The best lines from the Lord of the Rings movies that aren't in the books

Many years ago now, I wrote about the ten things from the Lord of the Rings movies that drove me the craziest. They mostly involved changes to the books that I thought departed thematically from their source material, rather than just on a straight plot level, to the ruin of all. Since the coming week is going to feature both the second coming of a man I can't believe was ever taken seriously as the chief civil servant along with super cold temperatures, it's going to be a bleak couple of days. I thought I'd try to inject a little hope by returning to the work that I think is more about hope than any other I've ever read seriously, which is Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. As Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey said, if there is one image that best captures what LoTR is about, it's a trumpet braying in defiance. So let's defy this week by considering Tolkien and the movies he inspired a little bit. 

Since the goal this week is to spread hope, I'd like to find something to celebrate in Jackson's trilogy, rather than something to be annoyed by. If earlier, I wrote about changes to the source material that I thought changed the theme in ruinous ways, this time, I'll write about good changes made that were appropriate to the medium of film, changes that either preserved the original themes or even advanced them in new ways.

Here are the rules

I'm only dealing with new material on a dialogue level, meaning I'm looking for best lines that are in the movies that aren't in the books. Of course, with Jackson's movies, "not in the books" is a little bit difficult to decide upon. A characteristic of all three movies is that they often include dialogue that is in the books somewhere, but not in the place where it appears in the movie, or even in the exact words or spoken by the same character. 

One example is the very opening lines of the movie. There is a voiceover by Galadriel that begins, "The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air." In the book, these lines are spoken almost exactly like the ones in the movie, but they are spoken to Galadriel, not by her. It is the Ent Treebeard who says them. And he isn't saying them near the beginning of the story, but near the very end, after the ring has been destroyed.  

A second example is spoken by Gandalf to Pippin to comfort him as he is afraid during the battle with Mordor in Minas Tirith. Pippin says he didn't think it would end like this, and Gandalf says: 

"End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it....White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise."

Part of this is invented whole cloth, and part of it is taken from narration, not spoken dialogue, that occurs early in the books. Frodo is in the house of Tom Bombadil (a section that I think was wisely excised from the movies), and Frodo has a dream. In the dream, he sees a pale light..."growing to turn the veil (of rain) all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise." Much later in the book, we realize that this was foreshadowing Frodo's journey across the sea to Valinor, because once he is away, he recalls the dream, only now he adds "white shores" to it. So in the movie, Gandalf is making explicit what the books only ever hint at darkly, which is some hope of a destiny beyond death for humans and hobbits.

It's sort of a subjective call, then, to decide whether lines from the movies are "not in the books" or they are. I don't aim to be consistent. If it feels to me like the line is new enough, I'll count it.

As far as criteria for best, that is subjective, too, obviously, but I'm looking for something that stands on its own as good enough dialogue that it was worth inventing it. The line should reveal character, move the plot, or develop the themes of the story. I will also be awarding bonus points if the line in question has become a fruitful source of LoTR-related memes. I'm not a huge meme fan for the most part, but the memes from LoTR are still top-notch twenty-five years later, and I will honor some of the lines for having created their own secondary art form. 

The list

These are in no particular order, except for the last two, which I consider the best.

What about second breakfast?

This line, spoken by Pippin before he has quite processed what it means to have agreed to accompany Frodo on his flight from the Shire, does a great job of establishing both Pippin's pre-heroic-journey priorities as well as developing our understanding of hobbit lives. The list he enumerates after second breakfast of other hobbit meals often forms the backbone of the menu during LoTR watch parties. The line is loveable and funny and comes with a good sight gag from a mildly annoyed, mildly amused Strider. Sadly, the expression "second breakfast" is not in the books at all, although you could easily infer its existence from both LoTR and The Hobbit. 

One does not simply walk into Mordor

The king of all meme-creating lines. The king of all lines from the movies that one ends up twisting into other sayings in real life. The king of lines that show us the temperament of Boromir, who is brave and noble, but who thinks that everyone not from Gondor just doesn't know shit about what it's like to face real fucking combat, man, so fuck all you civilians. 

...and I'm coming with you!

Ah, Sam. Such a familiar character from the moment we meet him, and yet so true and faithful that by the time the story is over, he's taken the archetype he fits into and broken it and remade it into his own image. When Frodo tells Sam that he is going to Mordor alone, Sam's response, "Of course you are, and I'm coming with you," tells us many things about Sam. One, it tells us that he had already guessed Frodo's mind, which he usually does. Second, it tells us everything we need to know about what Sam's core principles are and where his head is going to be at for the rest of the movies. 

I've said before that one thing I don't like about the movies is that they switched many characters from having a flat arc to a positive one, because that's what movies usually do. Aragorn is the biggest example. But Sam is the one character whose pre-adventure character is the same as it is at the end. Except for maybe getting up the courage to ask Rosie Cotton to dance. 

I would have followed you....my captain, my king

I used to be kind of indifferent to these lines, but they've grown on me. It's important that Boromir isn't just a throwaway character who is only there to convince viewers that the ring really can corrupt and that maybe not everyone will get to live to the end of the story. Boromir deserves to be mourned, and it's worth taking a beat to acknowledge that he was a worthy man done in by evil. In the books, the three walkers Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli take an insane amount of time, under the circumstances, to sing a funeral song for him. I think the movie is right to redeem him fully in the eyes of the audience by telling us that if it had come to it, he would ultimately have welcomed the return of the king.

Those without swords can still die upon them

This is one of those lines I'm taking liberty with, because Eowyn does say them in the book, but in a very different place. She says these lines while in the houses of healing in Gondor after she awesomely slays the Witchking of Angmar because he is the absolute baddest of bad asses in Tokien's supposedly misogynistic story. She wants to go out and join those assaulting the Black Gate, and she is frustrated that her healers will not allow her to go. I think the movies needed to leave out most of the houses of healing scenes just for time purposes, but it was important that they include this line somewhere. Having Eowyn say it to Aragorn allows us to know her mind before and during her fateful decisions, rather than after. 

I have been working on and off for a while on a long paper concerning disobedience to orders in LoTR. There are at least five times in the story where someone disobeys an order and if they had not done so, Frodo's quest would have failed. Eowyn is as good an example as any, and this line shows that she has the clear, internal moral vision that is necessary to make the incredibly difficult decision to follow one's internal orders over those of authority. 

