Official Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit thread

Out of interest has anyone here read the History of Middle Earth books? I saw the 2nd volume The Treason of Isengard in a charity shop but I couldn't find any of them when I looked them up on kindle. Are they all collected into one book or something?
 
i've read half of The Return of the Shadow, which I need to get back to reading sometime

anyways the ones at my local library are separate, so yeah they can be found separately
 
I think i actually need to start going to charity shops

they've always got some sort of lord of the rings book in there somewhere, usually one you haven't read
 
i'm so jaded about desolation of smaug i want to wait until it's five dollars on a bargain dvd rack

but i'm probably going to end up seeing it just because i'm bored
 
Finally got around to watching The Battle of the Five Armies.

It was... okay. I think it would've been better had they stuck to the two-partner plan: Part 1 was a nice, standalone movie, but this one is obviously bisected and suffers for it. Too much reliance on flashbacks/callbacks, a lot of which ended up really over the top with the special effects (i.e. most of Thorin's stuff: just have him quoting Smaug with his normal voice and remember the jerkass things he did and how he's not his grandfather and leave out the weird drowning in the gold bit). Meanwhile, other little details don't connect easily, like how Legolas was using the sword Thorin had originally (iirc), and then he got it back. Then the opening sequence with Smaug is completely disjunct from the rest of the film, while the second film got saddled with a bunch of cheap cliffhangers and Azog was MIA for the most part.

I dunno, I'm cool with adding connections to LotR with with the White Council subplot and even Legolas and his dad. Expanding Bard's part of the story was better than him just being the random dude who killed Smaug too, although Smaug talking to him was too much imo (plus, doing it got him killed and Smaug's too cool a character to deserve a cliche "the villain sews the seeds of his own destruction by being too stereotypically evil" death). Vut what I can't stand is the entire Tauriel plot. Like, if they were going to go to all the trouble of adding a girl to the boy's club, the least they could do it make her a big hero, instead of falling in insta-love with Kili and then getting him killed trying to save her and then requiring the dude with the unrequited crush on her to save her ass again when she wasn't even able to avenge the dwarf herself. Hell, even Galadriel spent most of her screentime incapacitated while the boys do most of the legwork - I'm just glad she got the opening and closing blows, and made 'em count. Plus that one townswoman being like "let's fight with the men" - props to her.

But that being said, I didn't dislike the movie even though it was disappointing in a few respects. Everything involving Bilbo was good and the pre-war interpersonal relations were well played out, Thranduil and Dain were great, and there were lots of good funny bits. Granted, there were a couple parts that the theatre laughed at that weren't supposed to be comedic, particularly with ridiculous one-on-one fighting stuff, but the battle scenes were excellent as always. Thorin was really dumb to think that drowning Azog was gonna be enough (always go for the kill, not the pain), but in the end, how the battle ended was nicely satisfying, as was his final friendship moment with Bilbo (much more effective than in the book when he died in a tent long after the fighting, I thought; him and his nephews dying on the mountain was also better than them going down in the fray with random orcs in the book): aside from Tauriel getting reduced to a damsel in distress at the worst moments, the entire sequence on the peak was a fitting climax for the film, I thought.

Overall, both the film and the trilogy as a whole could have been better, but it wasn't bad either.
 
i have to say

ballistic colonoscopy looks a lot better when his entire body is replaced by a cgi dragon

he should do that for all his roles
 
barrenduck conkersnuff has some sort of sexiness behind him, one that i wouldn't trade for the world

he's wonderfully weird and sexy at the same time



aaaaaaanyways, this movie was awesome.
 
alright so i've got the dvd of this now, guess i may as well watch it

this way even if i'm disappointed peter jackson won't have got any of my money :smug:
 
So I was talking with a friend, and we brought up the Hobbit and talked about some of the characters....

And then it hit me.

How many women are in The Hobbit?
 
Wally said:
So I was talking with a friend, and we brought up the Hobbit and talked about some of the characters....

And then it hit me.

How many women are in The Hobbit?
Click to expand...
In the original book, only one is mentioned, which was Belladonna Took

In the movie, you've got around abouts four or five women who can be considered major female characters: Galadriel, Tauriel, Sigrid and Tilda (bard's kids), and there's that one Dale woman who wasn't named but constantly berated Alfrid for his cowardly behaviour, she was pretty awesome. And, if you do watch the extended edition of the hobbit, you do get to see Belladonna Took.

IMO, Tolkien gets better with diversity throughout the books, as he introduces more female characters. In the Lord of the Rings, you get Galadriel, Arwen, Eowyn, who are badasses, and once you get to the Silmarillion, you've got just about as many female characters as you do make characters. Can't be assed to name them all, there's a lot of characters in that book.

So yeah, not many women in his books. I can only suss that the only reason he didn't have many female characters in his books is that he found them harder to write for earlier in his days. Don't know why, but you gotta admit that writing for the opposite sex is something generally hard for writers to do, since they seem to understand more what it's like to be their own gender, rather than the opposite gender. Especially back in those days when the world was a lot more divided in terms of race, gender, and nationality.
 
I've never found it harder to write for men than women. Just treat everyone like people and it's not that difficult to get into their heads - most things in life aren't actually all that gender-specific.

Maybe if Tolkein was trying to write about what it's like to be a woman in 1930s/40s society he'd have more trouble without researching it a bit, but he was writing about warrior-princesses and a hella powerful, centuries-old Elf Queen in a fantasy world he made up, and doing so from the all-male fellowship's POV anyway, so really, if he was a halfway decent author, he should have been able to create more major female characters. He just didn't want to, either because he was catering to the mostly-male fantasy book audience or he personally wasn't interested in writing about women to begin with (or both), at least earlier on.
 
amazon bought the rights to make lotr show what the fuck how the fuck did I just find out about this

e:source https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/arts/television/lord-of-the-rings-series-amazon.html
 
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