This is right after Gandalf says, “A balrog. A demon of the ancient world.”
I just love how PJ chose to cut to Legolas’ face because he is exactly who you should cut to at this moment. You need an elf to show what it really means. Other than Gandalf, the rest of the Fellowship can sense something is gravely wrong, but they don’t understand just how grave. Like Gandalf, Legolas knows the terror. He understands the gravity of what lies around that corner. He’s got a piddly little bow and he is mere steps away from a demon of the ancient world. This frame shows a kid coming to the realisation that he is way out of his depth, that this mission will take him to places he only knew to exist in legends of the Elder Days, a time long gone, barely history.
He’s probably one of the youngest elves in Middle Earth at this point. He probably grew up on stories of the balrogs, slaying the ancient High Kings of the Eldar and tearing Middle Earth apart, thousands and thousands of years ago. They are legends in old crumbling books, read illicitly by a little elfling who was kept up at night by the terrible tales.They are the monsters under the bed and the shadows in the heart of the forest. They are the beasts behind the winged hordes of hell, that older elves, who’ve seen the worst that Arda has to offer, always assured him were no more than distant nightmares, stories relegated to dust and ancient memory. Except now they are real. They are here. They are coming.
The best part is that in the books he just starts screaming when he lays eyes on it
In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its left hand it held a whip of many thongs.
‘Ai! ai! wailed Legolas. “A Balrog! A Balrog has come!’
Legolas can be relied upon to have the correct reaction to everything.
It is not necessarily normal, or socially appropriate, or sane, but it is always 100% correct.
Meanwhile, the Hobbits in the background: “Haha what’s a barlog.” “IDK but let’s have a second breafast, while Gandalf takes care of it.”
I fail to see how my inquiries and
concern are of a sudden interest to others. Dorian cautioned me against such behavior
once we arrived. Am I not expected to hold concern for the Inquisitor and her safety?
Not more than an hour later, Leliana repeated his words. There are eyes in the dark, my friend and they see what even you may
not. Discretion always. Between the two of them, I dread this affair even
more than before. It took Lady’s Vivienne’s words to fully understand.
All eyes will be on Valerie, Commander. Yours should not; unless
you can look on her as Commander of the Inquisition you do her a disservice.
There will be those who desire her and those who will despise her. Take note of the latter.
I
had not considered what passed between us could harm Valerie. Perhaps there is
truth in the warnings. I will try if for no other reason than Valerie’s
protection.
what she means: the words “christmas tree” are used in the hobbit, and since we know that bilbo is the author of the hobbit, hobbits must have christmas which means there must be a middle earth jesus. but hobbits seem to be the only ones who have the concept of christmas which means it was probably a hobbit jesus. but frodo says in return of the king that no hobbit has ever intentionally harmed another hobbit so who crucified hobbit jesus?? were there other hobbit incarnations of religious figures?? was there hobbit moses?? did jrr tolkien even think about this at all??
Wait wait I might actually have an answer
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore
Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude
But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work
This is the version we know and love today
BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore
If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found
To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit
The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior
Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies
So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written
Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah
Not only all that, but Tolkien was also working within a frame narrative that he wasn’t the real author, but a translator of older manuscripts; so, in-universe, the published The Hobbit isn’t actually Bilbo’s book, but rather Tolkien’s copy of an older copy of an older copy of an older copy of Bilbo’s book. So when errors and anachronisms came up, he would leave them there instead of fixing them, and he may have even put some in intentionally; what we’re supposed to get from the “Christmas tree” bit is that the first scribe to translate the book from Westroni to English couldn’t come up with an accurate analogue for whatever hobbits do at midwinter.
Yes. Another example of tolkien doing this is him using, for instance, Old High Gothic to represent Rohirric – not because the people of Rohan actually spoke that language, but because Old High Gothic had the same relationship with English that Rohirric had with Westron (Which is the Common Language spoken in the West of Middle-Earth). There’s tons of that stuff in the book.
Like, Merry and Pippin’s real names (In Westron) are Kalimac Brandagamba and Razanur Tûk, respectively (to pick just one example of this). Tolkien changed their names in English to names which would give us English-speakers the same kind of feeling as those names would to a Westron-speaker. Lord of the Rings is so much deeper than most readers realise.
tolkein’s entire oevre is just one epic in-joke with the oxford linguistics department imo
No that’s right! The basic point still stands and is neat but a lot of Rohirric names are translated as Old English, like Theodred and Eorl and so on. Another interesting thing is that he sometimes modernized them to modern English because, apparently, those names were intelligible to Westron speakers, either because Gondorians knew them or because the Hobbits recognized them from their dialects (they once lived near the Rohirrim and borrowed a bunch of words, including their name for themselves). Here’s a good link about it from Tolkien Gateway, it’s SUPER cool.
Also if I correctly recall (it’s been a while so I might not) there was a draft of TTT where Tolkien intended for Theoden to greet Our Heroes in Old English. This was in The Treason of Isengard and I have a very distinct memory of reading it at about fifteen and being completely floored and baffled by the fact that he just…wrote an entire speech in Old English for Theoden to say. Like, can you even believe. I absolutely love how much flavor and care he put into the languages in LOTR.
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