The Fellowship actually started out very Hobbit-like, which was part of its power (over me, anyway) - it was all nice and sweet and avuncular until the Nazgul showed up in the Shire. At which point I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. It was sort of like paddling around in the shallow end of the pool thinking you’re safe and all of a sudden realizing that you were in the deep end all along. Problem is, you can only do that once, but it sure worked on me.
“It was sort of like paddling around in the shallow end of the pool thinking you’re safe and all of a sudden realizing that you were in the deep end all along. Problem is, you can only do that once, but it sure worked on me.”
It was a wonderful read, tooling around in the Shire, and you’re exactly right about the arrival of the Black Riders. I read the whole thing about three and a half times I think, got bogged down in the middle the fourth time through, the second book was the darkest.
The movies have been amazingly like how I saw it in my mind’s eye, except for the Orcs. I had major issues with their portrayal as WWF-rejects. To me they should have looked like ragged hybrid raven-ostriches, nailed-on shoes and all. Gollum was great in CG mode, and other beasts - I would have liked to see the same care given to the Orcs.
The elves and their cities were wonderful. Gandalf in the Dark Tower was awesome. The hobbits were great. Strider/Aragorn was excellent.
All in all, great fun. Tolkien may have been disappointed, but he and the Inklings would have been disappointed in many things about our times. They would have grieved the loss of the joy of the written word in favor of technology and everything being visualized FOR us.
Hell, I grieve at the loss of bookstores. I could spend hours in my favorite haunts. That’s all gone now. What a shame.