Update: Sauron is not afraid of hobbits. He was unaware that hobbits existed up until very recently. he literally did not have time to be afraid of them, they went from a 0 to 100 threat level in twenty seconds. There he was, minding his own business worrying about the usual Elves and Men when suddenly these kids are on his lawn and now he’s dead, like just;
What did— who–
did I just get one-shotted by an infant how is this occurring
Honestly I have to love this whole thought process that the Fellowship must have cultivated in Sauron, like…
“These children have found the Ring! But they’re taking it to the elves, of course. I will simply have to catch them on the way.”
“Well, the elves are still not to be trifled with, it seems. It looks as though they have a group of intrepid heroes, how cute! Wait, who’s leading them? Aw, hell.”
“OKAY! Olorin’s out of the way, and now I can finally kill them all and reclaim the- OH DAMMIT, IT’S IN LOTHLORIEN.”
“Well, okay. They’ve taken it onward. Curunir says one of the halflings is still carrying the ring, so he’s going to capture them and we’ll see how this develops. Thankfully Olorin’s still out of the picture and their little group just shattered into pieces, so that’s one less thing to worry about.”
“Aaaaaand Curunir shat the bed. Excellent. Trees, who would have thought? Okay, so we’re back to plan A: conquer Gondor, because if the Ring’s going to be anywhere, it’ll be there.”
“Wait, who’s on the– Isildur’s WHAT? Ohhhh. Ohohoho. Oh now everything makes sense. Isildur’s Heir is back, and he’s here being all prideful again. That’s fine. Really. I’ll just crush him and his kingdom, and then nobody can stop me!”
“WHAT? FUCKING WHAT? THEY SENT HIM BACK? Ugh, alright, alright, I’m cool, I’m fine. He’s still got that stupid wizard costume on, and I’m still stronger than he ever was. It’s not like he can come toe to toe with me, even if he does have an army behind him. This’ll be fine.”
“They’re… actually marching on the Black Gate? Sweet lord, I didn’t think they’d actually do it! This is perfect, everyone’s right here! Olorin, the human princeling, most of the remaining fighting forces of Men, all I have to do is kill them now and– Wait. Someone just put on the Ring. Someone just– That’s a halfling. They’re inside the mouNTAIN OH GOD NAZGUL GO GO G–”
…aaaaaand curtain.
you can laugh but that is literally what happened
This is the single best brief summary I have ever seen of the entire point of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
what she means: the words “christmas tree” are used in the hobbit, and since we know that bilbo is the author of the hobbit, hobbits must have christmas which means there must be a middle earth jesus. but hobbits seem to be the only ones who have the concept of christmas which means it was probably a hobbit jesus. but frodo says in return of the king that no hobbit has ever intentionally harmed another hobbit so who crucified hobbit jesus?? were there other hobbit incarnations of religious figures?? was there hobbit moses?? did jrr tolkien even think about this at all??
Wait wait I might actually have an answer
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore
Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude
But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work
This is the version we know and love today
BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore
If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found
To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit
The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior
Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies
So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written
Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah
Not only all that, but Tolkien was also working within a frame narrative that he wasn’t the real author, but a translator of older manuscripts; so, in-universe, the published The Hobbit isn’t actually Bilbo’s book, but rather Tolkien’s copy of an older copy of an older copy of an older copy of Bilbo’s book. So when errors and anachronisms came up, he would leave them there instead of fixing them, and he may have even put some in intentionally; what we’re supposed to get from the “Christmas tree” bit is that the first scribe to translate the book from Westroni to English couldn’t come up with an accurate analogue for whatever hobbits do at midwinter.
Yes. Another example of tolkien doing this is him using, for instance, Old High Gothic to represent Rohirric – not because the people of Rohan actually spoke that language, but because Old High Gothic had the same relationship with English that Rohirric had with Westron (Which is the Common Language spoken in the West of Middle-Earth). There’s tons of that stuff in the book.
Like, Merry and Pippin’s real names (In Westron) are Kalimac Brandagamba and Razanur Tûk, respectively (to pick just one example of this). Tolkien changed their names in English to names which would give us English-speakers the same kind of feeling as those names would to a Westron-speaker. Lord of the Rings is so much deeper than most readers realise.
tolkein’s entire oevre is just one epic in-joke with the oxford linguistics department imo
@deadcatwithaflamethrower do you know any thing about this? It sounds like something you would know about….
