Lord of the Rings

Maybe so, but it kind of came out of nowhere, and without knowing that background, just comes off as a bad line.

Hmm. On that point I disagree, I think: I feel like the line would be perfectly chilling in movie form.

(Which would be sort of the problem with including it, as I see it: it makes perfect sense for a being like the Witch King to say such a thing, but it's a little too directly horrifying to fit the likely age-restriction of an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, I think.)

It would take him fully two minutes to deliver that line. Monologues dont work for the witch-king as he's presented in the film. He's not Sauron's diplomat, he's the hammer. The big stick.

There are many lines I can understand being swapped about for filmic purposes, but I can't say I find the confrontation between Witch-King and Eowyn one of them. There's a dynamic in the book that ends up missing in the screen, because the book plays up more the fact that the Witch-King's mere presence drives people insane with fear and terror. If memory does not fail me there's a passage where soldiers leap off the towers just from seeing the Witch-King, the whole thing with the Black Breath and whatnot. And the fact Eowyn is not only steadfast but also able to hold a conversation with him without fainting or fleeing in terror is part of what makes the scene awesome for me.

In the film I think they try to straddle the line by having Eowyn being more openly terrified of the Witch-King when they fight (and nonetheless steadfastly facing him) while in the book she's pretty stone-cold. It works, very well even, but there's a certain nuance that gets lost in translation.

Oh definitely.

Plus it's really hard to convey that kind of aura of scary purely visually. Like, even with today's advanced CGI you can't have that visceral reaction purely through a character on screen, the risk/probability of serious Narm is immense.

Whereas Eowyn being visibly terrified but fighting anyway conveys that this is a scary fucking dude and also she is badass.

Edited by jakobitis on Apr 2nd 2020 at 10:19:32 AM

In fact, there is a stone-cold badassness to the Book Eowyn that isn't translated at all into the Film character, who is a far warmer character.

I didn't like Eowyn (or Aragorn) until I read the books, which was after I saw the movies. I still have to fight off the movie impression of her when I reread them; it tends to undermine the mythic elements of her character, which are what appeal to me. Aragorn's description of and conversation about her in the Houses of Healing remains one of my favorite parts of the trilogy.

Aragorn and Eowyn both are very different characters in the movies. Book Aragorn almost never doubts himself. He sometimes wonders if he made the right decision, as with choosing to pursue the orcs who captured Merry and Pippin rather than the Ringbearer, but he never doubts who he is and what his final goal should be. I like both versions.

I love the fact that the Witch King uses such archaic language when confronting Eowyn. It emphasizes that he is thousands of years old and is stuck in the same speech patterns that he used as a king thousands of years earlier. He can't learn to talk like it's the fourth milenium of the Third Age. He's stuck with his "thous and thees" because his ring won't let him learn a new way of doing anything.

It probably has something to do with Eowyn being a Death Seeker in the book. Maybe they played that down in the film?

I still remember the Ralph-Bakshi film that had the dialogue from the books line for line and it came off as clunky and melodramatic. To say nothing of Robo-Skeletor the Witch King.

The mistake is to have the Witch-King shout the lines. Shouting a long threat like that is likely to come across as hammy. It needs a delivery that's more cold, calm, and chilling. Something more like this:

I think the only character who didn't go either up or down in my opinion between book and film was Sam. Because Sam is always 100% awesome.

x5

Then he should be unintelligible. Just 600 years ago, English was unintelligible to modern ears.

I like the thous and thees in the book because they work when you understand their implications. Thou/thee is used with close friends or with inferiors; it can be used either to display familiarity or to display contempt. The Witch-king and the Mouth of Sauron are using it - towards Eowyn, towards Gandalf, towards Aragorn - to be deliberately disdainful and insulting.

(On the other side of things, one of my favourite bits of LOTR trivia that I didn’t pick up on for ages is that the hobbit language used to have a formal/informal second-person distinction, but they’re so relaxed that they dropped the formal one. So Pippin is going around Minas Tirith calling everyone from Beregond to Denethor by the equivalent of the French tu that you would use with close friends. Which is why he gets the nickname “Prince of the Halflings” - they figure he must be someone incredibly high-ranking in his home country to be doing that.)

For my part, my two favourite scenes in LOTR are the entirety of “The Voice of Saruman” (even the extended-edition version in the films doesn’t match up; I’m so grateful to the BBC audio drama for doing it at full length and excellently) and the showdown between Eowyn and the Witch-king.

Edited by Galadriel on Apr 2nd 2020 at 8:11:08 AM

It's hard to say how much linguistic drift Tolkien actually put into his work given that the main extant languages we have for comparison over extended periods of time are elvish, which wouldn't be subject to linguistic drift in the same way of course because it's more or less the same damn people speaking it now as there were then. We do know Westron is a Creole Language derived from the Adunaic language of the Numenoreans however, so this drift might be subject to Medieval Stasis to a certain degree.

Also, given that the Witch King participated in the search for the Hobbits in the Shire as well as commanded armies of orcs which we know can speak Westron (modern Orc languages at the very least are derived from Westron) , it wouldn't be unfeasible for him to be able to speak modern Westron with passable mastery while perhaps keeping some old-timey inflections in from time to time. Remember, the Lord of the Rings was not originally written in English, the underlying conceit is that it was written in Westron and translated into English by Tolkien, to the extent that even the names of characters were changed in order to portray the same meanings in our language as it did in theirs. So, they may even be something lost in translation in that interaction

Edited by GoldenKaos on Apr 3rd 2020 at 9:56:51 AM

Elves would HATE meme culture

Oh, I think quite a few of them would find it fucking hilarious. They can be very teasing at times.

Yeah see for example when Bilbo is reciting his verse about Earendil. They are even more teasing/refusing to be serious in The Hobbit.

Like, Tolkien elves have tons of humour - they aren't the snooty self-important types that came from his derivative successors. They tended to be more melancholic at the wane of the Third Age and more likely to lament what was lost, as well as get far more serious when it comes to matters of the Ring and of Sauron, but on the whole they're just pretty good-natured and jovial bois otherwise.

I like to imagine Elrond, Arwen and Glorfindel joining in a rousing chorus of "Tra-la-la-lally, here down in the valley, ha! ha!"

"Toss a coin to your Ranger, "Oh valley of plenty!"

;P

That is fascinating! I don't think that I'd picked up on that at all, let alone as a reason that the people of the city call Pippin a "prince". (I also find it very amusing that he was going around talking informally with all these great people; "Heyo, Titan of our Age!")

And I think that it could work exactly that way: as a drawn-out, to-the-pain threat, delivered coldly and cruelly.

Indeed, I feel like some of the menace of the scene between Eowyn and the Witch-King was somewhat lost in the movie version, sadly. :/

All that said, at this point I should probably admit that I'm one of those few who laments the loss of Tom Bombadil from the movie, so my opinions are invalid. ;P

I hate Tom Bombadil with a burning passion so I don't :3

I will forever mourn not being able to see the legendary bright blue jacket and yellow boots on the big screen.

Tom Bombadil reminds me...

There's that part where Frodo decides to play a prank while they are at his house and puts the Ring on. The other three Hobbits all cannot see him and are shocked at his disappearance but Tom can see him clearly and even says "take that off, your finger's prettier without it", then fails to become invisible when he himself puts it on.

What do you think, did Tom see Frodo normally with the Ring on, just like we all saw Tom, that is no change, or...?