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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   Edited 3yr ago   40351 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color.

Insofar as I have a problem with it, it's that the Lord of the Rings was a substitute for the loss of Anglo-Saxon mythology. Unlike the Greeks, Vikings, or Romans, we (I'm half Anglo-Saxon) don't have a surviving corpus of cool sagas/myths, but Tolkien did an amazing job of filling in that gap in Anglo-Saxon culture.

But there was nothing particularly Anglo-Saxon about the Peter Jackson films (e.g. Aragorn wasn't played by an Anglo-Saxon actor, a lot of the music was Celtic...) so this isn't a new problem.

Similarly, the fact that the race-swapping etc. is so forced is off-putting, but I also didn't like how Arwen's character was changed to fit with modern sensibilities in the Fellowship of the Ring film. Off-putting, but not the end of the world.

My personal case for not watching it is that I found The Hobbit films that I saw (Hobbit I and Hobbit III) painful to watch, and I didn't like the Lord of the Rings films that much anyway. I enjoyed all the Tolkien I've read a lot, but just like they can't make a Madeline L'Engle film to match her brilliance, I have accepted that Tolkien will never be great on screen. The closest that match the awe-inspiring images I have in my head as I read Tolkien was a few moments in the 1978 Lord of the Rings and in the original Peter Jackson trilogy. The rest is meh at best.

Same with Dune, except that I thought the most recent Dune film was at least worth my time watching, unlike anything done with Tolkien's works for nearly 20 years...

(e.g. Aragorn wasn't played by an Anglo-Saxon actor, a lot of the music was Celtic...)

Mortensen is Danish, so it's very plausible he's a direct descendant of the Angles.

Didn't know that. Somehow, I was caught by the first name and assumed he was Italian (basically an African, really...).

Or Jutes

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