Amph One Thread To Rule Them All: The Rings of Power + The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings Trilogies

Maybe he exploded, maybe the peak-to-peak distance is actually really lame and he just smooshed them a little, maybe he sprayed his canonically really hot fire all over the place in his death throes and melted them, maybe he actually was huge and crushed them (in which case lol being as big as three mountains and getting owned by a sailor in a magic flying boat), maybe Tolkien deliberately exaggerated every detail in the Silmarillion for the purposes of conveying a legendary scope and by playing into excessive literalism we have become trapped in a box of our own construction. I see no particular reason to assume a fixed scale the way your original image implied existed.

 

I found some Sightly Different Size Scales, Maybe this could give us a better Perspective on Ancalagon's Size.

 

Yeah, that second image above is the one I referred to earlier... and then all the "dragon size" discussion really got going.

How recent was this? My impression was that nothing very substantive about this has really been said by anyone, including Jackson; that a lot of it was just kind of baseless theorizing by sites, basically.

 

It was about, 2-3 years ago, After BOTFA came out. He said he wouldn't do it right now, But after a while he might.

 

Oh OK, thanks.

 

See, that first one's a little more reasonable, but I also think that trying to pin it all down is a bit misguided.

If I may wax a bit more metatextual than my initial objection, there's kind of a weird habit in the fandom with regard to stuff in The Silmarillion to portray it as more awesome, more ominous, more high-stakes than anything in LotR. While that's partially encouraged by the text (although there's that risk that, since Tolkien explicitly framed The Silmarillion as being a received text rather than intrinsically reliable accounts, it's potentially misguided to take everything literally), said text portrays the reduction in scale as inevitable owing to the decline of things over time, whereas in the fandom that difference of scale gets pushed as like a weird marketing point. "Oh you think Sauron's evil, well check out Satan, the Prince of Darkness MORGOTH! Thought those spiders in The Hobbit were scary? How about the PRIMORDIAL SPIDER?" It reduces a key philosophical underpinning in the work (and one I stridently object to, but that's another argument entirely) to a pissing contest and I don't actually think it works to encourage people to read a dense book full of deliberately stilted KJV-esque prose.

tl;dr

 

The struggle between Ancalagon and Earendil is most definitely film worthy.

 

Oh I wouldn't treat the scale I found on the Internet as canon, I just used it because it came up and it showed he's much bigger than Smaug, not that he's canonically exactly that size.

(and I'm a person who found the Silmarillion more fun to read than Lord of the Rings, and read it every year since I was 11)

 

the Fellowship by Ryan Pancoast

 

The Desolation of Smaug's Self-Esteem

 

Damn you Peter Jackson! You've made what should have been a single post into two posts!!

 

Honestly I'm more put off by the decision to put a bad pop song after one of your posts.

 

Here's an AU idea-what if Ancalagon managed to kill Earendil? Would he end up dying eating the silmaril? Would the Valar's host be pushed back to the sea?

 

Fellowship of the Ring - Western style

from http://sallyrah.deviantart.com/

 

^ Would that make Sauron a business tycoon, seeking to drive off Native Americans from their lands?

 

Or maybe have him as an President Andrew Jackson like character

 

Yeah, the business tycoon-type would be better suited for Saruman, hoping to ride on the coattails of the big guns...

 

With maybe a Jackson-like President as Morgoth?

 

Got me the Hobbit Extended trilogy box set! Haven't cracked it open yet but the OCD geekery in me needed to have Hobbit Extended and LOTR Extended. I do intend to watch both back to back but that would be, like, a week long investment at least.

 

Thrill as Peter Jackson runs wildly out of control and it kind of works if you're explicitly into that!

 

I've seen the first two Hobbit movies at least twice (theatrical cut) but haven't seen BotFA since opening weekend in the theatre so I actually barely remember a lot. Aside from the dude running in on the war moose and decapitating like 6 orcs at once, that was badass.

 

It's my fetish.

 

So EHT, have you gotten around to reading the Sil yet?

 

Wait, was I supposed to be? No, I haven't read The Silmarillion. Honestly, it's not on my list either, since I haven't even read the entirety of The Hobbit or LOTR (just bits and pieces here and there, like notable excerpts). So I'm really only familiar with the movies when it comes to Middle-earth stuff (and the theatrical versions more than the EE).

 

Oh, I thought you were trying to read more Tolkien

 

If you ever get the itch, I'd say at least give The Hobbit a shot. Yeah it's for kids (of all ages as they'd market it these days) but it's a fun little adventure story and there's a surprising amount of narrative snark which really helps propel you through it.

 

Yeah, not me, but I do think a few others in here may have stated that they wanted to do that. I know a couple have asked about The Silmarillion.