Elrond's warning to his daughter that Aragorn will still die

Holy Jesus, if you want to read something sad, read the full story of Arwen and Aragorn's love from the annexes to Return of the King. In the movie, Elrond is borrowing from that part of the annex. I was glad that it was worked into the movies in some way, and I also love the use of some of Tolkien's archaic, noble language here, the reference to the enormous past that Middle Earth has had, as in "splendor of the kings of men undimmed before the breaking of the world." I'm not a huge fan of a lot of choices the movies made with Aragorn and Arwen, either individually or as a couple, but I was fine with adding in Elrond's resistance to their marriage mostly because it led to this insertion. 

There won't be a Shire, Pip

Of the three movies in the trilogy, Two Towers is easily the weakest. There are some questionable choices of manufactured conflicts meant to give arcs to characters. One of those conflicts is the one the two "other" hobbits, Pippin and Merry, face. They stumble across Ents, who are very strong and could be powerful allies in the war. They try to convince the Ents to join the war, but the Ents originally aren't interested. They eventually change their minds, but in the space between the Ents' decision to sit out the war and the decision to get involved, Pippin thinks that maybe he and Merry should just hightail it back to the peaceful Shire. Merry rightly observes that unless evil is stopped, the Shire will soon be as bad as everywhere else. 

I've said this line about a million times, every time someone brings up leaving the U.S. now that Trump is president again. The fires of Isengard will spread unless they are stopped where they are. This isn't quite explicit in the books, mostly because the Ents never actually reject the notion of going to war, but I was fine with making it more of an explicit theme in the movies. I think Tolkien would have agreed with the sentiment. With confronting all manner of evil, there are times to "fly, you fools," and there are times to turn and confront the evil. 

So it begins

This isn't an especially good line. It's kind of boilerplate action movie fare. Chosen for its extreme memeability alone. 

Share the load

Also chosen mostly because of the memes it has inspired. I’m not a terribly huge fan of how the Smeagol/Sam/Frodo relationship is made into a love triangle in the movies. This line is part of that whole indulgence, but at least it’s one that leads to funny comments.

I give hope to men/I keep none for myself

I'm not the only person not crazy about how Aragorn is changed in the movies from a guy who knew he wanted to be king to a guy with a crisis of identity because he doesn't want to be one. So I don't really like that one scene that many people love where Elrond comes to Aragorn to give him the sword (that he had already had for two whole books in Tolkien's version) and convince him to "put away the ranger" and "become the king you were born to be." 

However, that scene does contain another reference pulled from the appendices. It's actually Aragorn's mother who said she kept no hope for herself, although she had given it to men by bearing Aragorn. (Aragorn's name as a child is Estel, meaning "hope.") I said above that LoTR is more about hope than any story I've ever thought about a lot, and it is, but part of its message concerning hope is that a realistic appraisal of the world will mean having to carry on without hope sometimes. I just can't think of a better message for this week.

Pippin's "Home is Behind" song to Denethor

If you've read the books, you know they're just crammed full of songs. It would have been impossible to put even a quarter of them into the movies, but the movies do want to reassure viewers who love the books that yes, they're aware that it's sad to leave all of that out. There are a few moments when the songs and poems work their way in, even if in shortened form. Aragorn sings part of the Lay of Luthien, and he also sings of the ancient story of how his ancestors arrived upon the shores of Middle Earth. Treebeard sing-songs about the lost Ent-wives. Maybe the best use of the musical/poetic material from the books is when Pippin sings for Denethor, who has lost most of his mind and is about to lose the rest. Once again, the writers of the movies wove the song in from other places in the books. In the books, Pippin still sings the lines heard in the movie, but in a very different context. He sings them while the hobbits are traveling and still in the Shire, not yet fully aware of their peril. 

The song in its full version from the book concerns a traveler who is thinking about all of the places in the world he hasn't gone yet, and the traveler decides for the moment to delay seeing them and to head home to fire and lamp and meat and bread. In the movie, using only that one verse from the song, it takes on a different meaning. Tolkien used some songs repeatedly in his work, changing them slightly as the context of the story changed, and the movies did the same thing. "Home is Behind" was the best example of it, and so I single it out here as an example of something the movies do well throughout. 

The journey doesn't end here

I wrote about this one in the introduction above. I'm okay with making the movies more overtly Christian-ish and marginally less pagan-ish. It's there in the books, just not quite so confidently stated. If anyone is going to tell humans and hobbits that there is a chance they survive death in some way, it's Olorin-Gandalf, who learned mercy from Nienna herself. Although Tolkien's legendarium is pretty vague on the fate of men beyond death, I think it's possible Gandalf actually knows what he's talking about. Nienna was the sister to Mandos, sort of the Hades of Tolkien's world, and she lived on the borders of Mandos' kingdom. It's possible Gandalf wasn't just making that up to make Pippin feel better. 

That still only counts as one

Most of Gimli's D&D dwarf yuk-yuking in the movies annoys me. This one doesn't.  

Aragorn's inspirational speech at the black gates

Almost none of this is in the books. The one line that is, "Stand, Men of the West," has a totally different meaning. Aragorn isn't saying "stand your ground and fight," he's instead saying, "Look, Frodo just finished the quest, so quit fighting and stand still." I don't find this speech all that great, and Viggo Mortenson's voice sounds a little funny in parts, but I think it was probably important to show Aragorn being, I don't know, kingly in battle or something. Since they had to write a speech from scratch, they did a good job of at least making it sort of within Aragorn's character, understanding the weakness of others and trying to reason with them rather than order them. 

Okay...now the two best ones

Second place: A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to.

Wait...this isn't in the books? The line feels so natural in the movie, it seems like it must be in the books, but it isn't. When I heard this line in the movie way back in the day, I felt like I was home, and I enjoyed the ride for the next three hours. But it's not in the books. Check me on this. 

There are some observations in the books on how Gandalf comes and goes as he pleases. Maybe the closest the books come to the pith of what Gandalf says is when Gandalf arrives in the nick of time at the Battle of Helm's Deep. Aragorn, meeting Gandalf at last, says to him that "Once more you come in the hour of need, unlooked-for." Gandalf replies that it shouldn't be "unlooked for," because he had said that he would return and meet him here. In other words, you should have trusted that I would show up when I was needed. 

I'm not sure what made the movie's writers put this line in. Maybe after reading and re-reading the story, they themselves were struck by how many times Gandalf seems to arrive just in the nick of time. It's certainly true in The Hobbit. 

It's also sort of a foreshadowing. Gandalf is NEVER late, but later on, he's not going to show up when he promised Frodo that he would. He 'broke tryst" as he will say at the Council of Elrond, and that has never happened before. So it's setting up what happens later, which Tolkien does all the time. Oh, yeah, and it also establishes that Frodo is one of the few people close enough to Gandalf to be able to trade banter with him. Great addition. 

First place: My friends! You bow to no one. 

