No single character from Two Towers has caused more controversy than the writing of Faramir. Some people have been outraged enough to brand it “character assassination”. Keeping in mind that there’s much more of Faramir to come in RoTK, what do we think so far?
The Movie Characterisation of Faramir. Success or Failure?
Is Faramir off-base and miscast, as some have suggested, or have Jackson and Boyens brought onto the spotlight the darkness within and desperate desire for his father’s approval? What can we expect to see in Return of the King? And regardless, does Jackson’s interpretation enhance or detract from Two Towers?
Join us this weekend at Hall of Fire for what is sure to be a very lively debate!
Upcoming Discussions:
January 18-19
Frodo, the Ring and controlling Gollum
January 25-26
Arwen’s Choice as handled within the Two Towers
February 2-3
RoTK Book 5 Chapter One – Minas Tirith
Place:
#thehalloffire on theonering.net server; come to theonering.net’s chat room Barliman’s and then type /join #thehalloffire .
Saturday Chat: 5:30 pm ET (17:30) [also 11:30 pm (23:30) CET and 7:30 am Sunday (07:30) AET]
Sunday Chat: 7:00 pm (19:00) CET [also 1:00 pm (13:00) ET and 4:00 am (04:00) Monday morning AET]
ET = Eastern Time, USA’s East Coast
CET = Central European Time, Central Europe
Do you have a possible topic for Hall of Fire? Drop us a line here.
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Women are flocking to heroic epics – Times of London tries to explain why. Not sure if many of our longtime female readers of Tolkien would agree with these conclusions, though. Thanks to Ringer Spy Arwenelf for the link. [More]
NB: For anyone wishing to comment on this article, The Times does have an e-mail address at the very bottom that you can write to. Much more effective than writing to me!
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After the best crop of holiday movies in recent memory, many of the year’s Academy Award races are wide open. David Ansen of MSNBC offers his early forecast on the likely nominees. [More]
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And there the resemblance ends? “A memorable scene in Wagner shows Siegfried filing the shards of his father’s sword into dust, and casting a new sword out of the filings. That, more or less, is what Tolkien accomplished with the elements of Wagner’s story. Wagner will still haunt the stages of opera houses, but audiences will see him through Tolkien’s eyes.” [More]
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Here’s some snippets from a couple of articles written by Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey where he talks about The Two Towers. [More]
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Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey wrote a piece for The Daily Telegraph on the Two Towers. We can’t post it all for copyright reasons, but here’s a few interesting snippets and a link to the full article. You need to register to read in full (pesky), but it is free.
Take courage – things may not be as bad as they seem
By Tom Shippey
None of the characters, as Tolkien wrote the story, really understands the whole of what is going on.
Not even Gandalf. In fact, the only thing they do know is that their fate will not, in the end, be determined by visible events but by a mostly invisible one: the stealthy crawl of three insignificant-looking characters into the lion’s mouth of Mordor. The great ones and the heroes are continually trying to see what is happening elsewhere, through the palantirs and the Mirror of Galadriel and the Eye of Sauron. The attempt is repeatedly disastrous. Denethor commits suicide because of what he sees in his palantir, but he has read it wrong. As Gandalf says, “Even the wise cannot see all ends,” and the really wise remember that.
The moral is the motto of the British redcoat: “Look to your front.” Don’t think about what other people are doing: you’ll get it wrong and it’s disheartening. Or, to quote Gandalf again – and Jackson picked out just these words to repeat in the first movie, varying the pronouns cunningly – “That [the future] is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Tolkien surely did not mean these words just for Frodo. They were a major part of his own conviction and a part of his own cure for the defeatism, the appeasement, the lack of will and the weary calculation of odds that he saw dogging the Western democracies as he was writing The Lord of the Rings and still after he had finished it. Tolkien’s achievement, it may be, was to reintroduce a heroic world view, drawn from the ancient texts he taught as a professor, to a world gone ironic.
And this world view was put across not only by the obviously heroic figures such as Aragorn and Faramir and King Theoden, but by the hobbits – and, most of all, by the very structure of the story. In this story, all the characters find themselves, literally as well as figuratively, bewildered: their bearings lost, not sure what’s for the best, but slogging on regardless. The most important ones, moreover, the hobbits Frodo and Sam, think they’re on their own. All the time, their friends are risking everything to distract the Eye of Sauron from them, but they don’t know that. They go on anyway.
The film version, adapted to the limited attention span of the modern viewer, can’t handle all of this, but it handles a surprising amount. Tolkien himself, commenting on the first of several attempted film scripts back in 1957, remarked that he had no objection to people cutting things out, but he disliked compression, trying to jam everything into three hours. It loses the uncertainty, the false trails and the fog of war that link The Lord of the Rings and the battle of the Somme, where Tolkien fought with the Lancashire Fusiliers.
You can read the entire article here.
We also received an excerpt from an anonymous spy of a review of Two Towers that Shippey wrote for the Times Literary Supplement.
“An Arwen sequence has to be introduced to keep her in the action, but Tolkien himself might have approved of this. Not only does it draw her and Aragorn’s story out of the Appendix to which it was consigned in the book, it also emphasizes Arwen’s choice between her lover and immortality, and does so with Elrond speaking to his daughter very much in the mode of Hrothgar warning Beowulf.
“Aragorn will go in the end, he says, by ‘the sword or by the slow decay of time,’ and Arwen will ‘linger on in darkness and in doubt’; he urges her to abandon Middle-earth for the Undying Lands. Serious stuff for an action movie.”
Great stuff.
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