The Ring was considered lost, but Sauron was still around - battling him and his minions, and training up generations of [del]Last True Numenoreans[/del]Rangers takes time.
My headcanon is that Balrogs were not all the same. Some had wings, some did not. I refuse to get into arguments about it.
The earliest stone tools are about 2 million years old. However, there was no single technology of “stone tools”. They improved (very slowly) over the millennia as well as became specialized for various uses.
To those who are admirably recounting the story points from the books; I have tried on a few occasions to read the books without success; it feels like doing a book report on the book of Numbers from the Bible sometimes. I do get that there is likely a fuller and more sensible explanation for some of these issues in the books, but I’m approaching the story from the standpoint of one who has only familiarity with the cinematic adaptation. Regardless of how many months Eowyn and Faramir spend getting to know each other, even in the extended version the impression one gets is that it has to be less than a couple of weeks at best before they’re holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes; this is compounded by the interspersed scenes of Frodo and Sam at Mt. Doom, which make it seem like it’s a matter of a day or so at best from the end of the battle at Gondor to their arrival at the fiery pit itself; I get that isn’t the case at all. This is more a criticism of the choices the filmmakers made, how it comes across to the uninitiated viewer. But I get the impression that a fully faithful adaptation of the books would probably take something like twelve movies.
Look at Faramir and Eowyn this way:
Eowyn isn’t really in love with Aragorn (hell, she hardly knows HIM!*). She just thinks he’s the studliest guy she’s ever seen, AND, he’s gonna be a major king, not like her extended family, who rule out of a small, greasy hut by comparison to what she’s heard about Minas Tirith. She THINKS she’s in love with him, but she’s more in love with the idea of him.
As for Faramir, he’s the first Númenorean she’s ever really spent any time with. He’s good looking, he’s a hell of a fighter, and, unlike her dreamlover Aragorn, Faramir actually appears to have qualities she really prizes, though she’s too caught up in the shield-maiden thing to accept that. If you don’t think two people can fall in love with each other in a matter of a few days, I think you have a bit of an unrealistic viewpoint on love. 
I’ve heard that argument about Aragorn and I quibble with the part of “The idea of him”.
Aragorn is the King. The heir of Isildur. Aragorn is a BFD. Aragorn IS the idea of him. He’s legion. He contains worlds. You can’t put Aragorn on a pedestal.
I also think he loves her. (Im not going to argue with the difference between ‘love’ and ‘in love’) What’s not to love. Anyone would love her. “From the moment i met you, I’ve wished you nothing but joy” is a fancy way of saying you love someone.
BUT…of course he belongs to another. And he has a lot of duties.
Slightly related to my earlier “Gandalf pissed off for seventeen years”:
Balrogs and Shelob are intelligent arnt they? Smaug certainly is.
So what the hell do they do in their downtime?? I guess I can see how Shelob has no further ambition than to venture out occasionally and catch an orc. And I GUESSSS Smaug really needs his beauty sleep. Like REALLY needs it.
But what the hell is the Balrog doing?
The Balrog, Smaug and Shelob spend way too much time on the Evilnet. Lots of swapping of recipes for heroes and adventurers on Facecook, for example.
Shooting hoops for Villanova?
I can understand that the Eowyn-Faramir romance seems rushed on the big screen, but I’m not sure I can really fault the filmmakers for that. They had to cut a lot to fit the books into three movies, and what they didn’t cut, they had to compress. They really didn’t have time to spend on a romance between two third-tier characters. Similarly, I’m not upset by some of the things they cut entirely: Yes, I’d love to have seen Tom Bombadil, and the Scouring of the Shire, but those were things that could be cut out relatively cleanly, leaving more room for the things they couldn’t cut.
As for the Army of the Dead, the book actually says that nobody even knows if their ghost-weapons would even have been effective: The sheer terror of them was so effective that nobody stuck around to test them.
EDIT: silenus, I was actually attending Villanova when I read that, and it was all the more ironic, in that, first, the biggest Balhog in the NCAA at the time was playing for our archrival, and second, our own star was the most team-oriented player in the NCAA.
Who would win: Army of the Dead vs. the Nazgul? Both used terror as their main weapon and were probably immune to it. And I suspect the Dead would not be bothered by mere physical weapons. So a stalemate, I guess.
With cruel runes across his sweatshirt.
Sorry, but Aragorn doesn’t “love” Eowyn. Remember, to him she is but a child; she was born in 2995 T.A., and that means he was already 64 when she was born. Hell, her FATHER was just a young 'un when he was serving King Thengel of Rohan as Thorongil.
She cannot “love” him because she’s spent essentially no time with him. She doesn’t know his habits, his manners, his thoughts, etc. He shows up at her home, helps Gandalf heal her foster-father the King, and by the next day, is riding off with the host to do battle with Saruman’s forces. She sees him briefly again when he returns to Dunharrow, before he heads off on the Paths of the Dead. She’s not in love with him at all.
But she THINKS she’s in love with “him”, meaning she thinks he’s an amazing man, a future King, mighty, puissant, wise, etc. She longs for such a person to take her away from the squalor of her own little kingdom, which she has seen fall into decay. She aches to follow him on the Paths of the Dead, not because of love of a woman for a man, but because of the love of a shieldmaiden for someone who will lead her to glorious victory.
Aragorn certainly doesn’t feel romantic love towards Eowyn. He might feel something like paternal love, though.
Such an overloaded word “love” is.
Nah. It’s a fancy way of saying, “You’re like a sister to me.”
Compared to Arwen (2700yo), Aragorn and Eowyn are the same age. If Aragorn sees Eowyn as a child, what must Arwen think of Aragorn (or should she think of him)? Or others think of Arwen when she wants to bed a proto-child such as Aragorn? My theory is that elves, for all their high and mightiness, aren’t the brightest bulbs in the pack or their brains have a limited retention period and clean out after a century or two keeping only the most important stuff from the past.
Mind you, look at Arwen’s family tree- virtually every known instance of elves getting with non-elves happened in it. She’s been brought up on stories -famous romantic ballads even -of how her ancestors gave everything up for the love of a mortal. It’s not surprising she copied.
Here’s another thing about the movies and a weird ass choice to make:
Aragorn shows Sauron the reforged sword for two reasons. To make him think that Aragorn has the Ring and to cow him or to show us what a badass Aragorn is and that Sauron fears him…and Sauron responds by…showing him a dead or dying Arwen? And Aragorns pendant falls and shatters? Now I love how this immediatly segues to Aragorn marching out, but the Arwen thing and the pendant was a weird choice to make.
Another thing I don’t understand; Arwen says she “chooses a mortal life” with Aragorn, but then Elrond nearly convinces her to go to the undying lands because if she stays with Aragorn, Aragorn will eventually die and she’ll be left alone basically forever; the flash forward scene shows an aged dead Aragorn and Arwen looking not a day older. So what, then? Does she become mortal and just lives a hella long time? Or does she continue to be immortal?
She dies of grief shortly after Aragorn’s death. As to what happens to her after death, well… She wanted to share Aragorn’s fate (whatever that is; even the Wise of Middle-Earth explicitly have no clue what happens to humans after death), and she claims that’s her decision to make. But on the other hand, her first cousins (Aragorn’s long-distant ancestors) resented that they were not allowed to make that decision, and dying of grief is a possible cause of death for elves, but not for humans.
The acting, writing, and directing choices diverged from the books, and I can live with that because to film the books as written would have yielded MANY more hours of cinema to be effective.
But all the goddamned Wilhelm screams…why? How does invoking the baggage of hundreds of other iconic movies add to the story at all? Jackson should be smothered in a vat of live mice for that.