Sentence four: Within a span of three weeks I watched The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, rewatched The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, reread The Hobbit, and read the majority of The Silmarillion. That’s about seventeen hours of Tolkien and Middle Earth (sentence five . . . I’ll stop now). My main problem with The Desolation of Smaug (alternate title: Barrel Riding, Smaug Won’t Die, and Who on [Middle] Earth Is Tauriel?) was the same one I had with An Unexpected Journey: nobody falls 500 feet/gets hit in the head nineteen times/gets set on fire and then is a) perfectly fine or b) stunned for a few minutes then makes a miraculous 2.1 second recovery.
Other than that, I thought the movie was very good. Besides the storyline and cinematography itself, I did not fall asleep and I didn’t think the movie was excessively loud. In fact, the twenty minutes of previews were louder than the actual movie because of all the gunfire they had in them. No guns in Middle Earth . . . just force-field-creating staffs and glowing swords and the like. . . . You know, much more realistic stuff.
I’d heard that the actor who plays Thranduil (Lee Pace) was good, and he was. I also found out/realized that the actor who plays Bilbo (Martin Freeman) is Watson on Sherlock. As it turns out, his other role that I recognized is Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Which fits in perfectly with the fact that he spends most of his screen time confused, ridiculed, insulted, and otherwise verbally abused. [Bilbo: dwarves consider him a burden. Watson: gets called an idiot on a regular basis by Sherlock. Arthur Dent: taken from his home planet and dragged uselessly around the universe.]
Anyway, after rereading The Hobbit I found out that the movies follow the book more closely than I thought. The stone giants from An Unexpected Journey are really in the book, and the eagles do in fact leave the dwarves/hobbit in what appears to be the stupidest place possible: a giant spire that is 1) in the middle of nowhere, 2) super high and steep, and 3) nowhere near the mountain. The dwarves do also escape Thranduil by leaving in barrels, but there is no orc/goblin fight as they’re leaving. In fact, the dwarves are not actually pursued by anything for almost all of the book.
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| My collection of Tolkien books |
As for The Silmarillion, I’d been trying to read it for awhile (i.e., years). I first tried it sometime in high school, got through the horribly dry introduction and maybe twenty pages of the actual book, and stopped. At the end of last summer, I thought I’d try again, made it through about a hundred pages, and got derailed by college. Between Schrodinger, matrices, degrees of freedom, and Aristotle and all his pals, I was not in the mood to read something as dense as The Silmarillion. Because it’s dense. There is no filler material in the book. I guess when you’re trying to write several thousand years of history in 400 pages, every word counts.
Basically, The Silmarillion is a history of the elves: how they were created and came to Middle Earth, and then everything that happens to them up until the end of The Lord of the Rings. It really is dense, but it’s also interesting, if somewhat depressing. Throughout the book, there’s murder, war, treachery, breaking of oaths, anger, greed, and lust; however, there is also some love, and friendship, and the triumph of good over evil. Like I said, it’s interesting, and the book explains certain things, like where the wizards came from, and why Aragorn – the king – ends up wandering aimlessly around the wilderness, and how Sauron ended up in Mordor. While you do have to be interested in Tolkien’s Middle Earth and its history to make it through The Silmarillion, it was well worth my time. Apparently there are over a dozen other books about the history of Middle Earth . . . Summer reading?
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