I get angry in the books when the hobbits go back to the Shire and nobody seems to understand that Frodo is the goddamn savior of the planet. I know, I know. It has to be that way. Frodo even says so, in some of the most poignant words of the whole trilogy: "I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them." But do all those dumb hobbits really have to go about not realizing who Frodo is? It angers Sam, and it angers me, too. 

Frodo may be stoic about not fitting in around the Shire when he comes back, and of course, he never wanted to be treated like a hero. But he is a hero. He's the hero of heroes. 

The book does grant him a good deal of being treated like the hero he deserves, just not in the Shire. When he awakes after nearly perishing in the fires of Mount Doom after completing the quest, Frodo is told of the honor he and Frodo will be held in: "The clothes that you wore on your way to Mordor...even the orc-rags that your bore in the black land, Frodo, shall be preserved. No silks and linens, nor any armour or heraldry could be more honourable." There are festivals in honor of Frodo and Sam, and minstrels write songs about them, and the people go so far as to use quasi-religious terms about them: "Praise them with great praise!" 

The movie was never going to include a long segment on the Scouring of the Shire or all the other things that happened in the books to the hobbits when they returned home. It wasn't going to have a segment with a minstrel singing "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" (although the much shorter animated version did include this song). But you know what? Frodo suffered for our salvation. He deserves his moment. So does Sam. If Merry and Pippin happen to get honored along with them, fine. They're kinsmen of Frodo. His kinsmen can have my praise and thanks, too, just for having been related to him. It's a necessary scene, not so much for the movie, but for me to feel whole. There is a moment when everyone recognizes that in spite of all the heroism that went on, the only two real heroes are the ones who slogged it out to the finish line in a land far beyond hope. 

The flat arc, Lord of the Rings, and going the distance

We're almost a week into the new year, meaning, according to all research, that a fair number of people have already abandoned their New Year's resolutions. People can be forgiven for thinking there is some magic to keeping a resolution; we're often fed the notion that change only comes as a result of some great epiphany at the end of unusual events. The character arc of most fiction, be it in books, movies, drama, or TV, follows this formula. A character is stuck in some place, then events come along that crescendo until they finally reach a point where the character realizes something that prompts a change. The change allows the character to overcome the thing that has been preventing him or her from finding happiness.

Three kinds of arcs

(Caveat: I'm definitely plagiarizing someone in this section. I'd be happy to cite the proper source, but this is now so widely circulated, I don't really know where the following classification of character arcs began. I'll have to just be content with saying this isn't me.)

Generally, the trajectory or arc a character follows in a narrative can be classified as one of three types of arc:

The positive arc: Most of us are pretty familiar with this one. It's what I just described above. We meet a character and learn about that character's traits, which are a blend of positive and negative. The negative traits are causing some kind of problem in the character's life. (This is sometimes called "the lie the character believes.") The character faces a series of challenges that force her to face up to the weakness (or to see through "the lie") and change. The moment of change is the climax, and it is followed by the denouement, which shows us how the climax allows the character to resolve the issue.

One reason I really like Finding Nemo is that you can teach a lot of narrative concepts easily from it. It follows a perfect narrative cycle of rising action-climax-denouement. It also has three characters who clearly have positive character arcs.

The negative arc: This is an artsier example, at least for main characters. Stories in which the main character gets worse instead of better tend not to satisfy, so we usually relegate the negative character arc to a secondary character. In a negative character arc, the person has a chance to change for the better, but fails to. Sometimes, this just means retreating into the negative traits that cause the problem (continuing to believe "the lie"), but it can also mean the character actually goes from good to bad or bad to worse. Charles Foster Kane from Citizen Kane is one familiar example of a main character with a negative arc.

The flat arc: In a flat arc, the character doesn't essentially change. We might see the character dealing with challenges better in some sections than others, but the character's view of how one ought to face challenges doesn't really change. Often, it is a secondary character with a flat arc. This character is not changed by events nearly as much as the character causes change in others. This character comes into the story knowing something, and this knowledge unlocks the mysteries another character (usually the main character) needs to unlock, or helps the main character see through "the lie." Once in a while, a story will be about this "impact character," and the story becomes about how the main character changes others, rather than is changed. Chauncey Gardner in Being There or Amelie from the movie of the same name come to mind.

There can be mixed arcs. Frodo Baggins has basically a flat arc: he is able to endure from beginning to end because he is basically humble and true and good from beginning to end. However, he is wiser at the end. So are all of the hobbits, and while their basic character remains the same at the end as it was at the beginning, they have also changed enough that they are able to defeat Saruman and his lackeys in the Scouring of the Shire.

Lord of the Rings and the flat arc

Nearly all the main characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings have flat arcs. There are a few exceptions, like Saruman, Boromir, and Gollum (all negative arcs), but most of the characters are very much the same at the end as they were at the beginning. The movies changed this for a couple of characters, because the movies needed to make money and people really love positive character arcs. I understand why everyone loves positive arcs. It's important for us all to believe we can change. That's a good thing to believe. If you didn't it'd be hard to get out of bed in the morning.

But I'm a big fan of the flat arc. The fact is that most of us don't really need an epiphany to get past the hurdles in our lives. We just need to do the damn work. Most people who resolved to lose weight or run a 10K this year or whatever know what they need to do to accomplish their goals. Lack of knowledge isn't keeping them from losing the weight. It's lack of tenacity. One of the great secrets to life that isn't really a secret at all is how important it is to put your head down and keep on going.

Aragorn, the movie

There's one character arc in LOTR in particular I'd like to look at a little closer. Owing to the influence of the movies, Aragorn has come to be seen as an example of a classic positive character arc. Kristen Kiefer on her writing blog makes this very mistake while discussing--go figure--the subject of character arcs.

Aragorn is sort of a fantasy George Washington in the movies. He's happy fighting wars, but reluctant to assume the responsibility of ruling. Afraid he might not be worthy to be king because of mistakes made by his forefathers, Aragorn spends much of the trilogy denying the mantle of hope for mankind that others are trying to put on him. This "lie that he believes" is chipped away at bit-by-bit, until finally he decides to become the king he was born to be when the father of the woman he loves tells him it is the only way to save Aragorn's love.

It's a nice story. The trilogy itself came out right after 9/11, and America immediately read its current political situation into the challenges faced by the Fellowship. We saw Frodo's reluctant resolve to do what needed to be done to stop evil as our own story of facing up to extremism. So making Aragorn over into a Washington resonated with us, as well.

Tolkien's Aragorn

But that's not Tolkien's Aragorn. Tolkien's Aragorn was two when his father Arathorn was killed fighting orcs. Aragorn was taken to Rivendell by his mother, where Elrond took on the role of father to him. While in Rivendell, he was given the name "Estel," Elvish for "hope." No one spoke of his true name or lineage in order to protect him from the enemy. When he became full-grown, though, Elrond told Aragorn who he really was and "delivered to him the heirlooms of his house."

