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sweet geek swag posted:They end up getting hobbit beer and handjobs, which all in all is a pretty good outcome to answering an ad like that. Just as long as they aren't hobbit hand jobs because nobody wants those little rat claws near them.
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Nov 19, 2018 17:11
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sassassin posted:No way Aragorn and Eomer didn't go annihilate them for revenge just as they did in the south and east. How many halflings did he draft as skirmishers to supplement his Gondorian levies and Rohirric hordes?
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Nov 20, 2018 02:27
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I assume Arnor and so on would now not have any major obstacles, either hostile (orcs) or friendly (elves) pretty soon, and Men, given few natural enemies, tend to get their gently caress on and increase.
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Nov 20, 2018 02:38
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"The King of the West had many enemies to subdue before the White Tree could grow in peace."
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Nov 20, 2018 02:48
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Tolkien never ceases to amaze me. The Fellowship travels for days with nothing really happening? Describe every bit of landscape, geography, who slept and who stood watch, and what songs they sang. Boromir murders 20 orcs trying to save Merry and Pippin before being killed? Don’t even tell us what happened, just spend like a half a page on it. I had forgotten too that Tolkien actually leaves the fate of the Fellowship an open question at the end of FOTR. Honestly I think that’s one great move Peter Jackson made, the first chapter of the Two Towers belongs at the end of FOTR.
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Nov 20, 2018 04:24
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He didn't structure it as a trilogy.
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Nov 20, 2018 04:30
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Yeah, the book was published in three parts because paper was expensive post-WW2 and the publisher didn't want to take on the risk of publishing something so large all at once. The only divisions intended in the original manuscript were the six divisions into books which were intended to still be bound into a single volume.
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Nov 20, 2018 04:39
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euphronius posted:He didn't structure it as a trilogy. Yeah but he separated that chapter from The Breaking of the Fellowship, even amongst the “books”. It should’ve been part of Book 2. It’s a really inelegant break in the action whether it’s the end of a volume or the end of a book. The end of “The Departure of Boromir” is a much more natural way to end both the Fellowship of the Ring, and “Book II”.
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Nov 20, 2018 04:46
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How Boromir killed a bunch of orcs is irrelevant (there has already been one gratuitous scene of orc slaughter in the book) and Tolkien is a better writer for not wasting time on it when what is important is Boromir's suffering, death, repentance, moral purification. The "action" of the chapter isn't focused around Boromir killing some orcs, it's around Frodo's decision to abandon his friends and pursue the quest alone. It isn't an open question. The idea that a bunch of orcs have fallen upon them isn't some thing that Tolkien leaves unresolved, it's something that is only brought up at the start of Book III. As far as Book II is concerned, they're being pursued but the orcs aren't like right there or anything, it's a horrible shock to Aragorn in the beginning of book III when suddenly they're under attack. The fact that PJ's movie chooses to end with a big action scene is because action is what the movies are about.
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Nov 20, 2018 05:17
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skasion posted:How Boromir killed a bunch of orcs is irrelevant (there has already been one gratuitous scene of orc slaughter in the book) and Tolkien is a better writer for not wasting time on it when what is important is Boromir's suffering, death, repentance, moral purification. The "action" of the chapter isn't focused around Boromir killing some orcs, it's around Frodo's decision to abandon his friends and pursue the quest alone. It isn't an open question. The idea that a bunch of orcs have fallen upon them isn't some thing that Tolkien leaves unresolved, it's something that is only brought up at the start of Book III. As far as Book II is concerned, they're being pursued but the orcs aren't like right there or anything, it's a horrible shock to Aragorn in the beginning of book III when suddenly they're under attack. The fact that PJ's movie chooses to end with a big action scene is because action is what the movies are about. You speak of Boromir’s death and repentance, but that’s like 2 paragraphs of one page. And Aragorn gives some cheesy rear end soliloquy after he dies “Oh what shall I do? And what shall become of the Quest?!” It’s bad writing from an otherwise really good writer. In fact, I find the dialogue between the characters to be the most engaging stuff in the whole book, but Boromir’s death is really kind of glazed over and it’s a little off-putting. It doesn’t feel as redemptive as it should. Maybe we don’t need gratuitous descriptions of the slaying of the 20 orcs, but he died trying to save the lives of Merry and Pippin and I feel like that deserves more than a one line mention. Mahoning fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Nov 20, 2018 |
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Nov 20, 2018 05:41
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I believe that all gets covered in the Merry and Pippin chapters, and Aragorn doesn't even find out until they reunite iirc
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Nov 20, 2018 05:42
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This is a tangent and off-topic and I don't mean to pick on you, Mahoning, it's just something I've seen a whole lot recently and I have to mention it somewhere: You don't "glaze over" a big block of text. You "gloss over" it. More specifically, you "gloss over it", as a transitive verb with an object. Your EYES "glaze over", intransitively, when reading a big block of text, i.e. they become all glassy and unseeing because you're bored. I've seen people mix this up tons of times in the last couple of weeks and I just had to say something, sorry. A thread about the love of the written word seems as good a place as any.
