Lord of the Rings

We started the third (extended) film last night. Stand by what I said, wouldn't change a thing ... about the first two. This one, though, a few things irked pretty immediately, but mostly the Extra Evil One-Eyed Orc, which the film clearly tries to elevate to Big Bad status, no doubt because in the (theatrical) version there is no follow-up with Christopher Lee and Sauron is still just a big eye. Extra Evil Orc annoyed me the very first time I saw the movie, in fact.

Even so, for being the most over-stuffed, relatively speaking, there were a couple of really striking, iconic scenes I was reminded of, like Liv Tyler seeing her son in the future, or the gross king feasting like a monster during the hobbit hymn scene. My daughter keeps asking questions that I am not qualified to answer, like how Gandolf can apparently die and come back but not Christopher Lee, or why Sauron can't just make another ring, or what even *are* the rings, anyway? What can the One Ring even do besides turn you invisible? I know these things have answers, and some of them are pretty convoluted, but it's kind of a testament to the writing and acting that the focus remains on the characters, and the magic and the ring specifically is almost a MacGuffin. There's a lot of weeping and whining, but as has been said it's really largely Sam's story, and Sean Astin sells it pretty well.

It’s a smart question she asks because there’s no true answer. The protean nature of the Ring is what is truly key about it. The only specifically ‘magic’ thing it does is invisibility and even then the result is, per the book, something that makes you feel horribly and uniquely visible. Beyond that, everything scales, though the book makes this clearer by example than the movie.

Gandalf won his industrial tribunal and was reinstated, whereas Saruman was bang to rights, is how I break it down

The ring is kind of like Blairite "third way" centrism, once you've pretended to be all things to all people and it turns out you're a sinister control freak and not actually anything anyone likes at all, you can't just fool them the same way again a couple of years later

Also, Sauron put his will, anger, power into the ring, linking himself to the ring, so that without it he is diminished, with it, his power is magnified, and with it destroyed, so he is.

it's a remote control for all the other rings, is how i break it down to an extent

Yes, that too.

little bit too drunk to fully parse the last 50 posts, but:

patricia mckillip's riddlemaster is better. laurel has my back

― mookieproof, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 4:15 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

u get me. New McKillip is good, but old McKillip is magic.

Gandalf was considered fit for upcycling by the powers that sing the world

We can only presume that Saruman was fit for the skip only

Note that in corporal death Gandalf was revealed as a strong being of purity

Saruman melted immediately into the semblance of a corpse long dead iirc

Standard enough christian message on the caretaking of one's soul, really

i remember when reading as a teenager i was kind of obsessed with the wizard judo belts.

is there a specific section that deals with that or is it all just inferential?

cos reading it now, i just think yeah radagast is brown because of the trees and nature and stuff. not because he's still learning.

Yeah i reckon assignation not grade

The Blue Wizards do not feature in the narrative of Tolkien's works; they are said to have journeyed far into the east after their arrival in Middle-earth, and serve as agitators or missionaries in enemy occupied lands. Their ultimate fates are unknown.

Saruman's a traitor, Radagast's a simpleton, the Blues are off god knows where. Gandalf is like the only Maiar doing his job.

Work colleagues thread

the relationship of the ring to power isn't that it has it. it is it.

a shot in the first movie i like (tho could respect others finding a lil on the nose) is the hisperidian image of the quarreling (suddenly racist) council reflected in the inert surface of the ring. it's the distress caused by this image that seems to make up frodo's mind to take on the burden to destroy it. immediately the council, on the volcanic point of fission, fuses into fellowship. i don't read this as the ring's malign influence literally casting a spell of discord. yet its influence is there.

when we see people covet the ring we don't necessarily understand what they would physically do with it. possibly they don't either. (possibly gandalf does.) yet we understand that they all have problems they know it would solve. instead of weeping and whining and swallowing loss, they would sweep aside obstacles like sauron in the movie prologue, absurdly hurling elves around mordor.