This included the shards of the sword Narsil, the one that cut the ring from Sauron's hand. Aragorn is, in fact, carrying this broken sword with him when he meets the hobbits in the books, because it is part of his destiny to carry it as the heir of Elendil.

The only heirloom Elrond does not give to Aragorn is the sceptre of Annuminas, which he says Aragorn needs to earn by way of a hard and long test. This test becomes Aragorn's whole life, which he spends in wandering and fighting the enemies of the free people of Middle Earth. His wandering is not something he does to avoid being king; it's what he has to do to earn the right to be king.

The day after Elrond told Aragorn who he was, Aragorn met Arwen, Elrond's daughter, and immediately fell in love. (Arwen had been away for many years at Lorien, which is why Aragorn had never met her before.) Elrond, sensing Aragorn's true feelings, tells him this:

"Aragorn, Arathorn's son, Lord of the Dunedain, listen to me! A great doom awaits you, either to rise above the height of all your fathers since the days of Elendil, or to fall into darkness with all that is left of your kin. Many years of trial lie before you. You shall neither have wife, nor bind any woman to you in any troth, until your time comes and you are found worthy of it."

The next day, Aragorn begins his long test. He wanders for thirty years, learning about the world as he does, becoming friends with Gandalf, and "uncovering the plots and devices of the servants of Sauron." He then sees Arwen again in Lothlorien, and she falls in love with him. She believes he will achieve great things. He does not know if he will be able to live up to her hope, but he says he will "hope with her hope."

When Elrond learns of Arwen's choice, he is grieved. He tells Aragorn that he will agree to lose his precious daughter to him, but only if by doing so, he can help to restore mankind. He will not allow Arwen, therefore, to marry him unless he becomes the king of a reunited Gondor and Arnor.

This is critical to understanding Aragorn. He wants to become king more than anything, because only by becoming king can he have what his heart desires, which is to marry Arwen. At no point in his story does he ever waver from his determination to become king. What we see in him is not reluctance to be king, only an uncertainty about whether he will be able to pass his test. He does, it is true, remain long hidden, and he keeps many false identities. But this is a strategic decision on his part to delay coming forth until the time is right, not born out of a concern that he might somehow have the same moral failings his forefather Isildur did when Isildur failed to destroy the ring. Aragorn refers over and over again to his wish to return to Gondor as heir to the throne, beginning as far back in the trilogy to the Council of Elrond, when he explains Boromir's dream thus:

For the sword that was broken is the Sword of Elendil that broke beneath him when he fell. It has been treasured by his heirs when all other heirlooms were lost; for it was spoken of old among us that it should be made again when the Ring, Isilur's Bane, was found. Now you have seen the sword that you have sought, what would you ask? Do you wish for the House of Elendil to return to the Land of Gondor?

And, in fact, the ring having been found, it is Aragorn who has the sword remade--not Elrond--and Aragorn does this before the Fellowship leaves Rivendell on the quest. He sees the quest as the end of his long trial. It's the denouement to a catharsis he had decades ago, not a moment of new revelation.

Most of our lives are flat arcs

One of the questions about literature I most often ask myself is whether it's ultimately good for people who spend a lot of time reading it. Certainly, I think that believing we can make our lives into positive-arc stories, ones in which we change and overcome our challenges, is a healthy belief. But we might also end up in long and futile cycles of waiting for some kind of enlightenment to strike us before change can happen. In reality, most of us are in a story that's more like the Aragorn of the books than the Aragorn of the movies. We don't have some great moment of revelation where we suddenly see we've been doing it all wrong. We've known for a long time what we were trying to do with our lives, and we know what we need to do to accomplish it. It's not a mystery, it's just hard, and we might fail at it.

Aragorn doubts himself. Four times, after the Fellowship breaks, he criticizes his own decision-making and puts the blame on himself for the group's difficulties. But he doesn't doubt his ultimate goal, just his ability to accomplish it. There is no catharsis in Lord of the Rings for Aragorn, no moment when he stops "believing the lie." He's got a game plan from very early on, and the story for him is just that game plan developing over a long time.

As we try to accomplish our dreams in our own lives, this arc is more likely what we need to succeed. We don't need a great unmasking of some truth. We don't need to learn some secret we don't already know. We don't need a new plan; we just need to do better at the plan we've had all along.

Are Frodo and Sam...you know? A guide to the most common discussion at your next LOTR movie marathon viewing

I will be hosting a Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movie marathon in the near future, which explains this being my second LOTR-related post in two weeks. Much like Carlos Fuentes needed to read Don Quixote once a year, I occasionally have a mystical need to re-visit Frodo's quest to Mount Doom. It's like eating or having sex. I can only go so long without it.

Even though I've said before I'm not crazy about everything in Jackson's movie trilogy, it's still easily the best way to enjoy the story in a communal fashion. It'd be awfully hard to read through all three books in a day with a group of people. And even the films' flaws can be a good point of discussion.

If you watch the movie in the company of a lot of men, as I have many times, one topic of conversation that infallibly arises is the level of homo-eroticism in the films. Jokes and comments about homo-eroticism are a constant when a group of largely heterosexual males gathers. In my personal experience, this is as true today as it was three decades ago, even though now you would be hard-pressed to find a man even in a group of hetero-normative males who thinks there is anything essentially wrong with homosexual behavior. The jokes today have lost their mean-spirited edge of fag-bashing, of guarding hetero-normative standards by threatening harm to those outside the standards. But the jokes are still there. Why?

In my short story about male identity in the Marine Corps, "Brokedick," the main character notes that "most of the jokes they'd played (in the Marine Corps) had been either homo-erotic or homophobic. Possibly both." The Marine Corps requires that men within it become closer than most men become in normal life. But that closeness, when it starts to take on a deep and spiritual dimension, threatens hetero-normative standards. Men need to be close in the Corps, but the closeness required is itself suspect--or at least uncomfortable for most men. So men play jokes like "tea-bagging" one another. By doing this, they are able to hide physically homo-intimate behaviors that are a corollary of spiritual closeness in plain sight.

When men watch a story like Lord of the Rings together, certain male characteristics are called into question. There are heroes who demonstrate tenderness, gentleness, and compassion, traits that do not fit the standard male hero archetype. The men watching these things are at once uncomfortable with them and drawn to them. So we cope by joking about them.

...and joking, and joking, and joking...

Three types of intent

Before getting into various ways to interpret the physical and emotional closeness of Frodo and Sam, the two most important characters in the Rings trilogy, I need to make a quick digression into the question of intent.