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Nov 20, 2018 13:28
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Data Graham posted:This is a tangent and off-topic and I don't mean to pick on you, Mahoning, it's just something I've seen a whole lot recently and I have to mention it somewhere: Ya I actually thought of that this morning. Usually my vocabulary gets better while I'm reading but apparently not last night.
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Nov 20, 2018 15:04
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Man, Frodo has absolutely no personality whatsoever. Even Eowyn comes across as a more developed and interesting character.
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Nov 23, 2018 05:49
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Eowyn is suicidally depressed from the moment we meet her, she’s very operatic. Frodo‘s personality is a lot more bland, bourgeois, low-key for most of the book, which is as it should be really, he’s just some random gentry dude and not a doomed princess. It’s not until near the end that he fully goes nuts.
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Nov 23, 2018 13:10
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Frodo is very basic (in what is mostly Frodo's own account of events to be fair) which makes Sam's adoration seem all the more distasteful. Frodo's only remarkable quality is his fabulous inherited wealth. But Sam can't be a gold-digger as Merry & Pippin are even more fabulously wealthy and Sam doesn't fawn over them (he does conspire against Frodo with them for a while, though). So Sam must love him simply for being his owner, as a dog does. This is Tolkien's idealised member of the lower class.
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Nov 23, 2018 18:54
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The Gamgees have been attached to the Bagginses for generations. It's at least partly a matter of familial sentiment.
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Nov 23, 2018 19:35
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Frodo’s most notable personal quality (at the start of the story anyway) is his connection to elvish lore/fairytales that Sam grew up hearing and is obsessed with. This connection isn’t actually super strong (Frodo can greet elves politely in their own language and knows some very basic ancient history but that’s about it) but in Sam’s understanding it makes him one step removed from superhuman.
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Nov 23, 2018 19:56
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Frodo generally makes decent decisions and has a good head on his shoulders. He only really fucks up when the Ring overpowers his will.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:21
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Frodo is remarkably brave and adventurous for a hobbit -- even Gandalf was surprised (and relieved) by how ready Frodo was to leave the Shire with the Ring at the beginning of LOTR, and of course Frodo's decision to be the ringbearer at the conference at Rivendell was the necessary but not guaranteed key to setting everything else in motion. He is well-educated and knowledgeable about elven lore. The elves are condescending dicks about it, but they're condescending dicks about everything. He has remarkable physical and mental stamina, as is exhaustively well established in the whole post-breakup of the Fellowship narrative. He is also essentially decent, empathetic, and moral, as seen in his treatment of Gollum and his reaction to the Scouring and its aftermath. Again, Tolkien makes it abundantly and explicitly clear that this decency is central to the success of the entire enterprise. Sure, most of this gets overshadowed once the hobbits start hanging out with actual elves and wizards and Aragorns. In contrast to Bilbo, who managed to seem more heroic than most of the dwarves in his party in The Hobbit, Frodo is never going to be the prime personality of the group. It's definitely true that Frodo and Sam are supposed to fit into idealized roles of (already antiquated at the time of publishing) British class structure, with the culmination being Sam phyiscally bearing Frodo up Mount Doom once Frodo had spent his spiritual energy resisting temptation on behalf of the entire civilized world. But just because he's plugged into an outdated social role, and just because goons like pissing on books they presumably enjoy, doesn't mean that you can ignore his strong personality traits. In my opinion, one reason Frodo gets short shrift is that the themes of his personality (decency, self-sacrifice, strength in the face of adversity) are the same as the themes of the book overall, and so he tends to get subsumed into being a vehicle of the overall plot.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:23
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Ginette Reno posted:Frodo generally makes decent decisions and has a good head on his shoulders. He only really fucks up when the Ring overpowers his will. He takes ages to leave The Shire. Everyone knows he's leaving by the time he does. He uses Black Speech even after being told to shut up. Decides to walk instead of going on the quicker wagon. Offers the ring to practically every random person he meets along the way. It's a non-stop parade of selfish little mistakes with Frodo.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:30
