Speaking of the Balrog, another question (probably unanswerable) pops up. Sauron offers to give Moria back to the Dwarves for the Ring. Assuming he was actually going to do it (let’s pretend he cleared out Moria first then made the offer) could he have ordered the Balrog to leave, presumably sending it back to Mordor?
If the Balrog were willing to serve Sauron, he wouldn’t have been lurking in Moria, would he? He’d have been out and about, cracking skulls for Mordor.
Another minor question. Does Frodo actually know Legolas’ name? He never says it in the movies and they barely interact at all.
Funny, but they travelled together for weeks if not months. One must assumed that they talked to each other at some point.
Eh, he was downsized from his last position and didn’t feel like dealing with the boss’ son and his newfangled ideas. We’ve all been there! Rings! Back in my day we had flaming whips and liked it!
Gasp!
And I just thought of a very minor nitpick in Moria. So Pippen gets chewed out by Gandalf for dropping a stone and maybe alerting the locals that the Fellowship were around (I was never clear if they’d been following the group until the big tomb-fight). But Gimli sings his sad song and Gandalf says nothing? Maybe he felt they were so close to the exit it didn’t matter.
Maybe not in The Lord of the Rings, but The Hobbit most definitely uses the word. (As I recall, the very last word of the book is “tobacco-jar”.)
There are foxes in Lord of the Rings? I may have to read it after all 
I’m afraid you have read most of the fox related prose. I did shorten it a bit.
Even without foxes, the books are well worth reading.
I always just took it for granted that the problem with Pippin’s chucking a stone into the guardroom well was that it fell down into “the deep”, i.e., the lower regions where the enemies are.
A random rat or bat or spider in the old dwarf-halls of Moria isn’t going to be shoving hand-sized stones into holes in the floor. Even if Orc sentinels can’t hear talking or singing in the desolate halls hundreds of feet above them, they’re gonna notice a big old rock making a noisy echoing splash in their water.
Ah well, thanks anyway! And yes I suppose I really should, I’ve watched the movies but not the extended director’s cut versions.
-
I highly recommend the extended versions. I haven’t watched the theatrical since, well, the theater or their very earliest DVD release when extended had not come out.
-
Nitpick: The director’s cut was in the theater, at least according to Peter Jackson. Extended is…an alternative director’s cut that is just longer. He never felt like the theatrical was a studio version and that the real version is extended. I guess, until after the movies came out and New Line tried to steal money, he had a pretty good experience with creative freedom on the movies.
Thanks, I’ll have to check them out! And the whole directors / extended / super-ultra-special edition thing just confuses me to be honest, even video games have started doing that.
I just played Persona 5 Royal a few months ago. The “Royal” part was their version of extended/director’s cut.
Since this thread seems to be about minor questions/issues, am I the only one that finds themselves scratching their head in Fellowship of the Ring when Tolkien describes the hobbits first setting out from Hobbiton and there’s a sentence about a fox reflecting on how curious the hobbit’s presence was? You know the sentence I’m talking about? It always seemed to me like the thoughts of a woodland creature like Mr. Fox would be something you’d find in a children’s story, or at least the Hobbit at any rate. Seemed quite out of place in the LOTR epic.
Yeah, for the first few chapters, Tolkien was still feeling out just what sort of story it was. On the one hand, it’s a sequel to The Hobbit, which is a children’s story, but on the other, both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are built on the foundation of his extensive, and adult, mytharium for Middle Earth. So it ends up starting off whimsical and childish, but then maturing.
I enjoy the fact that there’s no real religion in Middle Earth. There’s no need, people know unequivocally there’s a god. Some of the characters used to hang out with his angels. Others are his angels.
So Boromir, Legolas and Aragorn are all royalty or nobility of one sort or another ( as is Merry, I guess). Is Gimli a Prince of Dwarfs, or the like? His dad Gimli was one of Thorin’s companions, after all.
And Celeborn really married up, didn’t he? (Not a question, more of an observation.)
Merry and Pippin both.
Merry was related to the Master of Buckland, which if I recall correctly was a separate entity from the Shire. It was sort of a colonial plantation, owned and controlled by the Brandybuck family.
Pippin was part of the Took family, who were said to be less respectable than the Bagginses, but were far wealthier. The head of the Took family was nearly always elected Thane of the Shire.
Gimli was a third cousin once removed of king Dain II Ironfoot. Related to the royals, but far down the line of succession.