So one day a dwarf is talking to a human and finally realizes that when humans say woman, they generally mean “person who is theoretically capable of childbirth” because for whatever reason, humans assign social expectations based genital differences. (What a fucked up culture, the dwarf thinks.) But hey, better communication! So the next time the dwarf introduces theirself, they say, oh, by the way, I am what you call a “woman.”
And the trade negotiations just stop. They just stop cold. The tall people insist on speaking to the man, they insist on talking to the lady dwarf about all sorts of irrelevant bullshit, like recipes and childrearing and perfume
so the dwarf goes back home, enraged
and is like “BTW guess what happened, we’re all just going to be men forever now as far as the tall ones are concerned”
and everyone is justly horrified at this barbarism but they all agree to do whatever it takes to squeeze those tall bastards for all the resources they are worth
and the dwarves get surlier, and the trade agreements less generous
and the tall people are all “what a miserable and greedy race”
but really they’re just still nursing a grudge about how goddamn backwards and sexist the tall people are
because their best negotiator, one of their sacred cave people, got snubbed the instant she said she was capable of childbirth – and a mortal insult like that can never be forgiven
Just as an additional thought, we hear that women dwarves generally stay within the mountain and are a protected, guarded subset of the dwarves. There’s not many of them, so there’s an implication that women dwarves are too precious to be allowed out.
But what if this too is a mistranslation? What if the dwarves were talking to the Men and when asked “where are all your women?” they hit a wall. They whisper amongst themselves, and eventually come back with a question, “What’s a woman?” The Men are incredulous.
“Why, the members of your race that bear children, of course!“
More dwarven whispering.
They reach the conclusion that Men mean dwarves who are currently pregnant. Well! Of course those dwarves are currently safe within the mountain, well cared for and generally loathe to travel until the child is born. The Men take this to mean that all dwarven women are discouraged from traveling, and that their primary purpose is childbearing. Dwarves find this a satisfactory outcome, especially with the way Men treat their women, and so even when the misunderstanding becomes clear to them they never correct it.
Okay I know we always go on about Marvel’s uncanny casting ability.
But if you thought they were the only ones, let me draw your attention to this man:
Viggo Mortensen, aka Aragorn son of Arathorn, aka Sexiest Ranger in Middle Earth
would hike, often for more than a day, to remote filming locations, in costume, for the sake of authenticity
was the best swordsman Bob Anderson (swordsmaster/instructor for LotR, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc) says he has ever trained
occasionally writes poetry (more book!canon than film!canon but um hello)
does all his own stunts
lived all over and speaks about 23940209384 languages
you know that scene at the end of Fellowship when he’s fighting the Uruk-hai? And one throws a dagger at him and he hits it away with his sword? Yeah, the guy who threw it was supposed to miss, but accidentally threw it directly at Viggo. Who just casually Aragorned and hit it away.
They actually cast Aragorn to play Aragorn
Can I just add a few things?
Would randomly give chocolates to the hobbits
According to John Rhys-Davis (aka Gimli), whenever you have a large cast, one or two actors will naturally become the leaders. Guess who ended up in that role.
Single-handedly convinced cast and crew to camp out to shoot a scene in the sunrise
Once hit a wild rabbit with his car by accident. Promptly stopped his car and went to see if the rabbit was dead, needed a vet or if the only merciful thing to do was to finish killing him. The rabbit was dead. Viggo realized he was hungry. So he took the rabbit, made a fire by the roadside and ate it.
According to cast and crew, sometimes you’d just see him disappear in the middle of the night and suddenly he’d come back with fish he’d caught
Had his sword with him at all times. Slept with once.
The best horse rider of the cast, hands down. Rides better than lots of pros, according to a horse trainer. Couldn’t bear to part with his horse at the end of the shooting, so he bough him. The next movie of his also involved horses, and he bought his horse in that one, too.
Knows how to survive in the wild. I’m not kidding.
Hand-stitched a few things in his costume for an authentic “I live away from civilization” Ranger feel. Also told the weapons department to make him a small bow because “Aragorn lives in the wild, he needs a hunting bow, or he’ll starve to death” – literally nobody else had thought about that. Also requested a small stone to sharpen his sword. Suggested that Aragorn would take Boromir’s arm guards after his death.
Speaking of hand-stitching, once he was touring Japan with a reporter for an article. Walked into a store, took a tshirt, bought it, cut off the print and hand-stitched it into the hat he was wearing. The reporter was going “?????????” the entire time.
