LORD OF THE RINGS poll (film version)

Frodo shoulda pushed him in.

I would have no problem with a broad and Hollwood ending if it makes more sense than the "whoops, I slipped!" ending we have now.

Maybe the reason it's like it is in the books is Tolkien could never have had a character literally commit suicide

What about Denethor?

i mean he couldn't present suicide as a good choice

if you are v. religious then fighting a lost cause = fine, topping yourself = not cool

to counter Tuomas' observation:

neither Gandalf, Boromir nor Gandalf are CGI'd in their tempting of the ring.

i always sort of read's gollum's fall as at least partially, on some level, self-inflicted.

But now both the book and the movie reach their conclusion because someone doesn't look where he steps, and to me that has always been terribly trivial and undramatic way to end the story.

i think the point was that this was how God basically works in the world.

Or just how the world works. The ending of the Hobbit has a fair few convenient coincidences itself. The missing piece on Smaug's armour, Bilbo finding the Arkenstone.

yeah absolutely. not sure Tolkien's religious beliefs would lead him to think things are totally up to chance, but there's nothing stopping someone else from reading it that way. one man's chance is another's divine intervention.

I've had similar thoughts to Tuomas re. Gollum's fall. I don't think it would neccessarily be self-sacrifice that makes him jump, more "If I can't have the Precious, no one can".

Also I love Galadrial's CGI freakout, it really shook me up in the cinema.

If it was indeed Tolkien's religious views that made him write the scene at Mount Doom as it is, then it's kinda sad that his religion stopped him from writing what might've been the dramatic high point of the whole story. Though I don't really see Gollum's fall in the end as some sort of divine intervention or Will of God; throughout the rest of the book the fate of Middle Earth has always been decided by acts of men and elves and other non-gods. One central theme in the series is the freedom to choose between good and evil; several characters have to decide between using the Ring and being potentially corrupted by it, or leaving it be and remaining on the narrow path. So it would be weird to Gollum's final, random fall as some sort divine intervention, when all through the rest story the gods have not interfered in any way and it's been the choices of mortals that have decided what happens to the world.

"so it would be weird to view"

well i always took the mysterious and elusive ways that God works (ie, indirectly or through chance) to be one of the near explicit themes of LOTR, but then I'm not an expert on it so maybe that's a poor reading of it.

so yeah, and without getting into a debate over theology, we DO have freedom to choose between good and evil, that's why God is largely absent, but that doesn't prevent the tiniest bit of chance from helping out once in a while.

so, in other words, you have to put yourself in the right position, but even if you do sometimes events are out of your control.

iirc Tolkein meant to do nothing religious, overtly or covertly, in LOTR – he thought it was pretty cheap that C.S. Lewis did that in the Narnia books

also iirc the ending where the ring goes into the fire with Gollum IS different from the book, in that Sam has to save Frodo, correct...? In the book, Gollum just falls in while capering around, Frodo doesn't go over the edge with him.

i thought god guided orlando's arrows into the evil hearts of orcs.

i'm not saying gollum's death mundane death is an example of tolkien explicitly writing _in_ some "god works in mysterious ways" thing (although now i think about it, it kinda reminds me of the ending of NCFOM). i'm saying that, as a strict catholic, jrrt would be unlikely to present suicide in a positive light, even it would have been more satisfying for the grand narrative.

also, if tuomas's idea occurred to him and seemed dramatically appealing then it's not necessarily "his religion stopped him" from writing the ending. dude was a serious theologian and he held his beliefs in seriousness and after considerable thought. it's not like he was worrying about what the pope would think and threw away a great draft. tuomas's post reads a bit like "it's a pity he wasn't smart enough to agree with me about religion".

I wish I cld watch the pop throwing the stink eye over Tolkein's shoulder as he penned the manuscript. All the incense got to his brain. It was censership, I tell you!

pop=pope of course

did you know there was a draft where frodo knocked up sam, but sam got an abortion?

