Tolkien headdesk

[calimac]

1. News report that a bio-pic of Tolkien's life is in the works.

Of course, the chances are still high that this will never happen. I'm encouraged to think it won't by the fact that Tolkien's life, rather than "complicated and colorful," was - at least once he got back from WW1 and settled in Oxford - so domestic and uneventful (no, he wasn't a codebreaker in WW2, good grief) that his biographer struggled to find a story worth telling in it, deciding that the real action was in what was going on inside Tolkien's head. They already made a few movies of that.

2. Comics blogger finds Tolkien references in The Wizard of Id.

The news here is not The Wizard of Id, still less its writers' decision to give up on figuring out what the quotes mean. It's the blogger's statement "that all three quotes are from J.R.R. Tolkien."

No they aren't. Yes, the first one is from Chapter 2 of The Lord of the Rings. And the second one is from the last few pages of The Silmarillion. But the third one is FROM THE MOVIES.

There's nothing worse you can do in this field than mix up the books and the movies. TOLKIEN DID NOT WRITE THE MOVIES. HE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEM. THEY HAVE NO AUTHORITY OVER HIS WORK. WOULD YOU CREDIT BORIS KARLOFF'S MAKEUP TO MARY SHELLEY, OR "OVER THE RAINBOW" TO L. FRANK BAUM?

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm sad to say that I wouldn't be at all surprised to find Baum credited with 'Over the Rainbow' by some of my students.

The last few years they have revealed a disquieting tendency to write profoundly of "the circle of life" in the apparent belief that it's a quotation from Marcus Aurelius or similar. In fact of course it's from The Lion King.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

And yet people do it all the time, like when I was hired to continue theOz books, the publisher who had secured the rights told me his ideas, which were all based on the MGM movie. (Which is protected by its own copyright). He not only had never cracked the book, he had no idea that Baum had written more.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

(a thousand words)