I am not a full-blown LotR nerd, but that Tolkien the linguistics nerd would do this surprises me NOT AT ALL. None. Nope. Tolkien was a Language Troll and he loved it.
Pippin: finally i’m getting the respect i deserve from these peasants
so accurate i am choking on my carrot. this is making me giggle harder than it should. I love Pippin so much.
I don’t think there will come time when I’m not reblogging this. Sorry guys.
no no no you guys don’t understand, Pippin is someone really important in the Shire! The books don’t talk about it a lot, and the movies won’t touch that stuff with a bargepole, but Pippin will be inheriting land rights to about a quarter of the Shire. He’s second in line to becoming military leader of all Hobbits. His dad is currently in charge of that stuff, but he’s completely aware of it, and educated for it, and that’s why he’s such an over privileged little shit in the books.
I thought it was a shame the movies didn’t talk about class differences in the Shire. Also puts M&P stealing food in an uglier light.
To be fair, at the time of the Party, Pippin would have been 12, which puts it back into a more acceptable light. And they’re stealing food from Bilbo, a wealthy and eccentric family member, which again makes things a bit different.
But yes, when they call Pippin Ernil i Perrianath – Prince of the Halflings – they are actually completely spot on.
And when Pippin tells Bergil “my father farms the land around Tuckborough” he’s deliberately downplaying his class so that he can greet the boy as an equal rather than a superior. It’s Pippin’s most adult moment in the series. Bergil is engaging in a status contest which Pippin can totally win – but instead chooses not to compete. Pippin is a gilded and spoiled lordling in the Shire, but he becomes a Man of Gondor.
Yeah, to add a bit of unnecessary trivia/level of preciseness, Frodo is the oldest of the four; he was born in 2968, was (obviously) 33 at the time of the Party, and so he’s 51 here. Sam’s second-oldest; born in 2980, he was 21 when Bilbo left and is 39 at this point. Merry’s two years younger than Sam, making him 18 or 19 in 3001, when the Party took place, and Pippin was born in 2990, so he was actually 10 or 11 during the Party, and during this scene they’re ~37 and ~29, respectively.
So yeah, Pippin’s the youngest by a lot. Plus, taking hobbit aging into account, he really is still in the equivalent of his teens; remember the Party was half to celebrate Frodo’s coming-of-age at 33, and Pippin’s around twenty years younger than Frodo.
This fucked me up. I didn’t read the books and in the movie it was shown like Frodo took off with the ring like 2 days after Bilbo’s gone away, but it was 17 years after that. OMFG.
Also worth noting that “Merry and Pippin stealing food” isn’t in the book – raiding Farmer Maggot’s fields, specifically the mushrooms, is something Frodo used to do when he was a kid, before his parents died and he moved to Hobbiton to live with Bilbo. Frodo’s still afraid of Maggot’s guard dogs, but the farmer himself is sympathetic and helpful when he finds Frodo & Co. cutting through his field.
And this is specifically invoked in the books at the Council of Elrond, where Elrond argues against Pippin in particular going, because he is so young. He’s okay with Merry going but wants to keep Pippin in Rivendell. Elrond has serious misgivings against sending an early-teenager off to face the Shadow, and given what happens to Pippin in The Two Towers, he was not wrong.
Merry is also a prince of sorts – his father is Master of Buckland, which is the semi-autonomous boundary community between the Brandywine river and the Old Forest (never, alas, discussed in the movies). Merry and Pippin are friends in the books in part because they’re of relatively equal status and in part because they’re cousins (like all nobs, Shire nobs mostly marry each other).
However, the books also clearly make Merry the Responsible One, even though he’s only been a full adult for four years. (Think early 20s in human terms.) Merry buys and prepares the house at Crickhollow. Merry figures out the secret of the ring before Bilbo even gives it to Frodo, but Merry keeps Bilbo’s secret. Merry convinces Sam to spy on Frodo. Merry explains that they’re all joining Frodo on the Quest, whether Frodo wants them to or not. Merry cautions about the Old Forest and doesn’t go down to drink in the taproom at the Prancing Pony.
