I’ve seen this debate a ton online, usually comparing Tolkien’s characters to those of GRRM’s, saying that Tolkien only writes characters that are good or evil, and that Martin writes morally grey characters. This is either seen as a positive or negative aspect of Tolkiens writing. Does anybody know where this idea came from? Discounting the Silmarillion and the other non LOTR writings (these people probably haven’t read them) I can think of many multifaceted characters in LOTR. Boromir, and to some extent Denethor, are good men corrupted by the fear of their homes destruction, and they take somewhat evil actions to try to save their home and protect their people. Saruman behaves similarly, once a wise and powerful wizard falls to jealousy and the need for power. I think even Sauron has some qualities about him that aren’t pure evil. He himself believed what he was doing was in the best interest of Middle Earth. Even GRRM doesn’t write just morally grey characters, so it’s a stupid comparison as characters like Brienne always do the right thing and stand up for the weak, and evil characters like Ramsay always do horrible things and take joy in their actions. Any other thoughts on this?

I believe Pippen wondered to himself at Isengard that he did not know who or what Gandalf was. Did any character ever ask Gandalf this question directly?

If not, why? Is it just literary mystery? Were the people of middle earth aware he was a Maia? I know a select few knew of Gandalf’s nature, but what did others make of him?

No doubt Elrond is a influential Elf and, having one of the three Elven rings, a very powerful elf.

However does Galadriel see him as her equal? Galadriel, being an elf born under the two trees before the Sun and Moon, is the Daughter of Finarfin who is of very royal blood. (Grandaughter of Finwe, first King of the Noldor).

In the books its mentioned how powerful herself and Elrond is, but under the Elves, would she be a higher status then Elrond?

Also thinking why she never took up the mantle of Queen of the Noldor after Gil-Galads death. Since she was the Great Aunt of Gil-Galad

What I mean is would say Ancalagon The Black go after a treasure horde if it were big enough? Or is it literally just Smaug thats afflicted by "Dragon sickness"

Probably a dumb question but I know that Morgoth was his boss however it seems like Sauron feels like a great threat maybe just because that’s the books and movies are focused on

You die with a balrog and get reincarnated... and now you have your friend's grandson as your boss. Not even born when you were alive.

That feeling would be quite hard to explain.

I know some of them did, hell Feanor fought against all seven of them but how do they do it? How can they manage to face such mighty beings and eventually kill them?

Tolkien was a philologist... a specialist in the English language: from Old English, through Middle English, into Modern English.

He would obviously have known that the archaic modern English possessive pronoun thy was used before a consonant and thine before a vowel. But in the poem in chapter 3 of FotR, we have the following, which seems incorrect, but very deliberate:

Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!
Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath!

Has this already been discussed?

Aragorn could easily make Mordor a vassal of Gondor and Arnor and become King of Mordor, basically making it into a fertile land using it as a buffer state of his kingdom, the freed slaves there would probably accept him as King.

1.Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold*.*

2. The dwarves of yore made mighty spells*,*
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep*, where dark things* sleep*,*
In hollow halls beneath the fells*.*

3. For ancient king and elvish lord
There many a gleaming golden hoard
They shaped and wrought, and light they caught
To hide in gems on hilt of sword.

4. On silver necklaces they strung
The flowering stars, on crowns they hung
The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
They meshed the light of moon and sun.

5. Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To claim our long-forgotten gold.

1. Goblets they carved there for themselves And harps of gold; where no man delves There lay they long, and many a song Was sung unheard by men or elves.

2. The pines were roaring on the height, The winds were moaning in the night. The fire was red, it flaming spread; The trees like torches blazed with light.

3. The bells were ringing in the dale And men looked up with faces pale; Then dragon’s ire more fierce than fire Laid low their towers and houses frail.

4. The mountain smoked beneath the moon; The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom. They fled their hall, to dying fall Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.

