It's only a matter of time...

[malsperanza]

Sat in a meeting on Friday in a room with no ventilation; on my left someone with wicked flu (coughing and sneezing), and on my right 2 people with bronchitis. Also, my assistant was out for 2 weeks with pneumonia--yes, real pneumonia--and is now bravely dragging herself around, wheezing and wobbling and fainting in coils. And now half my flist is down with thrombotic pulmonary disorders.

I am doomed.

*coughs*

*breathes deeply; listens for telltale signs of emphysema, sarcoidosis, lymphangioleiomyomatosis, or common cold*

OK, nothing nasty yet, but I'm not optimistic.

Well, having grouched about ROTK, I feel bad. Will pause for 5 min. of



1) Mmm. Aragorn.
1a) Mmm: Aragorn with clean hair (briefly). Why is it that Jack Sparrow looks just fine with messy hair, and Aragorn does not? Note to self: pursue interesting male grooming question for 2004 Popular Culture Association Conference panel discussion.

2) Beacons!
Beacons were hot! (Yes, literally and figuratively.)

3) Grond!!
Why has no one mentioned Grond yet? Grond also was veryveryhot! (Yes, literally and figuratively.) Grond was totally excellent.

4) Shelob!
W00t Shelob! Much though I'd enjoy watching POTC Undead Pirates fight ROTK Undead Dead, what I REALLY wants to see, preciouss, is Shelob taking on Mothra. Or the giant ants in "Them." Or both. Shelob would kick Mothra's ass. (But, dude, the POTC Undead Pirates would totally kick the ass of the ROTK Undead glowing vaporous ghosties. I bet Jackson was spitting nails when he saw the quality of the computer work in POTC--made his GreenEctoplasm!Undead look like the phantoms in Caspar the Friendly Ghost.)

(Only more of them, of course.)

Shelob was perfect. In fact, the whole Cirith Ungol part was perfect, despite being (O horrors!) Not Entirely Canonical.

5) Smeagol and Deagol!
Excellent opening gambit for the movie. Such a relief not to get a whole lot of awkward summary of FOTR and TTT frontloaded, but instead the very backstory that we got part-way through the book, in much the same manner. Elegantly done.

6) Absence of Saruman.
Well, I wasn't crazy about Cher!Saruman in TTT, so I didn't miss him. Her. Whatever.

7) Giant Eagles!
And to those who ask how come the Nine Walkers couldn't have flown by EagleAir to Mordor in the first place, I say: Well obviously because the Eagles dint feel like it that day, okay?

I wouldn't mind seeing a Giant Eagles vs. Shelob smackdown either, come to think of it. Or Shelob vs. Grond. Or the Eye of Sauron Meets the Smog Monster. That would be good.

8) Wizard of Oz quotations.
I have decided I like these, though on Wednesday night they made me laugh inappropriately & I pissed off the veryveryserious folks wearing Spock ears (or possibly Bad Santa's Helper ears) in the row in front of us. I liked the Wizard of Oz quotations in Oh Brother Where Art Thou too.

I think all adventure/fantasy/quest/Odyssey movies should quote from The Wizard of Oz; if Cold Mountain includes a horse of a different color, I will be veryveryhappy. Let's not forget the brilliant but subtle auteur moment in The Last Samurai, after the great massacre, when the hero clicks his sparkly red samurai geta clogs together and in the next scene is seen returning home to the village.

And all romance/noir/spy movies should be required to quote from Casablanca.

9) Misc.
Shadowfax. The Nazgul. The way Minas Tirith looked. The palantir. The fact that Merry and Pippin were distinguishable from one another.

10) The general pacing.

11) Did I mention Aragorn?
Mmm.



OK, that's enough of that. What I really want to post about is The Trickster Figure in Literature. Have many quotes and brilliant auteur insights to share, but must first get LOTR out of system a bit.

FWIW, the main Trickster figure in LOTR is Bombadil.

I still can't find one in HP, which I find both curious and interesting.

Have also not forgotten promise (now one month old) to deal Mighty Cold War Humor Death Blow Challenge to black_dog upthread. Am currently researching Judith Exner/Marilyn Monroe/Luttwak connection. Stay tuned.

Comments

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Whee. Here we go...

1) ... I think that hobbits are Tricksters, sort of.
a) They play a catalyst role when drawn into the affairs of other peoples. [snip]...
c) The very word "Halfling" (and I'll concede I'm going overboard here) is suggestive of Trickster-y in-between-ness.

