<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="1" > preface</h1>
In RPG (Role-playing game) role-playing games, game designers usually design some ruins for players to explore, which are full of various monsters, but also leave many treasures of the past waiting for players to arrive, as a reward for exploring the ruins. By exploring the documents or objects left behind by the designers in these ruins, the player can learn something about the glory of ancient civilizations.
So why are game designers obsessed with designing relics in games? And why is it necessary to set a lost ancient glorious civilization in the history of the game's alternate worldview?
The source of its influence was actually because of John Ronald Riel Tolkien.
John Ronald Riel Tolkien
Tolkien was one of the most famous writers in the British literary world because of his promotion of magical literature. Before him, European magic literature was just fantasy stories on the stalls, and there was no work that could be done. Since then, magic literature has officially become a literary genre that has had a huge impact around the world.
How influential is it? In the West, The Lord of the Rings is almost as well-known as the Bible. The Times once commented: "The English-speaking world is made up of two parts: those who have read The Lord of the Rings and those who are about to read the Lord of the Rings. In 1997, the British media voted "the greatest book of the twentieth century" and his works were translated into 60 languages and sold more than 250 million copies.
In addition to the magnificent adventure stories and epic war descriptions that attract readers, the most important thing is that the logic and rigor set a grand worldview structure.
Tolkien himself was a brilliant linguist, and in order to make the setting of non-human races such as elves, dwarves, and orcs more realistic, he spent a lot of effort designing 15 different elven dialects, and also created various languages for creatures such as tree people, half-orcs, dwarves, humans, and hobbits.
This professional creative ability is unmatched by other novelists, and as a result, a large number of his magical world view settings have been used to this day, becoming the blueprint for the design of magical works of art and even magical games.
This includes the Dungeons & Dragons series, the originator of the magic RPG.
Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game
The birth story of Dungeons & Dragons is also interesting, and it will not be mentioned here. In simple terms, the emergence of Dungeons & Dragons specifically highlights the "Ruins Exploration" section, making the scope and route of the role-playing tabletop game more controllable, faster pace, and more rapid entry into the combat phase. Its game rules and numerical system have become more reasonable with the change of versions, and a large number of later RPG video games can be said to be the spiritual sequel or game extension of Dungeons & Dragons.
In order to make the player more interesting in the process of exploring the dungeon, the game designers went back to adding background settings to the decadent ruins of the dungeon that were once brilliant but abandoned or occupied by monsters. A large part of the inspiration for this setting is Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. Humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves have become essential races in magic games, and swords and magic have become must-have fighting methods in magic games.
So, where did the source of this design start? It all starts in the 16th century.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="17" >, the treasure room of the nobles</h1>
Around the 16th century, the European Renaissance was in full swing, the nobles on the land of Europe had ushered in a hundred years of development, they were no longer satisfied with hunting rare animals or fighting for God, with several crusades, many nobles obtained a large number of historical documents and classics from the Muslims, of course, a large number of treasures and works of art.
The treasure rooms of the powerful nobles were filled with all kinds of curiosities they had scavenged, and their study rooms were piled with heavy books that they might never be able to read for the rest of their lives. And their descendants cherished these things that proved the "glory of their ancestors," but there was a problem that they did not know what the things that the Persians regarded as treasures were, let alone the books written in pagan writing.
So some nobles began to mobilize their own forces to recruit scholars to identify treasures for their translations, and then they learned that these things came from a country that had long disappeared into history, the Roman Empire.
The long Dark Ages made people know very little about this once great empire, and the only one with the Roman name was as far away as the Apennine, the holy and sinful city. It was the city of the Pope, the surrogate of God, and every elector wanted to inherit the name of the so-called Emperor of the Roman Empire, for which every day the nobles waged wars or played conspiracies.
But why would those evil pagans like to collect these things from the ancient Roman Empire? The nobles were puzzled until the scholars gave the answer: Adults, that is the Roman Empire! That's a mighty empire that has conquered them! That's our ancestor!
Thus, the nobles understood that the worship of ancient Rome had shifted from religious to cultural. It's hard to describe the process of this transformation now, because it's so long, more than 100 years, generations of conceptual shifts.
