HEY! Thanks for coming by for this week's True Fiction. Between unpacking J.R.R. Tolkien's life, the work he's created, and WWI, a lot went into researching and putting this episode together, and I could only hope it left you with a different perspective to Tolkien's work. It'd mean a lot to hear what you think.
@@forickgrimaldus8301 I'd never thought of it like that. But I think you're absolutely correct - more than any other character, Frodo is the fictional representative of Tolkien himself. A man broken apart by war, separated forever from the peers of his youth, through death for Tolkien, or through the journey to the Western Lands for Frodo. Which, in ancient British/Celtic traditions, is the symbolic name of the Otherworld/Lands of the Dead. Damn, if only I'd thought of this when I was studying this stuff at University a good 18 years ago...
@@seonaelizabethcoster8465 if want to be more meta Gondor is France, Rohan is Britain, Mordor is Germany, Saruman is Austria Hungry, the Easterlings are the Ottomans and the Americans are the Elves (kind of Ironic as Amerca is comparatively young as a Nation) . (Tolkien kind of Unconsciously did this as he realized that he practically based Middle Earth in World war I Europe)
@@seonaelizabethcoster8465 not to mention that the series depicts hobbits as not too powerful and let’s face it; no matter how good of a fighter or gunman you are, you are powerless in war without protection from above. (watch 1917 for a great example of LOTR meets wwi, it’s my favorite war / military movie and really feels like LOTR if the world were to have technological advances of a few centuries and no special powers or magic.
His work will live on forever. He was a known linguistics person and had been creating languages since he was a young child, and he wrote as a way to cope and deal with his PTSD from his time in WW 1
From every episode here I get an education but this one excelled in that aspect. Somewhere along the way I passed up Tolkien's stories. I knew of only a couple of classmates who ever read Tolkien back in those ancient times when I was in school and had no influence from teachers in that direction either so it looks like I missed out. Great presentation, as usual.
Another brilliant episode, I'm so impressed with al the research that must go into making this series, and the settings/backdrop are fantastic too, I would love to know where you've filmed these episodes....
Hey, Karen! Thank you, endlessly. Can't express enough how much it means to see you coming back. These scenes by the fire were filmed at Schmidt's Pub in Albany, CA.
Hefty is certainly a way to describe it. Thank you, as always, for coming back and watching. Also, really happy to hear that your appreciate the sets -- means a lot to me.
Tolkien's marriage and his farewell to his wife before leaving for war probably served as inspiration for Aragorn and Arwen, his saying goodbye to her to leave as part of the Fellowship, and the prospect of her traveling from the Grey Havens to the undying lands.
Very enlightening episode about this awesome writer, his life experiences and work, I truly enjoyed it. By the way, it made think of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, another great writer who also served in war times, wrote about it and described fantasy worlds in his writings.
Hey, Juan! Thank you so much for taking the time to watch, and comment. And as for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, it's quite uncanny (and tragic in a way) how many creatives were shaped and affected by their time served in war.
This was SO cool! When I was younger my friends and I would get together on Sunday afternoons and pretend that we were Hobbits. We'd eat potatoes, figs, and prosciutto. Then when we got full we would start playing Battle of Beleriand. I would always be an elf because after I ate I would be passing gas so bad that I would defeat the others. One time, Tommy Horgoth put a pair of MC Hammer balloon pants on me so I would gas myself out. Those were good times...
Oddly enough 1917 brought me here even though I’m a huge Tolkien fan. I think the realistic feel of 1917 (big understatement and movie offered loads more but to be swift I summed down) and the fact he based his stories off his trench/war experience and the similarities between Frodo & Sam and Schofield & Blake really made me want to delve into the authors person history more.
