frodo was 50. a hobbit comes of age at 33. he and bilbo were about the same age when they first went out. they were definitely not young. as FOTR described described frodo, “the mature and sober age of 50,” and “taller than some and fairer than most.” and the way they were depicted in the book, only pippin (who was 29) showed an immature streak. but you’re right in saying frodo was a young 50 because he already had the ring, “like a robust hobbit just out of his tweens.” what really set frodo apart was his knowledge and depth. wood didn’t show that.
Dude, if Aragorn is a giver, Boromir is a taker. What do you think those viking horns are for? They’re love handles. So that Aragorn can ride Boromir chopper-style, all the way to Mordor (great mpg by the way).
I preferred him in dick dangling mode in Eastern Promises (now, that’s an Aragorn I could have gone with).
Nope, Barad-dûr was on ROTK. The Two Towers (from that series that used Tolkien’s illustrations for Hobbiton and Barad-dûr) uses this one which Tolkien originally entitled “Beleg Finds Gwindor
in Taur-nu-Fuin.”
I have those paperbacks and I treasure them. They are sadly a bit worse for wear, what with me having read them first as a young lad and then having re-read them more times than I can remember.
Here are more of Tolkien’s illustrations. There are many of those I am still very found of.
I agree that the Orthanc sketch is not in accord with the description at all.
Yep, you’re right. I thought I remembered that spindly-tree illustration as the ROTK cover, but I obviously had them swapped. I still have the FOTR paperback from those covers, but the other two have succumbed to the elements, so my memory has grown dim. Thanks for the correction!
a balrog is a maiar and is sentient but whose powers are certainly finite. physically, it’s no more powerful and imposing than say, morgoth whom fingolfin wounded 7 times in the leg, or sauron who was beaten by a tag team of gilgalad and elendil.
we all know that the best way to beat a balrog, or at least fight him to a draw, is to do so near a body of water. ecthelion(sp?) faught the lord or balrogs to a fatal draw when they both fell into the fountain pool at the gates of gondolin. the other gondolin captain glorfindel chose to fall off the cliff-path with another balrog just to save the others. gandalf fell into deep water with his balrog and chased him up a stairway all the way to the mountain’s summit.
so put a balrog’s dimensions at maybe hagrid-range. that movie thing could have killed gandalf with his finger.
i remember it now. FOTR showed hobbiton with bilbo’s green gate visible in the distance. TTT showed merry and pippin gamboling among the roots of trees at fanghorn. ROTK showed that fortress. and yes, i think my friend said it was barad-dur but i thought it was too white and clean to be sauron’s fortress (mount doom was visible though and that was the giveaway.)
I thought the Gandalf-Balrog fight worked OK because it was primarily a magical duel. I liked the cave troll, both in terms of appearance and movement, but it was over-sized. When it started throwing members of the fellowship around they should have been left as smears on the walls. The worst for me were the vast mumakil. There was a scene where a rider (was it Eowyn?) brought one down by riding between its legs with a couple swords outstretched. Really, the best they could have hoped for was to give it a very minor shave, it just wasn’t believable.
I didn’t have any problem with that scene. She was cutting the thing’s hamstrings. Sure, the sucker was huge, but a razor sharp sword being swung from the back of a charging horse is going to cut pretty deep into just about any sort of flesh, regardless of how big the beastie.
Just checked the DVD, as I thought she runs underneath the beastie from front-to-back. To sever the hamstrings from there she’d have to cut through more than half of the legs.
This, exactly. Most of my mental images come from the calendars in the mid-seventies.
I think that Jackson took a lot of his imagery from the Hildebrandt paintings, too (not all, certainly, especially Aragorn), and that is part of what made the movie a success: people like myself had (many of) their mental images completely validated.
McKellan and Lee looked like the images in my head. My Frodo isn’t as… cherubic as Wood. Holm really surprised me with how close he managed to be to my image of Bilbo.
The Ents, I still haven’t seen anything that looks like an ent. Humanoid enough to be “man like” but tree-ish enough to be able to hide by holding still some yards away.
Agent Smith Half Elven had the right hair color, but failed in every other way.
The only image in my head that was changed by the movies was Boromir.
I was thinking more about Elrond (Hugo Weaving). I think the problem was that he was played too emotionless, or cold.
When watching “V for Vendetta”, I admit to laughing at hearing Hugo’s voice behind the mask and thinking about Agent Smith. But without being able to see his face, the role wasn’t too bad, as facial expressions are hidden anyway.
Does Mr. Weaving show the chops (more emotion) in other films, or no?
He does. See Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Definitely. More range than Agent Smith, prettier dresses than Elrond.
Hah!
Ok, so Elrond was written cold. Thanks!
In a slight hijack, I’m really hoping that with all the criticism they got for him being Agent Smith of Rivendell, he’s going to be given a bit lighter touch for the Hobbit. Hope springs eternal anyway.
On the thread topic…
I’m in the enviable position (I suppose) of being one of those people who had mental images about 90ish% identical to the film vision.
Alan Lee and John Howe were always a more resonant illustrating match for me, and I’d say that all of the visuals were like seeing my imaginings on screen (with the exception of the Paths of the Dead with the very overdramatic ghost-green lights and cascades of skulls :rolleyes: ).
People were less-solid, around 75% there.
Notable instances of “nope, that’s not right”
Elrond (I think if I wasn’t as familiar with the actor, he could have made the cut, but the Agent Smith thing just killed it dead),
Galadriel (just… not it. Nothing I can quantify very well, but no.),
Arwen (Arwen needs to have more of a chin than that)
poor Haldir (just bad all around),
Legolas (mine’s a brunette, and you can’t take that away from me),
Faramir (more due to character crucifixion than anything else.)
People that didn’t match which I liked anyway -
Grima surprised me. I was expecting a little less obviously icky, but it was fun to watch. I could really see him stabbing old Sharkey in the back.
Saruman actually took a while to get used to, even though I enjoyed that representation of him in the film. He’s a bit meaner and obviously nefarious than in my mind. Again, I’m expecting the Hobbit to rehabilitate him a little as far as pretending to be on the good team.
For the not-matches, I don’t have any trouble at all keeping my own images in mind - they’re the ones I prefer.
Agree on Boromir. In my head, I pictured Boromir as more a big muscled viking type. But Sean Bean was good enough in that role to change my mind.
Sean Bean was great, and he made Boromir a more sympathetic and complex character than Boromir was in the books. However, his eye and hair color contradicted Tolkien’s description.
I think that cold, emotionless Elrond could have worked, and Hugo Weaving as Elrond could have worked, and the combination of the two could have worked if Weaving weren’t also Agent Smith, but put it all together, and the comparison is just too in-your-face. And even that wouldn’t have been so bad, if LotR and The Matrix weren’t such different movies.
Gandalf was also a maia, and may have had additional powers over the Balrog even as Gandalf the Grey. Gandalf the White could’ve destroyed the Balrog without breaking sweat, although he would probably not have done so unless forced to. Sauron was the only entity in Middle-Earth with unquestionably greater power than Gandalf.