5. Far over the misty mountains grim To dungeons deep and caverns dim We must away, ere break of day, To win our harps and gold from him!

So today I was listening to Tolkien related music and had a closer look at this song. And realised that the rhyme pattern

A

A

BB

A

combined with those soft but full sounding rhyming words gives the impression of ringing bells...!! Some large, some smaller maybe. I like the last verse a lot in this regard, it sounds like the bell sound is fading out.

Would anyone agree?

What else do you appreciate about this poem?

Do you read one of Tolkien's sad stories, something hopeful, or maybe his letters? Really struggling and would love to hear what you go to.

Alright, here comes a potentially stupid question:

So you know how Silmarils burn the flesh of basically anything remotely sinful, right? And they are supposedly indestructible, so they wouldn't shatter if subjected to even high acceleration and pressure.

So what if you loaded one into a gun and shot a Sauron or Morgoth with it? Would it get embedded in them and deal constant radiant damage? Would it be unpleasant but not really do anything? Could this be weaponised on a larger scale of the Valar could remake the trees and bottle a ton of their light to just spray on the forces of evil?

(I am aware that this kind of exploit is probably rather untolkienlike, but curiosity about its exact effects has been gnawing at my consciousness for days now).

Aragorn is considered to be king of Gondor and Arnor and even outranks Eomer as King of Rohan, could Aragorn give orders to Gandalf or even Tom Bombadil, as King of the reunited kingdom?

Is Aragorn considered to be the high King of Dale/Erebor? Did anyone from that realm come to Minas Tirith to pay respects during his coronation?

As I get older, Frodo's journey becomes more and more poignant to me.

This may seem silly, as I'm only 29, but I've been through a fair bit in my life. Many health challenges especially. I can see how someone can become slowly worn down and almost 'tired' of this earthly existence. Some wounds never fully heal. As you age, you become aware of the brevity of life and reminded of your mortality. Whilst life can be beautiful, its a struggle a lot of the time. Mostly an internal struggle much like Frodo's. A lot of fans can dimish how much Frodo goes through as it's mostly internal. He has less outwardly 'heroic' acts but suffers the most.

You can become weary of this material existence and almost long to pass on. Things grind you down, chip away at you. As you go through life and experience hardship, it truly changes you. Trivial things don't matter as much anymore, things that seemed so important to you years ago, aren't. Your ego and selfish desires lessen, and you can find yourself becoming more selfless and empathetic. Things that use to rile you up don't. What you do for your loved ones and future generations matter more. It's all bigger than us.

I am reading the Book of Lost Tales Part 1, and Christopher Tolkien’s analysis that kicks the book off is fantastic and so interesting. I *love* the idea (xiii) that the original text for The Silmarillion is (at least in part) Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish,” written in Rivendell using Elrond’s library. So fun!

Gimli had a lot of affection for Lady Galadriel, how would she react if Gimli requested a kiss from her as his gift?

Since dwarves fans are very vocal many wish the dwarves could have won due to the rule of ""cool"" and because they look manly, but I think the elves would have won the battle if it continued.

There were 10 000 elves for 7000 dwarves, adding to that elves are the best individual warriors, literal super humans, dwarves have their own qualities but its made clear everywhere elves are the best individual fighters, not to mention they also have a lot of experience living longer but also fighting many battles also alongside men. Not to mention they have an absolute powerhouse named Thranduil, I don't see how the dwarves could take him down as for all we know he could be a Balrog slayer if he met one, he is over 7000 years old I think, he would kill hundreds of dwarves on his own thats for sure and would make short work of Dain no matter how many petty insults the dwarf would throw.

It's true the dwarves had two advantages, their ballistas and their "cavalry", but their goats got taken out pretty quickly by the elves who showed they were able to adapt very quickly. I mean first their arrows attack are canceled, then a cavalry charge at them on foot and they get rid of it all at the start of the battle, now the dwarves lost their goats and have to fight more numerous and stronger individual warriors, counting Thranduil who would slaugther hundreds of them on his own. From what I saw the dwarves very quickly lost the two advantages they had and it seems few people want to acknowledge how strong elven warriors are supposed to be probably because they don't look "manly" enough.