Intent of the author

Most people who haven't studied literature seriously would most likely assume that the most important type of intent--maybe the only one that matters--is the intent of the author. Many, many discussion fora on the Internet have discussed the question of homosexuality in the relationship between Frodo and Sam in terms of Tolkien's intent (one example). Tolkien lived at a time when homosexuality was seen as a mental illness, an abomination. Tolkien was a devout Catholic. Tolkien cannot have meant these things, so Sam and Frodo cannot be gay, however it may seem to a modern reader.

It may surprise those who assume the author's intent to be the only intent that matters to find that literature scholars actually speak of something called an "intentional fallacy." That is, to think of literature only in terms of what an author meant is a mistake. This might seem crazy, and nothing more than a rearguard justification for the inventive interpretations of literary professors, but there is a point to it. We all say things that others take to have meanings we don't intend. If I tell my wife she looks nice for an older woman, I may insist I didn't mean it as an insult. I might say she is wrong to take offense, that she didn't understand my intent. But clearly, my intent is not the only thing that matters in such a statement.

Similarly, when an author writes a story, there are often images, symbols, and language in it that suggest things on their own that the author never imagined. Shakespeare may not have had in mind modern theories of the meaning of time when he wrote "there is no clock in the forest" in "As You Like It," but it doesn't matter. The statement expresses psychological truths about the way people experience time in a pastoral setting. Critics are free to view the statement's meaning on its own terms.

Intent of the text

The idea that the final written product of the author, rather than the author's mind, is the right place to look for meaning, is called "intent of the text." When I was in graduate school, we all learned to start our thoughts on what we'd read with "the text states..." rather than "Shakespeare states that..." Such a reading doesn't completely ignore the author. A reader still needs to know what a "nunnery" meant in Shakespeare's day in order to interpret a statement including a reference to a nunnery. But that doesn't mean a critic needs to restrain her possible readings to only those that she can plausibly argue might have occurred to Shakespeare himself.

There is obviously a great deal more openness in this kind of interpretation. If Frodo and Sam appear to exhibit a closeness that can best be explained by a sexual attraction, even an unspoken and unspeakable one, then that interpretation is on the table, whatever Tolkien himself believed.

However, a reading focused on intent of the text does not make any kind of reading possible. One still has to take the text on its own terms. Frodo and Sam are not space aliens. They are not ciphers for Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan, written by a prophet who guessed their presidential race 40 years ahead of time. But there is a kind of reading that might allow for this.

Intent of the reader

The most radical kind of reading is one that focuses on the reader's intent. What matters in reading a text isn't what the author meant or even what a close reading suggests. It's what the reader feels while reading the text. Much scholarship that examines Frodo and Sam in sexual terms actually focuses on fan fiction, in which readers of the stories respond by writing their own follow-on fiction about Middle Earth. This includes "slash fiction," erotic stories that focus on same-sex relationships. In a reading like this, if a reader feels that Sam and Frodo seem gay, then there really isn't anything to say that such a reading is wrong.

Which intent do I intend to follow?

A product of my academic times, I tend to favor the intent of the text, but I don't really exclude any type of intentionality when examining a text for meaning. Reading for authorial intent maintains the human side of the humanities, as one tries to see how the life of a writer lead to a certain work's creation as a response to the events of that life. A text-focused reading maintains integrity and intellectual rigor. Focusing on the reader preserves the reason any of us read: not just what does it mean, but what does it mean to you? When I attempt to give some ways to look at Frodo and Sam's relationship, I will try to keep a balance between them all.

Five Ways to Look at Frodo and Sam's relationship and sexuality, from least interesting to most

1. Frodo and Sam are sexually attracted, but either they hide it from each other or the text hides it from the reader

When I was in graduate school, Queer Studies was still a relatively new thing. I thought it was a little bit dull, because a lot of it back then seemed to amount to little more than reading old texts to see if one could find any secret clues about whether a character in it was really gay. One blogger (from whom I stole the above picture) followed this kind of reading in asserting that Frodo and Sam are "queer coded." The writer quoted a passage often cited by those who see something essentially romantic in Sam and Frodo's relationship:

Then as he had kept watch Sam had noticed that at times a light seemed to be shining faintly within; but now the light was even clearer and stronger. Frodo’s face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiseling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: “I love him. He’s like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.

The blogger, Monique Jones, suggests that if Sam were a woman, we'd naturally assume the text meant romantic love here. It's a bit artificial to suggest that it must be a spiritual, Platonic love Sam speaks of.

I do believe there is a lot more at play with Frodo and Sam than just friendship. But if it's sexual attraction, then the story to me sort of just ends there. They're gay. So what? That doesn't really make their relationship more compelling to me. It doesn't add anything to my "reader's intent" interpretation. It's a possibility. There are portions of the text that certainly suggest something much stronger than friendship is there. It's possible it's romantic attraction. But if it's true that their friendship is not like most friendships, then it's also true that their sexual attraction is not like any other sexual attraction I've ever witnessed.

As Yvette Kisor put it, "What seems less likely to prove fruitful is a singular focus on the question of the homosexuality of characters in The Lord of the Rings…. Did Tolkien write a homosexual relationship between any characters, specifcally Frodo and Sam, in his novel? Clearly, no. Can readers fnd such relationship(s) in his novel? Clearly, yes."

Sam and Frodo as frustrated lovers just doesn't leave much room for continued, interesting readings.

2. Frodo and Sam are a little bit gay

Being gay may not always be the either/or thing we see it as. There is no one gene that determines sexual orientation. It's a host of genes, and those genes don't always do the same thing to everyone. Homosexuality is "epi-genetic," meaning there need to be environmental factors that "switch on" those genes.

So Frodo and Sam may have demonstrated some of the characteristics of a homosexual couple and yet still been, for the most part, heterosexual. We can reject the false dichotomy between being a rugged, hyper-masculinized heterosexual and effeminate homosexual.

3. Frodo and Sam are the closest friends ever, and every man should feel depressed he isn't close enough to another man to hold hands as they walk toward their doom 

Leonna Madill offers what I find to be a more interesting application of queer theory and feminist theory. She argues that LOTR is "not a text that invites criticism of hegemonic masculine values, but it is a text that can provoke multiple discussions about its various messages about masculinity." One discussion of hegemonic masculine values Frodo and Sam encourage is the meaning of male-male friendships. This is even truer and more interesting if Frodo and Sam are straight, rather than gay. If they are gay, all the intimacy between them is explained--perhaps even explained away, one might say--if it is all merely sublimated sexual attraction. The question of what all those gestures of affection mean is actually much more interesting if they aren't gay than if they are.

