General Tolkien Discussion (books, movies & TV)

[Carol the Dabbler]

9 hours ago, Arcadia said:

In the Hobbit, there was Bard, and, um ... a lot of extras whose names and appearance are, er, irrelevant (sorry, bit players!) Oh, the weasly guy, who was far from pretty. Ditto the mayor.

Those I can tell apart!  It was mostly in LotR that I had trouble.  And in most episodes of Murder, She Wrote.

9 hours ago, Arcadia said:

Faramir and Boromir could be mistaken for each other, maybe, but Boromir's dead at the end of the first movie,

Yeah, mostly them, as I recall.  Partly because I was distracted by wondering why their parents named them after pigs.  (Logically their sister would be Sowamir.)  And there's also the nice guy who's holding hands with what's her name at the end -- unless that's Faramir.  (It might have helped if I'd remembered more from the book.  Then again, knowing Jackson's habits, maybe not.)

9 hours ago, Arcadia said:

Now, telling the Dwarves apart ... that is hard! Bombur's the fat one, Fili's the pretty one, Thorin's the one on screen the most. ...  after that, you got me. Oh, Balin's the white-haired one. And Gimli's the only one.

You forgot Kili, the other pretty one.  I can tell them apart by their hair color, but never can recall which name goes with which dwarf.

 

[Arcadia]

On 6/10/2022 at 6:30 PM, Carol the Dabbler said:

On 6/10/2022 at 8:37 AM, Arcadia said:

In the Hobbit, there was Bard, and, um ... a lot of extras whose names and appearance are, er, irrelevant (sorry, bit players!) Oh, the weasly guy, who was far from pretty. Ditto the mayor.

Those I can tell apart!  It was mostly in LotR that I had trouble.  And in most episodes of Murder, She Wrote.

On 6/10/2022 at 6:30 PM, Carol the Dabbler said:

On 6/10/2022 at 8:37 AM, Arcadia said:

Faramir and Boromir could be mistaken for each other, maybe,

Yeah, mostly them, as I recall.  Partly because I was distracted by wondering why their parents named them after pigs. 

Er.... what???

On 6/10/2022 at 6:30 PM, Carol the Dabbler said:

And there's also the nice guy who's holding hands with what's her name at the end -- unless that's Faramir.

Egad, Dabbler, there's a whole chapter dedicated to the romance between Faramir and what's-her-name! Although, to be fair, that part was left out of the movie...... 

On 6/10/2022 at 6:30 PM, Carol the Dabbler said:

On 6/10/2022 at 8:37 AM, Arcadia said:

Now, telling the Dwarves apart ... that is hard! Bombur's the fat one, Fili's the pretty one....

You forgot Kili, the other pretty one. 

Eh, to each their own taste....

[Carol the Dabbler]

On 6/10/2022 at 6:30 PM, Carol the Dabbler said:

I was distracted by wondering why their parents named them after pigs.

 

5 hours ago, Arcadia said:

Er.... what???

City kid, huh?  A "farrow" is a litter of piglets.  I'll admit that's kind of a technical term, but maybe you're aware that a "boar" is an adult male pig (or any wild pig).  So, Boar-o-mir and Farrow-mir.

Wasn't really worth asking, was it?  

 

[Arcadia]

7 hours ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

 

City kid, huh?  A "farrow" is a litter of piglets.  I'll admit that's kind of a technical term, but maybe you're aware that a "boar" is an adult male pig (or any wild pig).  So, Boar-o-mir and Farrow-mir.

Wasn't really worth asking, was it?  

 

Good lord.

I think you've mistaken this for the puns thread.....  

[Artemis]

On 6/16/2022 at 5:37 AM, Arcadia said:

Eh, to each their own taste....

I've never heard anyone call Fili "the pretty one", lol.  Now I'm curious what everyone else thinks.  Who's more to your taste, Fili or Kili?

 

[Artemis]

In "The Hobbit" (the book), all the dwarves have different-colored beards.  Colors that aren't natural hair colors.  I don't mind at all that they changed that for the movie, I think Tolkien might have changed it too if he knew that LotR was going to become a serious thing when he started his hobbit story.  But I still think it would have been neat if they'd included a little nod to it.  For instance, a tiny braid in each of their beards that corresponded to their color in the book, or the same color hairbands.