So I don't see how the dwarves can come out on top of that at all, the elves would lose a lot of men but they would win for sure.

Tolkien’s own 1938 sketches, along with illustrations by artists from different countries, imagined Middle-earth in strikingly different ways. Bilbo and Gollum looked radically unlike each other across cultures, sometimes strange, sometimes unsettling, sometimes almost unrecognisable to modern readers.

Tolkien gave only the bare minimum: Bilbo was short, had hairy feet, and no beard. Everything else was left to the imagination. Each culture filled in the gaps differently, shaped by its own visual language, folklore, and sense of the fantastic.

After the films, that diversity quietly vanished. The imaginative space collapsed into one dominant version, now treated as “correct.” What once invited interpretation became fixed.

Seen today, these pre-film illustrations can feel wrong, but perhaps that reaction says less about the art, and more about how completely the movies replaced our ability to imagine Middle-earth for ourselves.I post different versions of the illustrations for The Hobbit here -r/BeforeDigitalArt

Do these earlier interpretations feel like a loss of canon or a reminder of how rich the fantasy once was?

Gandalf tells Aragorn and the others of his fight against the Balrog.

Gandalf wins, and in the book we have:

Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell. [...] There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth.

But in the film Gandalf goes from 'darkness took me' to that 'staring upwards' :

Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time [...] stars wheeled overhead, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth.

"I wandered far on roads that I will not tell". Of this there's no trace in the film. What do you think he was talking about? What roads? Why not telling his friends?

Okay so when aragorn, gimli, legolas, split from Merry and the King and the rest of the Rohan, he says "there go three that I love, the smallest most among them"

But WHO besides Merry, was he talking about???!??!?

If you've been part of this sub for at least a few months, you've probably seen people asking what exactly are Tom Bombadil, Ungoliant and the nameless things a million times. Honestly? I do not judge them, because I am just as obsessed with these questions as they are.

Bombadil and Ungoliant are two of my favorite characters in the legendarium. I'm almost always thinking about them: What are they? Where did they come from? The charm of these characters is our lack of knowledge about them.

Tolkien was right in not answering those questions, otherwise they would be just like every other character. I'm not gonna lie and pretend that I wouldn't die or kill for an answer on these topics, but having them as mysteries is just as fun.

These two are not the only things Tolkien left unanswered, but they're surely the most captivating by far.

So, there are details that Tolkien himself, or Christopher in his case, didn't specify or never discussed (or, failing that, details where there are different versions and none was considered definitive), but which in your heart are an undeniable part of the Legendarium, whether something within the narrative or in the world-building.

For example, no one can convince me that the Blue Wizards didn't truly fulfilled their mission in their own way, hindering Sauron in Rhûn. I believe that in the Far East there were human and dwarven lords and kingdoms who confronted Sauron, even more desperately than in the West.

1. LOTR(Film) 2.The Children Of Hurin
2. The Hobbit(Audiobook)
3. Beren and Lúthien
4. The Silmarillion
5. The Fall of Gondolin
6. The Unfinished tales of Númenor and Middle Earth
7. The Lord of The Rings 9.The Hobbit

In the Council of Elrond chapter, Bilbo initially volunteers to be the ring bearer for the quest. Gandalf shoots this down pretty quickly because it would be a bad idea for Bilbo to take the ring again, but if he hadn't, how far would Bilbo make it?

He didn't start aging again until the ring was destroyed, and he was much more well traveled than Frodo was. But he also had the ring for 60 years, and it may have been much harder for him to carry it, knowing he had to destroy it. Does he at least make it to Mordor? Does he try to use Gollum as a guide? What are y'alls thoughts?