It’s sad how this makes sense. In the return of the king, he stated that “the orcs had dug in into trenches, firing arrows into the city” trench warfare
Kalevala also inspired lord of the rings for example the ring represents sampo which is a crystal that gives the owner food and “money” and if you don’t share it you will lose sampo
Tolkien and Lewis were the last two members of their writing group, called the inkblots I believe. He began writing in the trenches. Watch the extra features on the dvds it talks about his coming to write it from the trenches to turning the page he was grading and writing 'in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' he also mentioned at some point that the world would be better if they stuck to good food, drink and good tilled earth. (not exact quote as I don't remember it)
He actually wrote the two towers all in the trenches. There’s a black dot on one of the pages in the original book. The siege of helms deep was based on cheddars bulge, a place where visited on his honeymoon before having to fight in it
I'm not sure if this one is actually true or was actually inspired by WW1, but, during 1917, when the British attacked the Bulgarians at Lake Doiran, the area was very uneven and had a lot of hills and high points. The Bulgarians were able to build a massive watchtowers around the area, and if I remember correctly the British would refer to them as the "Evil Eyes", since the Bulgarians could "SEE ALL", or at least everything around them for miles. So, even though Tolkien didn't fight on the Macedonian front, I think it's very possible that those watchtowers were an inspiration for the Eye of Sauron, or the Palantir in LOTR. Just thought that would be something interesting to share.
Tolkien has survived WWI because of the small and insignificant parasites called lice, which gave him trench fever. He was sent home because of his disease and his battalion got almost entirely annihilated. Just like the Hobbits in lotr, such minute beings achieved a tremendously vital task keeping the professor alive.
Good episode. A lot that a casual Tolkien fan like myself can take. I've been reading the books since before the majority of you were born. The most history I really had was the advance in the first publication of The Silmarillion in 1977. Nice pipe, did you take that out of my collection?
The Dead marches comes first in mind in World War. There many bombs and all the bombs creates holes and ditches and all those ditches got filled in water and many bodies lay burried in those water.
@@KurtIndovina We all can learn from history and I am continuing to learn sad to see people not appreciate the endeavors of others sharing knowledge and wisdom. This segment was so well put together and researched and thank you also.
What if the environmental movement was influenced by Tolkien? Humans in LoTR are not the best behaved. Their short lives make them vie for power or be corrupted easily. They are the bad child in the room. Elves, dwarves and hobbits all have these deeply good characters but humans are easily corrupted and fly of the rails. The main antagonistic villains are fallen human kings who have been turned into the Wringwraiths. The corrupted pacts with Sauron are what give them power and from the perspective of a reader it is Fallen Human Kings that are chasing you. I just realized that this kind of "re-framing of the human race" might very well have helped the early environmental movement to see humans as anything but glorious heroes whose success would last forever. If you watch videos from the 20' into the 50's, it was very common for people to think of The Conquest of Nature as something extremely positive. Proof that the human race was superior amongst the creatures on earth. What if Tolkien threw a wrench into that ideology by giving readers a whole world to explore in which humans the ones who got it wrong?
Oh definitely. My dad, a baby boomer, read Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit in university in the 1970s, and, from what he told me, introducing the book to me when I was a kid, it was extremely popular among a lot of his hippie/counter-culture peers for the very ideas you describe.
What is this video about? I heard that Tolkien himself was fuming when someone was comparing his literature to anything and himself said its pure work of fiction nothing else, these people are such bigots
This is a blatantly false commentary that comes up about LOTR from time to time, Tolkien himself addressed this in the forwards to LOTR years ago and pointed out that if LOTR was meant to be an allegory for the war, he’d have had the Hobbits take the ring and use it to rule Middle Earth. This is a case of critics reading some deeper meaning into the author’s works than the artist intended.
This is blatantly NOT a case of applying allegory, though. Did you even watch the video? Or, did you already have this reply mind once you saw the title? Drawing inspiration is not the same as allegory. It's not even close.
Huh? Of course there’s symbolism in Tolkien’s works and of course his experiences shapes his writing. That’s not the same thing as his books being a one-for-one allegory of WWI.
Again, Tolkien flat out said no regarding this, if I’ve got an author telling me that he didn’t draw any inspiration from something, I’m generally going to take his word for it…
JRR Tolkien, had very strong opinions regarding allegory and his distaste of it. He used the term "applicability" and preferred that instead. Tread carefully on this one GameSpot, or a lot of Tolkien fans can get angry at you.