Of course, with a beard like Kili's which is barely there at all, I don't know what they would have done.  Dwarves take great pride in their beards, so I thought it was a strange choice for Kili to have little more than scruff.

 

[Carol the Dabbler]

8 hours ago, Artemis said:

I've never heard anyone call Fili "the pretty one"

 

8 hours ago, Artemis said:

with a beard like Kili's which is barely there at all, I don't know what they would have done.  Dwarves take great pride in their beards, so I thought it was a strange choice for Kili to have little more than scruff.

I had never really thought about it, but now that you mention it, Kili's "Miami Vice beard" strikes me as a blatant ploy to make him "the pretty one."

However I've never much cared for the "oops, I forgot to shave" look, so Fili and Kili (movie versions) strike me as about equally "pretty."  Plus they're both really charming -- especially in contrast to the other dwarves!

8 hours ago, Artemis said:

In "The Hobbit" (the book), all the dwarves have different-colored beards.  Colors that aren't natural hair colors.  I don't mind at all that they changed that for the movie, I think Tolkien might have changed it too if he knew that LotR was going to become a serious thing when he started his hobbit story.  But I still think it would have been neat if they'd included a little nod to it.  For instance, a tiny braid in each of their beards that corresponded to their color in the book, or the same color hairbands.

In the book, they also wore different-color hoods, though I never did remember which was which.  If their beards were different colors too, I forgot that completely!

I suspect that Tolkien color-coded them in an effort to make them easier to tell apart, though all I remembered was Thorin (the bossy one) and Bombur (the fat one).  In the movie, of course, the dwarves all look different, because they're played by different actors.  I still can't remember most of their names -- just Thorin (the bossy one), Bombur (the fat one), and Fili & Kili (the pretty ones) -- I'm always lousy at remembering names.  But at least I can tell them apart!

 

[Artemis]

12 hours ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

In the book, they also wore different-color hoods, though I never did remember which was which.  If their beards were different colors too, I forgot that completely!

Hmm, maybe I'm confusing beards and hoods, although I'm fairly certain I remember at least a couple of dwarves described as having blue beards and yellow beards, because I remember thinking how weird that was.  But it has been a couple of decades since my last reading.

12 hours ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

I still can't remember most of their names -- just Thorin (the bossy one), Bombur (the fat one), and Fili & Kili (the pretty ones) --

I never had any trouble remembering their names, but I'm generally good with names so there's that.  Gloin is easy for me to remember, being Gimli's father, but that's because of LotR.

12 hours ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

Kili's "Miami Vice beard" strikes me as a blatant ploy to make him "the pretty one."

Ditto.

12 hours ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

Plus they're both really charming -- especially in contrast to the other dwarves!

Was Fili charming?  To be honest I can hardly remember anything he did or said in the films.

 

[Artemis]

A quick Google search brought me to this article about the hoods and beards.  I was only partially correct; only four of the dwarves are described as having a beard of a certain color, and at least one of those (if not all four, according to the article) could be considered a natural hair color.

 

[Carol the Dabbler]

10 hours ago, Artemis said:

Hmm, maybe I'm confusing beards and hoods, although I'm fairly certain I remember at least a couple of dwarves described as having blue beards and yellow beards, because I remember thinking how weird that was.  But it has been a couple of decades since my last reading.

You're not misremembering.  I just checked and the first dwarf had a blue beard and a green hood.  Please bear in mind that humans can have hair that's more or less black, brown, yellow, red, gray, or white (to say nothing of little old ladies with blue hair) -- so I suppose members of a different (albeit related) species could have other colors.  But yeah, it strikes me as a bit silly too.

10 hours ago, Artemis said:

I never had any trouble remembering their names, but I'm generally good with names so there's that.  Gloin is easy for me to remember, being Gimli's father, but that's because of LotR.

I'm generally pretty slow to put names together with faces, which is what I was talking about.  I could probably list the names all of the dwarves (including Gloin, of course), but as for matching the names with the faces, not so much.

10 hours ago, Artemis said:

Was Fili charming?  To be honest I can hardly remember anything he did or said in the films.

I'm trying to remember -- he certainly didn't get nearly as much screen time as Kili!  Mostly, I think, he was part of their double act -- e.g., those matching big grins and "At your service!"  And I do not remember him ever being grumpy or stern or macho, etc., like most of the others.  So I'm left with the overall impression that he was charming.

