Lord of the Rings

reading fellowship again with my children and it becomes clear to me - and them - that despite his status as like the dirk pitt of middle earth, strider manages to fuck up just about every part of the journey from bree to rivendell

hes kinda dropped in it and admits as much many times

And whose idea was it to take the Caradhras Pass, eh?

that sense of being hunted and lost, the "behind enemy lines" vibe of the first book through rivendell is so great.

i think strider being somewhat obscure in his abilities- capable, trusted by gandalf, sure, but unsure, imperfect, certainly not up to taking on the forces hes up against and knows it- is critical to the shift from hobbit-sized danger to a story that becomes a young adult/adult touchstone.

ppl will refer to lotr as a work that birthed every cliche going but there's something quite striking in how useless direct confrontation is with a powerful enemy is, and how *badly* it turns out time and time again.

only second tier characters want to fight, gandalf and strider are the most powerful respectively in magic and arms of the fellowship and they spend large parts of the story avoiding having to demonstrate this and the story makes a point of demonstrating why, imo

of course, the movie glorying in special moves like a final fantasy cut scene gets this utterly wrong also.

might read it again with this new-sprung take tbh

'What will happen?' said Merry. 'Will they attack the inn?'

'No, I think not,' said Strider.

but two grafs later Butterbur is telling Nob to bar the doors and the hobbits not to go to their rooms - and the next morning they find their appointed beds to have been knifed in the night

which attack strider avoided

this is a witch hunt

they make for Weathertop even though the Riders 'are likely to make for Weathertop themselves'. even though they tramp 5 days through the Midgewater Marshes to avoid the Riders they're now heading straight for the place the Riders probably are too!

he allows Sam and Pippin to trample the ground of the dell behind this key staging post, essentially wiping its browser history, and says 'I wish I had waited and explored the ground down here myself'

of standing on the actual tippy top of Weathertop itself, he says he was 'too careless on the hill-top. ... It was a mistake for three of us to go up and stand there so long.'

as they build a campfire, scared out of their minds, Strider says 'there is little shelter or defense here' - thanks, Strider - 'but fire shall serve for both.'

the Riders promptly attack them anyway.

'Is this troll country?'

'No!' said Strider.

two days later they find a door built into the rock of a hillside. Strider: 'It is certainly a troll-hole.'

all i'm saying is, teach the controversy

in a terrible scenario its very ilxy of you to focus all your judgement of the guy on your side trying to do something to avoid almost inevitable disaster who is already too hard on himself for the imperfections inherent in the attempt

imo

xp no im enjoying it

fresh lotr takes are good. the book is quite vague in a lot of aspects!

lol i'm not mad at strider. it's just that as a kid i'd imagined him as kind of impossibly competent - the quiet hero who could follow any trail, who could suss out any danger. and now i'm reading it and just see him making all kinds of bad calls! just straight up wrong about stuff.

Strider is running up against the limit of the usefulness of the guidance he received when he was captain of a stolen Nazi U-Boat and his master chief advised him “Don’t ever say ‘I don’t know!’ Those words will kill a crew, dead as a depth charge!”

Now Strider finds himself on land, in charge of completely untrained amateurs, he realizes he still can’t say “I don’t know,” even though he really absolutely does not know. Except about which fights they are guaranteed to lose.

There's a deep cut.

Anyway thank you for potentially contributing a subject to a future episode of the podcast hey did I mention I have a Tolkien podcast thanks great you're all wonderful people.

the quiet hero who could follow any trail, who could suss out any danger.

i think tolkien in LOTR is big on even these guys being fuck all use against a cohort of witch kings who know where you are going while you are carrying four gravy babies who think they are on a daytrip to bath.

