So I read it (Page 1 of 2)

My experience went like this: Everything up to the Council of Elrond is utter shit. I had to force myself, through pure stubbornness, to slog through that mess. Please don't say the word "Bombadil" to me. I'm liable to punch you on pure reflex.

After the Council of Elrond, it gets pretty okay. Not perfect, but not bad either.

Then, in the second half of "Return of the King," there's one little paragraph that's just fucking awesome. I liked the movies. I liked them a lot; I'd consider myself a fan. But this one paragraph absolutely eclipses anything that made it to the screen. That's not a criticism; it's not the kind of thing that could really translate to film. But that one paragraph made the whole six-week reading worth it for me.

Ohyeah. I guess I should have finished that thought. Sorry. The paragraph in question:

"His thought turned to the Ring, but there was no comfort there, only dread and danger. No sooner had he come in sight of Mount Doom, burning far away, than he was aware of a change in his burden. As it drew near the great furnaces where, in the deeps of time, it had been shaped and forged, the Ring's power grew, and it became more fell, untameable save by some mighty will. As Sam stood there, even though the Ring was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor. He felt that he had from now on only two choices: to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or to claim it, and challenge the Power that sat in its dark hold beyond the valley of shadows. Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He only had to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be."

Last edited by Jeffery Harrell (2010-07-14 12:35:09)

This is Not the Book for You, apparently.

Though I did notice something when I transcribed it that I hadn't been aware of while I was merely reading it: commas. Lots of commas. (Cue seemingly endless racks of punctuation marks whooshing into an otherwise empty void.)

Woah. That's actually pretty good, for a tossed-off gag. Props.

Oh, there was skimming. There was definitely skimming.

Yeah, I didn't bother to transcribe the next paragraph down. Tolkein talks about how ultimately it's Sam's "hobbit-sense" that saves him, that he one small garden is all a gardener needs, not a whole kingdom. It's about humility in the face of blind ambition and lust for power.

I knew the story behind the Lord of the Rings long before the movies came out, but the ring seemed rather silly to me. It makes you invisible, whoopty shit. But the movies did a very good job of saying "Okay, no, for serious, this ring is a very big deal." It was never explained why, just alluded to (and occasionally outright stated), and that was fine.

But only the book really cemented in my head just what the ring is, in context of the story. It promises things. It makes you feel like you can take over the world — and you can. Right up to the point where the ring slips off your finger.

The ring is cocaine, basically.

Read them all a while back. I try to re-read them every year but end up just skimming them. I always, always skip FOTR up to the Council of Elrond (but usually skip FOTR altogether).

It's not until ROTK that you start to get Crowning Moments of Awesome. Aragorn's arrival at Minas Tirith, the unfurling of his new standard above the newly arrived ships up the Anduin, is a great moment.

That said my favourite line in the entire thing is from Faramir.

“I do not love the bright sword for it's sharpness, nor the arrow for it's swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend”.

The Unfinished Tales have some great LOTR stuff as well. Isildur and the Fords of Isen are really great pieces. There's a grandeur and a hint of tragedy to much of Tolkien's work.

You punk ass kids, I read The Silmarillion. Yeah, all of it.

Well, I think that's more an artifact of the story's construction and evolution. As Invid pointed out, and I think is fairly obvious, the end of the book is almost entirely different from the beginning of the book. Once the ring's true nature is established, I think the notion of Bilbo just sitting on it all those years, and ultimately handing it over with little more than a pout, loses all credibility.

Then again, Tolkein did go out of his way to say that the ring became more powerful and seductive the closer it got to Mordor. So maybe that's the out that explains how Bilbo could emerge from under it's shadow relatively unscathed, and for that matter how Gollum could merely become insane rather than trying to take over the world. They both spent all their time well outside the ring's locus of power.

Then again again, we are talking about the writer who threw Bombadil (shudder) in there seemingly just to make the point that the ring was really no big shakes after all, and hey, aren't poems much more awesome anyway. Stupid Bombadil. Those chapters never should've hit the press.

I dunno, I kind of got the impression that Gollum's proto-hobbit nature was key to his relative banality under the ring's influence. It seems like the ring's great evil is the stoking of ambition, so the characters with the least ambition — hobbits — are the least affected by it.

Where I wrote "ambition" feel free to substitute "greed" or "lust for material things or power," 'cause I think either of those fit as well.

Blade Runner bores me to freaking TEARS. I love the production design, but I just don't get at all what people love about the movie.

And even going into a viewing KNOWING that there's a debate about whether Harrison Ford is a replicant or not, I don't see anything in the movie itself that hints one way or the other.