I believe it is speculated. She does not so much work for Sauron as she benefits from living in that passage.
I read a lot of mysteries, and I have a kind of sixth sense with clues sometimes. I think it was well disguised, but if you catch on early, everything confirms your guess.
Sure, he was more comprehensive than his predecessors (or more anal, depending on your viewpoint). That doesn’t make him the first.
I’m curious what the ranking of LotR book sales was prior to the Peter Jackson films.
I don’t disagree, but for me it wasn’t until multiple reads and/or understanding some of the appendices that Tom felt any more randomly enigmatic than Elvish poetry, or Gildor, or the wraiths of the barrow downs, or the ghost men of the mountain.
I would have liked to see Tom, but to be honest, the LotR is so long- something had to be cut, and Bombadil was one of the obvious choices- as well as the Scouring of the Shire.
Tom Bombadil is my favorite character in The Lord of the Rings. From a plot perspective, he plays the same role as Beorn in The Hobbit. But he’s so much more. More mysterious. More powerful. More mythic.
I think Peter Jackson was right to cut him from the movie, because a lot had to be cut, and that’s pretty self-contained. But that’s one of the reasons the movies are so much shallower and poorer than the books.
I won’t argue against any of your opinions (after all, I find The Hobbit a better book that than The Lord of the Rings, because it is a tighter focus), but when you think “sidetracking” or “stopping the story”, I think the author is taking the story in an unexpected (to me) direction. Maybe that means the author needed a better editor. Or, maybe it means I’m missing what the author is trying to tell.
In Tolkien’s works, the journey itself is just as important as the mission. The journey is prompted by the mission, but the mission does not define the journey. It’s why I’ve come to dislike the movie adaptation, which is more about the action of the heroes winning, rather than how they got to where they are. It’s not that action is wrong or unimportant, but it’s not the totality of the story that Tolkien was telling.
It’s not just the creative process, it’s how mythic storytelling is in the real world. There is no definitive “story of Heracles”, because every teller had their own variation with their own emphases.
So while the movies are not my thing, I believe Tolkien himself would approve of them, simply because Jackson should retell the mythic story in his own way.
Yep. But one thing that cutting him out misses- that fact that Merry and Pippins daggers were magical and wrote with spells to fight the Witch King-
So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.
See, if I had to read a thousand pages of that style of writing by the end I’d be wanting to die. Or by page 100. Verily foorsooth it soundeth as if it wast parodying itsownself.
I’d want another ten thousand pages of that.
Christopher Tolkien (J.R.R. Tolkien’s son and the editor of his posthumously published works) did not approve. J.R.R. might or might not have had a similar reaction. It’s interesting to speculate, but that’s all we can do.
This was my read as well, and I thought it was brilliant. Tolkien gave us opportunities to catch our breath after extended sequences of deathly peril. I saw these chapters as essential to the pace of the narrative, not as interruptions.
Me too. I love it.
A thousand pages of it would bug me same as @Darren_Garrison. But I think I’d like more than @Darren_Garrison too.
Somewhere in the middle. All things in moderation.
If I had to describe the style with one word, it would be “pompous”. Eyes-rolling was I as read it I did.
What I am about to say gets right to the heart of the differences and needs between the two media in question-note as said I come to the issue as a non-reader of the novels pre the year 2000, so I’ll be upfront with my bias from the start. For worldbuilding purposes in a novel a character like TB can indeed fulfill a useful role for the author. In a film a character like that would be dramatic poison; PJ would have lost 90% of the audience to have this singing dancing buffoon come along, laughing at the pretty but useless trinket that Frodo gives him, only to vanish from the rest of the narrative while people wonder how this bozo wasn’t affected by the Ring while pretty much everyone else is or will be (ok Sam maybe not, as well). This is why I get rather frustrated when literary Tolkienites get all up in arms about how PJ did this, that, or the other thing (or in this case didn’t do anything) that utterly despoiled his holy writ.
The truth is that a 100% faithful adaptation would have been a crashing bore, requiring at least 6 films. If you honestly go over each major change with an eye to how the original text would have worked, or not worked, on screen, while also keeping the time factor in mind, you’ll have to admit that he did an excellent job with said decisions about 90% of the time in FotR. [For the other two films I’d agree that that percentage dropped a fair amount, to 85% for TTT and perhaps as low as 75% for RotK]
A lot of the notes in the linked article will often say “This change is an invention of the scriptwriters which takes screen time away from scenes that Tolkien actually wrote.” They did this for Frodo reading a book in a glade when Gandalf comes on by. I’d say that an addition like that was in perfect keeping with the tone and aim of the original novel.
Bree would be an excellent example. In the novel, there was quite a bit of scheming with some of the human conspirators (some of which were the ones Pippen apparently spilled the beans about Frodo’s true identity to in the film), while Barliman and Fatty Bolger helped the burgeoning Fellowship avoid trouble with them. In the film adding all of that would have really caused the entire narrative to drag, taking away from the menace that the Nazgul posed and the need for the troupe to keep moving. Plus we would have had 2 allied characters that would have never shown up for the rest of the story. Law of Conservation of Characters.
By contrast I think he could have added the Barrow Downs in without too much trouble (allowing the hobbits to get their swords w/o Aragorn handing them off), but PJ was on record as saying that the wights would have posed a weird contrast with the Ringwraiths and also might have taken away from the latter’s danger.
Same thing with Faramir (I liked his changes, with the exception of him giving in only after Frodo offered the Ring to a passing focking Nazgul) vs. Denethor (which made a complex conflicted character into a cardboard villain).
Point is, you have to consider each change in the context of the needs of film, without unilaterally assailing each one for daring to alter what JRRT originally did.
That’s been noted as part of the narrative structure of the first part of The Fellowship of the Ring, called “Frodo’s Five Homely Houses”, interspersed with places of danger:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Frodo's_Five_Homely_Houses.svg
They sold over 100 million copies before those films came out. I remember reading that they had sold that many before those films came out. That didn’t have that much effect on the number sold:
A bare handful? Are,you talking about high fantasy or all fantasy? Because there was a lot more than “a bare handful”. L. Frank Baum. C. L. Moore. Leigh Brackett. A. Merritt. H. Rider Haggard. Clark Ashton Smith. Etc., etc.