"Aye Mr. Frodo, ensoulment hasn't yet happened."

dude was a serious theologian

He might have balked at that description but there's no question he took questions of doctrine very seriously. Tolkien wondered in the years between WWII and the publication of LOTR whether or not all his work with Middle-earth was inherently arrogant and potentially sinful, in that by the act of sub-creation he might not be pushing a little too far towards the idea of creation, in a certain sense -- the 'Notion Club Papers' that were published posthumously explore this in depth. Various other later works address everything from the scientific bases of Middle-earth to extremely involved philosophical debates as framed by certain characters in the overarching legendarium. Only those who really want to look at his work in that depth will sense how much of a continuous internal struggle played itself out over the years; it's really no surprise in the end that those major works that did get published during his lifetime, The Hobbit and LOTR, appeared due to the alternate impulse behind their creations (his random idea for a children's story and the desire of his publishers for a sequel to it).

So Ned did he mean for there to be semi-didactic xtian elements in LOTR? (Haven't read any non LOTR/Hobbit, tho my husband has read a ton of them & they are defs sitting around the house.)

Is the r I r actually c?

He's often silent on that in terms of his notes in the developing manuscripts, from what I remember -- internally he might well have thought otherwise, but he's more concerned with the working out of the story, something which took years of revision and reconsideration as the original idea for a Hobbit II turned into something deeper. While he was clear about the work being both Christian and Catholic I suspect he thought of it more in the sense of demonstrating by example rather than spelling it out, and basically encouraging reflection if one sought it out.

I highly recommend reading his short story "Leaf by Niggle," which presents his own particular self-identity as 'sub-creator' working in the service of something grander in terms more explicitly Christian and Catholic.

for the sake of clarification, i wasnt trying to suggest there is anything didactic or even christian about LOTR. but there is a "higher power" VERY obliquely suggested and hinted at. but yeah, his religious views are highly sophisticated and i doubt he'd intend for the reader to surmise that God was simply moving chess pieces around throughout LOTR.

All this stuff you are talking about, Ned, sounds v enriching (way moreso than all the C.S. Lewis I've read, tho dude the guy's middle name was Staples = badass.)

Xpost the allegories in LOTR I believe were designed by Tolkein to be obfuscated so that the audience could read into it what they wanted while still getting a nice story of good vs. evil. Some stuff has to do with WWI, that I think has been confirmed as intentional by Tolkein.

his religious views are highly sophisticated and i doubt he'd intend for the reader to surmise that God was simply moving chess pieces around throughout LOTR

Very true. Free will is certainly one of the most tricky things about the whole story, and I like the fact that the tension is not entirely resolved.

All this stuff you are talking about, Ned, sounds v enriching

It provides alternate perspectives and a greater understanding of his deepest impulses, at the least. If I were a believing Christian and/or Catholic I'd doubtless find it even more so, but the general issues at work -- what is artistic creation? what makes the artist who he or she is? how is this conveyed? -- have a broader applicability. "Leaf by Niggle" is probably his most concise and, for all its relative simplicity in style, mature expression of it, and the moral lesson he emphasizes in it is very moving -- it's an argument against artistic obsession and solitude and against trying to get everything 'right,' something all the more striking given how much of his own life was given over to these impulses. But "Smith of Wooten Major" has a strength there too, an 'adult fairy tale' in a real sense of the word, addressing inspiration from beyond the fields we know and how age and perspective affects this, as well as social commitments and pressures alike.

Meanwhile if you just want something light go for "Farmer Giles of Ham" with the original illustrations by Pauline Baynes, which is nothing but enjoyably ridiculous Latin and English language and history jokes.

In the foreword to my edition at least Tolkien states "As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. [...] I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations".

You're right Ned, he was not a capital-T Theologian. I suppose my point was that he had a very sohpisticated approach to Christianity compared to modern popular writers.

