Talk:Of Beren and Lúthien

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Latest comment: 12 December 2021 by GondolinFan

This article says that it needs to be rewritten to comply to higher standards. I'd be glad to help with any revisions to small errors in details or poor writing quality, but I am relatively new here and don't know if this is what needs to be done. Any specifics? --Grace18 00:38, 21 September 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The admin who included that indication explained that the text needs a better prose. I think it is because the summary here fails in some points of Tolkien_Gateway:Manual_of_Style#Terminology. I think you have been cleaning the article quite well. If you want to help with The Silmarillion chapter summaries, they need to be strictly about the 1977 book and not mixing other versions of the legendarium (and I'm not sure if this article does this right), following the structure and vocabulary of the text, but without paraphrasing. --LorenzoCB 07:20, 21 September 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thank you so much. A couple of quick questions on clarification: Is there a significant difference between the 1977 Silmarillion and the second edition? I currently only have the second edition, but can certainly acquire the 1977 version if this is important. Also, when you say follow the structure and vocabulary without paraphrasing, I assume you mean rewrite it so it is not copied from the original text, but maintain the style? Sorry, the without paraphrasing part confused me a bit. Thank you again for your patience. --Grace18 16:56, 21 September 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
No, there is no textual difference in the second edition of The Silmarillion (except the Foreword, which is not important now). With "1977" I just meant The Silmarillion as edited by Christopher Tolkien, because there are other verions of the Quenta Silmarillion throughout The History of Middle-earth. About rewriting: yep, we can't directly copy the text, unless there is a beautiful sentence, which should be included between quotation marks. Thank you for your contributions. --LorenzoCB 21:37, 21 September 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I've rewritten this article, providing a detailed synopsis and (tried to!) write in a "Tolkien-esque" prose. Though it is quite a bit longer than the other articles on "chapters of The Silmarillion". If the length is a major problem, then perhaps we could move a lot of the details to the article "Quest for the Silmaril", and make this one a bit of a shorter summary to fall in line with the other Silmarillion chapters. Although, if any Silmarillion chapter summaries were going to be longer than others, I'd say that this one, "Of Túrin Turambar", and "Of the Fall of Gondolin" would be the ones (just because these are the longer stories, and so will require longer articles to do them justice). Please let me know your thoughts on this. I'm sure there's still tidying to do in this article too! If others are happy, then I shall remove the "rewrite" and "claimed" tags. Thanks! --GondolinFan 23:42, 3 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I appreciate your efforts, and I agree this and "Of Túrin Turambar" should be longer than the other chapter synopsis (not the case with "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin"), but I find it too longer now. Also, "tolkien-esque" prose doesn't help to keep things concise as in a proper synopsis. I'd avoid things like "thus began the greatest of" and writing about small details and explanations. --LorenzoCB 09:36, 4 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thank you for your comments LorenzoCB. You make some very good points, and I agree there is a lot of unnecessary detail here for a synopsis. I will remove some of these and the "claimed" tag too. Thanks again! --GondolinFan 10:16, 4 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I've trimmed a lot of unnecessary details from this article and now believe it to be of high enough quality as a synopsis that the "cleanup" tag is no longer required. Of course there is likely still some tidying to do but I wanted to run this by other editors before removing the tag. Please let me know your thoughts. Thank you! --GondolinFan 13:27, 12 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I'd like to compare the synopsis with the book by myself in the near future and revise it with more detail, but I think it is good enough, so I removed the template. --LorenzoCB 21:47, 12 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Sounds good, thanks LorenzoCB! I've tried through a few iterations to strike an optimum balance between detail, brevity, and readability/good prose for this article. Hopefully you (and other editors) will be able to improve on this. --GondolinFan 22:15, 12 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]