The deeper a friendship goes, the greater the intimacy within it. But modern, American masculinity--even in an era in which we no longer think homosexuality is a sin--does not feel comfortable with intimacy between men. This limits the friendships. There is a reason most men today will say their wives are their best friends. They are the only people with whom we are physically intimate, so they are also the ones with whom we tend to be emotionally intimate.

But what if we are limiting our friendships in this way? What if our insistence that any sort of physicality be kept out of a male-male friendship made those relationships anemic? Frodo and Sam aren't an example of a gay pair keeping their love on the DL; they're comfortable hetero-sexual friends without our hang-ups over what holding hands or laying you head on someone's lap means. As Madill put it, "male friendship can be more complex than simply protecting a friend from harm; caring and showing affection is another means of nourishing a friendship."

4. Frodo and Sam's relationship mirrors a parent-child relationship

The physical affection between Frodo and Sam could be understood as part and parcel of their parent-child relationship. Carolyn Hoke summarized this reading, first proposed by Verlyn Flieger. Frodo starts off as the grown-up, the wiser, more mature one. When Sam is first allowed to participate in Frodo's adventure, he "springs up like a dog invited for a walk." However, Frodo is eventually worn down by the ring, and Sam, like all children eventually do, must care for the parent who once cared for him. Sam carries Frodo "like a hobbit-child pig-a-back" when Frodo cannot carry on anymore. As Hoke puts it:

This physical aspect accentuates the spiritual bond between the two hobbits, such that in a way, it seems as if the two of them are linked in a strange, inverse relationship of power. When Sam is childish, Frodo is mature and capable; when Frodo grows physically and emotionally weak, Sam is the strong one who helps him see the Quest through.... comparing their parallel journeys in this way leads me rather to compare the hobbits’ relationship instead to that of a Parent and Child. Initially, in a Parent/Child relationship, the Parent takes control and directs both their paths, but as both mature, the Parent falls back into the second-childhood of old age and it’s up to the Child to carry their combined burdens.

5. Frodo and Sam are "married" for the duration of the quest

There is a sense in LOTR that some things happen because they are meant to happen. "You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck?" Gandalf asks Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit. Gandalf also suggests at one point that what others call chance might not be chance at all.

In a world where things happen by design, one of the most obviously meant-to-be happenings is Sam's marriage to Rosie Cotton. Sam is a gardener who marries a woman named Rose. They have thirteen children named for flowers. Clearly, there is some providence involved in this union. So Frodo and Sam aren't frustrated lovers meant to be together but denied their chance by the world. Sam was always meant to be with Rose.

Yet Sam can't really be the husband, father, and lord of Bag End he was meant to be until Frodo leaves. With Frodo around, Sam is "torn in two," as Frodo puts it. That's because when Sam agreed to come with Frodo, he agreed to see it through to the end. Throwing the ring into the fire was the end for most people, but it wasn't for Frodo. Frodo carried the ring long enough that he would never truly be free of it until he traveled to the undying lands. That means Sam can never really be free of his duty to care for Frodo until Frodo leaves.

That's a pretty profound bond they have. The only bond we have in most societies that comes close is the sickness-and-in-health, til-death-do-us-part version of traditional Western marriage. I'm not sure that either hobbit realized the profundity of their tie at the beginning of the quest. Frodo didn't know when he set off from the Shire that he was headed to Mount Doom. He thought he'd be gone a short while. Sam didn't know he was headed with Frodo to Mount Doom, either. He just thought Frodo needed someone to look after him.

Frodo and Sam realize what their bond is to one another while on the trip. That passage quoted earlier in which Sam looks down at a sleeping Frodo and realizes he loves him is something Sam only realizes after Frodo has become "old and beautiful" as a result of fighting the ring's power. Frodo was called to confront evil itself and he answered the call. In that fight, Frodo became something Sam loved.

The ring binds its wearer to it. The only reason the hobbits were able to fight its power was because their bond to one another grew along with the ring's power. Their bond needed to be stronger than any bond in existence, and that meant it was a little bit of every relationship. It was master-servant. It was friend-friend. It was parent-child. It was man-wife. It was every kind of relationship you can think of, which made it deeper than any relationship you can think of. The two were, in every sense, bound to one another. You may think of them as married. Their intimacy was appropriate and natural.

Many people have opined that Frodo and Sam's relationship was more spiritual than physical, and they are right. But the spirituality of it doesn't necessarily preclude the physical. While they were together, they were bound, body and spirit, to one another. I tend not to think of the physical side of that as a Brokeback Mountain-type sexual awakening, but that doesn't mean it cannot include parts of that. C.S. Lewis distinguished between the Four Loves--storge, philios, eros, and agape--but we need not think that there are clear borders between them. Sam and Frodo developed agape love to such a degree that they were able to use the other loves, eros included, to help one another.

In the end, Sam cannot divorce Frodo. Only death can do them part, which is why Frodo needs to leave. The time when he has interrupted Sam's purpose is over.

Or is it? The book suggests that Sam may one day follow Frodo. Sam was, after all, a ring-bearer, too, if only for a brief time. Before telling Sam he must no longer be torn in two, but be one and whole for many years, Frodo wonders aloud, "Your time may come" (to go to the undying lands). I can only wonder, too.

Lord of the Rings as Zombie Fiction

Lord of the Rings is one of those stories that continues to reward me throughout my life for knowing it. As a young man entering the Marine Corps, I drew on its characterization of adventure. The story both set me off on the course out the front door of my parents' house and also reassured me when nothing went the way I thought it would that that's just how adventures go.

As an idealistic man in my 20's and 30's after the Marine Corps, I saw the story as an injunction to push back against evil, even when it seemed like evil was likely to win. The movies came out during this period of my life.

Now, in my forties and seemingly in the middle of multiple, overlapping slogs that feel like they'll never end, I see something in Frodo's quest I appreciate now in a way I never did before: the way the hero's journey is often about fighting the same small battles thousands of times more than it is about one epic moment of heroism. It's a zombie war.

Why I would ever use stupid zombies in the same breath as my favorite fantasy series

LOTR isn't a zombie story, although there are elements in the story that have some similarities. Orcs are largely undifferentiated--one orc's the same as another. (In the book, we do learn that orcs have different dialects and factions, but largely, orcs are just orcs.) Orcs don't think much for themselves, although instead of following some primal instinct to eat brains, they follow the will of the Eye. And Aragorn saves the city of Gondor when he takes control of an army of undead soldiers. But none of these are what I mean when I speak of Lord of the Rings as a zombie story.