Oh, golly. Tolkien fans are going to be upset at me! I better get an aluminum foil tent on my head to prevent the spittle from their protests messing up my hair!
There is no definite answer because Tolkien was never able to come up with an explanation for orcs that would satisfy himself. But as far as the books LotR and Silmarillion are concerned, the orcs were corrupted Elves, sometimes cross-bred with humans, because that is how those books explain the origin of the orcs.
Meduseld Tales that is true, however chronologically that would be impossible since there were orcs long before the elves awoke. I would say though that elves being almost perfect it would make more sense to mess with what Ilu made as close to the gods
I enjoyed this video and it was very informative. However the live action bits with the host were pretty tacky. Didn't need the pipe, the beer, sitting by candlelight, the fake old book or getting up from the darkly lit desk to just sit another chair into the daytime. It was pretty distracting. At the end you showed who you really were and I would have preferred you had been yourself during the whole video.
Hey Scott! I appreciate the feedback, but this show and our approach to telling stories simply may not be for you. Nonetheless, I appreciate your time watching it, and apologise that you found my parts distracting.
@@KurtIndovina No need to apologize like you said it comes down to different tastes. For the most part I did enjoy the video. Hope these videos are a great success for you 😄
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
HEY! Thanks for coming by for this week's True Fiction. Between unpacking J.R.R. Tolkien's life, the work he's created, and WWI, a lot went into researching and putting this episode together, and I could only hope it left you with a different perspective to Tolkien's work. It'd mean a lot to hear what you think.
Kurt Indovina That work obviously didn’t include reading the forewords of LOTR 😀
Its soo fun and i look forward to sunday yo watch your episodes
I just found your channel, and so far I love it all. Really fantastic job!
@@deepwaters7242 That means a great deal, Adrienne! Thank you so much for coming by.
Did you get the comic published
Also worth mentioning that young Tolkien had a group of close friends and he stated later that by 1918 all of them but one had died.
Well if you think about it Tolkien is Frodo, a simple man forever Chamged by War.
@@forickgrimaldus8301 I'd never thought of it like that. But I think you're absolutely correct - more than any other character, Frodo is the fictional representative of Tolkien himself. A man broken apart by war, separated forever from the peers of his youth, through death for Tolkien, or through the journey to the Western Lands for Frodo. Which, in ancient British/Celtic traditions, is the symbolic name of the Otherworld/Lands of the Dead. Damn, if only I'd thought of this when I was studying this stuff at University a good 18 years ago...
@@seonaelizabethcoster8465 if want to be more meta Gondor is France, Rohan is Britain, Mordor is Germany, Saruman is Austria Hungry, the Easterlings are the Ottomans and the Americans are the Elves (kind of Ironic as Amerca is comparatively young as a Nation) . (Tolkien kind of Unconsciously did this as he realized that he practically based Middle Earth in World war I Europe)
Due to the world war or something else?
@@seonaelizabethcoster8465 not to mention that the series depicts hobbits as not too powerful and let’s face it; no matter how good of a fighter or gunman you are, you are powerless in war without protection from above. (watch 1917 for a great example of LOTR meets wwi, it’s my favorite war / military movie and really feels like LOTR if the world were to have technological advances of a few centuries and no special powers or magic.
His work will live on forever. He was a known linguistics person and had been creating languages since he was a young child, and he wrote as a way to cope and deal with his PTSD from his time in WW 1
Amazing video. I can't imagine if Tolkien had died in WW1, the world would lack so much of its current beauty...
Thank you for you giving this a watch. I can't help but wonder what is work would have been like if had never gone to the war to begin with!
And you know, sometimes I imagine who died there. I think there was so much beauty in those men, wat a waste.
@@alessandromerelli7221 yep, millions of soldiers who were basically still boys sent to die in one of the most hellish, pointless wars in history
The world, in all its current ugliness and soullessness, was made so much more beautiful by Tolkien’s presence.
