Gondor

In the movie, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the character that I found most intriguing was Aragorn. Right from the start, He was kind to the hobbits by escorting them to Rivendell. When the council meeting was being held by Elrond, Aragorn was the first to volunteer to help Frodo take the ring to Mordor and destroy it. In this scene, Aragon told Frodo that he would protect him with his life. Throughout the movie, he always put Frodo and the hobbits first which demonstrated his…

Wormtongue is a malevolent traitor who exemplifies J.R.R. Tolkien’s belief that power is corruptive in The Two Towers: Book One. Wormtongue is not an influential character alone, but he leeches onto the power of Theoden and uses the force of betrayal to attempt his own personal gain. While Wormtongue’s ultimate loyalty remains to Saruman, he manipulates King Theoden to weaken the power of Edoras. While Wormtongue’s method of manipulation and strategic influence over Theoden gain him some…

Combined with courage was often the virtue of self-sacrifice: the willingness to place oneself in danger to assure the safety of others. This noble attitude has often been trivialized and made almost into a cliche in some fiction, but its origins in heroic literature are much more serious as numerous squires die protecting their knights. (58) Although Sam is not a warrior he shows undying devotion to his master as he follows him into danger and refuses to leave him. Frodo is a hero because he is…

at a servant to Morgoth but now is a slave to his ambition. Ambition is good but too much ambition is poison. Many men have died for their own ambition but none more than Boromir. He fell prey to his ambition of using the ring to save his people of Gondor. Although he allowed Sauron to influence him. Sauron influenced and incited many to follow and do his bidding. The main bait that ensnared many was the promise of immortality. It catered to the greed in lesser creatures such as men. Men who…

J. R. R. Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892. He loved to create and learn languages his whole life. His parents died when he was a young man. He attended Oxford College. The Hobbit was published in 1937 and is the prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He wrote it as a Dark Age prehistory for Europe. The novels had integrated many diverse characters throughout the storyline. There are many conflicts that change the course of the plot. This includes characters’ fates and the destiny…

Humans have constantly been improving what they have already got. To achieve a more perfect version, they go through a number of eras or epochs where they try out different versions. Pablo Picasso, a Spanish painter in the 20th century, went through different periods where he drew in a specific colour to see how it affected the painting. He started off with the Blue Period, where he drew mostly blue colours (Pablo Picasso, 2015). This he used for a few years, until he switched to the Rose…

It was the most unlikely event to happen. Just by chance did the hobbit Bilbo Baggins reach down and pick up what at the time seemed insignificant, “ . . . a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel” (Tolkien 76). At this point of the book, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, the character Bilbo thinks nothing of picking up what seems an insignificant object, this cold tiny ring. Little does Bilbo know that this ring would change Middle Earth forever and, though the ring is an…

The Battle of Helm’s Deep was the first major battle of the War of the Ring where the Rohirrim defended Helm’s Deep from Saruman’s militia of Uruk-hai and orcs. The Battle of Helm’s Deep acts dissimilarly in both the film and the book. In the film, it is a pivotal battle, similar to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King. In the book, it is simply just another battle in the lead-up to the finale at Pelennor Fields and Minas Tirith. Per se, there is much less detail in the…

In 2001, the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo allowed three sessions on Tolkien to be presented. That seminal event was the ‘nucleus’ from which this collection sprang. For forty years, editor Jane Chance, Professor Emerita in English of Rice University, has written and taught medieval literature, medieval culture, medieval women and modern medievalism. She has authored or edited five critical studies of Tolkien’s work, as well as numerous…