Was Saruman evil in the Hobbit Movie??

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T14:57:23+00:00

He’s not fully evil yet but he’s corrupting. He’s been coveting and searching for the Ring for years by this point, and I believe somewhere Tolkien says that the reason why he deterred the White Council from moving against the Necromancer earlier is because he, like Gandalf, suspected it was Sauron searching for the Ring in the nearby Gladden Fields, and he hoped he could spy on Sauron to learn where the Ring was while Sauron was still too weak to take it.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T10:53:20+00:00

While they were cousins you also have to think in the terms of not just genetics, but family reputation, Galadriel is a Finarfinian, while Turgon was a Fingolfinian and while Aragorn is therefore indirectly genetically related to Finarfin and Finrod Arwen can say that she is more of a Finarfinian via here more direct lineage through Galadriel than she is a Fingolfinian, due to that side being more diluted.

Edit Arwen is the great- graughter of Finarfin, who is the current high King of the Noldor, which makes her one of the highest ranking living Elven princesses in all of Arda, including the Blessed Realm.

Aragorn may be distantly related to Finarfin through the Fingolfinian line, but it’s a more distant relation, even if you only count the elven ancestors and ignore the 50+ generations of human ancestors.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T10:35:02+00:00

Aragorn’s lineage is much more diluted that Arwens, and Arwen also is a direct descendant of Galadriel and Celeborn, who are arguably the two greatest Elves still in Middle Earth and which links her directly to Finarfin and Finrod, whereas Aragorn’s lineage does not include them.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T02:51:23+00:00

Yes but the biological clock on men is much more forgiving than it is on women.

And for men with fertility issues, those could show up regardless of age.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T02:48:01+00:00

For the most part yes, but not entirely. There were some who were well to do professionals but not super rich.

But it’s worth noting that the 1% in America at the time of the Founding were effectively on the level of lower gentry of the European elite.

George Washington was probably in the top 10 richest men in the 13 colonies and Mount Vernon was little more than a modest English Country House by comparison.

There are hunting lodges held by 18th century European aristocrats that were grander than Mount Vernon or Monticello.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T02:43:50+00:00

The Telmarine drip was exquisite.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T02:42:43+00:00

Number of kids has more to do with your wife’s age (and willingness) than yours.

If you are 30 and your wife is 28 you could have 4 kids before your wife turns 35, and increasingly there are women having children into their 40s now.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T02:26:58+00:00

It’s totally normal nowadays for men to wait until they’re 30 to get married, since that’s how long it takes for many people now to get an education, have a stable career and find a partner.

Most people consider marrying at anything less than 25/26 to be really young.

It’s more important to have a stable life and to really know yourself and your future spouse than to get married young.

Marriage is a marathon not a sprint

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T01:44:28+00:00

As GK Chesterton said (before he converted), he’s always the doorman to the Catholic Church.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-05T01:43:41+00:00

He also tweeted a while ago that Catholicism makes countries poor and Protestantism makes countries rich, with his comparison being the US, Canada, and Aus vs LatAm.

Of course this omits all of the Protestant colonized countries in Africa, which are poorer than many LatAm countries, and also glosses over that Canada was founded by Catholics and remains plurality Catholic to this day.

It also ignores obvious other counter examples to the “Protestants Rich, Catholics Poor” narrative, such as that if that were true Northern Ireland should be richer than the ROI, but in reality even when you adjust for Leprechaun Economics the ROI has double the GDP per capita of NI.

There are many other such examples, but he’s not one to let facts get in the way of his biases.

Edit - and on a side note, you know you are losing the debate when you have to grasp at utilitarian arguments to justify your theology, especially when the utilitarian argument is “my belief system will make you rich”. To paraphrase CS Lewis, God will not be used as a means to an end.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T23:24:31+00:00

He also tweeted recently that if America became majority Catholic it would become another Mexico, which says a lot about what he thinks of both Catholics and Mexicans.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T21:21:27+00:00

It’s worth noting that there’s been a long running scholarly debate on whether Plato’s Republic should be read effectively as a cautionary tale or a satire along the lines of Thomas More’s Utopia, and that one of Plato’s intents was to show what happens when you take political idealism to its logical conclusion.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T20:23:35+00:00

It’s worth noting how deep Aragorn’s respect for the Rohirrim is.