From every episode here I get an education but this one excelled in that aspect. Somewhere along the way I passed up Tolkien's stories. I knew of only a couple of classmates who ever read Tolkien back in those ancient times when I was in school and had no influence from teachers in that direction either so it looks like I missed out. Great presentation, as usual.
I'm so glad you were able to get value from this despite not being as familiar with the work of Tolkien. Thanks for watching and leaving a comment!
Lord of the rings was my favorite book series! I didn’t not know this story!
There's already so much to unpack considering LOTR... taking a dive into Tolkien's life is a whole other thing to obsess over. Thanks for watching!
Kurt Indovina thank you for making another amazing video!!!!
"Trees, good food, tobacco, and beer."
Well, I know what's going on my headstone.
Yeah same here it’s not even going to be bottom texted it’s going to be the headline of my gravestone
I'm really enjoying this series. Thanks for the in-depth details I otherwise wouldn't have known about. I can't wait for the next installment.
Tanya! That's amazing to hear, and it means a great deal to me.
Also Christopher Lee was the only cast member of the Lord Of The Rings cast to actually meet tolkien
Christopher Lee himself, being the real life inspiration for James Bond.
Another brilliant episode, I'm so impressed with al the research that must go into making this series, and the settings/backdrop are fantastic too, I would love to know where you've filmed these episodes....
Hey, Karen! Thank you, endlessly. Can't express enough how much it means to see you coming back. These scenes by the fire were filmed at Schmidt's Pub in Albany, CA.
Fascinating. Simply fascinating. What a nice young man the narrator appears to be.
Another amazing episode. The amount of research and writing are so well done.
Thank you, Rafaela! This comment means a lot
This is a hefty episode! Great stuff. Loving the locations you guys used.
Hefty is certainly a way to describe it. Thank you, as always, for coming back and watching. Also, really happy to hear that your appreciate the sets -- means a lot to me.
Tolkien's marriage and his farewell to his wife before leaving for war probably served as inspiration for Aragorn and Arwen, his saying goodbye to her to leave as part of the Fellowship, and the prospect of her traveling from the Grey Havens to the undying lands.
This was super informative and well written. Thank you for bringing it into our lives! 🙏
Yo! Andrew! Thank you. That means a lot.
Very enlightening episode about this awesome writer, his life experiences and work, I truly enjoyed it. By the way, it made think of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, another great writer who also served in war times, wrote about it and described fantasy worlds in his writings.
Hey, Juan! Thank you so much for taking the time to watch, and comment. And as for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, it's quite uncanny (and tragic in a way) how many creatives were shaped and affected by their time served in war.
"A mine is no place for a pony." Given that ponies had been used in coal mines when he was young...I see what you did there, Tolkien.
What a fantastically produced video full of terrific content.
Thomas! Thank you, endlessly.
Fascinating, I loved all of the videos in the series so far. Looking forward to more.
Thank YOU, Tamás! We still have a few more to go! Deeply appreciate you coming back.
This was SO cool! When I was younger my friends and I would get together on Sunday afternoons and pretend that we were Hobbits. We'd eat potatoes, figs, and prosciutto. Then when we got full we would start playing Battle of Beleriand. I would always be an elf because after I ate I would be passing gas so bad that I would defeat the others. One time, Tommy Horgoth put a pair of MC Hammer balloon pants on me so I would gas myself out. Those were good times...
Oddly enough 1917 brought me here even though I’m a huge Tolkien fan. I think the realistic feel of 1917 (big understatement and movie offered loads more but to be swift I summed down) and the fact he based his stories off his trench/war experience and the similarities between Frodo & Sam and Schofield & Blake really made me want to delve into the authors person history more.
There’s a documentary about him on Prime Video
It’s sad how this makes sense. In the return of the king, he stated that “the orcs had dug in into trenches, firing arrows into the city” trench warfare
When I first read Tolkien at 16 I saw the resemblance between Mordor and the Western Front.
Kalevala also inspired lord of the rings for example the ring represents sampo which is a crystal that gives the owner food and “money” and if you don’t share it you will lose sampo
Tolkien and Lewis were the last two members of their writing group, called the inkblots I believe. He began writing in the trenches. Watch the extra features on the dvds it talks about his coming to write it from the trenches to turning the page he was grading and writing 'in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' he also mentioned at some point that the world would be better if they stuck to good food, drink and good tilled earth. (not exact quote as I don't remember it)
They called themselves the "Inklings". There is a great duo-wop group called the Ink Spots.
He actually wrote the two towers all in the trenches. There’s a black dot on one of the pages in the original book. The siege of helms deep was based on cheddars bulge, a place where visited on his honeymoon before having to fight in it
@@theonering2966 that's complete nonsense
Good stuff, I always enjoy your videos.
Thank you, AshkPunk. That means a lot, and glad to see you here again.
This is a tremendous video. Thank you!
underrated video, really informative
I'm not sure if this one is actually true or was actually inspired by WW1, but, during 1917, when the British attacked the Bulgarians at Lake Doiran, the area was very uneven and had a lot of hills and high points. The Bulgarians were able to build a massive watchtowers around the area, and if I remember correctly the British would refer to them as the "Evil Eyes", since the Bulgarians could "SEE ALL", or at least everything around them for miles. So, even though Tolkien didn't fight on the Macedonian front, I think it's very possible that those watchtowers were an inspiration for the Eye of Sauron, or the Palantir in LOTR. Just thought that would be something interesting to share.
Wow you are so awesome at teaching and making me learn new things i always wanted to know.
It's always a pleasure, Kassy. Thank you for always returning.
Of course i love how you make its so fun and interactive. Thats why i keep coming. 😀😊😄
What an excellent channel.
Tolkien had his inspiration to shire from Suomenlinna. Amaizing place, sea fortress.
Tolkien rising up from the grave to have an argument
Tolkien:ITS NOT WORLD WAR 2
Tolkien has survived WWI because of the small and insignificant parasites called lice, which gave him trench fever.
He was sent home because of his disease and his battalion got almost entirely annihilated.
Just like the Hobbits in lotr, such minute beings achieved a tremendously vital task keeping the professor alive.
Good episode. A lot that a casual Tolkien fan like myself can take. I've been reading the books since before the majority of you were born. The most history I really had was the advance in the first publication of The Silmarillion in 1977. Nice pipe, did you take that out of my collection?
The Dead marches comes first in mind in World War. There many bombs and all the bombs creates holes and ditches and all those ditches got filled in water and many bodies lay burried in those water.
Sean Astin played Sam with too much swagger and Californication
This is a great series!
Thank you, Amy! That means A LOT to us.
And finally i under stand abit more about ww1.
Trust me... so do I.
😃😄
Your a good teacher thanks😀
The House of Araqiel is a good book read. Yall can look it up on Amazon if y'all likes?
I've always felt that the World Wars were written between the pages of the Lord of the Rings.
So deep and fascinating and tragic
Agreed on all fronts, Luis. Thanks for coming by and watching and commenting. Means a lot.
@@KurtIndovina We all can learn from history and I am continuing to learn sad to see people not appreciate the endeavors of others sharing knowledge and wisdom. This segment was so well put together and researched and thank you also.
LOTR is what WWI never wants to show.
SamuelLanghornClements had a similiar problem
WW1 was the last War that sword was used although shields are not need it
This was an excellent reading. I only want to give you enough letters to give you more add views.
Deeply appreciated. Thank you!
2:44 Nicolas Cage?
They clearly mis-casted Nicolas Holt as Tolkien in the recent biopic...
7:49 - 1916 Mud
What if the environmental movement was influenced by Tolkien?
Humans in LoTR are not the best behaved.
Their short lives make them vie for power or be corrupted easily. They are the bad child in the room. Elves, dwarves and hobbits all have these deeply good characters but humans are easily corrupted and fly of the rails. The main antagonistic villains are fallen human kings who have been turned into the Wringwraiths. The corrupted pacts with Sauron are what give them power and from the perspective of a reader it is Fallen Human Kings that are chasing you.
