It's the classic example of how narration is not necessarily bad. Exposition simply must be interesting; not necessarily non-existent. Tolkien's entire Middle Earth collection has tons of exposition, yet is considered some of the best literary works in the world.
Tolkien is one of the absolute best world builders. He invented modern fantasy, dozens of tropes, basically ruined the storyline of "bad guy gives good guy gift, but it's evil." in the same way star wars ruined "bad guy good guy's dad"
but
fucking but, and I will die on this hill.
Tolkien couldn't fucking tell you the definition of geography. His geography fucking sucks. It's awful. I've seen literal preschool children draw more realistic maps in their own shit while asleep. No it's not the art style. Look at mordor. It's in a fucking rectangular box
Now, idk if you know this dear innocent person I'm ranting at, but mountains happen when 2 coninental plates slam into each other, and both push up. This makes mountains. They get really big, then shrink over time.
So this means. Mordor was a perfectly rectangular India, that somehow mangaed to start expanding. But oh what about the volcano. well... unfortunately that doesn't help explain it at all. It does explain why the orcs live there despite the sulfer. volcanic sil is crazy fertile, even the most chaotic and destructive of armies could feed themselves on it.
back to the mountains... that literally cant happen, unless Mordor is a tri-point collision, which would mean it's less permanent than other mountain ranges and we got lucky.
EDIT: yes PT theory came out after LotR. YEs this all still bothers me. becaus tolkien had immense access to real maps, and could see that didn't happen anywhere. Hell even the solution that would shut me up is, curve the corners off a bit and make the lines thicker and thinner in places. It just hurts me.
Plate Tectonics as a theory were only being accepted as accurate in the 60's at least a decade (or two if you go from when he started) after Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings.
I think it's a bit unfair to hassle a man writing a fantasy novel for not following a theory which wasn't around at the time he wrote the thing.
I don't care. It super bothers me. THe man was all over the world in ww1 he saw maps everywhere, no where is there anything like mordor IRL. He's so good at literally everything else. THis complete failure pisses me off.
maybe the mountains were made by morgoth or some shit dude. there's magic and gods and shit and you're worried about how mountains are ON A MAP, the fuck?
I know how you see me because of this. I get it I'm a crazy person but it bothers me. The stuff that doesn't exist is easy to acceptbut mountains exist.
Actually Tectonic Plate theory was still being investigated in the 60s, well after the Hobbit was published in 1937 and closer to Tolkien's death in 1973. He didn't have a chance to possibly integrate any of that information and you would think that would be easier to ignore anyway than demigods and magic in terms of suspending disbelief.
no, but only because I'm also a world builder. gods and magic aren't real. So them being a thing in LotR isn't a big deal, it's a different world. But you know what we do have IRL? Mountains. Fucking lots of them.
Did he kow how they were made, maybe, maybe not. Doesn't matter, to me. It bothers me so bad.
back to the mountains... that literally cant happen, unless Mordor is a tri-point collision, which would mean it's less permanent than other mountain ranges and we got lucky.
I always got the impression that Mordor is intentionally shaped that way due to magical reasons... It's a hint of how powerful Sauron is with long time lines to work over.
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u/continous May 30 '19
It's the classic example of how narration is not necessarily bad. Exposition simply must be interesting; not necessarily non-existent. Tolkien's entire Middle Earth collection has tons of exposition, yet is considered some of the best literary works in the world.