Yeah but he fought in war! Hand to hand in a trench there’s gonna be a lot of fuck youuuuuu
edit: Ok now we’re on the giant elephants…where are the “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck”?? I mean im saying it and I’m just watching.
Joking aside, Sam/Sean gets it as right as you can in a PG-13 movie in his battle with Shelob. The smack talk, all the grunts and yelps in the right spots. Makes it one of the best spots in a great movie.
I love Infinity War but Marvel needs to watch these battles, to see how much better a fight against faceless mooks can be improved just making a level of Lieutenants between your mooks and Captains. Admittedly its hard to without being cheesy, I like Albino Head orc with the fucked up hand, but its a fine line between effective and cheesy. Give us some hero Lieutenants and you can kill them off since we know most of the heroes arn’t going to fall. (Snappening aside)
It’s certainly “instinctive” if you’re in the habit of using such language, or if you spend a lot of time around people who do (in person or on screen). But cursing, and verbal expression generally, is to at least some extent learned behavior, so I can at least imagine societies or worlds in which it wasn’t the custom to yell dirty words. (Like Vulcan, maybe. “Why would you say the word for excrement during a battle? That is so illogical. What information are you conveying?”)
So now I’m curious, whether there are societies without cursing; and whether there is cursing in Middle Earth, and if so, what form it takes and what are the customs and mores surrounding it.
The learned certainly knew, or at least suspected what he was.
He was not a man; he lived too long.
He was not an elf; so far as I know, elves don’t look old, since they don’t grow old.
He was neither ent nor dwarf, the only two other species of intelligent non-angelic humanoid life on the planet.
We can easily discount that he was orc or troll.
Hence, he had to be some form of ainu. I suppose he could have been one of the Valar, but since there are a limited number of them, all well-known, it’s doubtful he could have been one of them.
By process of elimination, the wizards were lesser powers (maiar).
Less learned peoples probably didn’t think much about it, simply categorizing them as “strange, powerful, old, don’t get involved with” types.
But that assumes there is a limited set of beings.
Tom Bombadil, as usual, throws a spanner in the works. Does that process of elimination mean Tom is a Maiar as well?
And if not, then Tom is an example of something not human, dwarf, elf or Maiar.
If there is one individual that does not fit those categories, then that means Tom is a different category.
If Tom is a different category, why couldn’t Gandalf also be in that different category? He seems to be the one at the Council who is most familiar with Tom. Maybe they are kindred of some sort?
Another nitpick: Maia is singular, Maiar is plural.
Perhaps over the course of a couple of thousand years it might have occurred to one of the lords of the Eldar to ask one of the Wizards who they were and where they came from?
The lords of the Eldar were sufficiently convinced of nature of the Wizards to join with them in the White Council, and Cirdan to hand over his ring his Gandalf - quite a major act of trust.
Northern Piper makes a good point about range of beings not being limited. Tom Bombadil deserves more attention than he generally gets.
In case someone brings up the Eagles again – they were not transportation devices, they were divine intervention. They were not available for planning purposes. They showed up when Manwe decided they should. The only person they ever show up for is Gandalf, and he never calls them. Leaving The Hobbit, an earlier work for children, to one side.
I also think that Tom Bombadil is someone who doesn’t fit anywhere and is an example of how Tolkien wrote LOTR, which was not very planned out. He more or less just started writing at one end and wrote until he got to the other. Bombadil is a plot device to get the hobbits out of the Shire, and also illustrating that at that point they were incapable of avoiding fatal danger on their own. He appeared in a long poem much earlier and I guess Tolkien liked him so much he put him into the novel.
Looking at LOTR as Christian allegory (despite what Tolkien explicitly said about how it wasn’t one), is a lot more useful to understanding the plot than the application of any psuedo-practical fantasy rules.
I was under the impression that Tom Bombadil was a Maia. Although the fact the ring had no effect on Tom, but Gandalf was afraid to touch, it might indicate Tom was something else.
Shelob was also not affected by and had no interest in the ring and I assume Ungoliant (primeval spirit of night) would not have been either.
RE: Gandalf’s nature. Are we entirely sure that Gandalf himself knew what he was until after his ‘death’ at the hands of the Balrog and subsequent resurrection?
I think the idea isn’t that his memories were “wiped”, so much as that he couldn’t fit all of them in that mortal frame. Certainly, when he comes back as the White, he seems briefly mentally muddled while he tries to make sense of who he is and was.
Also, none but the wise would know what the available classes of being might be. Gandalf, Sauron, and the Balrog of Moria were all Maiar, but no one without deep knowledge would necessarily consider them to be the same “kind” of being.
The nature of some of the other beings in Middle Earth is also unclear or debatable, including Tom Bombadil and the Great Eagles (even perhaps to Tolkein). They might have been Maiar, they might have been something else. Also, what exactly was Beorn? He seems to have been more than an ordinary man (although he was certainly mortal since it is mentioned he was succeeded by his son after his death.).