Oh, I don't think that's going too far. "Halfling" is a very resonant and self-conscious term. And I think all of Tolkien's names are available to full-fledged symbolic interpretation (not to mention the false etymologies and the poetic chimes they contain).

It's interesting that the Hobbits themselves are a bit taken aback by the name when they first hear it at Rivendell, and not sure they like it. They call themselves Hobbits or Little Folk (at Bree). Halfling is how the high ancient races--Numenoreans, Elves--see them. The great races, therefore, understand them as liminal--halfway between themselves and human. The Ents, eldest of all, have no name whatever for Hobbits, either because they are outis--No Ones, tricksters, or because they are too new and young to be on Ent radar (which is Treebeard's somewhat disingenuous explanation).

So far, I'm with you.

2) Tooks are coded in Shire-culture as Tricksters, and in the text of The Hobbit.

Here and following, you present a very interesting argument. I agree that Tooks are, among Hobbits, the most tricksterlike and transgressive family (as their wily, self-interested name suggests). So it seems that there is a double argument here: Within the frame of reference of Hobbits, Merry and Pippin approach Tricksterhood. Within the larger framework of Middle-earth as a whole, they at best possess some tricksterlike attributes, but not all. (And not, I would argue, some of the most important ones.)

This raises several questions:

I) Are we, the readers, in the Hobbit framework or not? (The answer to that question, of course, is Yes.) Tolkien implies many times that we--his imagined readers--are more like Hobbits than like the Men of latter days (the men of Bree, for example). E.g., the author of the Red Book of Westmarch, and its readers, are Hobbits. And the Red Book of Westmarch is, of course, LOTR itself.

Yet we also stand outside the Hobbits' framework and see them from a certain distance. If we identify fairly closely with Merry and Pippin, the members of the Company most like ourselves (most in-over-their-heads, least magical, least heroic, least Touched by Fate), we also understand all the ways in which we are not seeing the story from their pov, but above and outside it.

II) Although M&P play a catalyst role (notably in Aragorn's great Crossroads moment), so do all the members of the Company at one time or another. This is where Tolkien's concept of fate, accident, and the combined force (which sistermagpie described) of a collection of individual acts and decisions (each in itself accidental or casual) collectively influences the outcome of the quest. Thus, Boromir's madness splits Frodo and Sam from the others. Gandalf's choice of Moria, against Aragorn's advice, deprives the Company of his counsel at Rauros and forces Aragorn to the Crossroads decision. Only Legolas and Gimli have relatively few such moments. Despite the opinions of the fangirls, they truly are supporting characters.

So while I take note that it is the arrival of M&P that awakens the Ents, and it is Pippin's pebble in the well in Moria that awakens the Balrog (apparently), and it is Pippin's theft of the Palantir at Orthanc that precipitates Sauron's invasion and distracts the Eye from Mordor's own borders, I also note that far more than Pippin's acts, Aragorn's nonaccidental, deliberate decisions do the same thing: showing himself without disguise to Sauron, leading the armies of the West to the Black Gate. Just as M&P rouse the Ents to create an unlooked-for extra army, so too does Aragorn's rousing of the Dead create one. (And one could write a dissertation on Aragorn in the Underworld, which has some lovely parallels to Odysseus in the Underworld, Christ's Harrowing of Hell, and so on.)

So we have Accident (M&P, the accidental members of the company) driving the outcome of the quest on the one hand, and Design (Aragorn) driving it on the other.

Works for me.

Part B to follow.

[lorem_ipsum]

Hm, you answered my two posts with four. Does that mean I should answer back with eight, or with sixteen? *g*

Ents, eldest of all, have no name whatever for Hobbits, [...] because they are too new and young to be on Ent radar (which is Treebeard's somewhat disingenuous explanation).

Why do you think it's disingenuous?

Within the frame of reference of Hobbits, Merry and Pippin approach Tricksterhood. [...] Are we, the readers, in the Hobbit framework or not? (The answer to that question, of course, is Yes.) [...] Yet [...] we also understand all the ways in which we are not seeing the story from their pov, but above and outside it. I read into this the implication that M&P both are and aren't Tricksters-- that is, that they can be validly identified either way. Is that consistent with what you intended to say?

Although M&P play a catalyst role (notably in Aragorn's great Crossroads moment), so do all the members of the Company at one time or another.

Um. Yes. Point conceded. And to add to it, it's occurred to me that in quest-type stories it isn't unusual for hero characters to have catalyzing effects on their surroundings.