The best explanation I've ever read for the modern fascination with zombies was Chuck Klosterman's back in 2010. The physical prowess of zombies varies from franchise to franchise--a World War Z zombie is stronger than a Living Dead zombie--but by and large, a single zombie or a small group aren't that hard to kill. They are slow and loud and stupid. Knock the brains out of one, then do the next one. As Klosterman put it:

"If there's one thing we all understand about zombie killing, it’s that the act is uncomplicated: you blast one in the brain from point-blank range (preferably with a shotgun). That’s Step 1. Step 2 is doing the same thing to the next zombie that takes its place. Step 3 is identical to Step 2, and Step 4 isn’t any different from Step 3. Repeat this process until (a) you perish, or (b) you run out of zombies. That’s really the only viable strategy."

That's modern life for a lot of us, actually. Klosterman compares it to the act of answering hundreds of emails a day. It's not hard, task-by-task, but the downside is that what we do never ends. The same tasks keep coming back every day, just like the horde is never gone. 

Can I set up a rule in Outlook to delete this without reading?

The Fellowship leaves Rivendell around the Winter Solstice, which is about when Christmas happens. Frodo finally completes the quest around the Vernal Equinox, somewhat coincidental with Easter. In between is the sloggiest time of year. There are moments of terror and excitement in Frodo's quest, but most of it is just putting his head down, moving forward, and fighting the slow, poisoning effect of the ring on his mind. That's it. When reading the second and third books of the trilogy, which are split into a Frodo/Sam portion and a portion with the rest of the Fellowship, the Frodo/Sam portions are by far less thrilling. But they're also by far the most important. Winning heroic and desperate battles means nothing if Frodo doesn't complete his task. 

And that's the whole secret of life. "I know what I must do," Frodo says, "It's just I'm afraid to do it." He might also have said, at many parts in the book, that he knew what he had to do but just didn't want to do it anymore. 

"Time to wake up, Mr. Frodo," Sam said. "Another day of stubbing our toes as we walk about through these rocks." 

"Fuck off, Sam," Frodo replied, turning over to sleep some more. 

I often get irritated by silly people who describe their small accomplishments in epic terms. Calling a thirty-day detox/weight loss regimen a "journey," that type of thing. It seems to cheapen truly heroic deeds to describe our small lives in those terms. But maybe these people are right in a small way. There is at least some similarity between our hum-drum lives and the hero's journey. Both involve doing small things over and over until they add up to something. 

(But still, stop calling your new job at Cracker Barrel a "journey." Please.)

Zombies and writing

Writing is a zombie battle, too. It's getting up over and over and doing the same thing, mostly without any real hope of ever having a final victory. Why fight, then? Because zombies are there to be fought against. 

"If" for sedentary modernity

Life is more about resilience than anything else for most of us. Kipling told his theoretical young man that it showed real manhood to risk everything you'd won in life, lose it, and start over. But life for most of us is avoiding that drama--to never risk all our winnings on one game of pitch-and-toss. It's slowly building a 401K in the dullest fashion imaginable. It's college savings and making dentist visits on-time. It's doing what's in front of you to do, then doing it again and again and again. 

There must have been a point in Frodo's quest when Mount Doom ceased to even be a real thing in his mind. There was only thirst and soreness and boredom and fear. He kept going. That's a hero.

Years after Bilbo's great adventure, he was still somewhat romantic about adventuring. Frodo was not. He had obtained a deeper wisdom that comes of a more profound suffering. The point of all he did was precisely so people like Sam could carry out pedestrian accomplishments like having children and planting a garden. 

That's the gift this story has given me through this winter. Just keep walking. 

Looks like I'll finally get that Silmarillion TV series

After weeks of rumors, it was confirmed that Amazon is going to create a series that will cover "previously unexplored" stories from the Tolkien legendarium. To me, that means the Silmarillion. A lot of Tolkien fans have been hoping, ever since the success of Game of Thrones, that HBO would take on the series, but this is probably nearly as good. At least Peter Jackson won't be directing it, most likely. I don't hate what Jackson did, really. But part of Tolkien culture had always been the existence of many visions and many interpretations of Middle Earth. That seems to be what Tolkien himself wanted when he said that he originally envisioned that "the cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." I'd have liked it if a different director had done each LOTR film (and then only one film had been made for The Hobbit).

I'm very interested in how Amazon will end up plotting out the seasons. If I had to do a quick guess, I'd say:

One season: The creation of the world to the rebellion of Feanor
Second Season: Feanor and his brothers in Middle Earth up to the fall of Melkor (this could maybe be two seasons, depending on how much major story lines get spun off themselves).
Third Season: There was a mention in the article of a spin-off. There are a couple of stories that could be a complete separate season, the most obvious being the love story of Beren and Luthien.
Fourth Season: Sauron among the Numenor. There's actually a lot of room to come up with original, non-canonical work here. There's a really long period after the fall of Melkor where Sauron rules a good chunk of Middle Earth.
Fifth Season: Up to the last alliance and the fall of Sauron.

Much like with the movies, I'm just really looking forward to seeing scenes I've loved for a long time as someone else imagined them. Fingolfin battling Morgoth has the potential to bring me to tears. I'd lament that soon, I won't be the only person in the office who knows all the children of Finwe, but where I work, there are so many nerds that I'm already far from the only person who knows this stuff.

Very exciting news.

Top Ten Suckiest Parts of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy

While my writing hobby is still stalled (I've actually tried out two 'non-literary' stories while on my break since last December, but mostly I'm not writing), I'll use this blog, since I have it, to scratch another itch that I've had for a while. It's nice to use this time when I'm not being ignored or critiqued to critique the hell out of somebody else's work.

Unlike Walking Dead, which was my last list/diatribe, I actually had an emotional attachment to Tolkien before the movies came out. My dad read them to me when I was young, and then I read them again in high school. I thought about them often when I was in the Marine Corps, hating life, and they were sort of an inspiration to keep slogging along.

I'm not a purist. I understand movies are movies and books are books. None of my criticisms boil down to "this was different in the book." I was fine with not having Tom Bombadil. It was okay to have Saruman be killed by Wormtongue on top of Orthanc, rather than during the (elided) Scouring of Shire. Arwen saves Frodo and not a mystery elf who might have actually died in another part of the Tolkien legendarium? No problem. My hates are more of the "the movies changed something and made the story worse in so doing" flavor. Here we go:

The list

10) The drinking scene. While I understood the need for humor and was willing to tolerate Gimli's transformation into D and D dwarf to get it done, this scene wasn't really funny and took up a lot of time. The beginning of RoTK is really slow. It takes us a half an hour just to get to "Sauron is going to attack Minas Tirith." We could have just had Gandalf figure it out while talking to Saruman and saved time for other, better material.

