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

I read and re-read those books when I was young and never noticed them myself!

 

Here's evertying you need to know about the new animated movie, soo far.

 

Just nervous about Phillipa as a writer here. Fran seemed to be what elevated LOTR

 

her big ideas tend to be the biggest problems tho

 

Going back to the shire?

 

Hobbiton didn't remotely exist in the 2nd Age, though.

 

maybe the time when man and evles lived there and before it became the shire?

 

It’s most likely just a visit for the cast to see where the magic happened and get them in the mood. Nothing to do with filming.

 

Didn't realize this until now - in the Simarillion it's revealed that Sauron, when he was a lieutenant of the Big Bad, Morgoth, captured the elvish fortress of Minas Tirith and made it his dominion for a few years, until he was defeated by the legendary Beren and Luthien and driven from it.

... which means that renaming Minas Anor to Minas Tirith after the fall of Minas Ithil was some serious ****ing shade cast upon Sauron - a reminder of his most humiliating failure.

 

Or trolling someone who would use trolls.

 

Now, my favorite part when I was young - Gondor. No, not just Minas Tirith, but the rest of the land that we don't really get to see but we get lots of details about. While Minas Tirith was fading, a city under permanent siege, it's clear the rest of the land is fairly populous - you have southern Anorien below Minas Tirith (where, I presume, the bulk of the inhabitants of that province now live), the mountain vales of Lossarnach, the five rivers of Lebennin with its ancient city of Pelargir, the fisherfolk of the Mouths of Anduin, the hardy folk of Lamedon, the heart of 'new' Gondor, practically a kingdom in of itself, Belfalas, the populated Morthond and Ringlo Vales, and small villages of the Anfalas, and the rich hills of the PInnath Gelin - whew! It's a lot of territory.
Also a fun tidbit - there was a second set of beacon-hills, mimicking those between Rohan and Gondor (which Gandalf lists each beacon-hill at the start of ROTK) - the southern beacons led to Belfalas (again, reinforcing Belfalas as an almost-independent kingdom).

 

If you don’t yet play LOTRO or haven't yet gotten to its Gondor regions… you should.

 

I plan on (eventually) going through the old MERP stuff from the 1980s; they did a fairly good job, IMO, of a pastiche of Gondor just past its height.

 

Well, that's interesting - never noticed this before, but Gandalf indicates that Sauron is not destroyed when the One Ring is!

"...his fall will be so low that none can foresee his arising ever again. For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning, and all that was made or begun with that power will crumble, and he will be maimed forever, becoming a mere spirit of malice that gnaws itself in the shadows, but cannot again grow or take shape."

Also, Gandalf is kind of a downer:
"Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary."

 

Yeah, him and Saruman become like invisible powerless ghosts who can't even move, just carried around by gusts of wind. They have immortal souls, only humans can ever truly leave the circles of the world, even beyond the timeless halls the Ainur sprung from and Melkor is entrapped.

 

Well... no one knows about the Dwarves.

In one of his unpublished works, there's a long dialogue between a human wise-woman and one of the great High elves on the nature of immortality. The elf is astonished that humans are bitter about their lives, and believe that they were immortal once too, but it was robbed from them. He says that he believes this to be untrue, that short lives were always part of humanity. And then he reveals that the elves have a dread of the future - that they are confined by the bounds of the world, even in death, and there is a deep and abiding fear of the certainty that one day the world will end - and they will end with it. The human wise-woman is astonished to hear this, and that the elves are actually envious of humans 'escaping' the bounds of the world.

 

The "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth"
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Athrabeth_Finrod_ah_Andreth

 

Hand Of Isildur, Giancola.

 

I’m watching the Lord of the Rings movies again. Really the first time since seeing The Hobbit films.

That scene in Fellowship when Bilbo gives Sting to Frodo and spies the ring making him briefly go all Gollumy. I forgot how touching that scene is afterwards. Frodo has already been through so much at that point, but Bilbo knows even better the hardships ahead of his nephew. And Bilbo feels responsible and sad he can’t go on the quest for Frodo.

It also shows why Bilbo can’t be the person to shoulder the burden of the Ring. It’s not that he’s too old, Bilbo spent too much time with Ring and is under the sway of its power. He couldn’t destroy the ring.

 

Well, technically Frodo couldn't destroy the ring, either...

 

I love and appreciate that scene, but it gets a little maudlin the older I get. There's nothing of that quiet tinge of regret that comes with old age that we get with his poem in the book's same scene, it's just very "Ole poor old lil me feel sorry for me old Bilbo."

 

I almost get mad at Bilbo later at the end when he seems disappointed that Frodo "lost" the ring, because he would have liked to hold it again.

 

That just makes me sad because it shows that Bilbo's mind is slipping away.

 

Right, that's why I said "almost"... it's one of those "I can't actually get mad at him, it's not his fault" situations.