also fwiw and iirc strider is v much aware that hes heading where hed rather not go but its gandalf fucked that up

its all good general/sergeant comment on how it is once the feet hit the ground

ofc silmarillion and legends in lotr and elsewhere are full of the heroes that just did it and were legends (obv) or even whose failures were grand, decisive simple events

imo thats him being a bit meta about nature of legends and distilled tales and what they are used for vs "oh fuck we're here now and its not beowulf its wilfred owen oh fuck oh fuck ohfuck"

dulcimar et decorum est pro patria moria, as i shall title the essay on the topic

nb none of my apologies for strider should be taken as discouraging the continued attacking tracer, this court martial is v invigorating imo

pippin is for the fuckin noose if we're going to be consistent, mind

Imagining if Gandalf just threw him down the guard room shaft.

strider/aragorn's transcendent heroism is something literature can't convey, implies one of the greatest 20th century professors of english literature. see 1) all the references to post-hobbit - pre-fellowship northern ranging, 2) however the hell he and the phantoms commandeer the ships of the corsairs to win the day at the battle of the pelennor fields, and 3) he and faramir taking it to the dregs of mordor and the southrons in the return of the king appendices detailing the dawn of the fourth age

helms deep worth a mention youd say

that and 2 & 3 all disasters (albeit heroic doomed-to-fail let's try anyway attempts) salvaged by deus ex machina resolutions mind you

lucky generals and all that

To be fair he is revealed as a master aromatherapist toward the end of the last volume, is there no lack of strings to his bow? He probably gives a great massage too.

wait had he a bow

Deems is a big LOTR fan, eh? Surprising.

that sense of being hunted and lost, the "behind enemy lines" vibe of the first book through rivendell is so great.

Yes, that harrowed, paranoid, doomed flight from The Shire is my favorite Tolkien, no, favorite fantasy sequence, of all time (with the possible exception of The Children of Turin).

i think strider being somewhat obscure in his abilities- capable, trusted by gandalf, sure, but unsure, imperfect, certainly not up to taking on the forces hes up against and knows it- is critical to the shift from hobbit-sized danger to a story that becomes a young adult/adult touchstone.

I think another element in Strider and Gandalf's approach is that by revealing oneself, you give Sauron the ability to move directly against you. This limits his options to basically, run, quickly, as your little Hobbit legs will carry you.

the war of the ring was primarily a guerrilla campaign, in thus lecture i-

Insurrection of the rings, you were going to say

whole escapade is a black op, the only reason the reader doesn’t catch on at first is because you start in a place so removed from the emperor’s touch that he’s forgotten about it. Everything else is just moving from one supposed safehouse to another until the game is up. The Bourne movies? Ronin? Just remakes of fellowship with some acronymic mooks in place of orcs

Office of Reclamation of the Claims of Sauron

playing D&D is what taught me rangers are garbage

That’s some ouroboros right there

playing dundee taught me the same thing

tracer

i appreciate that you have a lotnon your plate right now

but tbh i was somewhat expecting another aragorn competence review by now and am a little put out

I did think that Théoden sorted himself out a bit sharpish, all Gandalf needed to do was unleash his staff and say "remember you're a womble king" or whatever, and then Théoden's all like "begone Gríma I am Lord of Rohan" and the problem's solved. Far be it from anyone to say the books should have been even longer, but I think JRR could have padded that sequence out a little.

sorry, that was meant to be womble, oops

lol darragh i've been saving those up. my kids make it about 5 minutes before they conk out. this is the longest council of Elrond EVER.

thats one of the moments in the book that may actually be helped by the visuals of the movie, bernard looks right fuckin pasty at the start and hes a new man be the time the magic words are through

tolkien has a lot about the power of words, but its possibly fair to say that his dialogue doesnt quite carry the load he thinks it does so those passages that rely on stirring-do fall a bit flat

plenty of "and it seemed to all who watched that his majesty shone through and all were in awe so they said yes to his plan" which yknow is a handy resolution

xp

oof and the council of elrond is one you really wanna get over quickly

mind u, no blame on them for falling asleep during tbh.

'and then he softly began to chant a song...'

GROANS

'do you expect me to remember all these NAMES??'

i hope you're giving it the full peter falk throughout

for a thousand page fantasy, LOTR is actually light on names tbh

frustratingly little is said about Cirdan The Shipwright

im not one of our scholars of the rest of the legendarium but he may well show up in some of the other scraps

shipwrong moar laik