I’m a huge Tolkien nerd having first read his works when I was eight and then many, many, many times since then. I’ve read bios of him, have many books of ancillary material, and just got back from a trip across the continent to New York to see the Tolkien exhibit at the Morgan Library. All that said I have no interest in seeing this movie. Even at their best biopics never do justice to the life of their subject, at their worst they distort, over simplify, lie, and romanticize. I don’t need Tolkien tarnished that way for me.
Yes The Imitation Game made me bitter.
Also if you love your Tolkien go to the Morgan Library in NYC and go to the exhibit. It’s amazing.
Certainly the relationship between Frodo and Sam was influenced by his experience in WWI when officers from educated families like his were paired with working-class orderlies who made up for their lack of education with more common sense than their supposed superior.
Pipe weed, despite the misunderstanding of Peter Jackson, was not cannabis but tobacco. Tolkien even makes that clear in an appendix for those who think the stolidly English inspired Hobbits were Rastafarians or something.
i always took it to be even more english than that… Bilbo and Frodo were from well-to-do families, and were basically landed gentry. Sam was literally the gardener’s son. His gaffer was in Bilbo’s employ. Frodo and Sam were just close enough together in age to become friends, despite their class divide.
i know people love to “haha” about it, but this is one of the things that drives me CRAZY about the movies, in furthering that joke/misunderstanding. i know that Jackson was just running with the nod-and-wink hippie interpretation from the 60s and 70s, which is why Tolkien ended up writing about it later to make it QUITE clear that it’s not cannabis, but argh.
Eh, it would explain a few things if Gandalf was a stoner. Like, how he didn’t recognize the Ring almost immediately when Bilbo found it. It took him several decades to figure it out? And, the great eagles air raid to Mordor strategy oversight.
His WWI experiences are reflected elsewhere as well. The descriptions of the desolation outside the Black Gate, and the pockmarked volcanic hellscape of Gorgoroth, bring to mind the artillery-pulverized, gas-poisoned mud wastes of the trench warfare. And in one of his letters, Tolkien says something along the lines that the Great War made orcs of everyone.
neither of those are things. gandalf clearly says there are many magic rings, it’s not like they are easy to differentiate. even he had to do research to find out how to tell it was the One. and the One Ring had been lost for so long that most living felt it was a myth. the eagles thing is so dumb i can’t even begin to get into it. why is advocating for deus ex machina a preferable solution for this story? usually people hate it. it’s not an oversight, it’s a strength.
The eagles thing is the sort of pseudo-clever nerdery that I hate. It looks clever at the first sight, but it actually shows the person suggesting it doesn’t know the story and is being an idiot. The whole point of sending the Ring into Mordor, carried by a couple of hobbits, is because being stealthy is the only option. Sending in the Eagles is completely moronic, because then you’re betting that Sauron doesn’t have any flying servants who could challenge or delay them (and he explicitly has, the Nine on Fell Beasts!), and that such a conspicuous move wouldn’t make him realize you’re trying to toss the Ring into Mt. Doom.
Sorry, but the eagle thing really is one of my pet peeves.