And so, for him religion does not appear to have been this outside force which acted on him and dogmatically prevented him doing things he wanted to do (like use Tuomas's idea for the climactic scene). It was something that he took seriously and debated with others. He may not have intended to write an allegory (or actually written much Christian moral philosophy into the books), but if he was a Catholic and believed suicide was always wrong, for example, which is something reasonable people can conclude without the help of religion, then he's not going to present it as a redemptive act, which I think is what Tuomas is suggesting.

xpost -- Yeah, that was from his foreword to the revised edition in the mid-sixties. I think I linked this China Mieville piece before but I like his explanation on it:

Tolkien explains that he has a 'cordial dislike of allegory'. Amen! Amen! And just to be clear, there is no contradiction at all between this fact, and the certain truth that his world throws off metaphors, can and should be read as doing all sorts of things, wittingly or unwittingly, with ideas of society, of class, the war, etc. But here is precisely the difference between allegory and metaphor: the latter is fecund, polysemic, generative of meanings but evasive of stability; the former is fecund and interesting largely to the extent that it fails. In his abjuring of allegory, Tolkien refuses the notion that a work of fiction is, in some reductive way, primarily, solely, or really 'about' something else, narrowly and precisely. That the work of the reader is one of code-breaking, that if we find the right key we can perform a hermeneutic algorithm and 'solve' the book. Tolkien knows that that makes for both clumsy fiction and clunky code. His dissatisfaction with the Narnia books was in part precisely because they veered too close to allegory, and therefore did not believe in their own landscape. A similar problem is visible now, in the various tentative ventures into u- or dystopia by writers uncomfortable with the genre they find themselves in and therefore the worlds they create, eager to stress that these worlds are 'about' real and serious things--and thereby bleeding them of the specificity they need to be worth inhabiting, or capable of 'meaning', at all.

This is not a plea for naivety, for evading ramifications or analysis, for some impossible and pointless return to 'just-a-story'. The problem is not that allegory unhelpfully exaggerates the 'meaning' of a 'pure' story, but that it criminally reduces it.

Whether Tolkien himself would follow all the way with this argument is not the point here: the point is that his 'cordial dislike' is utterly key for the project of creating a fantastic fiction that both means and is vividly and irreducibly itself, and is thereby fiction worthy of the name.

That is a v. appealling view to me.

A similar problem is visible now, in the various tentative ventures into u- or dystopia by writers uncomfortable with the genre they find themselves in and therefore the worlds they create, eager to stress that these worlds are 'about' real and serious things--and thereby bleeding them of the specificity they need to be worth inhabiting, or capable of 'meaning', at all.

so fucking OTM and really evident in like 9/10ths of the new scifi stuff I see these days.

I suppose my point was that he had a very sohpisticated approach to Christianity compared to modern popular writers.

A contemporary like Graham Greene was seen to be a little more worldly on that front, and since his 'entertainments' ie the spy novels were set in the present day, looked more consistently at moral ambiguity, addressed blunter desires and internal conflicts, it's probably one reason why those were seen in more positive terms by many writers and critics at the time. But ultimately it's a different approach to a lot of the same issues, and where Tolkien might understate or aim for broader portraits, there's still a lot of similar things at work.

I have an important question

do orcs have genitals?

You don't need our validation to create your slashfic projects, Shakey Mo.

you wound me!

I think I'd have to vote for the first one because it's the one I enjoyed watching the most. I never read the books so maybe I'd feel differently if I had but the first one is the one that sticks with me because it was just so beautiful and new at the time.

I should watch these all again.

I watched them all recently. It made for a truly delightful weekend. (I rec maybe something to do at the same time if you have a hard time sitting still? Knitting, weed, handjobs, whatevs.)

Yeah, that's sort of what I'm picturing tbh. A marathon viewing while otherwise preoccupied.

I had some knitting + some pear cider + lots of fun!

In a way I wish I'd never have watched these. My own personal conceptions of Frodo and Legolas and Gimli are lost and gone forever.

nah, just read the books again.

Watching all 3of these in a row while getting handjobs and smoking weed sounds alternately alluring and painful.