I’d like the orcs to have a moral compass, and not make them genetically evil people. I suppose “original sin” doesn’t sit well with me. Especially not like that.
I’d like to see more female characters. There’s only one (Eowyn). Arwen is just a prize, and Galadriel is a god, not a person. And… I can’t think of any others. Oh, Frodo’s aunt, I actually rather liked her. I agree about the lack of “toxic masculinity”, though.
Yeah, I’d let Glorfindel stay dead. He seemed jammed in. But I adore Bombadil. I only wish he were better integrated into the rest of the story. Why is he so close to the shire? Had he been protecting it?
I’d also be happy to see more dwarves. Although I suppose we get some of that in The Hobbit. But I’d like to see a mature work with more dwarves, and hey, maybe even meet a female dwarf.
I thought there was some suggestion the hobbits were brown?
There was Sam’s love interest, but she was also a goal as opposed to a character. (I’ll admit I just wanted to show off my knowledge there. ) I’d also like to have seen what Beorn was up to after The Hobbit, but that’s just me.
I always assumed that was just being tan from outdoorsiness, but I’m happy to be corrected.
On a side topic, there’s a Tolkien RPG set between the Hobbit and Fellowship that looks interesting.
The age difference was huge, and Eoywn realized later that it was just hero worship, she had a crush. Aragorn was about 90, he had served with her Grandfather.
Cut some of the slog through Mordor. But the book is nigh perfect.
Yes. The The Harfoots were nut brown, and by far the most population. They also had curly brown hair.
“Hey. Want to help raise some cubs? I promise I’ll sleep all winter.” That never occurred to me before. So magic ability is inherited in Tolkien? Unless she was a female Beorning? There are really no other examples, I guess.
" During the War of the Ring, while wearing the One Ring at Amon Hen upon the seat of seeing, Frodo Baggins saw many things from afar, including the land of the Beornings aflame. This hints at an attack by Sauron’s forces upon the Beornings, though the outcome of this attack is unknown."
The One Ring RPG. A new edition was just published by Fria Ligan; there was an earlier edition* published by Cubicle 7. I got my Kickstarter copy of the core book and the starter set just last week.
Both editions are set in the time period between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The first edition was set in “the Wilderland” of the North, basically the area between the Shire and the Iron Hills, including Rhovanion. The new edition is set in Eriador (really Eriador and Arnor). The idea, which I think is brilliant, being that these regions are at once iconic and familiar to fans of Tolkien, while not being all that well explored, and we don’t actually know all that much about what happened in them during that time period. So there’s a lot of room for adventures that can extend storylines from The Hobbit or involve the run-up to the War of the Ring, but that won’t contradict canon.
I’m not nearly as big a Tolkien fan as a lot of folks on this board, but for my money (literally), it’s by far the best table-top RPG adaptation of the material. Unlike Middle-Earth Role Playing or The Lord of the Rings RPG or Adventures in Middle Earth**, it doesn’t try to cram Tolkien into a pre-existing rules system, it’s built from the ground up for Tolkien-style adventures. I think it really captures the feel of Tolkien.
*Cubicle 7 actually published two “editions”, first a set of core books, and then a consolidated core book that made some significant revisions, which I would consider a second edition, but officially they were both part of the first edition of the game.
**Adventures in Middle Earth was a 5E D&D adaptation that Cubicle 7 published alongside The One Ring. I thought it was probably the second-best adaptation, and did a surprisingly good job of adapting the material to the rules and adapting the rules to the material. Unfortunately, it was released shortly before they lost the license, and not much material was released for it beyond the core books.
Fili and Kili’s Mother (Dis) is mentioned but not named in The Hobbit, but is named in appendix A of LOTR.
I think some if not all the spiders are female, but are not named.
Eowyn was of a bloodline that was not noble enough. Aragorn was a direct descendant of kings of Numenor; Eowyn was in the royal family (niece, was she?) but the Rohirrim were not, shall we say, as high as the kings of Gondor. It would be like the Norman king Richard II marrying Rowena (a Saxon princess) in Ivanhoe. She was personally worthy, but not socially appropriate.
Also, it makes sense to want to renew the elf element of his bloodline, to provide for longer life for his offspring, at least for a while. All for the sake of the stability of Gondor and Arnor. The love element was written in so that it doesn’t seem so mercenary (or so I think).
I don’t know enough about all of the genealogies to know if that makes sense and is consistent across Tolkien’s legendarium, but it certainly seems plausible off-hand to me that he’d be class-conscious enough to make sure the love matches also happened to all be class-appropriate.
But,
This frankly doesn’t make sense to me. They’re fictional characters. All of the elements of their relationships were “written in.” Either Aragorn’s motives were mercenary because that’s the way Tolkien wrote it, or they actually pure because that’s the way Tolkien wrote it.
Or are you saying that you think Tolkien intentionally wrote Aragon as a cold dynastic calculator and that Aragon “wrote in” the love element to cover his base motives in-universe?
) I’d also like to have seen what Beorn was up to after The Hobbit, but that’s just me.