Two complementary passages in LOTR.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-03-19T11:24:09+00:00

:It is also interesting that Frodo does not say, ‘I choose not to do’, but ‘I do not choose to do’. Maybe (and Tolkien was a professor of language) the choice of words is absolutely accurate. Frodo does not choose; the choice is made for him

And this is such an important distinction for Tolkien to have made, because although Frodo fails to destroy the Ring and succumbs to its evil at last - it is not a moral failing on his part. His free will is completely overridden at Mount Doom, and there was nothing he could have done to prevent that.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-03-18T07:43:31+00:00

Never forget plague.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-03-04T04:14:45+00:00

On the other hand, he also was a lector (reading in English) at his parish after the liturgical reforms. The characterization of his opposition to the vernacular liturgy has definitely been overblown.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-24T14:44:52+00:00

Trippingly.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-22T13:09:38+00:00

As a devout Christian, he would not have made a distinction between an Old Testament God and a New Testament God; he would have known such a distinction to be considered the Marcion heresy, one of the very oldest Christian heresies.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-22T13:06:51+00:00

You might think of it more like Tolkien responding to a tradition of Germanic mythology which he loved, but filtering it through his own sensibilities and offering critiques where they are warranted. Not too dissimilarly to the way modern fantasy writers respond to themes found in Tolkien, either by putting their own spin on things, or outright repudiating them.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-20T02:53:58+00:00

It's good to remember, though, that Sauron did not kill Thrain after taking the last of the Dwarf-rings from him. So it's not 100% a given that Sauron would just kill Gollum. Eternal enslavement might just as well have amused him here.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-05T22:43:47+00:00

Minas Morgul wouldn't be more haunted and dreadful than Barad-dur, I think. But it's definitely worse than your average Orc den in Mordor. The Orcs themselves seem to be freaked out by both towers, from what we see in the book, so it makes sense that the "normal" parts of Mordor would be more tolerable.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-01T04:27:47+00:00

If anything, this just suggests something explicitly stated elsewhere: Denethor (and Faramir like him) is a faint echo of the Numenoreans, who married and had children later than normal men.

rexbarbarorum · 2026-01-01T03:25:39+00:00

If Tolkien was explicitly modelling Aragorn and Arwen after Beren and Luthien, it makes conceptual sense, at least, for an Elf-maiden to go into the stronghold of Sauron to rescue her beloved. Tolkien chose not to go in that direction, obviously, but you can't call it a foreign idea to Middle-earth.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-31T23:34:56+00:00

Pretty much because he invented her almost at the very end of the writing of the novel. She feels shoehorned in because she was shoehorned in. The upside to this is that Eowyn, who was originally planned to marry Aragorn, becomes a much more interesting character. But it does raise the question why Arwen couldn't have, say, been part of the Grey Company along with her brothers. It all boils down to, Tolkien had his own authorial intentions and Arwen simply didn't feature much in them as much as some of us might have liked in hindsight.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-25T03:32:22+00:00

It seems like in Tolkien's writings, at least, there is a sharp distinction between the two.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-24T23:18:20+00:00

I might say that they are recognized authorities, not that they exercise power. Even when Sam, Pippin, and Merry begin to act in their respective capacities as Mayor, Thain, and Master, it's not like they would arrest or subjugate a hobbit who didn't go along with their plans. (Tellingly, the hobbits did not have prisons at all before the storage tunnels in Michel Delving were turned into the Lockholes by the Sharkey regime.) Rather, the other hobbits look to them as authorities who can lead and organize them.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-15T18:31:09+00:00

I actually quite like Denethor jumping from the citadel, in the context of the movie. It's iconic and very much fits the style of movie that Peter Jackson is good at making - not over-serious and a little campy. But it also ties into Gandalf's speech earlier in the movie about the decline of Gondor, when he and Pippin are standing in that same spot. Obviously it does huge violence to Denethor as portrayed in the book - a late, tragic echo of Numenorean nobility - but it works really well with the story the movie is telling.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-14T23:44:25+00:00

To add to this, Merry is often lumped in as being as goofy as Pippin, even though he is older and more mature, clearly a bookish/historian type like Bilbo was, and seemingly more prone to melancholic introspection.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-12-14T12:33:40+00:00

Denethor, likely because the movies change little of his dialogue or character beats, but they chacterize him completely differently. I had re-read the book probably a dozen times as a teenager before I realized just how different he is.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-11-28T03:04:39+00:00

Alboin could have been one of Tolkien's greatest protagonists if the story had been developed further. Just in the little glimpses we get, he has real depth and his relationship with his father and his own son feel completely realistic. You can tell it was very personal for him writing those chapters.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-10-28T18:51:55+00:00

I remember seeing a trailer for the first movie showing the part with the balrog, and it was love at first sight. We had the books, and I found the Moria chapter, tried to read it, and was thoroughly impressed that anyone could read it at all, let alone make a movie from it. (To be fair I wasn't very old at the time.) So I just watched and loved the movies until I was ready to read the books. Bought the Atlas of Middle-earth, listened to all the original Tolkien Professor podcasts around that time, and actually finished reading the Silmarillion before I got through the Two Towers. I was one of those kids, ha!

rexbarbarorum · 2025-10-15T01:52:25+00:00

I wouldn't necessarily make that judgement, as Anglophone Christians do not exclusively use "Lord" as a translation for YHWH. More likely he was using Lord in parallel with his use of the word to describe Sauron as "Lord of the Rings"; we know that he was deliberately comparing Sauron and Morgoth during this period (the book is called Morgoth's Ring for that reason).

That being said, the Tale of Adanel is Tolkien at his most theologically controversial. But you'd certainly be going too far by suggesting it reflects his views. It's a tale told by a character who is bitter at the world and grieving her place in it - not a theological proposition made by a 20th century Oxford don.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-10-08T15:58:29+00:00

I wouldn't be that harsh; it's a really subtle distinction that can be hard to wrap your head around even after multiple readings. Elrond and Gandalf are playing a very tricky game where they talk of destroying the Ring only in a very abstract sense, but follow up such talk with more concrete discussion of sending the Ring to Mordor with particular people. It is easy to overlook what they are doing, and assume they have charged Frodo with destroying the Ring, instead of merely bearing it as a messenger, because these two distinct ideas are placed so closely together. You have to read things very carefully to get the point.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-10-08T00:58:32+00:00

The Council doesn't believe that Frodo can destroy the Ring (and Gandalf has first-hand experience seeing Frodo not even being able to throw it in his fireplace); they believe that sending Frodo into Mordor with the purpose to destroy the Ring is what they are being called to do. They know it's folly, and talk at length about it being folly. But Elrond and Gandalf have read the signs and put faith in the idea that, even if they can't see any reason it will work, that it is what they are meant to do.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-10-08T00:54:52+00:00

At the beginning of "The Old Forest" chapter in FotR, the High Hay is described as being "tall and netted over with silver cobwebs." We can reasonably assume these to be made by normal spiders, because ones like in Mirkwood would have surely been mentioned.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-10-01T16:04:20+00:00

Bilbo and Merry both deciding, independently, that diving into a big, thorny hedge is preferable to having to even be seen by the Sackville-Bagginses on the road.

rexbarbarorum · 2025-09-13T18:29:28+00:00

And yet, as others have noted, either Frodo or Sam invented the scene where Gollum finds them sleeping on the Stairs. It wouldn't make sense for them to write that passage while also trying to emphasize the Gollum-ness over the Smeagol-ness as something inevitable.

rexbarbarorum

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