So in the books, Merry isn’t Pippin’s partner in pranks – instead, Merry and Pippin spend all their time together on the Quest because Merry’s looking after his younger cousin. Can you imagine what his mother would say if he came home without Pippin? Merry can, and that’s why he takes some pretty absurd personal risks during the books to make sure that doesn’t happen. Like, he literally rides into battle on the back of someone else’s horse, in disguise, because Pippin is probably somewhere in that battle.
Merry is 99%* common sense unless Pippin is involved, and then he is 100% save/rescue/protect/support Pippin. The character growth and maturation we see in Merry in the movies isn’t in the books; instead he has almost the exact opposite arc of becoming an extreme risk-taker, driven by his protective instincts.
(*The other 1% stabbed a ringwraith in the calf that one time, but we can argue that this was due to a natural expansion of Merry’s protective instincts toward Eowyn, with whom he’d bonded quite a lot recently, and toward Theoden, who he deeply respected as being kind of like his dad.)
^ALL OF THIS.
The irony of Pippin’s title of Ernil i Pherianath being that Gondor called him that because he used informal grammar with everyone, even Denethor, because inferior-to-superior inflections had vanished from Shire Westron. He was accidentally giving himself airs while trying to be humble, which just made him look better.
But although hobbits don’t stand much on ceremony, they certainly have their hierarchies, and Merry and Pippin are in fact near the top–even though they’re young enough they’ve never had to deal with any of the responsibilities of being important. Their inherited statuses are a factor in why their rallying of the countryside in the Scouring of the Shire (also not appearing in the movies) goes off so smoothly. When the Thane’s son or the heir to Brandy Hall sends out a call to arms, that’s a very different thing than just two lads who’ve gotten hold of some weapons doing it.
Bonus: Sam is also recognized as central to the Scouring and even more to the recovery efforts, because of the magic item Galadriel gave him, and gets elected Mayor of Hobbiton. Part of the reason Frodo left him his house (besides, you know, a lack of anybody else he would want to have it) is that owning such a fine smial (and by extension presumably the rental properties adjoining) allowed him to cement his social elevation to gentlehobbit.
Update: Legolas’ pupils are about 3.5 cm wide each. Now drawing kawaii Legolas on physics assignment.
And they told you science was no fun.
Science!
I’m going to do it. I’m going to hand it in.
Legolas’s pupil size isn’t the problem here, though. 5 leagues is 17.262 miles. The curvature of the Earth means that for a person of average height, the visual horizon is less than three miles away. Even if your vision is telescopic and the atmosphere is perfectly clear, you can’t see around the planet. If they were standing on a hill, it would have to be at LEAST 198 feet above sea level in order to see the horizon at 17.2 miles away, with nothing tall in between. Which, knowing Rohan, isn’t impossible.
But consider: Elven satellite eyeballs.
you mean like
@sidereanuncia it’s back, the post that I can only imagine haunts your nightmares
I shall never find peace.
Also, for what it’s worth, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the curvature of Middle Earth is the same as that of Earth.
There’s no evidence that Middle Earth curves.
Yeah there is. The Silmarillion states that the world was curved after the fall of Numenor (I believe), preventing access to Valinor. But Elves (among others) can travel the straight path across it.
So middle earth is round, but not for Elves because magic.
So wait, the reason he can see that far is because Elves just have the ability to ignore the curve of the earth? That’s awesome. It also means that no matter how good your optics got, you would always want elf eyes manning the spyglass because they can see arbitrarily far while everybody else is limited by this ‘horizon’ bullshit.
Oh thank God, my poor elf prince has seen too much in this post
Elves are flat-earthers
This post went from amusing to horrifying, to be brought back down to amusing, sprinkled in with some cannon explanation, and then you leave me here in fucking outrage
frodo and sam’s love for each other is literally the only thing keeping middle earth from just spontaneously combusting
No, but like, that’s literally it. Gandalf straight-up says to Elrond this Quest can’t succeed by force or wisdom, but by friendship. If Frodo and Sam hate each other even a little, Middle-Earth is doomed.
