Priori Incantatem @celestina-warbeck - Tumblr Blog

unproduciblesmackdown

ron was going to be spiders. he just was.

unproduciblesmackdown

god just saw i forgot to put in the last one

deanhoney-deactivated20220819

what she says: i’m fine

what she means: the words “christmas tree” are used in the hobbit, and since we know that bilbo is the author of the hobbit, hobbits must have christmas which means there must be a middle earth jesus. but hobbits seem to be the only ones who have the concept of christmas which means it was probably a hobbit jesus. but frodo says in return of the king that no hobbit has ever intentionally harmed another hobbit so who crucified hobbit jesus?? were there other hobbit incarnations of religious figures?? was there hobbit moses?? did jrr tolkien even think about this at all??

maramahan

Wait wait I might actually have an answer

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore

Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude

But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work

This is the version we know and love today

BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore

If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found

To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit

The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior

Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies

So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written

Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah

There’s a good chance it maybe did cross his mind

scripturient-manipulator

@old-gods-and-chill LOOK AT THIS THAT’S SO COOL

wodneswynn-deactivated-deactiva

Not only all that, but Tolkien was also working within a frame narrative that he wasn’t the real author, but a translator of older manuscripts; so, in-universe, the published The Hobbit isn’t actually Bilbo’s book, but rather Tolkien’s copy of an older copy of an older copy of an older copy of Bilbo’s book. So when errors and anachronisms came up, he would leave them there instead of fixing them, and he may have even put some in intentionally; what we’re supposed to get from the “Christmas tree” bit is that the first scribe to translate the book from Westroni to English couldn’t come up with an accurate analogue for whatever hobbits do at midwinter.

anarcho-tolkienist-deactivated2

Yes. Another example of tolkien doing this is him using, for instance, Old High Gothic to represent Rohirric - not because the people of Rohan actually spoke that language, but because Old High Gothic had the same relationship with English that Rohirric had with Westron (Which is the Common Language spoken in the West of Middle-Earth). There’s tons of that stuff in the book.

anarcho-tolkienist-deactivated2

Like, Merry and Pippin’s real names (In Westron) are Kalimac Brandagamba and Razanur Tûk, respectively (to pick just one example of this). Tolkien changed their names in English to names which would give us English-speakers the same kind of feeling as those names would to a Westron-speaker. Lord of the Rings is so much deeper than most readers realise.

jumpingjacktrash

tolkein’s entire oevre is just one epic in-joke with the oxford linguistics department imo

bookhobbit

#i thought it was old english representing rohirric but i have read lotr one (1) time so

No that’s right! The basic point still stands and is neat but a lot of Rohirric names are translated as Old English, like Theodred and Eorl and so on. Another interesting thing is that he sometimes modernized them to modern English because, apparently, those names were intelligible to Westron speakers, either because Gondorians knew them or because the Hobbits recognized them from their dialects (they once lived near the Rohirrim and borrowed a bunch of words, including their name for themselves). Here’s a good link about it from Tolkien Gateway, it’s SUPER cool.

Also if I correctly recall (it’s been a while so I might not) there was a draft of TTT where Tolkien intended for Theoden to greet Our Heroes in Old English. This was in The Treason of Isengard and I have a very distinct memory of reading it at about fifteen and being completely floored and baffled by the fact that he just…wrote an entire speech in Old English for Theoden to say. Like, can you even believe. I absolutely love how much flavor and care he put into the languages in LOTR.

vardasvapors

#other than in respect of certain blind spots #the answer to ‘did tolkien even think about this’ #is almost always ‘the man spent twenty years overthinking it' #and it’s either a moving philosophical reflection or a dumb joke he put in to annoy cs lewis (via @simaethae)

esichovequechova

wanderingtycho

This is what Kurt Cobain wanted.

catbountry

He would fucking love this.

unclefather

me in a Best Buy: excuse me, which one is the best

employee: I’m sorry, what?

me: which is the best to buy

#lol i work there and that’s how it is

foulserpent

cooking site, 10th paragraph of page titled “rustic pulled pork recipe”: my grandfather’s childhood was tough. every day he had to work the mines. he was only 6 months old when he held is first pickaxe. As he crawled into the mine elevator, just a little baby boy of one, he-

me, growing frantic: resippy

kixandgames

#dont tease me like this

tastefullyoffensive

(via Li4mricee)

setheverman

STOP TELLING ME I LOOK LIKE THIS DOG

deplcythebattery

kingjaffejoffer

“im getting old” starter pack

“this is way too sweet”

“they’re remaking that movie already????”

“my back hurts”

“wait, people get mad about that now?”

“I can’t eat that, its gone fuck my stomach up”

“hold on let me check my calendar first”

**turns on the radio** [groans]

thuggums

How dare you EXPOSE me at 5:18 am on this good Monday

zerofucksclub

jeffreydeanneganstrash-deactiva

The accuracy of this post tho.

cheese24k

News Anchor in my area loses it over a Fat Cat that likes to swim.

missjonesie99

I don’t know what’s funnier, how she said physical activities or the snort.

auncyen

I love how she gradually loses it. She gives it her best try and then you can just hear where her composure starts breaking down.

tamhonksss

i always lose it when her voice trips into the fifth dimension as she says physical activities

youre-imagining-me-deactivated2

This made my day so much fucking better

flannelwearingviking

@its-a-party-for-corpses

#bless

gahdamnpunk

Christian Soriano is bae

#👏👏👏👏

yeezy-nation

watch everybody say oreos when the real answer is brownies 🤧

ultrakinda-love

BITCH WHAT? RICE KRISPIES WILL STAB YOU IN THE BACK. THEY HAVE LITTLE HARD SPOTS THAT ARE BASICALLY FUCKING ROCKS AND THAT CEREAL COULD FUCKING CUT YOU

yeezy-nation

4-theculture-deactivated2018111

I agree with that random crackhead, rice crispies gotta go

#rice crispies are nice but how dare you choose them over the other 3

mothbug-deactivated20200626

real talk does anyone ever just take a moment to appreciate the flawless combination that is cheese and tomatoes

cheese and tomatoes

c h e e s e a n d t o m a t o e s

storyop1

lgbtsoundsystem

are you fucking kidding me

the-skeleton-queen

its him

its mash potato

#his waddle

rachandroll

I saw a sad facebook post from the gay bookstore back in Ann Arbor where I used to live about how they hadn’t sold any books that day so I went on their online store and bought a couple, and while you don’t get #deals like elsewhere online, I’d love it if y’all would consider buying your next gay book from them instead of like, Amazon.