Tengwar on a general purpose translation site
Mark E. Shoulson
mark at kli.org
Sat Mar 12 18:23:57 CST 2022
On 3/11/22 01:44, stas via Unicode wrote:
> "has a duty" - such a bullshit, it's all about money.
> I wonder what Tolkien himself would think about this.
That's one of the sadder aspects of this. Tolkien was trying to create
a sort of underlying mythology, one which might give rise to later myths
as we know them (e.g. Atalantë to Atlantis). He was trying to create a
whole mythos. And he has succeeded so well, beyond any expectation he
could have hoped to have. Aspects of his mythology (e.g. a race of
Elves that's not tiny fairies, but long-lived or immortal approximately
human-sized, extremely beautiful and skilled people) have become staples
across so much of the fantasy literature landscape; pretty much the
entire concept of Dungeons & Dragons (and RPGs spawned therefrom)
sprang from the "A Journey in the Dark" chapter of FotR,
dungeon-crawling through Moria. Even for some modern fiction that
Tolkien maybe would have hated, he probably would have appreciated how
thoroughly and utterly his mythos has been adopted. (see _Author of the
Century_ by Tom Shippey, also _Leaf by Niggle_ by Tolkien, and his
description of the creation of the Dwarves in The Silmarillion, both of
which can be read as a sort of self-description.) The Tolkien Estate's
attempted stranglehold on the concept is way too little and way too late
to have really affected Tolkien's success in this regard, it's just sort
of ironic.
> This is a good example of intellectual property rights stifling
> innovation.
>
> (and why the fuck they disabled text copying on their site? too much)
OK, disabling text-copying is a little ridiculous.
~mark
More information about the Unicode
mailing list