New Year, New Gifs Challenge Day 21: Favorite Quote

20 YEARS OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (18 DEC 2002)

I wonder if we’ll ever be put into songs or tales?

Having some feelings this evening about Frodo’s reaction to people around him being corrupted by desire for the One Ring. How generally devoid it is of any blame placed on that person, and how he instead treats it as a tragedy to spare others from by distancing himself.

It’s a big deal in the latter books that Frodo wants to show Sméagol kindness if possible because things have progressed so far that Frodo can recognize his own experience in him. But what’s really making me stare at a wall right now are Frodo’s early days reactions even before the personal identification is as strong.

Basically, I can’t stop thinking about how deeply Frodo’s reaction to that last encounter with Boromir is informed by the fact that the first person to ever try and take the ring from Frodo was actually Bilbo. The fact that the first person Frodo ever saw corrupted to that point, even for a moment, was the kind, clever, caring uncle who adopted and taught him, and who Frodo thinks the world of.

Just thinking about the personal relationship Frodo had with the very first person he saw the Ring affect and how fundamentally that set the tone for his understanding of it for the entirety of the journey.

The more despair I endure in life, the more I love Frodo. I'm just. I'm so glad that Tolkien wrote him like that. He was a hero and it broke him. He was given too much to carry. The circumstances were dire, everyone was doing the best they could, and Frodo tried so hard, for such a good cause, and he...broke. And the narrative has pity for him, the characters show him kindness. Even after victory, his hurts did not heal, and it isn't considered his fault. He must go to the undying lands, to seek out peace there. In universe, he is forgiven for being human - don't be pedantic - and his great torment is recognized. He fell. He could not have done it alone. He is still a hero.

And, I think that's important.

do you think faramir and frodo actually got to do this 🥺 do you think between the coronation and midsummer, faramir and frodo got to sit together in a sunny corner of minas tirith, away from prying eyes, and talk 🥺

something about faramir and sunny walls......

I'm about to go insane actually

Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring (2001) | dir. Peter Jackson 

Every time Sean Astin makes a statement on whether or not Sam and Frodo were indeed gay for each other in lord of the rings he’s always like “well we have to acknowledge that attitudes around sexuality have changed dramatically over the past several decades and since authorial intent is only up to speculation, the story is open to multiple readings, some of which might have different significances for different groups of people also they kiss on the lips because I said so”

at the rose city comic con panel this month a fan asked them (sean and elijah) if sam and frodo were in love and they said

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

Sean: dont tell rosie

Rosie: "This is my husband Sam, and that's his husband, Frodo. Frodo is my husband-in-law. I'm not into him, he's he's a bit too 'elfy' for my taste, but Sam likes him, and that's fine with me. As far as I know, Frodo can't give Sam children, but Frodo looks after ours all the same, so I don't mind sharing Sam if it means another pair of eyes on the wee ones. In all honesty, our family tree is right simple compared to some hobbits. Yes, I'm referrin' to you Lobelia, over there pretendin' you ain't eavesdroppin'. Still bitter you ain't got either of my boys or their house, eh?"

Tbh it's canon that Frodo invited Sam and Rosie to move in to Bag End after their wedding and they all lived there for a couple of years until Frodo went to Valinor, so yeah. Running with it.

And once Rosie dies, Sam says his goodbyes and disappears after him.

what’s funny is people assuming that rosie would somehow be too dim or naive to KNOW that sam loved frodo, instead of looking at a guy who would loyally follow a beloved friend to hell and then help carry him home again, and not be like ‘oh i can’t not fuck that.’

Polyamory, specifically polyandry, would be an interesting solution to the oddball population of the Shire.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

No outsider ever parses hobbit genealogy well enough to understand this except for Gandalf, who never explains anything either.

are you kidding? Gandalf would WEAPONIZE his knowledge of Hobbit genealogy against outsiders

Since “pledge” kinships are multidimensional and can occur in different directions, hobbits can form - and formalise - family bonds simply because they choose to. Gandalf doesn’t tell anyone that the formation of Thorin’s Company, the Fellowship of the Ring, and Belladonna Took’s Accidental Troop of Mercenaries* are legal formations of pledge-siblings, a hobbit family structure usually claimed to increase social class and prestige (as high numbers of pledge-kin confer distinction on a hobbit, being a sort of popularity vote/endorsement that adds greatly to their social power. Incidentally, this is partly why Bilbo was both controversial and successful in his pledge-claim of Frodo; outsiders mistook his “bachelor” status as someone living outside of heteronormativity, while the Shire was bewildered and increasingly annoyed by his rejection of pledge and hearth commitments. By rights Bilbo had too few pledge-kin, and too little parenting experience, to claim rights to an orphan, especially one from Brandybuck hearth; but conversely, his social status was high enough that his belated bid for his very first pledge-son couldn’t reasonably be denied by anybody.)

