The Tolkien Thread.

[Varangian]

I've read it at least eight times, but haven't finished it the ninth time (the bookmark is somewhere in "The Two Towers"). I guess I overdosed when the movies came...

[Steve]

Ah - the movies. That was very very surreal for me. I was a real nature boy raised in New Zealand and I read those books as I backpacked around and they were indelibly imprinted with my own concepts of woods and mountains. So when the movies came out I and they were filmed in that same scenery... I loved the movies...

[virphen]

If you listen real close to the third one, you can hear my voice... amongst the 20,000 others that did the crowd voices for the orc & Rohan armies.

[Varangian]

If you listen real close to the third one, you can hear my voice... amongst the 20,000 others that did the crowd voices for the orc & Rohan armies.

Oh, was that you!?

[Gawdzilla]

Ah - the movies. That was very very surreal for me. I was a real nature boy raised in New Zealand and I read those books as I backpacked around and they were indelibly imprinted with my own concepts of woods and mountains. So when the movies came out I and they were filmed in that same scenery... I loved the movies...

Some folks brindled at the movies, saying Jackson had "taken liberties". I just pointed out that they were movies about the world Tolkien had created. You can't do a book on the screen unless it's blood short. One page of SCRIPT is about one minute, rule of thumb, so LOTR, to be word faithful to the book, would have been rather longish.

Having said that, I am sad they had to leave out the Scourging of the Shire.

[campermon]

Having said that, I am sad they had to leave out the Scourging of the Shire.

Yeah, me too!

I love it when the hobbits come back and kick ass!

[Gawdzilla]

Having said that, I am sad they had to leave out the Scourging of the Shire.

Yeah, me too!

I love it when the hobbits come back and kick ass!

Ginormous Hobbits on a rampage! (Makes me want to watch "Them!" again. )

[Don't Panic]

Read it about once a year, every year since I was 12 so that's about 16 times. Once read it over the course of a weekend, that was tiring.

[thaesofereode]

The movies were very well done, although I would've cast Aragorn older and more haggard. Vigo Mortensen was just a touch too much the matinee idol for the role: insufficient gravitas in my opinion. Maybe how he looks now, or in a few more years he would've been better suited. Of them all, Frodo was the most marvelous bit of casting. I wish I could find it, but decades ago I did a drawing of what I imagined in my mind Frodo would look like, and was floored by the resemblance between my long-ago "portrait" and Elijah Wood. Stunning! Gollum was also dead-on accurate, I felt.

SIDEBAR ---
Funny: as a kid, I was in a children's play of The Hobbit, and was cast as Gollum, mostly because I didn't think anyone else had the nerve to do him justice. I did NOT sugar-coat him in any way. Onstage I mopped my brow with a dead fish. Thrown back in the freezer following each performance, this prop became more authentic with every show. And one would've heard at the far ends of the park the bloodcurdling shriek that my Gollum voiced at the end of the scene when he realized Frodo had made off with his Precious.

AND WE'RE BACK ---
On the other hand, I would've left out the head adornment for Elrond, and the depiction of Rivendell was entirely too chunky and cartoonish. Something more natural, elegant, and understated would've been (to use a Tolkien-like phrase) "nearer the mark."

Overall, though, they did extremely well. The landscape of New Zealand was perfect for the role, as role indeed it was, since Tolkien was particularly involved with his landscape throughout the work. I'd always heard that New Zealand is so beautiful and various, and rather like "a cross between Ireland and Japan, with the Canadian Rockies thrown in for good measure." I'd love to visit there some day.

EDIT: Correction: Rivendell

[virphen]

That's quite funny actually, as one of the few "liberties" they took that nobody seemed to notice was Frodo's age, in the book he was about 50. Even accounting for different maturity rates, he was middle-aged.

[Gawdzilla]

That's quite funny actually, as one of the few "liberties" they took that nobody seemed to notice was Frodo's age, in the book he was about 50. Even accounting for different maturity rates, he was middle-aged.

So they skipped seventeen years. That's just a slow fade in the movies.

(For those of you who couldn't find a "History of the Cinema" class to get those "empty credits", in Hollywood a fast fade means a long time, and a slow fade means a short time, and why that is nobody can say for certain.)

[j.mills]

Near where I live is a stretch of genteel English countryside called the Ribble Valley. Tolkein hung out there for a while (was he at the catholic Stonyhurst College with the child-molesters for a while?), so they like to play it up as the inspiration for the Shire. It's certainly right-wing enough.

Tolkein fans might like this CD.

[Gurdur]

... Tolkein fans might like this CD.

