Continuing a series of articles from our international fan-base, contributor and TORn TUESDAY friend Tedoras brings us a thorough look at the most bemusing/amusing character in all of Tolkiens’ legendarium: the master of the Old Forest himself, Tom Bombadil.
Category: Fellowship of the Ring
Welcome to our collection of TORn’s hottest topics for the week ending August 4, 2013. If you’ve fallen behind on what’s happening on the Message Boards, here’s a great way to catch up on the highlights. Or if you’re new to TORn and want to enjoy some great conversations, just follow the link to some of our most popular discussions. Watch this space as every weekend we will spotlight the most popular buzz on TORn’s Message Boards. Everyone is welcome, so come on in and join the fun!
Continue reading “TORn Message Boards Weekly Roundup – August 4, 2013”
Ringer Giurunian writes to tell us of this amazing diorama of the Argonath created by Russian sculptor Alexander Krasnov last year.
Krasnov calls the work “The Guardians” and created it from completely scratch using little more than plastics, foam sponge, PVA glue, gypsum, cardboard and a dremel. Oh, and some paint!
The scale is, apparently, 1:100, and the diorama measures 40 centimetres by 28 centimetres. The Argonath figures of Isildur and Anarion are 65 millimetres high and are based on the movie (and subsequent Weta collector sculpts), rather than the bookends released with the Collector’s DVD Gift Set of The Fellowship of the Ring. Continue reading “Check out this amazing Argonath diorama”
Last weekend in The Hall of Fire, we discussed sources of heroism in The Lord of the Rings. Who acts heroically, and what is it that makes them heroic anyway? For those who couldn’t attend, here’s a log.
And a reminder, next weekend (Saturday August 3 at 6pm EDT (New York time)) we’ll be discussing the next chapter in our read-through of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Book III, Chapter XI: The Palantir. It’s the final chapter of Book III, so don’t miss it! Continue reading “Hall of Fire chat log: the hero and the heroic in The Lord of the Rings”
The key players in The Lord of the Rings are probably some of the most-written about characters in literature. Everyone loves the leading lights such as Frodo, Aragorn, Sam and Gandalf.
Yet there are a number of minor (some even without a name!) characters who either serve an important purpose, give us a great deal of food for thought, or even go against established yet hard-to-overcome stereotypes about the content of Tolkien’s writing.
In no particular order, here are my leading six. Continue reading “Six overlooked yet important characters from The Lord of the Rings”
Strider, Aragorn, Longshanks, Telcontar, Elessar, and several other names come to mind for this particular character. But the first impression a non-Tolkien outsider would get from a man who has a dozen aliases is that he was probably a criminal. Maybe they’d think he was constantly moving from place to place, switching names because he was the equivalent of a modern-day “identity thief” who was on the lam! Funny how things in our modern world don’t always reflect clearly on mythology.
Aragorn is the kind of character that demands a closer look. You must remember the speech that Shrek gives to Donkey about ogres being a lot like onions: “We have layers!” I would also like to use the onion metaphor for Strider. But wait — that’s just one layer. Peel away a bit and you’ll find the outcast orphan-lad who was taken in by the Elves; his mother desperate for some protection. Peel away more layers to find within a skillful fighter, a passionate lover, a delicate negotiator with a voice of great wisdom, a healer and master of herb-lore, and yes… in the very center of his heart, underneath it all, is a King.