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



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