This has been bothering me for a while - why didn’t Frodo’s mithril shirt protect him from Shelob’s stinger? I mean it stopped a spear from a cave troll so one would think it would have stopped her stinger.
Yes, I know I need to get a life and stop worrying about these things…
Was he perhaps bitten on the neck or some other spot the armor would not be? I don’t recall the book or movie showing exactly where he was bitten.
He got hit by the stinger in the neck, which was not covered by the mithril shirt. JRRT makes that clear in the books.
In the book he was “stung” in the neck. The movie? Not so much.
Thanks. Although I’m with WhyNot - it definitely doesn’t look like he got it in the neck in the movie, hence my confusion. And I have to confess that mostly I avert my gaze during that part being a severe arachnophobe. I was completely unable to watch it in the theater and only recently have been able to force myself to watch it on dvd. The damn spider just moves way too realistically!
The movie made plenty of little mistakes, including the troll itself. It did not get Frodo in the book, the spear was from a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail.
There’s a difference between a mistake and a change.
They changed who stabbed him. It appears to be a mistake that he gets pierced through his mithril shirt.
One man’s change was a mistake in my opinion. The troll looked goofy anyway. It was a mistake as it serve no purpose to improve the movie, so why make the change. As written was also more dramatic as it led to the question of why the chieftain went straight for Frodo.
Its not so much a mistake as that scene was filmed at a weird angle, in later scenes you can clearly see the wound the sting made in Frodos neck.
He missed his saving throw?
Based on its qualities, the way it’s mined, the way it can be turned into jewels, it is aluminum right? I know I read that somewhere, possibly on the SDMB. I mentioned it to a friend who did not believe me. I need your Tolkien powers my friends.
Interesting thought, but bauxite is considerable more common than silver, so I find this very unlikely. Additionally, if you make chain mail from aluminum it has little strength, I know as someone that has used steal, copper and aluminum rings in make and teaching others to make chain mail.
Finally Mithril was called true silver and appeared inherently magical. I don’t see enough similarities between Mithril and aluminum to call this anything but false.
Jim
IMHO, it’s Unbihexium. Probably a mix of its isotopes 310 and 322.
Tho some have put forth that Unbihexium is Kryptonite. :eek:
This fellow suggests that the description and properties of mithril are most closely reflected by yttrium silver, a fairly exotic crystalline intermetallic compound . (There’s also a neat digression on the hardness of dragon scales.) I seem to recall that the American Chemical Society used this article as the basis for one of their April Fools’ columns, complete with molecular structure; but it appears to have since vanished from their site.
John Byrne? Bah! Byrne was to Superman what Bakshi was to Sam Gamgee.
“I wish I had a kryptonite mail-coat, because then you could keep both Superman and orc-cheftains away.” – J.R.R. Handey
I still don’t know why Frodo was alive. The mithril stops it piercing him, I get that much, but it would still transfer momentum. A blunt pole from an ogre to the chest is still going to be damaging.
Yeh, I don’t think so, either. Last time I checked, aluminum was not as hard as dragon scales.
One problem I’ve always had with that scene, is that chain mail, no matter how well made, is only really protective of sword glances, not stabbing strikes. Okay, mithril is magical, still it bugs me.
What if it’s properlly annealed or some such?
Hm. I always thought Mithril was Platinum, and I seem to recall reading somewhere that Tolkien thought so, too.
That Troll and that whole appalling sequence in the movie made me want to get up and fling spears and sticks and stones at the screen. Or at Peter Jackson’s head.
Remember R. Threshold, Aragorn thought Frodo was dead, too. Book Aragorn, I mean. What movie Aragorn thought is unknowable to the ordinary mortal.
And, just because it still irks me: Why were King Kong’s legs only 6 inches long?
While normally I’d agree that there wasn’t a good reason for introducing the change, not having it means that Boromir would never have delivered the line, “They have a cave troll,” a line that Sean Bean nailed perfectly.