 17 and the second time about half way through level 19 (Arghh!!!), and tonight she died at level 13. I'm going to give a couple more tries and then decide to live without the Undying title.

So that's me. If you happen to see Falleleb the Champion, Ringon the Minstrel  or Ulael the Hunter, running around give a me a wave.

To Begin

"I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and beautiful at whatever cost of peril."

Although, it may at first look like it, it is not my intention that this be a LOTRO blog, rather it's going to be a blog on my reactions to and interactions with the world created by Tolkien in all of its manifestations, including movies, books, art, and games, and also with wider realms of speculative and fantasy literature, films and art.

That said, I've been spending a huge amount of time recently playing Lord of the Rings Online, and have been thinking a fair bit how it fits into the Middle-Earth, as created by Tolkien, so I will be sharing my adventures in LOTRO and thoughts on the game quite a bit.

I first read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings in early Junior High. I've since read the Hobbit a half dozen times or more, and the Lord of the Rings at least once a year (call it somewhere between 30-40 times). I've made it through the Silmarillion 4 or 5 times and read much of the published Tolkien's shorter works. (I think that Mr. Bliss and Roverandom are the only things I've missed.) I've read, at least once, all of Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle Earth and Unfinished Tales, and the The History of the Hobbit. I feel like I have a decent grasp on Middle Earth.

At the same time I read a lot other fantasy, Narnia, Earthsea, Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and others. As time went on, though I read less and less fantasy. Eventually I was down to my occasional reading of Tolkien. Having kids started to turn it around for me. Reading the Hobbit and LotR to my daughters led to readings of Harry Potter and Narnia and Lloyd Alexander and rekindled my enthusiasm for the genre.


Chancing upon the Tolkien Professor was another big step, his podcast opened up Tolkien to me in a way that my many readings had not, helping to me to understand the deeper literary implications of the work. This is turn has helped me look upon other works with a new understanding.  Dr. Olsen's sporadic posting of episodes forced to me look for other podcasts which I found Father Roderick's "Secrets of Middle Earth" and eventually Merric and Goldenstar's "Casual Stroll to Mordor". These LOTRO-centric podcasts made me curious about the game and upon finding that LOTRO was free to play, I decided to give it a try, and became hooked.


So here I am. I'm beginning to re-explore fantasy literature while looking at it from a more scholarly perspective and playing lots of video games.