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Lewd Mangabey posted:In my opinion, one reason Frodo gets short shrift is that the themes of his personality (decency, self-sacrifice, strength in the face of adversity) are the same as the themes of the book overall, and so he tends to get subsumed into being a vehicle of the overall plot. Also because goons prefer the themes of irony, selfishness, and whining in the face of adversity.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:32
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Pippin has more moments of genuine ingenuity than Frodo. He also makes fewer stupid mistakes. While being half Frodo's age.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:35
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Pippin would have handed the Ring over at Weathertop.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:39
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sassassin posted:He takes ages to leave The Shire. I think a lot of the blame for his early stumbles has to fall on Gandalf, who makes an enormous error by assuming that Frodo will just be able to take his time and stroll off to Rivendell at leisure (the only thing that Frodo can reasonably be expected to do). He does a decent job of impressing on Frodo that the situation is at least serious, but it's actually incredibly and disastrously serious and he fails to get that across at all. Frodo is just a normal lazy well-off guy who has absolutely no experience of traveling except for pleasure and he acts like it. Pippin is a dipshit, he literally didn't even bother to look at a map of where they were going.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:51
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skasion posted:Pippin is a dipshit, he literally didn't even bother to look at a map of where they were going. He's a child. He's even younger than Sam, who is himself way too young to be hanging around a middle-aged weirdo like Frodo. The films would feel very different with an Elijah Wood Sam and John Rhys Davies Frodo. sassassin fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Nov 24, 2018 |
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Nov 24, 2018 02:35
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I don’t blame Frodo for not leaving the Shire sooner. Gandalf tells him all about the ring and how he has to leave the Shire, and then proceeds to hang around for a few weeks. Then Frodo is like “I think I’m gonna leave on my birthday” and Gandalf is like “Hmmm ok that’s fine”.
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Nov 24, 2018 02:44
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Yeah the film's choice to have the Hobbits be roughly peers, age-wise, was the right choice.
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Nov 24, 2018 02:45
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VanSandman posted:Yeah the film's choice to have the Hobbits be roughly peers, age-wise, was the right choice. It was certainly a choice. It generally has the effect of making Frodo look even worse though, and everyone else worse for continuing to back him. It's impossible to imagine Wood Frodo undergoing the transfiguration into a magic, almost godlike figure that the book's Frodo does on Mt Doom, which is probably why they literalized its effect into Frodo just wrestling with Gollum for a bit. sassassin posted:He's a child. He's even younger than Sam, who is himself way too young to be hanging around a middle-aged weirdo like Frodo. Sam's not just hanging around, hes the help ffs.
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Nov 24, 2018 02:58
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skasion posted:It was certainly a choice. It generally has the effect of making Frodo look even worse though, and everyone else worse for continuing to back him. It's impossible to imagine Wood Frodo undergoing the transfiguration into a magic, almost godlike figure that the book's Frodo does on Mt Doom, which is probably why they literalized its effect into Frodo just wrestling with Gollum for a bit. Sassassin seems weirdly determined to view everyone in LotR in the worst light possible as some bizarre thought experiment or something.
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Nov 24, 2018 03:17
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I think it’s worth while to read Tolkien critically, esp with regards to his treatment of social class. And too, LOTR is such a cultural fixture (and the movies even more so) that people often just forget about the weirder aspects of the book, or those that the adaptation chose to ignore. The big class divide between Frodo and Sam is one of those things. It won’t play for an american audience so there’s very little of it in PJs movies. But it is there in the book in a big way, and if people find it off putting I can understand that. Tolkien’s attitudes are certainly very unreconstructed.