I just realized that this kind of "re-framing of the human race" might very well have helped the early environmental movement to see humans as anything but glorious heroes whose success would last forever.
If you watch videos from the 20' into the 50's, it was very common for people to think of The Conquest of Nature as something extremely positive. Proof that the human race was superior amongst the creatures on earth.
What if Tolkien threw a wrench into that ideology by giving readers a whole world to explore in which humans the ones who got it wrong?
Oh definitely. My dad, a baby boomer, read Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit in university in the 1970s, and, from what he told me, introducing the book to me when I was a kid, it was extremely popular among a lot of his hippie/counter-culture peers for the very ideas you describe.
0:29 hahaha
I thought orcs were German soldiers back when I was a kid.
This was not the inspiration for him to write the novel
It was his religion that inspired lotr the most
What is this video about? I heard that Tolkien himself was fuming when someone was comparing his literature to anything and himself said its pure work of fiction nothing else, these people are such bigots
sorry to say someone should have told u but u got something in ur right nostril bruh
Where were you on set when I needed you! ...hope you enjoy the episode despite my nostril being distracting.
@@KurtIndovina bro gotta let another person know w/ that sort of stuff humane reasons. sorry i couldn't have been there lol
Orcs are Turks I think. Mordor is Turkey.
This is a blatantly false commentary that comes up about LOTR from time to time, Tolkien himself addressed this in the forwards to LOTR years ago and pointed out that if LOTR was meant to be an allegory for the war, he’d have had the Hobbits take the ring and use it to rule Middle Earth. This is a case of critics reading some deeper meaning into the author’s works than the artist intended.
Can I invite you to my next party?
This is blatantly NOT a case of applying allegory, though. Did you even watch the video? Or, did you already have this reply mind once you saw the title?
Drawing inspiration is not the same as allegory. It's not even close.
Huh? Of course there’s symbolism in Tolkien’s works and of course his experiences shapes his writing. That’s not the same thing as his books being a one-for-one allegory of WWI.
Again, Tolkien flat out said no regarding this, if I’ve got an author telling me that he didn’t draw any inspiration from something, I’m generally going to take his word for it…
JRR Tolkien, had very strong opinions regarding allegory and his distaste of it. He used the term "applicability" and preferred that instead. Tread carefully on this one GameSpot, or a lot of Tolkien fans can get angry at you.
Moist Von Lipwig this is covered pretty explicitly in the video :)
You are very correct! And what's why we thoroughly covered that fact towards the conclusion of this episode. Still, I hope you enjoyed it.
Oh, golly. Tolkien fans are going to be upset at me! I better get an aluminum foil tent on my head to prevent the spittle from their protests messing up my hair!
To clarify something... orcs were never elves. Orcs were a breed between lesser maiar and animals.
There is no definite answer because Tolkien was never able to come up with an explanation for orcs that would satisfy himself. But as far as the books LotR and Silmarillion are concerned, the orcs were corrupted Elves, sometimes cross-bred with humans, because that is how those books explain the origin of the orcs.
Meduseld Tales that is true, however chronologically that would be impossible since there were orcs long before the elves awoke. I would say though that elves being almost perfect it would make more sense to mess with what Ilu made as close to the gods
I enjoyed this video and it was very informative. However the live action bits with the host were pretty tacky. Didn't need the pipe, the beer, sitting by candlelight, the fake old book or getting up from the darkly lit desk to just sit another chair into the daytime. It was pretty distracting. At the end you showed who you really were and I would have preferred you had been yourself during the whole video.
Hey Scott! I appreciate the feedback, but this show and our approach to telling stories simply may not be for you. Nonetheless, I appreciate your time watching it, and apologise that you found my parts distracting.
@@KurtIndovina No need to apologize like you said it comes down to different tastes. For the most part I did enjoy the video. Hope these videos are a great success for you 😄
It’s 100% but it’s a fictional tale