9) "Fake death #1"--Sam Gamgee. Nearly every character has a fake death at some point in the Jackson trilogy. Aragorn has like three. By the end, it was easy to see that Gollum wasn't really dead when he seemed to fall down the crevice. These add minutes the films desperately needed to do other things, but they also take away the emotional impact of the two, real "fake deaths": those of Gandalf and Frodo. I guess it was okay to have the audience wondering along with the three walkers whether Pip and Merry had made it. But Sam didn't need to have his own fake death at the end of FoTR. It served nothing plot-wise, and telegraphed other, more important fake deaths.

8) Sam has too many Rudy speeches. Sam isn't terrible in the movies, but when he's bad it's by being too much of what he is. The Sam of the books is quiet and has a hard time finding his words. When he does speak, it carries more weight. He does his talking by his actions. In movies two and three, hardly a Frodo/Sam scene goes by without him talking up believing in the good in the world and holding on to hope.

7) Insertion of too many "this is the theme of the movie, guys" lines. "You're part of this world!" In movie one, Gandalf's words come during a tense lull in the action soon before he falls. They carry weight. You've got to play that with a light hand, though. Too much is just wearisome. TTT is dripping with these lines, and RoTK isn't free of it, either. Pick the best ones and drop the rest, Peter. And for God's sake, don't write your own.

6) Creating a conflict in TTT between Aragorn, who wants Theoden to ride out aggressively against a much larger army, and Theoden, who seemingly is healed from one blindness to go right into another. This conflict makes no sense. Strategically, Theoden was right, and there wasn't much to argue about. They were badly outnumbered. Get the high ground and dig in. Aragorn never argued this in the books, because he isn't stupid. This speaks to a real annoying feature of the movies: EVERYONE has to have a narrative arc, no matter how convoluted a route it takes to get them there. Theoden can't just fight the Uruk-hai. He has to be tentative about it before he is inspired to be brave, to be a LEADER about it. That's dumb.One of the cool things about Tolkien is that some of his characters are somewhat static. That sounds terrible, but it's what makes them different from every story you read today. They're static in a good way--they persist in their beliefs. They defy the usual narrative arc. Rather than becoming something new every time, they sometimes become the fullness what they were meant to be all along.

5) Fake death #2, Aragorn falls over the cliff. (Also, he almost gets killed by a troll in RoTK, almost drowns in runoff water in TTT, etc., but this was the worst.) This took a VERY long time. The only plot point advanced by this long side trip is that Aragorn thinks about his past with Arwen. He could easily have done this while riding along on the way to Helm's Deep. The opportunity cost of having this (and the wolves scene that goes with it) in the movie was the lost chance to have one really great scene from the book, the one in which Aragorn stands on the parapet before dawn and speaks to the Uruk-hai. It could have been a great scene in film, and it would have advanced Aragorn's true narrative arc--"Do I have enough greatness in me to accomplish what I desire to?" Instead, the audience got the hint even more that only Boromir is going to die for real.

4) The suckening of Faramir. Sam compares Faramir to Gandalf in the books. He is wise. He is never tempted to take the ring. He says if he found it on the road, he wouldn't pick it up. The movies need to give him an arc, though. "I want to get this to make my father love me, but I must resist. I will eventually learn to resist." That's so...modern. It's familiar. We already know this story. We love LoTR because it's different from every other story we read today. Don't make it more like them.

3) Frodo pushes Gollum into the pit of fire. One friend of mine said this is "like Jesus Christ coming down off the cross to kill all the Roman soldiers." Gollum falls in through his own uncontrollable lust, and possibly through the grace of Eru. That's how the ring works. It seals its own doom.

2) Not having Eomer at Helm's Deep. In the books, he forms a friendship with Gimli, with whom he at first had severe animosity. There is a funny bit about Gimli going off on a raid at one point so he doesn't fall asleep. In the movies, in order to make "Eomer forgives his uncle" a story, they keep him out of his great role.

1 1/2: Also, related to the Helm's Deep scene, something I just thought of: There are about five cutaway shots of women and children looking scared from their refuge within the caves. Did we really need this many shots of random fear to be reminded of the stakes of the battle? Do we feel more invested in the outcome because some redshirt townies will be massacred if the Uruk-hai win? 

1) Gandalf gets fucking pwnd by the fucking Witch Fucking King of Fucking Angmar. Fuck you, Peter Jackson. We wasted ten minutes on drinking contests and Gandalf holding a chamber pot, but we don't have time for the MOST MADE-FOR-CINEMA MOMENT from the books? Actually, the theater version didn't have Gandalf losing his stand-off. It's almost like the books: Gandalf says a few words, Witch King says a few words, then horns, horns, and the Witch King leaves. The feeling in the book is that it might have been a stand-off, but I wouldn't have bet against Gandalf. Here it is:

(Really cool scene in which the battering ram breaks through. Then...)

     In rode the Lord of the Nazgul. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgul, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.
     ALL SAVE ONE. (caps mine, because I just got an erection while typing that) There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dinen. 
     "You cannot enter here," said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. "Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!"
     The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.
     "Old fool!" he said. "Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!" And with that he lifted high his sword and flame ran down the blade.

    Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.
     And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

  So, yeah. Fuck yeah. That's the scene they had to nail. Instead, we get (in the extended version), Gandalf getting his staff broken and cringing, only to be saved by the horns. Jackson knew better than to put this in theaters. He'd have been lynched. In the first place, it makes no sense. The Witch King has the only effective leader in the city lying in front of him, and can't take three seconds to finish him off before he goes to see about those horns?

    But there's a bigger offense here. Gandalf, when he comes back from his battle with the Balrog, is something set apart. I have a sense that he fears nothing in Middle Earth except Sauron himself. Aragorn seems to second this. When he meets the risen Gandalf in the book he says "...you are our captain and our banner. The Dark Lord has Nine. But we have One, MIGHTIER THAN THEY (caps mine): the White Rider. He has passed through the fire and the abyss, and they shall fear him. We will go where he leads."

     I always read those last lines when most men my age take Viagra, and it works much better. I think I just impregnated the cat. And I don't even have a cat.

     Jackson felt, I'm sure, that he had to build up the indomitable nature of the Witch King prior to his death at the hands of Eowyn. But he really didn't need to do it at Gandalf's expense. He could have simply had the Witch King sweeping the fields of horsemen, much like Sauron did in the opening scene of the trilogy. This was utterly a false step, and it's not faithful to Gandalf's own narrative arc. What did his resurrection mean if he is so powerless? He is the greatest of a great order. He is the carrier of Narya, the ring of fire. He is the one, the white rider. This is all great film ready-made. But Jackson missed the layup.