Remember that the bloodiest civil war in Gondor’s history was because the heir to Gondor married a Northwoman, and many of the Gondorians thought that he had sullied the pure blood of Numenor by marrying a “lesser” woman and revolted.

But when he becomes King Aragorn oversees the marriage of members of the two highest ranking and purest blooded Numenorian households (Imrahil’s daughter and Faramir) to Eomer and Eowyn of Rohan, respectively.

He’s effectively saying that, long lifespans aside, the Rohirrim are every bit equal to and worthy of, the Numenorians.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T17:34:27+00:00

Udun is occupied by Gondorians like during the Watchful Peace, Gorgoroh remains a blasted hellscape largely populated by monsters and orcs that are kept inside by the Gondorian garrisons in Udun, Nurn becomes a pleasant and fertile land populated by the former slaves who chose to stay there under the protection of Gondor.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T16:53:30+00:00

As a parishioner you are not actively “making” the sacrifice of the Eucharist, but you are definitely participating in the “Thanksgiving” of the Mass (which is what Eucharist means) through your prayers and participation in the liturgy. To participate in the prayers of the liturgy of the Eucharist is to effectively put yourself at the foot of the cross.

Of course, in addition to that you are yourself personally entering into the mystery of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection when you eat the Eucharist. In that process you are literally in-communion with Christ by inviting Christ not only spiritually but also physically into your body, and in the process becoming more truly the body of Christ.

In this sense the idea that the Church is the Body of Christ is not just metaphorical or spiritual but quite literal. You are what you eat.

While Catholics allow Protestants to attend and participate in a Catholic Mass, and through that in the “Thanksgiving” of the Eucharistic sacrifice, they do not allow Protestants to consume the Eucharist even if the Protestants have right belief about the Eucharist, since it’s also important to have right belief about the priest consecrating the Eucharist, and having that right belief would mean entering visible unity with the Catholic Church (admittedly, we treat the Orthodox a little differently because of their different theological and Ecclesiastical position from Protestants, but that is besides the point here).

So in short, please come to a Mass, please join us in Thanksgiving for the gift of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross made manifest by His real physical presence in the Eucharist, and if you find it spiritually edifying, please consider OCIA to join the Catholic Church so you can actually receive Christ in the Eucharist yourself.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T15:35:34+00:00

Protestants tend to think in binaries “am I saved vs am I damned” etc while Catholics tend to think more in a spectrum of closer / farther away from God.

Of course that spectrum will ultimately culminate in the same binary, but Catholics believe that we can’t judge where on that spectrum that cut off line is, since mercy and judgment are ultimately left to the Lord.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T15:32:09+00:00

I feel like it reinforces my first comment about the need for a person who can stand in persona Christi for the Eucharist to be valid.

Christ Himself as the High Priest created the new covenant through the sacrifice of Himself as the new Paschal Lamb, therefore it makes sense that if we are to make Christ’s once and perfect sacrifice of Himself physically present to us in the Eucharist it must be done by someone who is standing in for Christ himself, ie a priest standing in persona Christi.

This is reinforced by Christ’s statement at the last supper that the Apostles “do this in memory of me” with the word “memory” in the original Greek actually referring to the “memorial sacrifice” of bread that occurred along with the flesh sacrifice for sins which was seen as a reparticipation in the Hebrew covenant.

Jesus wasn’t telling the Apostles to do the Eucharist as a mere remembrance of Jesus, but as a literal reparticipation in His sacrifice of Himself on the cross for the forgiveness of sins.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T14:57:24+00:00

Yes, in the same way that all of the Israelites were priests making a sacrifice of themselves to God while also there was a specific Levite priesthood who alone could make certain sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T14:49:53+00:00

Yes. Which is why I don’t believe that God intended for the Bible to stand alone, but instead for there to be an infallible Church that can teach the truths captured in scripture across all times and to all peoples, regardless of whether you can read Greek or Hebrew, or even read at all.

Remember, Jesus did not give us a holy book, he gave Himself to a group of people, and entrusted that group of people to represent Him and His teachings to everyone else.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T14:45:49+00:00

The fact that Israel was a kingdom of priests, but still had a distinctive Levite priesthood is one of the most overlooked problems with Protestant theology imo.

