The Hobbit, though, was a charming little adventure story with only faint echoes of the true depths of Middle Earth. It's like splashing in the shallows and thinking you have it all in hand and then, all of a sudden, about three chapters into the Fellowship the bottom drops out and you realize that the waters are very deep indeed. And pure. And that it's a long, long way to shore.
And then you read the Silmarillion...
Excellent Contrast!
“...and didn’t really understand the point of the whole thing in cutting the Scouring Of The Shire.”
That’s easy; the Scouring of the Shire is Tolkien’s assault on socialism. We can’t have THAT in a movie, now can we?
” didn’t really understand the point of the whole thing in cutting the Scouring Of The Shire”
Easy. We can’t have the audience realizing that Tolkien showed the hobbits removing socialists from power, can we?
Jackson shortchanged Eowyn? Dude, that was Tolkien who did that.
Eowyn and Arwen have always struck me as characters that exist solely because someone said, “Y’know, JR, women ain’t gonna read that unless you put some chicks in it.”