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Gavin Kisebach
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 Posted: Fri 20 Feb, 2009 9:44 pm Post subject: |
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Oddly Tom Bombadil was one of the characters that popped up druing the early writing phases of Fellowship. Tolkein has said in interviews that he had really no idea where the books were going until the Council of Elrond***, and the first few chapters of that book have a meandering quality that annoyed me. As a kid I generally skipped that chapter, though the baground lore became interesting to me later.
Egad; now that I count it out I've read the LOTR series at least seven times, and the Silmarillion three times. There's just so much content in there, it boggles the mind that it all spilled from the mumbly mouth of one quiet little professor. 
[edit] ***actually it might have been Christopher that said that, but memory fails.
There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them. ~ Emile Chartier
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Anders Backlund
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| Posted: Sat 21 Feb, 2009 5:41 am Post subject: |
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| Julien M wrote: |
Now another thing: the fighting abilities of Legolas...Again, we can't help thinking after seeing him defeat a Mumakil and all its host without even breaking a sweat that a single unit of a thousand wood elves would have been enough to dispose of the mighty threat of the East (his colleagues at helms deep were probably all as mighty a warrior as legolas, but probably uninspired that day as they were all slained by the dozen, surely just content with" fighting and dying alongside men" as Haldir puts it... |
Hm. I always kinda assumed Legolas was a very high-end "Hero Unit" -to use a video game phrase- and not a representative of the average wood elf warrior. In fact, this goes for the whole Fellowship, which is why they're such a small force to begin with; they're basically a commando unit of elite fighters. Heck, their equivalent of a normal human took down Uruk Hai by the boatload with arrows sticking out of his chest, for crying out loud.
That's the impression I got, anyway. Not sure what the actual Tolkien lore has to say about it.
| M. Eversberg II wrote: | So for all that budget they couldn't get the story right?
M. |
Of course they could, they simply chose not to. Making a movie out of a book isn't a question of mimicking the original and getting all the tiny details right for the sake of the die-hard fans. After all, anyone could do that. 
One of my favourite examples is Stardust; I thought the book was decent, but I Loved the movie. They could have easily made it exactly like the book, but would that have made it a better movie rather then just a "more accurate" one? Milage may vary, I guess.
| Gavin Kisebach wrote: | | Oddly Tom Bombadil was one of the characters that popped up druing the early writing phases of Fellowship. Tolkein has said in interviews that he had really no idea where the books were going until the Council of Elrond***, |
That explains a lot, actually.[/i]
The sword is an ode to the strife of mankind.
"This doesn't look easy... but I bet it is!"
-Homer Simpson.
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Ben P.
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| Posted: Sat 21 Feb, 2009 7:36 am Post subject: |
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That really ticked me off the Elves were mighty Soldiers and they were related to the Noldor and as such would be really tough and powerful yet the Uruks knocked them over with a feather
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Paul Watson
Location: Upper Hutt, New Zealand Joined: 08 Feb 2006
Posts: 395
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| Posted: Sat 21 Feb, 2009 11:20 am Post subject: |
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Anders, the Fellowship was not meant to be a commando unit.
Saying that, some of it's members were accounted amongst the great, (Gandalf is a Maia spirit that has taken an incarnate form and Aragorn is the greatest living man since his ancestor Elendil) but as is pointed out in the Council of Elrond they are putting their trust and faith in the Fellowship based mainly on friendship, (four of them are Hobbits) not who is the most powerfull, otherwise there were members of Elronds house who would have been included in the Fellowship, in fact in early conceptions Glorfindel and another elf from the Grey Havens were going to be part of the Fellowship.
Ben P, the elves at Helms Deep were only very distantly related to the Noldor. They were led in their homeland by one of Noldorin blood (Galadriel) but the actual elven populace of the Golden Wood had a very different history to that of the Noldor and were not their equivalent because they had never lived in the Undying Lands or seen the light of the Two Trees. Unfortunately they were a bit too much cannon fodder in the movies as you suggest. That many elves, even those of the lesser heritage would likely have destroyed or at least taken a substantial part of Sarumans army out before they managed to breach the walls.
I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, but that which it protects. (Faramir, The Two Towers)
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Lou Weaver
Location: amelia island, florida Joined: 04 Sep 2008
Posts: 27
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| Posted: Sat 21 Feb, 2009 12:19 pm Post subject: |
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kaor! big lou here again. i grant p. j. did a much better job of adapting L.O.T.R. than i was expecting when i heard it was in the planning stages.the dragons of pern adaptation was so bad the man ultimately in charge stopped it as they were about to begine filming! still, p.j. incorperated things that i LOATH in such a movie , like legolas shield sufing, his mumakil one man assault, eowen's twin sword mumakil assault , ad nauseum! IF YOU ARE GOING TO LEAVE OUT THINGS FROM THE BOOK DO NOT PUT IN TRASH THAT WAS NOT IN IT IN THE FIRST PLACE! ahem, pardon the out burst. anyway, endore and arda are not our earth but incorporate themes and similarities from it. you have various races and a long history so there will be a wide variety of arms and armor. p. j. and the great people at weta did a marvelous job as a whole and who better than john howe and allan lee to help. as for me, i wait with baited breath to see pixar's version of john carter of mars and hope it is not a fraggin abortion!
'...you know best the promptings of yor own heart. that i shall need your sword i have little doubt, but accept from john carter upon his sacred honor the assurance that he will never call upon you to draw this sword other than in the cause of truth, justice and righteousness.'
