Posted on 01/03/2011 11:50:39 AM PST by Pyro7480
“The spirit of wickedness in high places is now so powerful and so many-headed in its incarnations,” Tolkien wrote in 1969, “that there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydras’ heads.”
The world, he thought, seemed little better than a new Tower of Babel, “all noise and confusion.”
Yet, armed with Grace, citizens of the City of God should remain constant in their defense of all that is good....
With the Incarnation of Christ, “art has been verified,” Tolkien claimed. “God is the Lord, of angels, and of men–and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused” with the arrival of God in Time, and man has been blessed beyond earthly comprehension....
What then, should we just the gift of Beauty for, for glorification. That Beauty helps move us to do the right thing: there is always hope, no matter what ravages the world brings....
That hope, and especially the Grace imparted by the Incarnation, reminds us that the baptized must sanctify the world and, as St. Paul taught, “redeem the time.” When asked about the meaning of life, Tolkien did not mince words:
[T]he chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis . . . . We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour....
Today, 119 years after Tolkien’s birth, we would do well to remember the words and ideas of this brilliant (and, perhaps, saintly) Roman Catholic.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicvote.org ...
The books are excellent.
I dont think the Master of Middle Earth would have cared though for the films. Great special effects yes but way too much liberty taken by the scriptwriters, way too much added and taken away from the original design.
I laugh at the “cats eye” on the tower of Baradur and the comments on utube are made mostly by the ignorant as all they know is from what they saw in the films.
If the eye on the tower is supposed to “be” Sauron, then that is a great error. Of course Sauron had some physical form as Gollum was familar with the four-fingered Black Hand from his imprisonment in Mordor. Or did Hollywood leave that out of their movie?
The casting, not so good. The hobbits all look like models too pretty. Aragorn - Nothing like the Tall Man described in the book. May I go on? The scene at Galadriels mirror, disgusting really that they would make her appear evil, and change her voice to sound like a Cyclon. Ha!
I really dont have the time to list all the errors, I can say thank goodness they did excise idiotic things like Saruman falling off Orthanc!
I suppose the Hobbit will be just as bad.
Happy Birthday J.R.R Iam glad you never had to see the “film”.
I do hope they will not even attempt the Sillmarillion.
Yeah, they really did take some liberties. lmao! I mean, just Arwen alone was bad enough and if you never read the appendices in LotR you would not even understand the flashbacks in the movie.
They’d never attempt the Silmarillion. Too long, too depressing.
The visuals for the Elves were pretty good.
I mean just how fair can mere mortals be made to look (sans CGI assistance)
When I read the books I realy dont try to visualize the Elves in my mind - certainly they werent like what we call fairies/elves in childrens tales. History of Middle Earth volumes give you some better idea of the Elven-race.
I think Tolkien meant for the “fair folk” be at the edge of our mental grasp. But if you gotta make a film you gotta come up with something, right?
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