Seasons
This is a forum or general chit-chat, small talk, a "hey, how ya doing?" and such. Or hell, get crazy deep on something. Whatever you like.
Posts 520 - 531 of 6,170
Posts 520 - 531 of 6,170
Yeah, but Tolkien was already a scholar dude. Most of his elvish language stuff is based on Old English and stuff. In fact, a lot of the names for the dwarves in the Hobbit are actually from one or another of the Eddas. That doesn't mean it was easy though. I've got some of the stuff about the creation of his works, and even knowing all the shit he did, he still went through many many phases of revision. Compare the Silmarillion with his original conception of all that historical shit and you wouldn't recognize them as the same world, much less the same author.
Onyx, the main character in my book is a lesbian, a teenage lesbian no less, and it has very little to do with the story except for who she's attracted to, and how her mother treats her as a result. If all lesbians (or all of ANY group) were exactly the same, there would be no point in writing a story.
Tolkien knew several languages, and he was a professor for something that involved them. Elvish isn't based on old english, though. It's based on welsch or something.
Most of my stories have started out as a single character or concept. I usually write a few pages with pen and paper, making it up as I go along, until an idea for an overall plot comes to me. Then I work out a broad overview of the entire thing in my mind. Then I switch to the computer and work out things like character names and personalities. Then I lose my original manuscript and find it again a few months later, type it up and heavily edit it, iron out multiple holes in the plot, and rearrange some characters. After that it's just hard work. So far I don't have any completed projects, because I keep abandoning old ones to start new ones. But I've got a sci-fi short story that's probably going to turn into a whole book that I've been working on steadily all summer. It will probably get finished within a year or two.
The number of languages Tolkien knew, or was familiar with, is probably in the double digits. In the intro to the whole thing he says that the Hobbit and Ring Trilogy had its basis in linguistics. And here is the tansition between what I know and what I might be making up: He and his fellow aesthetes used to hang out in a certain pub where much of the Ring was written, the initial impetus was Tolkien trying to imagine a linguistic journey from England(?) through the Germanic lowlands etc to Scandanavia. Something like that. Some editions of LotR have this in the intro.
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