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Paul Watson
Location: Upper Hutt, New Zealand Joined: 08 Feb 2006
Posts: 395
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| Posted: Sat 21 Feb, 2009 1:50 pm Post subject: |
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Lou, Arda is a fictional pre history of our earth thought out by Tolkien to such an extent that he specifically excluded tomatoes in any text because they had not been brought to that part of the world (Middle Earth which is prehistorical Europe). This was something that PJ added in because he thought the exclusion was silly. I guess he thinks he knows more about Midlle Earth than Tolkien did.
I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, but that which it protects. (Faramir, The Two Towers)
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Eric Allen
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| Posted: Sat 21 Feb, 2009 4:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Paul Watson wrote: | | Lou, Arda is a fictional pre history of our earth thought out by Tolkien to such an extent that he specifically excluded tomatoes in any text because they had not been brought to that part of the world (Middle Earth which is prehistorical Europe). This was something that PJ added in because he thought the exclusion was silly. I guess he thinks he knows more about Midlle Earth than Tolkien did. |
Of course, Tolkien also explicitly mentions potatoes in The Two Towers (pg. 332 in my 1965 Ballantine paperback) when Sam is cooking up some rabbit stew (the line is kept in the movie as well), and potatoes, like their close relative the tomato, are a New Wold plant that would be unknown in Eurasia prior to European colonization. So even if Tolkien was careful about the tomatoes, he missed another obvious one.
Personally, I can stomach some of the crazy stuff in the movies, like Legolas shield-surfing and Aragorn killing Uruks by tapping them square on the breastplate with his sword. Is it silly? Yes, of course. But the movie makers were trying to establish these heroes as, well, heroes capable of superhuman feats. Considering that much of Tolkien's descriptions amount to little more than "They fought and Person A slew Person B" they had plenty of leeway to make the fights as Hollywood fantastic as they wanted.
Film is a very different medium than a book. What can be read in a book must be said or shown in movie, and some things that work well in a book come across as awkward or unnecessary in a movie.
And ultimately, the movie is not a translation of the book, it is an adaptation, a retelling if you will.
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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Sat 06 Jun, 2009 5:39 am Post subject: |
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| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: | | Gary Teuscher wrote: | | Quote: | | No, the pikes are (unusually) quite close to Tolkien's vision. Read Unfinished Tales and you'll find his account of the battle at the Fords of Isen, where the Orcs overran the Rohirrim with pikes. |
I am not sure of the passage you are speaking of. I would think that they were not all armed this way?
Maybe a few with some long spears I could stomach. But it's more than just the pikes, it was their discipline and organization. They looked like the equivalent of veteran Swiss Pikemen, that strikes me as a bit off for Orcs. They may have been a bit more disciplined than a normal orc (I think I remember reading this in the books maybe?) but there was way to much of a difference for me. |
Unfinished Tales. It's a posthumous publication, not part of the Lord of the Rings book. And the Uruk-hai's discipline and organization was quite strongly emphasized there. Even in The Two Towers (the book, not the movie) the image I got of them was more like some sort of dark, twisted Roman legionaries than the ordinary barbaric Orcish rabble. |
There. The Del Rey 1988 paperback edition of UT has this on page 379, just prior to the first battle of the Fords of Isen:
| Quote: | | But Saruman had not revealed his intentions nor the full strength of his forces. They were already on the march when Theodred set out. Some twenty miles north of the Fords he encountered their vanguard and scattered it with loss. But when he rode on to attack the main host the resistance stiffened. The enemy was in fact in positions prepared for the event, behind trenches manned by pikemen, and Theodred in the leading eored was brought to a stand and almost surrounded, for new forces hastening from Isengard were now outflanking him upon the West. |
It is also quite noticeable that Tolkien used the term "battalion" specifically for referring to units of Uruks "heavily armed but trained to move at great speed for many miles," as opposed to the more generic "company" that he used for other forces of all sorts of sizes and composition. So, while the image of discipline may not be all that explicit, it was quite consistently presented.
I'm not saying the movies got it "right," though. I can understand their decision to not depict the Dunlendish horsemen who made up a major proportion of the Isengarder vanguard, but there were clearly too many pikes and not enough of the "men or Orc-men armed with axes" that played such a central part in the first battle at the Fords. And I don't know where the hell they got those crossbows from since Tolkien only mentioned arrows and not bolts....
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Ben P.
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| Posted: Sat 06 Jun, 2009 8:41 am Post subject: |
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Actually Tolkien mentions bolts in the siege of gondor
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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Sat 13 Jun, 2009 2:44 am Post subject: |
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| Ben P. wrote: | | Actually Tolkien mentions bolts in the siege of gondor |
Where? I can find "darts" aplenty, "arrows," and even "shot," but not a single "bolt." And even if there was a "bolt" it would have been from siege-weapons, not from nonexistent Orcish crossbows.
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Ben P.
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| Posted: Wed 11 May, 2011 8:59 pm Post subject: |
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| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: | | Ben P. wrote: | | Actually Tolkien mentions bolts in the siege of gondor |
Where? I can find "darts" aplenty, "arrows," and even "shot," but not a single "bolt." And even if there was a "bolt" it would have been from siege-weapons, not from nonexistent Orcish crossbows. |
Ah, I stand corrected. I was thinking of the Appendices and the part where the Last Alliancer besieges the Black Gate.
IIRC he did mention some of them (Darts, Shot, etc.) taking out siege towers which would mean they would have to be pretty impressive weapons, right?
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