Lord of the Rings

Boromir has that constant weight of expectation & the shroud of a bad father wrapped around him & fear of fucking it up for himself & the whole what will dad say … check the boxes doomed doomed doomed

he sees himself nobly seeking what he believes is rightfully his but is really a slave to his doubt, it dooms him to fuck it up & makes us all kinda love him because he’s all of us

we all want to be sam but but maybe we’re all boromir

Just to say, LOTR starts with Bilbo in the power of the ring and ends* with Frodo similar - they're less susceptible, rather than not at all.

when i am tempted by the ring i simply think of the way my dad eats cherry tomatoes

lol

u_u

great Boromir posts! the casting/performance of Bean are also critical here imho.... he is really good at playing guys who are clearly not as cool/together/complete as the people around them, and know it inside (see: Ronin).

think boromir as written plays slightly differently ito establishing his bona fides, in the movie (of necessity) hes rushed into a somewhat unstable threat figure and redeemed in one battle sequence (which tbf works well, just differently)

as a one line summary its ofc the same thing but in the details and slow release of the character it does make a difference to me- feel same re denethor. impatience and frustration play v differently over two hours on screen than they do over several book chapters

his relationship with aragorn is imo much more key and gently layered in the book also, his entry into the fellowship and what trust the hobbits end up placing in him individually is through this lens and they in turn are often the perspective from which we think of him- again in the movie such layering is v difficult to achieve, its a group scene we watch all as it happens

I'm rereading right now (in French translation, for practice), and I think this might be the most devastating passage in the book (from the end of "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol").

And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo’s head, drowned deep in sleep; upon his white forehead lay one of Sam’s brown hands, and the other lay softly upon his master’s breast. Peace was in both their faces.

Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s knee – but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.

But at that touch Frodo stirred and cried out softly in his sleep, and immediately Sam was wide awake. The first thing he saw was Gollum – 'pawing at master,' as he thought.

'Hey you!' he said roughly. 'What are you up to?'

'Nothing, nothing,' said Gollum softly. 'Nice Master!'

'I daresay,' said Sam. 'But where have you been to – sneaking off and sneaking back, you old villain?'

Gollum withdrew himself, and a green glint flickered under his heavy lids. Almost spider-like he looked now, crouched back on his bent limbs, with his protruding eyes. The fleeting moment had passed, beyond recall. 'Sneaking, sneaking!' he hissed. 'Hobbits always so polite, yes. O nice hobbits! Sméagol brings them up secret ways that nobody else could find. Tired he is, thirsty he is, yes thirsty; and he guides them and he searches for paths, and they say sneak, sneak. Very nice friends, O yes my precious, very nice.'

Sam felt a bit remorseful, though not more trustful. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry, but you startled me out of my sleep. And I shouldn't have been sleeping, and that made me a bit sharp. But Mr. Frodo, he's that tired, I asked him to have a wink; and well, that's how it is. Sorry. But where have you been to?'

'Sneaking,' said Gollum, and the green glint did not leave his eyes.

Sam just picks exactly the most brutal word for Gollum to hear, and he's completely accurate, and yet he’s also unknowingly killed whatever was wakening in Gollum the moment before. You can totally see how the qualities of Sam that Windsor mentioned above ("the stolidest, simplest yeoman... who senses Strider's weirdness immediately, is initially suspicious but quickly falls in love") also have this chain of consequences when it comes to Gollum.

Tolkien also calls it the most tragic moment in the story: https://excerpts-from-tolkien.tumblr.com/post/25617989248/sam-was-cocksure-and-deep-down-a-little

Yeah it is unquestionably THE moment on many levels. The closest any adaptation has come to capturing it was the BBC radio series. It's just this profound moment of emotional wreckage -- two exhausted people far from home and only having each other at base, a ruined and wracked companion who still has a glimmer of light somewhere inside -- and the what-might-have-been lingers. It's one of Tolkien's most generous moments, really.

So…I started reading The Last Ringbearer yesterday. But I had to stop. Because all the description of the horrors of war are just too real in this moment. But it’s fascinating.

Definitely been meaning to read that, and am considering it for a future episode. (Separately earlier this week I was shared a link to a truly wtf fanfic sequel that is insanely elaborate, and also insane.)

jmm, never read that Tolkien passage you linked. Very interesting and some insight into how things might have been different.

Yeah, I want to get an edition of the letters. Whenever I read excerpts, it seems like Tolkien is his own best commentator.

yeah thanks for linking to that Tumblr, jmm, it's a lovely site to idly flick through. the letters are of particular interest. for instance:

“Some reviewers have called the whole thing [The Lord of the Rings] simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked)

:)

Tolkien otm

The letters are often fascinating. We regularly refer to them as needed in our episodes.

Okay, our latest episode is live -- we finally get around to tackling Bakshi's adaptation:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/37

New episode up and this time around we talked about evil -- or began what will be the start of more episodes to come, more accurately:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/38

the pod loves you but it's chosen darkness

Latest episode is live and we went a touch meta...

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/39

And our latest is up: on Tolkien's essay "A Secret Vice."

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/40

The latest episode? On food? Why yes.

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/42

New episode, we talked about some old film or something

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/45

So this time around we tackled two of the shorter non-Middle-earth works...

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/46

And we did one of the big ones here -- Gollum:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/47

Plus we finally have an episode guide up:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/episodes

Wait, what?

Warner Bros. Pictures is revamping the “Lord of the Rings” film franchise.

Get the details here: https://t.co/XfHSGK6zfh pic.twitter.com/Te23J4STah

— Variety (@Variety) February 23, 2023

I hope that these are new versions of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings

LOTRCU

If we get movies about the fall of Gondolin, Beren and Luthien, and Ungoliant and the distruction of the trees of Valinor that'd be cool

that article isn't clear at all on what these are, I certainly hope they are not remakes.

LOTRCU

Ha, made the same joke to my cohosts. (We are not sanguine.)

Here's the key part here:

Freemode, a division of Embracer Group, made the adaptive rights deal for books including “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.” The pact will be billed under the name Middle-earth Enterprises.

Embracer, who have been hoovering up a LOT of things, took over the rights from the 'original' as such Middle-earth Enterprises, who cashed out about a year back after holding onto them for fifty years -- that was the company that Saul Zaentz organized when he got the Hobbit/LOTR film rights in the early 70s, after they were briefly held by UA directly. Everything you've seen since on a cinematic or staging front, plus various other merchandising things that fall under that general umbrella, ultimately were controlled/licensed from the Zaentz team, first as Tolkien Enterprises and then as Middle-earth Enterprises as noted, a name this new venture is now incorporating. (The Rankin-Bass adaptations were the weird stepchildren that fell into an unclear rights void.) Anyway, by this I mean Bakshi's film, the two Jackson trilogies, even the stage musical from the 2000s.

akm is correct on what these are or aren't supposed to be. They could, if they wanted to, go for remakes. They could do works derived from Hobbit/LOTR. Embracer made noises about doing separate films based on characters a while back. That they've partnered with Warner Bros rather than doing something separate does make a certain sense; WB would like to hold on to their franchise opportunities and Embracer doesn't have to build from the ground up. In ways, this is just a recalibration of the original Zaentz situation when it came to dealing with studios/producers interested in developing things.

If you're wondering about how the Amazon show exactly fits into all this: Amazon used a carveout in the rights specifically regarding TV. They can do whatever they want within the scope of that deal, but it applies strictly to Hobbit/LOTR material, nothing more, which is why so much of the first season was, in essence, invented nonsense.

It's worth further noting that all this is due to Tolkien himself agreeing to a rights deal back in the late 60s, which specifically only covered the two key works published at the time, Hobbit and LOTR. Everything else published since is the estate's to deal with, and Christopher Tolkien absolutely refused any further licensing or rights deals. His own son Simon is now the de facto head of the estate and they were willing to do the Amazon setup precisely because it gave them some space for negotiation themselves, as far as we can tell, but that was it, and none of the posthumous publications have had their rights sold, from The Silmarillion on. Until or unless that changes, anything further developed in this new deal has to essentially be, much like the Amazon series, invented fanfic, with vague head-nods towards canon as such.

BTW, the Mike De Luca mentioned in the Variety piece has his own history with New Line and WB. Frankly I'm not thrilled to see his name back here, per this 2011 piece. I remember when he was originally fired from New Line:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/confessions-mike-de-luca-161111/

And a bit of further context to keep in mind -- there already is this film due next year, which was started some time back; this deal had nothing to do with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_War_of_the_Rohirrim

even the stage musical from the 2000s

the what now?

Enjoy our episode about it!

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/16

Plenty of links and more info in the show notes there.

Anyway here's a concise overall rights explainer:

https://gizmodo.com/lord-of-the-rings-rights-explained-amazon-warner-bros-1850157744

this time they can get some important things RIGHT

* more bombadil
* eagles carry the ring
• "one does not simply walk into mordor" (three-seat tandem)
• turning back roald dahl-style to the uncensored early texts, galadriel is a GNOME

New episode doncha know

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/48

Plus news of our first live episode...

Recording episode 49 this weekend -- but here's where to find us for episode 50!

https://www.megaphonic.fm/live-2023

Basically if you can make it to Portland on April 22...

So for our annual April Fool's as such, and even more appropriate given the day, we tackled a truly terrible knockoff:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/61

i made my kid read the mere description for The Sword of Shannara and he was absolutely appalled.

i think the "Soon a Skull Bearer, dread minion of Evil, flew into the Vale, seeking to destroy Shea. To save the Vale, Shea fled, drawing the Skull Bearer after him...." actually angered him.

Such poetic language.

Have enjoyed this twitter discussion this weekend
https://i.postimg.cc/zfFGD39T/IMG-9206.png

Keeping it to the Fellowship only, I agree with the main analysis that Frodo and Aragorn should swap; Frodo hasn’t got the arm for right field and you can hide him in left. I don’t think a hobbit should be shortstop, frankly, that should be Legolas.

Someone was saying “You can’t have a hobbit play second” to which someone responded “the Astros run out Altuve at second every day”. The hobbits are a problem for the infield, but you’ve got to play them. Boromir has to cover the hot corner to prevent it becoming a complete shitshow and you just hold your breath with the right side of the infield.

Durin’s Bane and Gandalf have an epic battle. DB keeps fouling off pitches, Gandalf keeps coming with the craziest shit you’ve ever seen. It’s a stalemate. Ultimately DB strikes out but Gandalf gets pulled due to pitch count. Who comes in, in relief? What???

Gandalf the White!

— Tyson, Lewis’ Number 🍉 (@TyMoIsSecret) April 13, 2024