And it is precisely because of these ancient Roman treasures looted from the pagans in the treasure room of these nobles that the European nobles re-realized the glory of ancient Rome, thus reviving the excavation of ancient Roman culture. Nobles, mercenaries, adventurers or merchants went to explore and acquire everything related to ancient Rome, but ancient Rome once had many colonies on the land of Europe, and the marble buildings that were once abandoned and deserted were patronized by people from all walks of life and reopened. Needless to say, there are many discoveries, many stone carvings, frescoes, gold and silverware, faience and other things have been discovered, and a gust of ancient Roman wind has begun to blow among the aristocrats throughout Europe.
In 1586, the Tudor antiquologist and historian William Camden published Britain, and the wind of antiquities research first began in England.
Britain, William Camden
Many nobles restored the costumes of ancient Roman sculptures or frescoes or asked craftsmen to restore and restore these ancient cultural relics, so that scholars could study the names and uses of these relics. With demand, there is a market, and of course there is no shortage of people in this world whose brains are turning fast, and there is a crazy trend of imitation that rises with antiquities.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="28" > second, the imitation of the Renaissance</h1>
The aristocrats' pursuit of ancient Roman artifacts and artistic styles made the antiquities that were actually excavated from the ruins in the market sky-high. Stimulated by such huge interests, many craftsmen took the risk and began to imitate these ancient Roman stone artifacts on a large scale, and a large number of transcribed books under the banner of "ancient documents" also began to appear on the market, which is also one of the reasons why many people in modern times believe that ancient Western culture is made up by people.
< modern Roman scene gallery in Modern Rome> Giovanni. Paul. Panini, the first and most important Roman historical landscape painter of the 18th century.
In the market full of fakes, the nobles lost interest in collecting these antiquities, because nine out of ten were fake. But they began to pursue something new — and since these craftsmen could imitate ancient Roman artifacts, why not simply transform their homes into an ancient Roman style?
So the hard-working craftsmen ushered in a group of strange parties, who proposed to build their own manors or courtyards according to the style of those antiquities. This is a very test of creativity, not all craftsmen can be qualified for such a very challenging job, so gradually some craftsmen stand out from the ordinary craftsmen, they are called "artists" by later generations.
Giovanni Paul Panini
Giovanni Paolo Panini He is not only an Italian landscape painter, but also an excellent architect. In Rome, Panini was famous as a decorator of palaces, including Villa Patrizi (1719–1725), Piazza carolis (1720) and the Roman Church of Seminario (1721–1722). In 1719, Panini was accepted as a Pantheon Master. He taught at the Académie San Luca in Rome and the Académie de France, where he influenced Jean-Hornore Fragonard. His work even influenced some British landscape painters, such as Marlowe, Skelton and Derby's Wright, who also imitated his Cabridge.
The artists absorbed the ancient Roman art style of the antiquities and began their own creations according to the requirements of the party A. These creations are clearly different from the rigid stylized paintings of the past and are more aesthetically pleasing. Naturally, this trend also swept through Rome, the economic, political and cultural center of the Western world at that time.
The Holy See of Rome was astonished when they saw these works, they had long been tired of seeing the immutable religious paintings, so they followed the aesthetic trend and recruited artists to create in Rome. And the artists were naturally very happy, and for the artists of the time, the highest recognition they could receive was the approval of God's substitute, the Church.
So Rome became a gathering place for all The European artists of the time, where they drank, reveled, discussed, collided, and although they knew how to paint this beauty from ancient relics, they couldn't say it clearly, and if they wanted to define these works of art, to say clearly where these works of art were better than the art of the past, they needed art critics to appear.
Contrast between the medieval paintings of the Virgin Mary and the Renaissance Virgins
Art critics, the dancers who made ink, relied on the ink in their own bellies to stand for these new art and created many fresh words, which also spread to all of Europe along with the mouths of art merchants and aristocrats, and were known to more people. Among them, there are many scholars, who know that the antiquities originated from the glorious civilization of ancient times, their art is so wonderful, their culture is so prosperous, so how powerful is their ideas? And so the Renaissance came. Of course, this is not the subject of our discussion in this issue.
Going down the lines of imitation, in this particular historical matter, there appeared such a special group of people, who were called big merchants at that time and capitalists now. The emerging bourgeoisie was eager to integrate into the aristocracy, and the antiquities that emerged at this time became a good stepping stone. In the long dark ages of Europe, the bloodline aristocracy was a closed circle, and it was not an easy task to integrate into this circle, and it was not easy to have money, and it was not rare to give money to others. There is a card face to send something, and the antiquity is a very card face thing. But the market is full of fakes, the emerging bourgeoisie is rich, but people are not stupid, whether it is to recognize the goods or counterfeit, professional knowledge must be available. This demand has fed a large number of antiquarians.
