/lit/ - Literature

What is your favorite LOTR character that's in the books, but not the movies? There are a ton of these.

I fucking love Beregond, the guard of the Citadel that Pippin befriends. He's a neat character because he's almost an "everyman" in Minas Tirith at the time of the War of the Ring, yet at the same time he gets to transcend everyman status when he breaks his vows to save Faramir's life.

>reading The Lord of the Rings
>get to the end of The Two Towers
>it's so much better than the movies

Fuck Peter Jackson. He ruined Faramir's character and that "fight" that Frodo and Sam have on the stairs of Cirith Ungol is monumentally stupid. Why do people like this hack? He just makes really dumb decisions with his characters. I hope Denethor isn't as bad in the books as he is in the movies, too.

I feel like Bloom, as an old ethnic Jew who's an atheist, really doesn't get religion at all, and therefore cannot possibly appreciate The Lord of the Rings.

>>Byatt - Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ''only personal.'' Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

This is absolutely true and I think it's a fair critique of Rowling. Compare 'magic' in Harry Potter to 'magic' in The Lord of the Rings. The magic there is connected to a broader cosmology and an ordering of the universe, which we are given strong hints about over the course of the trilogy. In Harry Potter, magic is just this thing that people can use. It's like any other tool, like a hammer or a gun or a pencil. It doesn't feel 'special,' beyond the feeling of specialness that is culturally attached to magic.