Peter Jackson literally sometimes called him Aragorn by accident
And speaking of pronouns, flat-out my favorite part of the LOTR Appendices is when it’s revealed that the Gondorian dialect of the Common Speech differentiates between formal and informal second-person pronouns but the distinction’s been lost in the Hobbit’s dialect, so Pippin’s blithely been using familiar terms of address with the Lord of the City, and thus helps to explain both why the Gondorians are so ready to assume he’s a prince and why Denethor finds him so amusing to have around.
not what i expected from a post that began with “speaking of pronouns,” but an a++ show of the versatility and surprise daily available on tumblr dot com
the thing about lotr that the movies don’t convey so fully is how the story is set in an age heavily overshadowed by all the ages before. they’re constantly traveling through ruins, discussing the glory of days gone by, the empires of men are much diminished, the elves (especially galadriel) are described as seeming incongruent, frozen in time….some of the imagery is even near-apocalyptic, like the ruins of moria and of course the landscape surrounding mordor
this is a strange thought to me, somehow: that the archetypal “high fantasy” story is set at the point where the…fantasy…used to be much higher? this is not the golden age; this is a remnant
LotR is Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome of the elves.
i want to emphasize that people have added excerpts of their theses in reply to this post but this is still my favorite reblog
tbh the funniest part in the fellowship of the rings is when pippin drops the helmet down the well in balin’s tomb and we’re just listening to it drop while everyone stares at him and he flinches at every clang and then when it’s over gandalf goes after his whole life i die every time
I realize this is not new information to anyone, but what struck me so hard this time I read the Lord of the Rings was the sense of melancholy. Like it’s painfully obvious to the reader that this world is Not As It Once Was. All of the characters we meet reference this feeling of loss in one way or another.
The elves are the most obvious – with their fading light and their ships sailing away. Treebeard talks about how the woods aren’t as they once were, about the ents who are falling asleep and withering to nothing. The dwarves lust after the glory of their forefathers, be it in mountain fortresses or caverns of mithril – now empty and echoing. Old Tom Bombadil remembers a race of great men and women, reduced simply to trinkets in cold tombs.
And even men, the race set to inherit this new age, even they are experiencing this sense of melancholy, of losing hold of something great. We see their great cities reduced to rubble on riverbanks, or possessed by evil. Aragorn longs to return to his throne to restore the glory of ages past, to somehow rejuvenate that which is dying in the race of men.
And hobbits? At first we see them as living in the present, with no great glory of the past to tie them down. Yet when Frodo returns to the Shire, it is…Not As It Once Was. And I think while the other hobbits are able to shake off this feeling and return to their love of life and the present, maybe Frodo’s true burden is to inherit this sense of loss from the rest of Middle Earth.
And what makes Lord of the Rings (and Tolkien) so extraordinary, at least to me, is how there is still so much hope in the story even with all its sadness. Hope is literally Aragorn’s childhood name, given to him at a time his House is all but finished. Hope is what drives Gandalf and leads his way when others of his order become distracted and give up their purpose. Hope appears to Sam when he and Frodo trudge towards what seems to be their end in the fires of Mount Doom. Hope is there at dawn when Rohirrim arrive at Minas Tirith and blow their horns, and they ride to defend the City of Kings, though they know what they are facing. In fact, for me some of the most brilliant moments in the story are those when hope appears in the middle of darkest despair. Tolkien writes like sadness and hope are merely the two sides of the same coin.
One of the many things I love about the world Tolkien created is the exquisite beauty that rises from sadness; lesser stories would transform sorrow and grief into bitterness, but in Tolkien’s world, it becomes a force for pity and wisdom and love. Some of his best and wisest characters are those who have known great sorrow. Melancholy and sadness are a part of Arda Marred, but like Gandalf says: “not all tears are an evil.”
Perhaps my favourite quote from Tolkien is Haldir’s line from the Fellowship of the Ring, when the company is nearing Lothlórien:
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
A lot of people dislike The Fellowship of the Ring because it spends so much time faffing around in the Shire, but that’s precisely why it’s my favorite. The whole series is a lot more enjoyable when you remember that Frodo spent years sighing melodramatically and thinking he was some poor tortured soul who must leave home in secrecy and solitude for a mysterious fate…. but literally all of his friends knew he had a secret evil ring and made all his travel plans for him behind his back.
Like. He paced around going “woe is me! such a burden I must carry!” so obviously that his whole squad accepted the fact that they’d all go on a dangerous international adventure with him because Frodo the Drama Queen could not be expected to take care of himself.
I love Hobbits.
Also they accomplished it via the Power of Gossip and the only reason Frodo himself didn’t pick up on it is because he vastly underestimates the intelligence of every single other hobbit he knows bc he thinks he is Special he’s such a condescending ass and I Love him
Frodo: “I must confess… I have some bad news for you. I have not been totally honest. I can’t tell you everything, but–”
His entire social group: “Is this about how you’re the new bearer of the One Ring and need to take it out of the Shire to be destroyed? Yeah, dude, we know. We’re all packed and ready to go whenever.”
Frodo: “But but but but but! How did you know? How could you EVER figure out my SECRETS?!”
His entire social group: “Gee, Frodo, I don’t know… maybe you’re a pretentious dumbass and we aren’t the bumbling fools you think we are?”
I pretend to be complex and clever but in reality, nothing has ever made me laugh harder than those bad Chinese subtitles from the bootleg Lord of the Rings DVDs. Tears streaming down my face, core aching, slowly suffocating because I’m laughing too hard.
also (because one can never have too many of these)
and my personal favorite:
I somehow forgot to add my own favorite, which is this one:
I also appreciate the ones that really change the tone and suggest that the characters openly loathe each other…
myblog 