And it gets more terrifying when you realize that one of the strongest powers of the Ring is to turn people against each other, and that even if it didn’t, the Ring and the Quest still put Frodo in a psychological state where he can barely keep himself sane, let alone love anyone or anything other than the Ring. In fact, I’m fairly sure the Ring tried to persuade Frodo to kill Sam far more often than the books shows – the Ring tends to encourage murder, from what we see. Instead of listening to the Ring, Frodo somehow manages to keep in the back of his mind that he can trust Sam more than he can trust himself, and I have no idea how Frodo can resist the temptation to think his trust is misplaced.
And sure, one could say, “Oh, but Sam has to understand it, so it’s not all that bad” but you have to remember Sam is a plain, non-Tookish hobbit with no inclination or skills for adventuring around and yet he has to become the entire Fellowship. Name one thing the Fellowship did for Frodo that Sam doesn’t also do. He has to advise, guide and protect him as well as keep his hope alive and remind him of who he is. The amount of pressure he’s under is incredible, and unlike, say, Aragorn, he has no experience to draw from. Plus, Merry and Pippin tend to rely on each other, while Frodo relies on Sam, but Sam himself hardly seems to have anyone to turn to for strength. I’m not saying Frodo doesn’t support him as well as he’s able – actually, Frodo is remarkably consistent about taking care of Sam from Book I to Book VI. But what Frodo is capable to offer (see the paragraph above) is far from being all that Sam needs. And actually, in the last stages of the Quest, Sam is basically living a one-sided relationship under the worst possible conditions, and that his devotion doesn’t even waver despite that just blows my mind.
That the Quest was successful is one of the most incredible and beautiful things that Tolkien wrote. Frodo and Sam walked straight into the Land where no love can exist and managed to become closer to each other than they had been. It’s the biggest fuck you Sauron probably ever got. No, seriously. Frodo and Sam beat a Maia basically by cuddling a lot and talking about food. Like, what the fuck??? I mean, if I told you someone could write a 1000 pages novel in which a pacifist and his gardener beat a minor god via supporting each other emotionally, would you believe me?
It’s classic Tolkien: the surprise element (i.e. flawed creatures can be incredibly noble even under unspeakable distress) might overcome even the most carefully thought out plots devised by powerful evil lords. (See also: the entire Silmarillion, pretty much.)
Flawed, unexpected, and usually disparaged persons. ie dancing elven girl, (lower class) gardener…
I have clearly watched too much Forged In Fire recently, because my first thought was ‘oh my god, put that curl somewhere else, that’s going to hurt to hold’.
tbh nothing is weirder to me than manly grimdark dudebro lord of the rings bc it’s just??? the epitome of light and love to me???? no narrative embodies hope and gentleness and healing like lotr does why must you insist on talking to me about badass aragorn vs. useless frodo. that’s not the point brad
I feel like this is also why so many of the post-LOTR Tolkien ripoffs are so terrible! It’s people pulling from Tolkien when they fundamentally don’t understand what makes Tolkien work. You get all these stories written by people who don’t think Frodo was worthy of his plotline and so they give it to their Aragorn expy instead, and it’s dull and boring and totally lacks the themes and the heart that make LOTR an important, enduring story.
Lembas Bread (Lord of the Rings “authentic” Elvish bread)
Ingredients:
2 ½ cups of flour (I used bread flour but you can use all purpous flour too) 1 tablespoon of baking powder ¼ teaspoon of salt ½ cup of butter (melted) 1/3 cup of brown sugar 1 teaspoon of cinnamon ½ teaspoon honey 2/3 cup of heavy whipping cream ½ teaspoon of vanilla
Directions:
Preheat oven to 425°F. Mix the flour, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. Add the butter and mix well till fine granules (easiest way is with an electric mixer). Then add the sugar and cinnamon, and mix them thoroughly.
Finally add the cream, honey, and vanilla and stir until a nice, thick dough forms.
Roll the dough out about ½ in thickness. Cut out 3-inch squares and transfer the dough to a cookie sheet.Criss-cross each square from corner-to-corner with a knife, lightly (not cutting through the dough).
Bake for about 12 minutes or more (depending on the thickness of the bread) until it is set and lightly golden.
***Let cool completely before eating, this bread tastes better room temperature and dry. Also for more flavor you can add more cinnamon or other spices***
Steel Phoenix Studios 