On the European continent, there was a group of guys who specialized in identifying antiques, and those ancient Roman ruins had a group of polite people.
The prosperity of antiquities in turn also promoted the progress of European linguistics, after all, ancient Rome is very fond of engraving words on stone, although romans later evolved into Latin, and Latin evolved into the writing of European countries at that time, but after all, it has fallen several hands, the cultural penetration rate at that time was extremely low, Latin and even the church will use the "high language", the average person wants to learn it!
As a result, many of the translators of ancient Roman texts at that time were themselves clergy or graduated from ecclesiastical schools, and had a good foundation in Latin. Even in the history of the development of European linguistics, "historical comparative linguistics" was developed.
Many antiquarians study and become linguists. Of course, it is also relying on these forerunners, combined with the literature comparison of the Holy See, basically figured out the meaning and role of most of the ancient Roman relics, and accumulated valuable experience for future generations.
With the gradual growth of the bourgeoisie, as a new class, people want to quickly close the gap with the old aristocracy, to break the various monopolies of the aristocracy over social classes, including the superiority of family history and the monopoly of knowledge.
The bourgeoisie actively established schools, on the one hand, to cultivate talents and grasp the right to speak in society, and on the other hand, to break the identity of the old aristocracy, and the important weapons of which were history and antiquities.
This involves some political and cultural confrontation between the old and new forces, and doesn't the aristocracy claim to be of noble blood? Well, can your family's history go farther than ancient Rome? That is the true ancestor of our European civilization. Don't you mean that this land has been the inherent territory of your family since ancient times? Well, I will tell the world that the land under all of our feet is once the Roman Empire, and your so-called noble status is worthless.
Through historical and antiquological evidence, the bourgeoisie broke the shackles of the traditional feudal landlord class and made people no longer pursue or fear the so-called noble aristocracy. Let the humanistic spirit and the idea of liberal democracy blossom on the earth.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="49" >3. The French Revolution and Napoleon's expedition to Egypt</h1>
A major climax of the post-Renaissance Enlightenment era took place in France, and here I will not dwell on the background of the French Revolution and its related significance, skipping on these things that have been written badly in the history books, we focus directly on one person - Napoleon Bonaparte.
The future great French emperor was still a fledgling young man, but in the process of studying in Paris, he eagerly learned a lot of fresh knowledge, especially the chaos and turmoil of the French Revolution made him realize the importance of knowledge through Rousseau's thought.
Because this period of history influenced Napoleon's life, this made him pay great attention to scholars, and in the development of world historiography, it is necessary to recognize his merits.
The upheavals of the French Revolution, although tragic, also brought a cultural dawn to the people, and on May 27, 1792, after the head of Louis XVI was cut off, the National Assembly announced that the Louvre would belong to the masses. On August 10, 1793, the Louvre Museum of Art was officially opened to the public museum.
This royal treasure house was not looted by the angry people, but preserved a large number of cultural relics and works of art for France. And just six years later, when Napoleon entered Paris, he pushed the collection to a higher peak.
In 1798, feeling threatened by the Governorate of Paris at the time, Napoleon was appointed commander of the Arab-Indian Front (Eastern Army) of the French Republic and sent to the Middle East to curb British power in the region and to attempt to control the Suez Canal and the sea route to Asia. In Napoleon's expeditionary force, in addition to 2,000 cannons, 175 scholars from all walks of life were led, as well as hundreds of boxes of books and research equipment. During the expedition, Napoleon famously issued a command: "Let the donkeys and scholars with their luggage walk in the middle of the procession." ”。
This decision also affected the entire historical community, because it was precisely because of the work of these scholars in Egypt that the historians developed the historical subdiscipline of ancient Egyptian historiography, and it was this decision that brought a lost civilization back to the human world. In 1799, these scholars established the Egyptian Institute in Cairo and compiled the Egyptian Chronicle.
Meanwhile, soldiers building fortifications near rosetta, a small town in the western Nile Delta, found a granite stele with writing in three scripts. Pierre Bouchard, the leader of the garrison, recognized the Greek language, which was illegible. He realized the importance of the stele and immediately sent someone to send it to the Egyptian Institute in Cairo.