10 hours ago, Artemis said:

A quick Google search brought me to this article about the hoods and beards.  I was only partially correct; only four of the dwarves are described as having a beard of a certain color, and at least one of those (if not all four, according to the article) could be considered a natural hair color.

Come to think of it, it's not just little old ladies who are sometimes described as having blue hair -- shiny black hair is sometime described as "blue," apparently because of the reflections.  Now I'll read that article.  OK, they mostly make similar points to what I did in my prior post.  They don't mention shiny black being referred to as "blue," but their portrait of Dwalin kinda looks like such a case.

 

[Artemis]

[Link]

 

[Carol the Dabbler]

Oh, good heavens, I totally forgot to make mushroom stew and seed cakes!  (Seriously, I sometimes do.)

 

[Artemis]

That sounds amaaaaaazing!  Hobbits and I are about equally voracious when it comes to mushrooms, lol.

 

[Carol the Dabbler]

My stew is based on Mom's beef stew (minus the beef), heavily influenced by Sam's wish-list in "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit" (minus the rabbit):  "... a few bay leaves, some thyme and sage, ... turnips and carrots, and taters too, ... onions," with contributions from other hobbit lore, namely Bilbo's tomatoes* and of course lots of mushrooms!

* His "prize-taker" tomatoes were not entirely Jackson's invention.  In the first edition of The Hobbit, Gandalf asks Bilbo for "cold chicken and tomatoes," which was amended to "cold chicken and pickles" in the second edition.  A lot of people claim the change was prompted by Tolkien's realization that tomatoes are a New World crop.  (The same people claim that Sam's "taters" weren't actually potatoes -- even though he attempts to clarify the term to Gollum as "po-ta-toes".)  But others (including me) have pointed out that "An Unexpected Party" explicitly takes place in late April, and since Hobbiton is clearly** located somewhere in the North Temperate Zone, then (unless Bilbo has a hothouse that's never mentioned) there could not be any ripe tomatoes till high summer.

** Tolkien himself stated several times that Middle Earth is our Earth, but about 6,000 years in our past.  It's established over the first few chapters of The Hobbit that April comes before summer (so not the Southern Hemisphere), and there is ice and snow in winter (so neither the tropics nor the subtropics).

 

[Arcadia]

On 9/18/2022 at 2:49 AM, Artemis said:

I've never heard anyone call Fili "the pretty one", lol.  Now I'm curious what everyone else thinks.  Who's more to your taste, Fili or Kili?

 

Egad. I really AM getting old. I mixed the names up. Kili is definitely the pretty one, and there was a time when I knew that very well....... 😛 

[Caya]

[Carol the Dabbler]

Is that a current photo, though?  I recall hearing that the site had been abandoned at some point after Lord of the Rings was filmed there.  OK, the caption does say abandoned after LotR, so I suspect that's when those pictures were taken,

When Hobbiton was rebuilt for The Hobbit, the landowner expressed an intention to maintain it as a tourist attraction, complete with some enter-able hobbit holes (the interiors seen in the films were all shot in a studio).  Yup, it's still quite a thing, with all sort of options (including a Second Breakfast Tour.  Whew!

 

 

[J.P.]

I think I've seen recent photos from the location. It's a kind of a theme park.

[Carol the Dabbler]

7 hours ago, J.P. said:

I think I've seen recent photos from the location. It's a kind of a theme park.

Well, yes and no.  In case anyone's either excited or worried, there are no "rides" at all!  Even the souvenir shop and cafe are by the parking lot, a five-minute bus ride away.  Based on several online reports by people who took the tour, Hobbiton itself is still pretty much just as you saw it in the movies, and you get to walk around in it.  There were originally no interiors to speak of (though some hobbit-hole doors did -- and still do -- open), because the actual interiors were filmed in a studio.

As of December 2023, though, there are two fully furnished hobbit holes with multiple rooms that you can walk through.  According to this site (which has a photo), the interiors are at 83% scale, so it's not like you're an average-size human walking into a hobbit hole (which would be more like 63% and would likely require some crouching), nor is it like you're a hobbit (which would be 100%), but rather about halfway between.

And the Green Dragon Inn had a movie-like interior even before that.

 

[Caya]

My apologies to everyone who already knew this one, but ... it's Mordor on the dancefloor: