Posts Tagged with Frodo

Small folk, big decisions: Tolkien’s hobbits change the world

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THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEYJ.R.R. Tolkien may have created a vast fantasy world in which the footsteps of gods and monsters made its history tremble, but when it came down to the works he is best known for, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the choices that carried the most weight were ultimately made by some of the smallest people in it: hobbits.

Although Tolkien began his rich history, cosmology, languages, and geography of Middle-earth in the myths that would be published posthumously as The Silmarillion, he gave special attention when writing The Hobbit to a scene which could have been just one of many episodes in the story.

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Books to Film: The Two Towers

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Time has a way of changing your perspective on things, and favourite movies and books are no exception. The article below was originally published in 2004; and since then I’ve reread The Two Towers and rewatched the movie version. So rather than just tinker with this I decided to let it stand, with some second thoughts added in.

I still like both book and movie — but they are very, very different creatures.

Director Peter Jackson had a thankless task in adapting the second part of The Lord of the Rings for the big screen.

The difficulty lies in the fact that Tolkien originally intended The Lord of the Rings to be a single volume. His publisher balked at this; it was too much of a risk for a book whose only known audience consisted of readers of The Hobbit — in many ways a vastly different book. Thus the story was published in three volumes.

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Structural suspense in The Two Towers

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One writing axiom is “keep your characters in trouble.” Another is “keep your reader guessing.” Budding fantasy writers — and, indeed, suspense writers — could learn a thing or two from The Two Towers, the middle part of  J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

The action picks up with the Company of the Ring in disarray, seeking the Ringbearer, Frodo, as they are ambushed by orcs. (If you haven’t read Lord of the Rings, stop now; if you’ve only seen the movies, this discussion will make no sense — the movie and the book versions of The Two Towers have totally different structures, among other differences.)

All the reader knows from The Fellowship of the Ring is that Frodo has decided to go to Mordor alone, and Sam has gone with him; Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas know even less, as they variously fight the orcs and finally discover Boromir succumbing to his injuries, having failed to stop the orcs from abducting Merry and Pippin (which he doesn’t get a chance to tell them).

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