And this stone stele is the famous Rosetta Stone In later generations.
In 1801, the French army was defeated, and the armistice between Britain and France stipulated that the French army must hand over important Egyptian artifacts, including the Rosetta Stone, to the British army. The British army transported the stele to London in 1802 and stored it in the British Society of Antiquities. In July of that year, the Society made rubbings of the Greek part of the inscription and sent it to England and other scholars working on deciphering hieroglyphs; it was not until early 1803 that it began to make rubbings of the sacred and mass parts of the inscription. In the same year, the stele was sent to the British Museum, becoming the undisputed treasure of the museum.
The significance of the Rosetta Stone cannot be described in words, it is a key to the ancient world, and many linguistics, philology, and historians worship this stone monument. This promoted the research and development of English Chinese dialects, for the British scholars at that time, unraveling the written information on the Rosetta Stone was an inspiration and challenge, and many people came to visit or copy the stone tablets every day, and many later became linguists.
Mysterious ancient civilizations, thick ancient ruins, and unsolved language puzzles became the stories that the people of London relied on at that time. Of course, what the world did not expect was that the more shocking historical discoveries soon arrived. For more than half a century, antiquology developed into archaeology.
In 1870, a successful but retired German Monopoly came to the ottoman Turkish soil with a shovel and an excavation team, and he began an archaeological journey in a wasteland that everyone did not like, and then he discovered the ancient city of Troy. His name was Heinrich Schliemann. I would like to call this person "the discoverer of the city of Troy, the opener of Agamemnon, the guide of the Minoan civilization, the legendary archaeologist, the hand of god, the master of misjudgment, Heinrich Schliemann" (see my other article for details).
The discovery of the ancient city of Troy and the remains of other Greek cultures discovered by Schliemann completely detonated the European historians, causing people to re-emphasize the significance of ancient Greek culture in history, especially the connection between ancient Greek literature and ancient ruins. This series of events affected one person, John Ronald Riel Tolkien.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="64" > IV. World War I and Tolkien</h1>
Tolkien's early years were bumpy, but his mother laid a good foundation in linguistics for him before he died. His mother, fluent in Greek, Latin, English and French, tutored her son with his homework, and Tolkien was proficient in reading and writing multiple languages before the age of 4, and at the age of 10, he began to create his own language. Tolkien once said: "I owe my talent for language, especially my love of Germanic languages and legendary stories, to my mother." ”
We omit the lengthy biographical introductions and begin to focus all the factors on tortify jr. Tolkien, who in 1900, at the age of 8, entered Birmingham's prestigious school, the King Edward School. During his time at school, Tolkien made three like-minded friends, Namely Weissmann, Gilson, and Smith, all of whom were gifted and talented, Weissmann was proficient in music and mathematics, Gilson was an eloquent and good at creating plays, Smith was a talented poet, and Tolkien had an insight into archaeology and linguistics. The four of them shared similar interests and formed a small society called T.C.B.S (Barofan Society Tea Party), which regularly gathered to discuss Greek Latin literature, share the joy of thinking, and exchange lives and dreams.
Weissmann, Gilson, Smith and Tolkien
In the years that followed, members of T.C.B.S were mutually supportive friends.
In 1911, Tolkien was finally admitted to the coveted University of Oxford and received a scholarship to Exeter College to study classics. Unfortunately, for various reasons, he did not like the rigid and boring teaching environment of classical studies. At the same time, he also met his lifelong mentor and friend, Joe White.
Born into a poor family in Yorkshire, White worked as a child labourer in a local woollen mill from the age of six. After self-study, he not only quickly read and hyphenate, but also developed a strong interest in the language itself. As a teenager, he learned French and German at night school, and he gained a basic understanding of comparative linguistics. In his early twenties, with a little savings on hand, he went to Antwerp, Belgium, and Heidelberg, Germany, to learn Sanskrit, Gothic, Ancient Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Middle High German, Old English and other ancient languages. After returning to the British Isles from Germany, he studied at Oxford University. White's study experience itself gave Tolkien a lot of encouragement, and especially importantly, White's diligence, knowledge, and outstanding achievements in linguistics stimulated Tolkien's love of linguistics that was buried in his heart as early as an early age, which in turn prompted Tolkien's studies to switch from classical to Middle English. White's linguistic education benefited Tolkien so much that if it went on, Tolkien might have become a brilliant linguist, but the war had come.