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

* see the post about the Old Took’s “enchanted diamond cufflinks” that obeyed the wearer’s commands; which were probably, given the general state of things, two lost silmarils recovered by his Remarkable Daughters and gifted to him because things stay small and safe in the shire

@elodieunderglass wouldn't that make pippin both denethor's pledge-son-in-law, and (as pledge-brother to the king) probably outrank him?

Only through Boromir while Boromir was alive! Pippin’s familial claim through Boromir technically dissolved on Boromir’s death, as Denethor hadn’t been privy to it, and those bonds rarely stretch to a stranger when the person in the middle has died before introducing them; although Pippin, who was well-brought-up, perfectly and politely rectified the problem at once by simply swearing himself as Denethor’s pledge-son. but through his blood-cousinship to Frodo, who was older than Boromir, his status as the Took double-primarc (don’t ask) and the proximity-enhanced status-doubling effects of having a five-way cousin in Merry, Pippin was demonstrably higher status as a pledge-sibling and was also his own father-in-law and approved of himself. As such, he would have significantly raised Boromir’s social status and marital prospects in the Shire.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

Ironically, the events in which Pippin realized this made Faramir his own hearth-son - so Pippin won in the end and took a great interest in ceremonially approving of Eowyn. Gandalf never explained

I will buy that for a dollar, yup.

Frodo Laid a Geas (and other invisible magic)

This was so obvious when I realized it, but I think most people miss it, because we’re so desensitized by D&D-style magic with immediate, visibly, flashy effects, rather than more subtle and invisible forces of magic. When Gollum attacks Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom, Frodo has the chance to kill him, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says:

Frodo: Go! And if you ever lay hands on me again, you yourself shall be cast into the Fire!

Frodo’s not just talking shit here. He is literally, magically laying a curse. He’s holding the One Ring in his hands as he says it; even Sam, with no magic powers of his own, can sense that some powerful mojo is being laid down. Frodo put a curse on Gollum: if you try to take the Ring again, you’ll be cast into the Fire.

Five pages later, Gollum tries to take the Ring again. And that’s exactly what happens. Frodo’s geas takes effect and Gollum eats lava.

On further reflection:

All the other people in the franchise who were offered the Ring declined to take it because they were wise enough to know that if they used its power – and the pressure to do so would be too great – they would be subject to its corruption.

Frodo uses the power of the Ring to lay a geas, and then five minutes later at the volcano’s edge, succumbs to its corruption. The Ring has gotten to him and he can no longer give it up. Because he used its power.

On further further reflection: I’d have to read the section again, but I recall that after throwing Gollum off and laying the geas, Sam observes that Frodo seems suddenly filled with energy again when previously he had been close to dead of fatigue. He hikes up the mountain so fast he leaves Sam behind – and doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s left him behind. 

Could he have been drawing on the Ring’s power at this point in the story? At this point in the story we’re relying on Sam’s narration, and Sam doesn’t know what’s going on in Frodo’s head, so it’s hard to say for sure. Having used it once, after spending so long holding out against it, was that the breach in the dam?

Which means that the moment that Frodo succumbs to temptation is not the moment at the volcano – it was already too late by then. The moment he is taken by temptation was when he used the power of the Ring to repel Gollum.

If so, this ties in neatly with discussions I’ve seen about how Tolkien subscribes to a “not even once” view of good and evil – that in many other works it’s acceptable to do a small evil in service of a greater good, but in Lord of the Rings that always  fails.

Re-reading Fellowship of the Rings, and I got to this passage in Lorien:

In other words:

Frodo asks Galadriel, herself carrying a Ring of Power, “Could I, hypothetically, use the power of the One Ring to do something magical aside from turning invisible?” and Galadriel replies, “Yes, hypothetically, you totally could, assuming the magic you want to do involves laying compulsions on others, but I strongly recommend against it, because it would fuck up your brain.”

This was in the first book. At the end of the third book Frodo uses the Ring to fuck Gollum up, forcing him to throw himself into lava if he disobeys Frodo’s commands.

Talk about a chekov’s gun.

Got to this point in my re-read and uh. This was a lot  less subtle than I remembered it.

…

Yeah.

THIS IS GENIUS

Chekhov’s One Ring

the only time of the year this can be posted

I am literally one of those high strung Respect Our Troops middle aged dads but about Frodo Baggins. If you hate on him I'm gonna pivot into a lecture about everything he's fought for and sacrificed and how you wouldn't last a day in his circumstances and

happy anniversary to 'By Elbereth and Lúthien the Fair,' said Frodo with a last effort, lifting up his sword, 'you shall have neither the Ring nor me!' <333

warming up with my favorite frodo picture

We loved the gay fan fiction when it came out. When it came out! Like coming out of the closet! Omigosh. Anyhow, our instinct when the movie came out was to just love how the fans embraced the movie and the characters. And so, whatever people want to conceptualize with them is fine with us.

when i watch the world burn all i think about is you

the return of the king / hozier / lana del rey / cabin in the woods / bastille / marina / rogue one / mitski / residente / the lovers of pompeii / mary zimmerman

"I love him, whether or no." — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers