not to sound 14 again but sam/frodo and gimli/legolas are the only valid lotr ships bc they would piss tolkien off so fucking much
jolkien rolkien rolkien tolkien, sobbing: but dont you care about their epic friendships
me (wise): theyre gay sir. you wrote them gay
the people tagging this with aragorn/boromir are the most valid people alive and in the secret ending to lotr which i just created they both survive and get married and retire from public life to farm goats and eowyn marries arwen while faramir rules gondor
How many times am I allowed to reblog this before it gets weird?
Fun facts: Tolkien constructed this scene because he came out of Macbeth thinking that Shakespeare had missed a golden opportunity with the ”Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn the power of man, for none of woman born shall harm Macbeth” prophecy
Being letdown by Macbeth is apparently a significant factor in Tolkien’s writing because the Ent/Huorn attack on Isengard was the result of his disappointment that the whole “til Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane” thing was just some dudes holding sticks and not actual ambulatory trees.
so he basically took his favorite shakespeare headcanons and put them into his AU fic
This revelation just knocked me over.
LET ME TELL YOU A THING ABOUT JOHN RONALD REUEL TOLKIEN. BACK THE FUCK UP SIT THE FUCK DOWN YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ANYTHING YOU’RE FUCKING JON SNOW HERE. LET ME TELL U A THING
JONNY T WAS LITERALLY THE BIGGEST FANBOY TO EVER WALK THE EARTH. LITERALLY THIS FUCKIN NERD WENT INTO WORLD WAR ONE AND WROTE NORSEFIC EDDA FANFIC IN THE TRENCHES AND SENT IT TO ALL HIS FRIENDS WHO WERE PRESUMABLY LIKE “JOHN WHAT THE FUCK”
BUT IT DOESN’T END THERE
HIS WIFE? MADE HER AND HIMSELF INTO SELF-INSERT OCS IN SAID FIC. ALSO MADE HIMSELF A TOTAL TYR SELF INSERT CHARACTER. ALL VERY DRAMATIC. KEPT WRITING THIS FIC UNTIL IT WAS HUGE. AFTER HE DIED HIS SON PUBLISHED IT AND CALLED IT THE SILMARILLION. JRR YOU FUCKIN NERD
WAIT I’M NOT FUCKING DONE YET. TREEBEARD? BASED THE WAY HE TALKED OF HIS OLD FRIEND JACK WHO YOU ALL MIGHT KNOW AS CS LEWIS. THAT’S RIGHT. THAT NARNIA MOTHERFUCKER. WROTE HIM INTO LORD OF THE RINGS AKA THE SEQUEL TO THE SEQUEL OF HIS ORIGINAL FANFIC MASTERPIECE. CS LEWIS FUCKING HATED LORD OF THE RINGS. TOLKIEN FUCKING HATED NARNIA. BASICALLY THEY STARTED THE OXFORD PROFESSOR LIVEJOURNAL CLUB AND THEY FLAMED EACH OTHER’S SHIT RELENTLESSLY YET REMAINED BFFS
SHELOB? FUCKING TARANTULA BIT J-TIDDY ON THE FOOT WHEN HE WAS LIKE 3. WROTE IT INTO LORD OF THE RINGS.
HIS AUNT’S HOUSE? NAMED BAG END. YEAH YOU GUESSED IT WROTE IT INTO LORD OF THE RINGS
THIS FUCKING DORKUS SUPREME MADE UP HIS OWN LANGUAGE. WAIT NO IM WRONG. HE MADE UP LIKE 80 LANGUAGES AND DIALECTS AND ALPHABETS AND SHIT
BEST PART OF ALL?? HIS OWN LAST NAME, TOLKIEN, WAS DERIVED FROM THE GERMAN “TOLKHUN” MEANING “FOOLHARDY”. DOES THAT RING A BELL TO ANYONE FAMILIAR TO LORD OF THE RINGS??? BECAUSE YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT PEREGRIN “PIPPIN” TOOK’S LIKE FUCKING CATCHPHRASE WAS “FOOL OF A TOOK”. TOLKIEN FIC’D HIS OWN FAMILIAL LINGUISTIC HISTORY INTO HIS WORK WHAT A DWEEB
IN 2008 HE RANKED 6TH ON A LIST OF THE TOP 50 BRITISH WRITERS SINCE 1945. HE WAS A PROFESSOR OF LANGUAGES AND OTHER IMPORTANT STUFFY SHIT AT OXFORD
AND JRR TOLKIEN WAS THE BIGGEST DWEEB EVER TO LIVE
And speaking of pronouns, flat-out my favorite part of the LOTR Appendices is when it’s revealed that the Gondorian dialect of the Common Speech differentiates between formal and informal second-person pronouns but the distinction’s been lost in the Hobbit’s dialect, so Pippin’s blithely been using familiar terms of address with the Lord of the City, and thus helps to explain both why the Gondorians are so ready to assume he’s a prince and why Denethor finds him so amusing to have around.
not what i expected from a post that began with “speaking of pronouns,” but an a++ show of the versatility and surprise daily available on tumblr dot com
no man will ever be as attractive as aragorn during his first appearance on lord of the rings: the fellowship of the ring (2001)
i nominate aragorn opening those giant doors in lord of the rings: the two towers (2002)
Can I also nominate Aragorn raising his sword and running towards orcs with masses of ghosts behind him in Lord of the Rings: The return of the king (2003)?
I wanted visuals.
adjusted statement: no man will ever be as attractive as aragorn.
It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point.
And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again.
And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil.
“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”
So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.
+1
You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest – the job of bearing witness to what happened – and the duty to finish and protect his writings?
Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school – the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916.
My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot.
And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor.
Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.
Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever – a particularly nasty disease carried by lice – and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor – as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.
TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.
I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.
“I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way”
the thing about lotr that the movies don’t convey so fully is how the story is set in an age heavily overshadowed by all the ages before. they’re constantly traveling through ruins, discussing the glory of days gone by, the empires of men are much diminished, the elves (especially galadriel) are described as seeming incongruent, frozen in time….some of the imagery is even near-apocalyptic, like the ruins of moria and of course the landscape surrounding mordor
this is a strange thought to me, somehow: that the archetypal “high fantasy” story is set at the point where the…fantasy…used to be much higher? this is not the golden age; this is a remnant
LotR is Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome of the elves.
i want to emphasize that people have added excerpts of their theses in reply to this post but this is still my favorite reblog
Honestly I’d take it further than that: it’s Fury Road. And that’s part of what makes Galadriel’s choice so fucking central, and so amazing, and so heartbreaking.
Because she was there. She was there from the BEGINNING. She grew up in the Undying Lands in the light of the Two Trees. She even LEFT the Undying Lands because she could pretty plainly see there was no chance to build great kingdoms or new things there.
She helped lead her people across the grinding ice after Fëanor and his sons abandoned them. She lived in Doriath at its height, her brother created Nargothrond at its height, the peak of cooperation between Khazâd and Quendi, her cousin built Gondolin.
And she watched all of it die.
She lost her brothers, two to war and one to torture and then being half-eaten by a demon-wolf in the depths of Sauron’s first stronghold. She saw Thingol murdered and Melian wrecked. She saw her brother’s shining Nargothrond fall to Glaurung and become a desecrated pit of hell. She saw her cousins die, one by one; then she saw her cousins turn on her own people (again) and murder over half of them.
She saw all of the lands she’d known wrecked and destroyed: some polluted and destroyed by Morgoth, some destroyed in the War of Wrath. She saw Khazad-dûm polluted and destroyed by the Balrog. She saw Númenor – whose royal line were also her kin, via Turgon and Idril – polluted, turned into a brutal hideous empire and tyranny, and then sunk.
She saw Celebrimbor, her young cousin, try to make the rings as tools to make the world better – and saw Sauron use and betray him, and then come back and utterly destroy his kingdom, slaughtering his people, who fled to her, to Thranduil, and to Elrond. She saw Gil-galad’s last kingdom and the very Pyrrhic victory in Mordor, followed by the slow but unstoppable decay of what she in Lorien, Thranduil in Greenwood or Elrond in Imladris could actually protect.
Then she saw her only child captured by orcs and held captive and tortured and gods know what else until Celebrien was incapable of staying in Middle Earth – not for her children, or her husband, or her parents. She saw the rise of the Necromancer and his unmasking.
She has bled and lost and grieved for thousands of years. Not a single person she came to Middle-Earth with still survives. Celeborn is the only person she loved she has ever got to keep with her, and she met him there. She couldn’t even keep her own child safe.
And now she’s being offered the One Ring, the source of more power than even Melian had (and Melian was strong enough for the Girdle to protect Doriath from Melkor). She’s being offered the one thing that exists that could even possibly let her change that, make that not so. The only thing that exists that could keep the final end of all of that being the death of Lorien, the loss of Imladris, the loss of everything she ever wanted or worked for.
Without the Ring, she was strong enough to hold Sauron off. With the Ring she could have erased him. She would have been stronger than Lúthien, who enchanted even Melkor. She could make the whole world like Lothlorien. And Frodo is offering it to her.
More than that, he’s asking her to take it. He’s saying “I’m too weak, I’m too small, I’m tired, I’m scared, it hurts, I don’t want it. Please say you want it and I will give it to you.”
And she says no. She doesn’t take it. She doesn’t ask for it.
She accepts that everything she has ever done is going to die. That she will be forgotten, that her people’s home will decay and disintegrate, that nothing she made or anyone she ever loved made will endure.
She fights the war that comes afterwards (and the movies ALSO mislead like fuck on that: Lothlorien and Rivendell were both under MAJOR siege during the war and a LOT of people died, and that should be even scarier: that Sauron fully felt he had the power to attack not JUST Gondor, but at the same time the Golden Wood, Imladris, the Lonely Mountain … and in all of them come so close to winning that it’s only the Ring’s destruction that saves the world; that’s how strong he was) in order to make sure that this will happen. That exactly the thing that will be the final nail in the coffin – the destruction of the Ring – will come to pass.
And then goes back to the Undying Lands as an exile returning on sufferance, alone, because Celeborn can’t bring himself to leave yet.
Elrond’s story is just about as tragic, and the thing is, this is the context of their last acts: throwing themselves at the war, at death, at the destruction of everything they love, because it’s the only chance that the people who come after them will get anything better than brutal slavery to the Enemy. They don’t get to keep shit. Elrond even loses his daughter – permanently, because her soul goes wherever human souls go. He’s already lost his twin brother like that.
And despite what everyone draws as parallels, Aman isn’t “Heaven”. There’s no guarantee of healing or happiness there. It’s more likely than in Middle-Earth, but Fëanor’s mother effectively died of exhaustion, and even Nienna, one of the Valier herself, lives in permanent shattered mourning for the desecration and suffering of the world. Even as Frodo’s offered the right to go there the wording is always may.
His wounds and weariness may be healed. Not will be. But may be.
There’s no guarantee that Celebrien is there waiting for her mother or her husband when they get there: she may still be the wreck she was when she left Middle Earth. There’s no guarantee of anything.
So it has a lot more in common with Fury Road, and the end of Fury Road – Max having given his all to help someone else win their victory and freedom, and then walking away because he can’t stay – than anything. And that’s pretty heartbreaking.
fadeslikewhispers 