in this sense it is a macguffin-- but the word macguffin only refers to a role an object plays in a story. the ring, in addition to (irl) being a macguffin, is (in middle-earth) literally power. no less and (more crucially?) no more. the limits of power are indicated to frodo in the gandalf line fizzles quotes upthread-- "can you give it to them?"-- and in a line i think is in the same conversation: "he hates and loves the ring, as he hates and loves himself". this is why, in the places where you would expect the story to put demonstrations of the ring's abilities, we really only see people's desires. often, the desires seem to make them angry. one exception is (again) gandalf, the world's wisest man. he seems frightened.

on those few occasions when we do see someone (always a hobbit iirc?) put on the ring, what they desire is to disappear. (to keep their nose out of trouble, so no trouble will come to them.) yet instead-- in the context that matters-- they appear. the ring is a trap disguised as an escape. the only person for whom it isn't a trap is the person whose desire is a world made-- like the ring-- coterminous with himself. the only effective strategy against him is fusion and renunciation. it's difficult because renouncing the possibility of exerting your will unimpeded can even for a hobbit be like cutting off a part of the self. but if you're not sauron, or final-stage gollum, it's not very much of the self. it is a strange thing that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.

Lovely post.

these are background themes tho obv. as correctly indicated above this is mostly a book about going for walks.

when we see people covet the ring we don't necessarily understand what they would physically do with it. possibly they don't either. (possibly gandalf does.) yet we understand that they all have problems they know it would solve. instead of weeping and whining and swallowing loss, they would sweep aside obstacles like sauron in the movie prologue, absurdly hurling elves around mordor.

This is one the greatest scenes, to 7 yo PBKR, in the Rankin-Bass animated ROTK: Samwise the Strong. They to a great job of illustrating how great the temptation must be to use the ring and how great the spirit it takes to resist it.

great

lol yes i almost linked to that! memorable for me as well. tho i can't say i remember the melody, whereas i doubt i'll ever be free of "when there's a whip there's a way". similar theme i suppose.

Same hear, actually.

It's funny, in some way, Sam resists the ring more completely than Frodo ever and ultimately does, though Sam (a) hasn't had to bear the ring for so long as Frodo, and (b) isn't required to resist at the moment of the ring's ultimate destruction.

The one ring has a mind of its own, it decides its fate, it wants to be possessed, it's why it abandoned Gollom when he was skulking in his cave for decades... even the ring's size shapeshifts to its owner (Sauron, Isuldur, Gollum, Bilbo, Frodo).

re: motivation in dlh's post, I had to recall Galadriel's temptation rejection:

“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”

She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

“I pass the test”, she said. “I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.”

Tolkien is pretty explicit here that her temptation was indeed related to its power. And to refuse it was beyond noble.

the melodramatic elf version of

A spasm of anger passed swiftly over the hobbit's face again. Suddenly it gave way to a look of relief and a laugh.

'Well, that's that,' he said. 'Now I'm off!'

(jackson movie has bilbo say "i've thought of an ending for my book!" here, which isn't bad either. of course in both book and movie he has his most gifable "spasm of anger" yet to come.)

Actual unprompted quote from my daughter as we finished the third movie: "Wait, how many endings are there? This is like 'Clue: The Movie'!"

Probably would be best ending with the "you bow down to no one" line, but the rest of the stuff is fine. It's like the final side of "Sandinista!" Necessary? Nah. But I'm glad to have it all the same.

Off to google "coterminous."

i was remembering this by jonathan schell about nixon i post on ilx whenever i can find an excuse (sadly idk if this is a clemenza-attracting thread)

Had he remained in power much longer, he would surely have put an end to such disruptions once and for all. Then no unexpected sights would have offended his gaze... His communion with himself would have continued uninterrupted, and the world he saw would have become co-extensive with his thought processes. There would have been only the sound of the programmed enemies and the sound of the surrogates praising him in words of his own devising. And, at the center, a perfect closed circle, in which he talked to his tapes and his tapes talked to him.

—only i misremembered co-extensive as coterminous, thus, gotta say, improving both passages, which both involve circles. anyway, that’s what the ring does imo

(just don’t google “hisperidian”, which is 1. made up 2. spelled wrong and 3. possibly about the wrong apples.)

