littlemanpoet:
I LOVE ancient history! Get me started talking about this kind of thing and I could go on for months without stopping for breath.
You're right about the connections interwoven into the stories being another reason that Tolkien's world has such depth. The things in the story all relate to each other in some way.
Squatter:
Quote:
|
History offers none of these things without revision, which is why you'll find massive inaccuracies in most historical films, which have to appeal to a mass audience.
|
I think that there is also a mixture of
1) Wanting to make the whole thing more "dramatic"
and
2) Wanting to write the story themselves.
To make a connection to (and expand a bit
)your section on "fictionalized history", the movies also often advance the cause of the fictionalized history to make their mass appeal. One of my favorite hobby horses in the "historical" movies category is
The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis. That movie was a butchering of Cooper's novel, which was a butchering of what actually happened.
The movie altered the facts (rather implausibly to anyone who knows anything about the true situation at Fort William-Henry during the seige) so that they could bring in the whole "The British were a bunch of arrogant snots" angle that plays so well. Not to say that there were no British officers that had arrogant, condecending attitudes toward the colonials (sorry Squatter
), but the movie made up a ridiculous back story to showcase this rather than use historical fact. I believe the reason why is they felt their backstory was more "dramatic" and it would fit in with people's preconceived notions, thus broadening the popular appeal. (And provided the opportunity to kill off sympathetic characters and show dead bodies.)
One thing they did keep from the book was the Marquis de Montcalm being responsible for the massacre that followed the surrender. This was one of the things that they could have safely axed (pun intended) because it is EXTREMELY unlikely that he was a party to it, and I could give a list of reasons that's so long it would probably overload the server.
*Ahem*...*cough* *cough*...Anyway where were we?
Quote:
|
and more often than not the morally bankrupt come off best.
|
I'd qualify this by saying that they came off best for most of their lives until the end. I could go on and on with a list of morally bankrupt historical characters who were important, successful, and are well known now, but who ultimately came to bad ends. (More often than not because somebody used their own tricks against them.) Of course one lesson to be taken from this is that if you want to win you have to cheat, but the other lesson is that sooner or later someone will come along who cheats better than you and you end up dying a very nassty, messsy death, my preciousss.
The first lesson is the one that people who are into such things usually pay attention to, but the other is there to be observed as well. (Not that despicable characters don't live to ripe old ages and die in peace, but this is actually rarer than might be supposed.)