Many thanks!!!!

[Corneel]

Ah well, must have read TLoR about a dozen times. And the Sylmarillion was the first book I ever read in English... and I'll admit I know how to write my name in Tengwar.......

For Tolkien fans, I can recommend TA Shippey's "The Road to Middle-Earth" (if you haven't read it yet). It explores the themes in Tolkien's works ao the nature of evil.

And for a less serious take and if you like/play RPGs this should appeal: DM of the Rings

Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign.

[drl2]

I have a love-hate relationship with the movies. I understood (but didn't like) the need to remove the Scouring of the Shire. I was bothered by a lot of the little changes - the substitution of Arwen for Glorfindel at the Fords of Bruinen, the non-arrival of the Dunedain to aid Aragorn, and the lack of some of the other minor characters/groups (the Knights of Dol Amroth, for instance) that only total geeks like me would recognize, but these are small touches I'd like to have seen. A brief visual of the Glittering Caves and Gimli's fascination with them would have gone a long way toward earning forgiveness for making him a comedic foil through the rest of the movie.

These are relatively minor quibbles, though, when stacked next to the following:

- Running time was an issue. Long movie. I get that. So why the hell did they waste such a big chunk of it with the falling-Aragorn/sick-Arwen sequence? Arwen gets weak when Middle-Earth is in danger? Huh?

- In the books, Aragorn uses the army of the dead to capture the Corsairs' ships, then dismissed them and gathered human allies to sail with him to Minas Tirith. The movies turned the dead into a deus ex zombie that swept in and magically invalidated all the sacrifice that had been made in the battle prior to their arrival.

- The Last Alliance of Elves and Men at the end of the second age was called The Last Alliance of Elves and Men because it was the last alliance of elves and men. It was not called The Last Alliance of Elves and Men Unless Some Elves Show Up To Help Out At Helm's Deep Some Day.

Now, all that having been said: These are amazing films that I'll still be pulling out to watch in 20 years. They're visually stunning and capture the "spirit", if I can use that word here, of Tolkien's world; the cast was excellent, the sets were amazing, and I want to go to New Zealand someday to see those landscapes in person.

Cheesy as they may be, I get teary-eyed at Theoden's speeches at Helm's Deep and on his arrival at Minas Tirith, and I cheer out loud for the charge of the Rohirrim.

[j.mills]

They also had the best extras of any DVDs ever. I'm talking about the extended editions, of course.

[Gawdzilla]

Cheesy as they may be, I get teary-eyed at Theoden's speeches at Helm's Deep and on his arrival at Minas Tirith, and I cheer out loud for the charge of the Rohirrim.

"Theoden" says in the Extras DVD that the sword-on-spears thing was totally spontaneous. Okay, that's fine.

Anybody else notice the one manic Rider during that charge? He was so into it he had to be a fan of the book.

[Ironclad]

I shall have to read the book once again but am I correct in thinking; the siege of Helm's Deep was not Uruk-hai** but orcs leading the wild-men?

**as in the movie

[Gawdzilla]

I shall have to read the book once again but am I correct in thinking; the siege of Helm's Deep was not Uruk-hai** but orcs leading the wild-men?

**as in the movie

In the book, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, the size of the initial garrison at Helm's Deep for Rohan was nearly 1,000, but many more were coming into the fort from across Rohan. The estimated number of total Rohirric defenders is 2,000[1] by the time Saruman's army arrived. Merry says that the force that left Isengard numbered 10,000 at least, most marching towards Helm's Deep and others heading off to the Fords of Isen. This number is later qualified by Gandalf: "I have about ten thousand Orcs to manage.", [2] so considerably more than 10,000 when the Men of Dunland are added. Though the battle appears severely lopsided, as Uruk-hai were much better in battle than simple orcs, the defenders managed to hold the fort until a force of nearly 1,000 men on foot[3] led by Gandalf along with a forest of Huorns arrive at dawn in the rear of the hosts of Isengard and surround the Uruks.

Battle of the Hornburg

[Weaver]

Anybody read Lord of the Rings?

I stopped counting how many times I'd read after # 25 - and that doesn't count picking up a book to re-read a particular passage or more.

I'm going through it right now, as a matter of fact - I'm preparing to deploy to A-stan, and find I always return to it just before I say goodbye to my book collection. (Although, this time at least, I'm bringing it in digital form).

I've also been reading The Hobbit to my granddaughter, though she's a little too young to pay attention still.

Of course, read many (if not all) of JRRT's other works, as well as the stuff published by his son (facinating the way some stories developed, and what stuff got left on the cutting room floor).