Harry Potter and the First Time Readers

So yesterday I talked about Boromir being the most relatable character in the whole of the fellowship because of his flaws…I take that back. I think Sam is

Jon, Danny, and Lizzy talk about the incredible ending of book 4, and the one point where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis shed a tear over.

Did the fellowship fail Boromir? It’s a question someone asked in a comment a few videos ago and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for the last few days. I think the answer is no…but also yes…absolutely yes.

Alright. So this is the weirdest, but the absolute funniest moment in the entirety of the Fellowship of the Ring. And what might sound like the start to a really immature essay on the Aragorn son of Arathorn, the well endowed, is actually going to really be about the mastery of Tolkien’s language…but give me a little bit of time to get there.

It took them 10 days to get from Lothlorien to the waterfall Tol Brandir. It’s a full chapter in the books and in the 10 days there is a whole heap of stuff that happens that…from Legolas seeing an Eagle hunting an eagle…which feels weirdly prophetic…to Sam being deeply uncomfortable in the boats. But I want to talk about three things that really caught my attention in this chapter.

I just feel, even though I have barely scratched the surface of the legendarium, that Galadriel and Gimli are doing something here VITALLY more important that I know or understand.

Rope…you’re telling me that we go from the books, where Galadriel gives Sam Gamgee maybe the coolest gift known to Middle Earth, and all we get in the movies is that sam got rope? ROPE?

I’m going to start this video off with a very very hot take. Since the Lord of the Rings films came out, in the early 2000s, there hasn’t been another movie that handles the storytelling of a fantasy or sci fi book, or has the beautiful visuals in the same way that the Dune series does.

I have to say, for maybe the first time in this entire series I am confused. I just don’t know what really happened at the Mirror of Galadriel. Maybe I’m over-analyising it and it’s really much simpler than I’m making it out to be, or maybe it’s way more complicated and I need to have a better understanding of language in order to do it. But there are just some weird things that happened that I didn’t have the answers for.

There is this weird section in the FOTR when the Company meets Galadriel. And Galadriel looks into each of their eyes almost simultaneously, and seems to offer them something.