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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I’m on Wadsworth’s The Poacher from Stratford, a now somewhat dated academic book on the Shakespeare authorship question which affirms the orthodox case and studies the skeptics.
I started Master and Commander this week. I saw the film before, and it's both a perfect adaptation could not be better, and doesn't hold a candle to the book, at the same time. The sheer wildness of the book is amazing. I'm also kind of amused at the number of times Maturin calls Aubrey fat in the book, and I'm curious how everyone else pictures Jack.
After watching the films in theaters, I started the Fellowship of the Ring on Audible, the Andy Serkis reading was available free. What a majestic work. I hadn't read it in years, and I'm so happy returning to it. It's interesting though that Serkis' reading is clearly influenced by the films, when he voices the main characters at times it feels like Serkis-doing-Orlando-Bloom instead of an independent interpretation of Legolas. T
he film adaptation can really close in your mind, in some ways, like the visualization of the Nazgul becomes the canonical view of them. I'm really reconsidering them on this read/listen. When the hobbits raise the alarm in Buckland, the Nazgul scamper, clearly a bunch of farmers showing up with torches and pitchforks would have been bad for them in some way. Were they secretly kinda cotton candy under the cloaks?
I was always a bit confused by how weak or timid the black riders were in the first book. Explained it as not wanting to draw the attention of the remaining powers in the north, either Saruman or Rivendell.
You don't want your guys to find the baggins and the ring, only to meet Glorfindel in a dark alley on the way home east, or Saruman in the gap of Rohan heading south. And that's exactly the sort of thing sauron would be worried about, especially because he knows the enemy knows something (if only because saruman's developed ring-mania and elrond is still around), but not how much.
So even once they find Frodo they want to grab him far from watching eyes and get home quietly (Aragorn says something almost exactly like that after they leave bree iirc).
But it could just be the power scaling of the first book vs the third, as we'd call it today.
Even in the third book though, the Nazgul never actually do anything beyond instill terror in those around them. Near as I can tell, in terms of physicality, they're just dudes in cloaks (maybe even less substantial than that) who can be killed (at least for temporarily? It's implied in Fellowship that their physical forms can be destroyed but that their spirits endure and can eventually reconstitute, but the Witch King is killed killed by Eowyn, who's just a normal lady with a normal sword).
Pretty much every time a character actually stands their ground and fights back against a Nazgul, they either win or fight to a stand-still (see their skittishness early in Fellowship, Aragorn and Gandalf each on weathertop, Glorfindel scaring them away, Gandalf staring down the Witch King in Minas Tirith, Eowyn and Merry).
That scene in the special edition--where The Witch King shatters Gandalf's staff and is about to have his Felbeast eat him, until suddenly the Rohan trumpet spooks The Witch King and he flies off--really annoys me. Long time since I read the book but I don't remember that being there.
The Witch-King is apparently on a horse, and he doesn't shatter Gandalf's staff, but the horns of Rohan do interrupt his meeting with Gandalf and cause him to leave the city gates to meet the Rohirrim on the field.
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