Xxp

hat tip parenting for yr daughter pulling that reference

Please don’t encourage him with this stuff, he does it on so many threads.

It's funny, in some way, Sam resists the ring more completely than Frodo ever and ultimately does, though Sam (a) hasn't had to bear the ring for so long as Frodo, and (b) isn't required to resist at the moment of the ring's ultimate destruction.

"you bow down to no one"

The single most tin-eared jackson/boyenism moment in the movies

'Praise them with great praise"/translation of same is perfect, quasi-biblical and elegant. The entire sequence is dreamlike, relief, you can pretty much feel our reader's eye pulling back as the narration becomes at once more distant, slightly formal, back to a descriptive tone more akin the mathom house book we originally picked up discussing hobbits and pipeweed

Its a sequence well-earned, our hobbits back central amongst the great and powerful and still a wonder to them, as we get probably the real ending of the war ("too many endings" is as much a criticism of later life as it is a narrative that tries to situate war relative to the lives that carry on afterwards)

Jackson hadnt the patience nor ear so he had a softlit gurning circle of closeups of our leads as viggo (who upon becoming king seems to have turned into a simpleton- and mrs mac cannot abide the sight of him *clean*) speaks to them like they were children.

Not having it.

Xp sam "alone" or sam "only"?

Also dlh that post was as good as a pint, post more pls

xp yeah only is probably better

and Mrs mac is otm, he’s only a ride when he’s filthy

D. D. B. Tolkien nest pas

isn't it funny that aragorn's appeal diminished by like maybe 15% when he took a shower. imagine being horny for him for three movies then by the end of the third, he takes a bath and you go.. oh... erm...

— MARS 18TH (@solosclark) May 14, 2020

Setting a marker here for when im not making porridge- come back to sam being the only hero

absurdly hurling elves around mordor.

Fine if you're using an actual hurl tbh. And so is the great elf king Slîeot Iaur remembered still to this day..

Don't think Sam is the only hero imo, but he is the ultimate hero of the quest itself and of the books.

Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that, but he is the most immune to the call to dominate anyway (tho arguably in eg sméagol the lure of the ring was purely for possession, so again maybe what we are seeing is Sam as the purest in all middle earth or w/e).

The class awareness comes in here too imo, aside from a general christian message of want not for yourself etc

I don't think it chance that our everyman hero has the only name in the stories that i can think of that wouldnt raise an eyebrow in everyday life.

Not saying anything new here obv but the thread is a nice sat morning diversion

but he is the most immune to the call to dominate anyway

But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.

He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.”

100% otm take re the ending, its a quiet triumph of known contentment and again im hardly saying anything new by thinking that a veteran choosing it that way adds heft

Maybe (removing sam the person to some degree) the importance of a refreshed backup to take on the burden anew for a while is the other aspect so?

Look sorry jrr but lookit mordor is the trenches, cmon lad

Yeah that makes sense especially in his context, as you say. The importance of friendship, even through the worst and most trying of times.

It’s a bittersweet ending, but it’s the sweet that comes through a bit more in the long run. It feels quite “well then” but that’s not what it is at all.

‘Well, I’m back,’ he said”

final line in a book called THE RETURN OF THE KING = tolk's equivalent of tweeting the 👑 emoji at sam, this is mark s canon

(also mark s canon: the lord of the rings is gollum not loser-melt sauron)

Sauron is basically fuck-all to do with it tbh

The real villain is peter jackson and the mouth of peter jackson philippa boyens

It’s a bittersweet ending, but it’s the sweet that comes through a bit more in the long run. It feels quite “well then” but that’s not what it is at all.

― scampish inquisition (gyac)

"Nah lets cut all that, we need another elephant fight for balance"

Just the absolute worst

Only cos it came up in the tv thread lately, but in many ways willow shows what LOTR movies should have done tbh

*warming to my theme and leaning into the challops*: the hobbit trilogy is the only good product of this entire franchise, book or film or lego figurines or game

EXCEPT… this is hott shelob in the game SHADOW OF WAR

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Es7r8MuXIAcDaiP?format=jpG

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Es7r8MuXIAcDaiP?format=jpg