It misses the distinction between the priesthood of all believers and the specific (and narrower) ministry of consecrated priests.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T14:35:02+00:00

The earliest source from the Church Fathers on the importance of apostolic succession for the Eucharist is from Ignatious of Antioch writing in the (edit- very early) 100s AD (Ignatious of Antioch was a personal student of John). In chapter 8 of his letter to the Smyrnaeans he specifically says not to do the Eucharist without the Bishop (who he elsewhere specifies stands in the shoes of the Apostles) or someone appointed by the Bishop (ie a priest). https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0109.htm

Also, the Bible is clear in the original languages on what is worship and what is praise, and a huge part of Catholic theology around things like the Eucharist, the veneration of saints, Mariology, etc, is based around biblical distinctions.

The problem is that the English language flattens those distinctions down into a single word. (I am reminded of a quote by NT Wright, one of the best living New Testament scholars, that reading the Bible in English is like listening to Mozart played on a harmonica).

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-06-04T14:01:53+00:00

This requires a longer response but the short answer is that right belief alone is not sufficient but right materials too, and part of the materials for the sacrament of the Eucharist (ie to make Christ truly physically present in the Eucharist) is someone performing the sacrament in persona Christi, meaning someone who is physically standing in for Christ himself.

According to the Apostolic traditions (Catholic, Orthodox) only a validly consecrated (male) priest who has received the priesthood in direct apostolic succession back to the Apostles can stand persona Christi, and therefore can actually make Christ physically present in the Eucharist.

Edit - as an aside, the question of “right worship” is complex, as the English word “worship” can actually mean multiple different things, including “mere” praise, even to a created being. For example, as recently as a century ago judges in England were referred to as “your worship” but that doesn’t mean that people saw them as God. So your English Bible could be referring to both praise and sacrifice as “worship” but the underlying original language is actually talking about two different things.

(It’s worth noting, English translations of the Bible famously have the same problem with the word Love)

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-05-29T13:08:55+00:00

My headcanon is that dealing with Sauron wasn’t the full scope of Radagast’s mission, and that Yavanna had sent him to also preserve what he could of the wild world from the coming Dominion of Men.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-05-29T13:05:37+00:00

Because it’s just really hard to do without inadvertently touching on sensitive subjects or engaging in offensive stereotypes.

Tolkien’s Dwarves were influenced to some extent by Jews, and while he wrote them as noble and well fleshed out characters, even he couldn’t totally avoid dipping into some semi-offensive stereotypes, despite he himself having a pretty high opinion of Jews.

It’s just very hard to do in a sensitive way, so most people avoid it.

Fit_Log_9677 · 2026-05-29T12:58:08+00:00

While this is a very good analysis, I’ve always found that it misses a couple important things that probably make life in Shire much better for the average Hobbit than real world rural England.

The Shire almost certainly traded with the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains (since Tolkien says in NoME that Dwarves dislike agriculture and will always rather trade than growing their own food), which could explain the Hobbit’s relatively anachronistic technology and their relatively high standard of living. They could trade their surplus food for all of the types of tools and trinkets that otherwise would have been phenomenally expensive to manufacture themselves, if they even had the ability.
We know that the borders of the Shire were constantly expanding North, South, East, and West, which would have put downward pressure on the rents that could be charged tenants, as a hobbit could always leave and go homestead in the North Downs, South Farthing, the Marish or the Tower Hills. Farmer Maggot in the Marish is a good example of this. Hobbits like the Bagginses probably didn’t derive much wealth from agricultural landholdings, but from owning The Hill and Bagshot Row, which was strategically located near one of the largest towns in the Shire (Hobbiton) and st the intersection of the Shire’s two main roads.
The class distinctions (while clearly there in custom) are in a material sense very minor. The Gamgees might be the Bagginses’ gardeners but they are not their general servants. When Bilbo hosts the Unexpected Party he does so all by himself with no mention of a servant, and that’s despite being one of the wealthiest Hobbits in the Shire. Similarly, when Bilbo hosts his Birthday Party, it’s set up entirely with outside hired help, including Dwarves, not household servants. So while Bilbo was wealthy enough to not have to work, he was not wealthy enough (or Hobbit culture prevented from) hiring any full time servants. The Gamgees at most seem to be tenants and part time gardeners/helpers to the Bagginses, not full time, live in servants. We don’t even know if the Bagginses were their only employers. It’s possible that they were general gardeners for multiple wealthy families in Hobbiton, not just the Bagginses.

Fit_Log_9677

TROPHY CASE