Re: TTT

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

John wrote:
> You, like know a whole lot more about Middle Earth history than moi.

Well, in all honesty I had to turn around and grab the Silmarillion off the
shelf to double-check a few of the names like Elwing and Idril; I can't claim
to be able to rattle off all the houses of the Noldor.  :-) I'd also forgotton
that Elrond was descended from Beren & Luthien on his mother's side.  I was
just thinking of Earendil (his father), being the son of Tuor and (someone).
Once I looked up Elwing and Idril, I saw that Elwing was the granddaughter of
Beren & Luthien, which startled me; I'd forgotten that Tolkien wove the two
half-elven lineages together like that.  And so, since Aragorn is the last
linear descendent of Elros, he's marrying his great-great-great-great-
great-[add a lot more greats here]-great-aunt.  Maybe the movies should get an
R for incest.  :-)  Anyway, the marriage of Aragorn & Arwen ties together 
the last remaining strands of part-elven bloodlines.

> Arwen as a pouty Juliet? Not likely - the woman's centuries old after all -
> old enough to make her own decisions.

I had the same reaction.  As I said to a friend, as we were walking out of the
film: "she's three thousand years old, haven't they worked out these father/
daughter issues yet?"

> Amd I was pissed that Fangorn forest did not move to Helm's Deep as it did in
> the book.

Well, it wasn't the whole forest, just the Huorns.  I tend to agree with you,
especially since the coming of the Huorns into battle was one of Tolkien's
motivating images for the whole introduction of the Ents in the first place.
He'd always said he was deeply disappointed with how Shakespeare brought
Burnham Wood to Dunsinane, and deliberately wrote in the Huorns as his
suggestion for how it should be done.  On the other hand, I can see why Jackson
& Co. might have felt that trying to introduce and explain Huorns as well as
Ents, and the differences between them (especially since they chose to make the
Ents look *so* much like trees), would be too much for an already long film.
Still, I missed them.  The whole Orc army being driven into the forest and
vanishing (with appropriate gruesome noises) could have been *very* cool.

Nikki wrote:
> My G-d. The two of you! Has it not occured to you that he doesn't want to see
> his daughter marry a human because he doesn't want her to stay in Middle
> Earth and leave him? To possibly age and die? To wander, lost in endless
> grief, all alone?

Well, yeah.  Isn't that implicit in what we were saying?

Good night,
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                 http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

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