In 1914 a war engulfed all of Europe arrived. This war changed the world and changed Tolkien. On the battlefields of France, he experienced the famous battle of the Somme, in which he watched the quiet village turn into a sea of fire, the ancient castle into ruins, the sound of the earth-shaking cannons spreading through the heavens and the earth, the river floating with a large number of dead bodies, and the smell of gunpowder mixed with the smell of corpses filled the rainy air. This hellish sight was deeply imprinted in his mind.
Gilson and Smith in T.C.B.S died in the war, making Tolkien feel the madness and cruelty of the war. After he returned to England from the front lines due to illness, he vowed that "the living should, with a fiery passion, say what the dead fail to say, and create works that are proud." Such words.
In the years that followed, with painful memories of the First World War and reflections on human nature, he wrote the famous "Lord of the Rings" series of novels.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
He takes everything he sees during the war into the magical world of the novel, and Tolkien deeply understands the consequences of power inflation from the war. In The Lord of the Rings, he created the villain of Sauron, the Dark Lord, who was The Greatest Enemy of Middle-earth, and Tolkien said, "The only thing Sauron knew was desire, the desire for power, and he would not hesitate to wage war and destroy the world for desire." He also arranged for Frodo the Hobbit to risk the danger of escorting the Lord of the Rings to the Volcano of Doom for destruction, which was a celebration of the ordinary soldiers of the war, as Tolkien himself said, "The Hobbits are the British soldiers of World War I, they may not be tall, but they persevere in the face of defeat, and they can always erupt in a moment of crisis with amazing heroism." ”
In his writing, the elves suffer heavy losses in a bitter battle with the Dark Lord to snatch three jewels made by the elves, and in the novel, the elves finally leave their cities by boat and go to their homes on the other side, becoming legends on Middle-earth. The magnificent cities that remained of the elves were regarded by future generations as relics of the glory of civilization. It was like losing the remains of the city-state of the ancient Greeks.
There are many ruins of the human kingdom in "The Lord of the Rings", of which the most important in the Story of the Lord of the Rings is Minas Ithil (Tower of the Rising Moon). Minas Ishir was one of the first two cities established by mankind, the other being Minas Anor (Tower of the Setting Sun), commonly known as the White City.
Minas Ishir
Minas Tiris
The specific history of the two cities can be read online, and countless readers who love "The Lord of the Rings" have long sorted out the history of the Lord of the Rings. All in all, of the two cities, Minas Ishir declined in the Third Age because of the plague, and because of the decline was occupied by Sauron's spirits with fallen creatures, and minas iss Ishir has since fallen. In 1640 CE, Tarundo (the 28th King of Gondor) moved his capital from Osgillas to Minas Tiris, and the White City became the capital of Gondor, the only orthodox kingdom of mankind.
This period of human history basically refers to the historical facts of the two capitals of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and the collapse of Rome has become a legend in the Middle Ages, and the once glorious Kingdom of Gondor has also become history, until the emergence of Aragon, so that the once classified human kingdoms have once been unified together and restored to their former glory. Perhaps in the world of The Lord of the Rings, a group of antiquarians also need to restore the truth of history based on the relics and relics of their predecessors?
In reality, the ancient Rome did not reappear, and Europe is still a divided Europe.
This may be the charm of magic literature, the birth and popularity of "The Lord of the Rings" has influenced the creation of literature and artists around the world. It also influenced the advent of Dungeons & Dragons and many spin-off game products!
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="83" >5</h1>
Through the entire cultural context, we can clearly see that the remains of those games are based on the study and exploration of lost civilizations by antiquities and archaeology during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It is this kind of exploration that opens up the prosperity of European culture and the speculation of artistic philosophy, thus cutting off the shackles of religion on human nature, so that writers such as Byron, Shelley, Ziz, Dickens and other writers flourished in the British literary world, providing the necessary nutrients for The growth of Tolkien, and finally allowing him to write such an era-opening work as "The Lord of the Rings", and then deriving a large number of magical works of art and games based on "The Lord of the Rings", and finally in modern players can appreciate the thickness of this overhead history through RPG games But don't forget that the inspiration for this sense of heaviness comes from the real historical development of mankind. History is such an inexhaustible mountain of gold, waiting for future generations to continue to excavate and recreate.