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Nov 24, 2018 04:42
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sassassin posted:He takes ages to leave The Shire. 1) He's terrified, and also Gandalf is supposed to come by and meet him. He has literally zero idea the Ring Wraiths are abroad. Nobody tells him. So why hurry? 2) Everyone knows he's moving, but that's all. 3) ?? I don't remember this. Gandalf does that at the council. I don't remember Frodo speaking it. 4) Farmer Maggot talks him out of this. The only reason he wants to do that anyways is he's considerate and doesn't want to endanger Farmer Maggot. 5) Because he's wise enough to realize most of the people he offers it to are far stronger than he is.
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Nov 24, 2018 06:16
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Ginette Reno posted:1) He's terrified, and also Gandalf is supposed to come by and meet him. He has literally zero idea the Ring Wraiths are abroad. Nobody tells him. So why hurry? Maybe Sassassin means hiking from Hobbiton to Buckland, rather than traveling by wagon. But going by wagon on the road almost certainly would have been disastrous, since the black riders would more likely have been looking for them there rather than wandering across the countryside. Offering the Ring to other people is almost certainly meant to portray a strength of Frodo’s personality rather than a weakness. Not only does it show recognition of power, but also of virtue and insight into intent. What’s more, it’s likely meant to show modesty and Frodo’s recognition of his own limitations. It’s pretty fair to say that in a cast of typically poorly defined characters, Frodo is one of the least well characterized. However, it’s also fair to say he’s probably the only person we meet in the story, and quite possibly the only person in Middle-Earth who could have successfully completed the quest.
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Nov 24, 2018 09:10
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What about Sam?
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Nov 24, 2018 09:25
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The slow fade was Gandalf's plan, and it was absolutely the best move given that all Mordor had was "Shire" and "Baggins" from Gollum, and no clue as to the context, including the existence of Hobbits or the location of the Shire. Remember that most of the outside world knows nothing about them either - it would have taken months or years to find the backwater place. On the other hand, if Frodo had rabbited - if yet another "Mad Baggins" had vanished without a trace - then that's a story that gets repeated, and ears will hear that ought not to. There are two reasons the plan failed and Frodo barely escaped in time, and it was only both together that spoiled it. One, Saruman imprisoned Gandalf and delayed his return to the Shire (maybe Gandalf should have seen this coming but you can't blame it on Frodo's judgement). If Gandalf had been on schedule, they'd have set out on the journey months earlier. Two, the Nazgûl, apparently by complete coincidence, ran into Gríma Wormtongue on the road from Edoras to Isengard. Wormtongue, being a sniveling cowardly little poo poo, spilled the beans about the things Saruman had been neglecting to tell Sauron in hopes of seizing the Ring - notably his interests in the Shire. This is covered in a section of Unfinished Tales because Tolkien couldn't make the timeline work without it - there's no way the Black Riders should have been in the Shire that soon if they were hunting on their own. Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Nov 24, 2018 |
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Nov 24, 2018 09:35
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Heithinn Grasida posted:However, it’s also fair to say he’s probably the only person we meet in the story, and quite possibly the only person in Middle-Earth who could have successfully completed the quest. Frodo failed at the last hurdle. Gollum/God completed the quest (depending on your interpretation).
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Nov 24, 2018 11:42
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Octy posted:What about Sam? Sam chose to fail the quest almost immediately, thinking it better to die at the feet of his dead master than carry the ring further.
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Nov 24, 2018 11:44
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Heithinn Grasida posted:Maybe Sassassin means hiking from Hobbiton to Buckland, rather than traveling by wagon. But going by wagon on the road almost certainly would have been disastrous, since the black riders would more likely have been looking for them there rather than wandering across the countryside. I did. Merry and Fredegar encountered no Black Riders on their journey.
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Nov 24, 2018 11:46
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sassassin posted:Frodo failed at the last hurdle. Gollum/God completed the quest (depending on your interpretation). It’s God/providence, because Gollum couldn’t have done it either without Frodo having cursed him to destroy himself.
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Nov 24, 2018 13:02
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sassassin posted:Sam chose to fail the quest almost immediately, thinking it better to die at the feet of his dead master than carry the ring further. Sam may be a class traitor, but in the end he was a better person than Frodo. Note how he chose to serve his community after the War, rather than retreat into an obsession with old pains and the loss of a favorite bauble.
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Nov 24, 2018 13:36
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