[quote=“Goonboy Panzer”]sheez. this has to be the most debated piece of fiction in the last twenty years or so. Are the orcs black? Is Sauron big brother?Is Sarauman hitler?
Is the ring a nuke? Blah blah blah. If Tolkien knew what people saw in his fiction to further their own agendas he would probably never wrote the damn books.[/quote]
Sauron is Big Brother… now that’s a new one! It’s interesting discussing different ways in which the book can relate to real life scenarios, although some of them are more than a tad far fetched.
I seem to remember reading (possibly in the LOTR prologue) that Tolkien didn’t personally parallel any of the themes in the story with World War II which was happening while he wrote the book. I’m sure he must have been inspired by it in some ways though.
I actually think that the Frodo/Sam relationship would actually be closer to Tolkien’s relationships with his fellow soldiers in WW1. I wonder if he considered those friendships as “homoerotic”.
Just to clarify, I was talking moreso about the movies than the books.
Oh, and there’s a reason why so many people can attribute so many different things to the LOTR series, Goonboy. It was written as a standard myth, and built into all mythology is a set of certain imagery and lessons that speak to the human condition. That is why such stories remain relevant even today. It wasn’t written as a contemporary piece of pop culture literature… Tolkien wanted England to have its own rich mythology, and took it upon himself to create one. I think he’d be proud of the fact that people can analyze it in so many different ways. That’s one of the things that a myth is suppose to do: speak to everyone based on their unique experiences.
Suposed?It depends.Tolkien might have had a moral message up his sleeve but that doens’t mean most myths have one too.Mythological worlds are just facades,The true story can be quite shallow.
I’m not talking about “mythological worlds.” I’m talking about the traditional myth. They have a purpose. They are created for specific reasons. He was a man well-educated in literature and the parallels between LOTR and ancient myth are unmistakable. He’s even been quoted as saying that he intentionally wanted to create a myth for England.
Read Joseph Campbells’ “Hero of a Thousand Faces” and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Oh, the movies. That’s a whole different story to annalise again.
The movies themselves are at their core just fan fiction, so I don’t think we can really judge Sam and Frodo’s true character on what takes place in them. Even if the writers had introduced new plot elements that suggested that Sam secretly had a thing for Frodo, such ideas would not reflect the “true” characters, and can’t really be excepted anymore as “fact” as the site that you posted earlier in the topic. Well, okay, perhaps a bit more than that
But I’m curious, what makes you think that Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh were suggesting that “their” Frodo and Sam’s relationship was homoerotic? Was it the looks between the two characters? The loyalties? I know Philippa Boyens said that the relationship between the two was love, but love can mean a lot of things.
Hm… I think maybe you’re taking it a little too literally. I’m not saying that they secretly wanted to jump each other. No, it was more of a “wow… Frodo… uh… really, really loves his Sam. Oh Sam.” …kind of deal. You can’t tell me that watching the movies, the thought didn’t cross your mind every time Frodo said, “Oh, Sam…” or whenever same said, “It’s me… It’s your Sam!”
See, this is the problem with modern society. It’s alright with girls, but whenever a male acts even a little bit weak or shows that he cares about another guy everyone screams “gay!”
Just yesterday I was sitting in KFC talking to some random guy (who came and sat at my table because he was trying to scab money off me :)) and he asked “are you gay?” just because my voice tends to go softer when I’m talking to people that I don’t know very well. I mean, common, if little things like that can be considered homoerotic, perhaps it is our society that has created an unrealistic definition of the word.
When I watched TLOTR movies it never even crossed my mind that there was any more to Frodo and Sam’s relationship than deep friendship and loyalty. Because of the situation that they had been placed in, they had become to each other like family.
Abadd is quite right about Tolkien wanting to make a mythlogy for England. =D
The story that he worked with, while he was at war as actually The Simrillion ( I know it is not spelled right. XP) it is the main story that he had worked on all of his life and wanted that particular book to be published, sadly however, people wanted more hobbit stories with the sucess of the Hobbit and because of it, the Silrillion was not published until after his death.
A lot of people think so because they have never felt a REALLY deep friendship before in their lives (I have, so I completely don’t see it this way) and (if so) it kinda’ looks like that. Tolkien had very DEEP bonding friendships in his life that were lost and he chose to make it a deeply felt theme in his work.
Also in times of great duress (when your life is on the line) it only intensifies this bondship moreso.
I must admit that I didn’t particularly like the way that Frodo was portrayed towards the end of The Two Towers and in The Return of the King movies, he seemed a lot weaker and less able to withstand the power of the ring than in books. Frodo was a strong, independant leader up until he gets captured in the book, but in the movies he seemed to have lost control of himself long before then. So, yeah, that line was a bit out of place, in that respect.
