2025 Reread: The Return of the King

The Lord of the Rings reread is done! And I have much to say...

So, right off the bat, one thing I didn't remember at all was Ghân-buri-Ghân, who guides the Rohirrim through the hidden path on the way to Minas Tirith. I loved him and his people and thought they were a great inclusion, it shows that as far as the Men go, it's not just Gondor and Rohan that have a problem with the likes of Sauron.

Speaking of people who have a problem with the likes of Sauron: Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. I mostly remembered him as the tomato-chewing madman from the films, and while I remembered he was more complex in the books (in part because he possessed a palantír), that was about the limit of my knowledge. I was surprised to discover a genuinely fascinating character who is probably one of my favourites in the series overall now, and a strong rebuttal to the charge that Tolkien's world is too black-and-white in terms of morality, because he lives in the grey areas. I liked the dynamic between him and Pippin, and thought it was hilarious how after Gandalf spent so long warning Pippin about Denethor, the fool of a Took swore himself to his service within five minutes. Good job, Pippin! Denethor's key moral failing seems to be, in the eyes of the story, that he succumbed to despair and lost faith in the fight against Sauron after it could no longer be won by the only way he saw (force of arms), and did not know that Frodo and Sam could still succeed.

Frodo and Sam...I think here is where the "Samwise Gamgee is the real hero of LOTR" starts to emerge, as he takes over as what is essentially the viewpoint character after Frodo got captured at the end of the last novel. His one-man siege of Cirith Ungol was amazing, and his sheer determination was very impressive afterwards. I liked how, after despising him for most of the story, and inadvertently ruining his almost-redemption, he finally takes pity on Gollum after knowing what it's like to bear the One Ring for a short while, and let him go. Gollum comes back, of course, and it's a good thing, too, because he saves the world.

Gollum's fall...I knew it went like this, and not how it did in the movie, where he and Frodo struggle and fall, but Frodo clings onto the mountain while Gollum keeps the Ring for the last five seconds of his life. I get why it was changed for the film, as Gollum accidentally doing a bit of an oopsie and tripping off the side of the Crack of Doom may have come off as anticlimactic, but I get what Tolkien was going for here as this was the result of all the mercy and pity showed to Gollum over the course of the story, and Gollum of course would never voluntarily destroy himself or the Precious (except in the alternate possibility Tolkien described in one of his letters where he did redeem himself, which I love as a what-if scenario), so by the logic of the story, it had to be Gollum and it couldn't be on purpose, so it had to be like this. I can't speak for one way or the other what's better, but I get both versions of Gollum's fall.

Speaking of anticlimaxes, the Scouring of the Shire! I loved this chapter and I feel like it needs a whole separate blog post just to cover it, but I'll go over the basics here. I liked how it took the whimsicality of the Shire and made it kinda chilling, like with the Shirriffs and the Rules and all that, so typical of The Hobbit but turned into something mean and nasty, like what Saruman has become. I wasn't expecting Saruman to show up slightly earlier in a preceding chapter as a wandering beggar who essentially yells some angry words at the hobbits and then leaves, and it might have been important for foreshadowing, but I thought it was unnecessary. I think it's good that it's not in the film, though, as this chapter can't be tacked onto the end of The Return of the King in a cinematic format...it'd need to be its own film, or a short film, at least, but I imagine that film, The Lord of the Rings: The Scouring of the Shire, would have been far less popular than the trilogy.

Anyway, rambling done. I loved rereading LOTR, and I'm nowhere near done rambling about Tolkien on the Internet. I'll be reading The Silmarillion for the first time soon, and I have so much more to ramble about when it comes to Denethor, Théoden, Saruman, Wormtongue, Pippin (okay, I'm essentially just rattling off my favourite characters now), and so on and so forth. I'll leave this post here, though. The Return of the King, like the preceding instalments, was fantastic, and I eagerly await delving further into Tolkien's legendarium...

 

2025 Reread: The Two Towers

This post is still a bit behind-the-times as I finished rereading The Two Towers a couple of weeks ago now, but like I said in the last one, better late than never! I loved it, of course, Tolkien's work is fantastic (I say, stating the generally obvious).

As far as the stuff that stood out to me this time around goes...I'll start with the Dunlendings, or as they're called here, the Men of Dunland (from memory, "Dunlendings" was first used in the sequel). I appreciate how they're done: Tolkien gives them a genuine ancient grudge against Rohan, and explores how despicable it is that Saruman took advantage of that by lying to them and stoking the flames of vengeance amongst them. The reveal that Saruman claimed the Rohirrim burned their captives alive is both horrifying in terms of a reader reaction and satisfying in terms of narrative development. Théoden made peace with them, a far better outcome than continuing to fight them.

Speaking of Théoden...what a character! I loved him so much more than I remembered. Where do I begin unpacking this guy? Starting as unnaturally old beyond his years and having fallen under the spell of Saruman and Wormtongue, feeling overwhelmed with the issues that plague Rohan, and in his feeble state, lets the realm slip through his fingers. But then Gandalf comes, snaps him out of it, sends Wormtongue packing, and Théoden returns to the man he should be, a strong king who can fight back against the forces of Isengard, and reclaims that which he lost, but was really within his reach all along. Then he tells Saruman exactly where he can shove his manipulation. He was a very compelling character, and I dread reading his fate in the next book.

Gríma Wormtongue was another character I previously overlooked. On the surface he falls into the usual treacherous advisor and sycophantic servant archetypes, and he plays those parts well, but I was interested to see the role he plays thematically for Tolkien. My interpretation is that perhaps more than any other character save Gollum, Wormtongue represents of the mundane evil that people do, as opposed to the big villains like Sauron and Saruman. He's just one guy in Rohan who is offered power (and also Éowyn) and sells out his king for it. He's pathetic, but also pitiful in how human his motives are and the fact that serving Saruman will not be a pleasant fate.

What else...Helm's Deep was epic in the film, whereas in the book it seemed like a much less significant affair, although to be fair, it was the dramatic climax of the film, whereas here it was in the midpoint of Book Three. Treebeard was much quicker to action than in the film, but that too makes sense, and ye gods that was a heaping helping of Ent-lore. I do wonder, though, whatever became of Radagast the Brown here, as the wizard who loved nature most of all, and would have undoubtedly been appalled at Saruman's actions.

But Radagast, like so much more about Théoden, may well be the topic of another post on here. I've rambled on long enough. The Two Towers is great. The Return of the King is next!

2025 Reread: The Fellowship of the Ring

I reread this weeks ago and forgot to update this blog! Ah, well...better late than never!

I thoroughly enjoyed rereading it, although I'm glad I did The Hobbit first, as sort of a gateway point back into the dense and complex lore of Middle-earth.

The main thing that stuck out to me was how much the Peter Jackson films, brilliant in their own right, of course, have come to inadvertently dominate how much The Lord of the Rings is seen! For instance, I only remembered Gandalf telling Frodo about Gollum when they're in the mines of Moria, whereas in the book, he spills all the beans to Frodo before they even leave the Shire! So not only is Gandalf a bit more forthcoming than I remember, but if even minor details like this could get forgotten, I was interested to see what more there was.

I knew about the major stuff, like the one and only Tom Bombadil...rereading his chapters was interesting. I thoroughly understand why he was cut from the films, but I loved him and Goldberry here. The whole first half (or Book 1, more properly) felt like The Hobbit 2 and Book 2 transitioned more into the LOTR that I was familiar with.

 I don't think I have much more to say that others haven't already said far, far better than me (I'm not a Tolkien scholar, far from it), except that I didn't realise how much more present Gollum seemed. Unlike the film, the book always seemed to remind me that Gollum was there, always watching and hunting the hobbitses for his Precious. Gollum being one of the most interesting characters in the series (and literature as a whole) it set up his entry in the sequel very, very well.

That's about it for The Fellowship of the Ring in terms of what I can comment on! I'll post about The Two Towers soon enough.

Also, RIP Boromir, he died a hero.

Tome of the Devourer

AntipodeanSF published another one of my flash fiction pieces, read it here!

2025 Reread: The Hobbit

This 2025 reread thing started with a wish to reread The Lord of the Rings, but shortly after I finished The Eyes of the Dragon and picked up The Fellowship of the Ring, I got about a page in before I thought to myself "no, no, no, this isn't right...LOTR starts with The Hobbit!" So I put it back down and started on The Hobbit instead.

This turned out to be a very good idea.

I won't bore anyone with recapping any details of The Hobbit, and I knew the basic story off by heart once again. But one thing that surprised me, reading it over a decade later, was how much depth there was to the setting, I could understand why Tolkien wanted to make the most of it and wrote The Lord of the Rings in it. I appreciate how it never seems unnecessary: the Iron Hills don't appear in the story, but they're fleshed out enough for the reader to understand their significance to the dwarves. The mines of Moria don't appear either, but they do even more to flesh out dwarf lore.

The settings that are depicted are done very richly, while avoiding being overcomplicated. The Shire is a vividly quaint little town and Bilbo Baggins feels very much "from there", the Elvenking's realm feels like something out of a fae story, and the Lonely Mountain feels haunted by dragon-sickness. My favourite would have to be Lake-town, which I found genuinely complex and intriguing...the people there are, by and large, good, but they live in the shadow of destroyed Dale, the Master is like a G-rated corrupt politician, and Tolkien sets its dreary tone very well.

As for the secondary characters depicted along the way...I loved Gollum as usual, but special mention has to go to Beorn, who I had, by and large, forgotten from my first read, and i found him very interesting, as well as the Eagles. There was a convincing answer to the infamous question "why don't the Eagles just take them everywhere?" Bard the Bowman feels like Tolkien's precursor to Aragorn in LOTR, and I remember thinking he came out of nowhere the first time, but on reread I liked him more...to me he felt like a good representation of how Bilbo is just one hobbit in a larger world, and other heroes like Bard are a part of it, his story crossing over with Bilbo's on occasion (and I did like it when the two met face-to-face).

The villains seemed different on reread too. Gollum was fantastic, of course, and other minor villains like the trolls and the spiders of Mirkwood I thought were fun roadblocks on the company's journey. The Great Goblin was rather bland, but he was cut out of the story (heh) in short order, and I liked how the story kept bringing up the repercussions of killing him. Bolg, at the end, has a tie-in to the old Azog lore (more on Azog in a bit), but he's another "just kind of there" bad guy to crop up at the end and make everyone work together. Smaug was the one I was interested in rereading: I could see his death coming off as anticlimactic, but I also liked how, much like the rest of the story, it wasn't really about Smaug, and Bilbo played a vital role in bringing the dragon down, so I liked that again. My favourite villain, though, was the Master of Lake-town, and I thought his fate at the end was very interesting and fit the themes of the story perfectly.

The main question I had on reread was the matter of the film trilogy, which stretched a children's book shorter than Fellowship out to three movies, so when I went back over the book, I wondered how that was even remotely possible. As it turns out, a lot of material from the movies is there...kind of. Gandalf pops in and out of the story seemingly at whim, leaving whenever he'd seem overpowered, and showing up when Thorin and Company are in mortal danger. At the end of the book, though, he explains what he was doing (and this is something I don't remember from the first time): he went to a council of wizards and then into the woods to oppose the Necromancer and drive him out of the region. I'm not doing it justice here, but Gandalf's epic quest sounds awesome, and it makes Bilbo's journey to the Lonely Mountain seem not insignificant at all, but just one part of this larger world.

In the book, that's all off-page. But in the movies, you get to see Gandalf going to Dol Guldur and fighting the Necromancer and all of that, and his meeting with the council with Saruman present. The way I see it, in the book it makes sense, because the power of the reader's imagination is infinitely greater than any words put to page to describe Gandalf's quest. But in a medium like film, there's a good chance it would've come off as silly, with Gandalf being a recurring deus ex machina and disappearing whenever convenient. Plus, moviegoers went in with memories of the more serious tone of Peter Jackson's LOTR movies (the book isn't outright goofy by any means but is certainly lighter and funnier than I remember LOTR being, like a fun adventure), and the foreknowledge of LOTR lore, so they knew the head of the wizard council would be Saruman and that the Necromancer is Sauron. When we, the audience, know what's there, it's different compared to the mystery of the book where "the Necromancer" is just some bad guy and "the wizard council" could be anyone.

I said I would get to Azog again: I think the choice to have Azog as a recurring villain in the movies makes a lot of sense. In the book, the villains along the way either don't stick around for too long (Gollum) or are just kind of there (Bolg), so having Azog as a regular antagonist throughout the story makes sense to me and builds up to the Battle of the Five Armies in a good way. Having him be a legendary villain "Azog the Defiler" who killed Thorin's grandfather also adds to his menace and builds him up to be a strong threat, and his being a servant of Sauron / the Necromancer ties Gandalf's stuff in as well, so the Battle of the Five Armies really feels like a proper conclusion to it all rather than a big fight coming out of nowhere to make everyone work together (which was fine in the book as Bilbo was a small part of a big world, but in film might've seemed like a bizarre ending).

In short, I loved reading The Hobbit again, and I wound up gaining not only a new appreciation for the book, but also a bit more appreciation for the film trilogy adaptation and understanding a lot of why they were made the way they were. Next up is The Fellowship of the Ring!

2025 Reread: The Eyes of the Dragon

So as one of my New Year's Resolutions, which I wrote down and thus can't forget, I began the plan to reread old books I read ages ago. It's an experiment to see how much I've changed or if the book looks different or anything along those lines. It started with me just wanting to reread The Lord of the Rings, but then it expanded beyond that once I realised The Hobbit would have to be included, and then everything else followed on from there.

One of my other New Year's Resolutions was to use this blog for more than just posting whenever I get published, so I decided to check off two resolutions with one stone, in a metaphor that made less sense the more I typed it out.

I'll get to Tolkien pretty soon, but I started off with The Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King's medieval fantasy novel. I read this in either 2013 or 2014 (in those days I could be found in the library reading either a Stephen King novel or a Garfield comic compilation...so it was hardcore horror or Stephen King), and I remember enjoying it...although the only story element I could recall was that the main antagonist seriously gave me the creeps...by the standards of fantasy villains, this one stood out just that little bit more in terms of a chill factor. I hadn't read A Song of Ice and Fire in those days, so my baseline was lower than it is now, but I did remember this villain for standing out in the otherwise tame novel for how evil he was.

I didn't know, of course, that Flagg the magician was actually Randall Flagg, the big bad guy of King's mythos overall, and who had appeared in other stories of his, and that his depravity in The Eyes of the Dragon was relatively tame compared to his actions in The Stand and The Dark Tower. Flagg has a claim to being one of my favourite villains in literature, potentially even taking the #1 spot for me, and that alone will get a blog post at some point in the future.

But I digress. When I reread it for 2025 to kick off the resolution, I had seen The Stand miniseries (I haven't read the novel yet), I had read some of The Dark Tower (although that was in high school too and I remember little), and I was fully aware of Randall Flagg's status in Stephen King's mythos. Not to mention I wasn't in high school this time.

And my thoughts rereading it? I liked it! "Generic" has a bad connotation, to be sure, but it plays out like a typical medieval fantasy story, with all the expected tropes in their place. You've got the good prince Peter, his resentful younger brother Thomas -- who I appreciated a lot more than I remember as a character and is probably the second most memorable -- the good King Roland who reminded me of a much nicer Robert Baratheon from ASOIAF, and the evil advisor masterminding a plot to usurp the crown. The novel isn't exactly a groundbreaking story, but it's an enjoyable read.

Flagg, though, stood out just as much now as he did back then. The man's vivid creepiness comes from just how much he differs from the relatively pleasant "King Arthur" vibes of the rest of the novel...while Peter is learning how to relate to the common people as a prince, Flagg is consulting a grimoire made of human skin! (I'm pretty sure said grimoire is heavily implied to be the Necronomicon itself also...) His manipulation of the other characters works very well, also. At times I wondered "how does nobody suspect the clearly sinister magician who wears a black cloak all the time and knows a lot about evil?" but as it progressed, I was able to buy that Flagg was just that entrenched in the kingdom's politics that so many people saw him as basically untouchable, and he was careful enough to hide behind his puppets.

To sum it up, rereading The Eyes of the Dragon...I enjoyed it once again! I think having read a lot more since reading it the first time, I'm a lot more familiar with the tropes of fantasy and how straight they're played here, so the story does feel generic (for want of a word with better connotations), but it's still enjoyable and Flagg is just an effective bad guy.

Next 2025 reread post is The Hobbit!

The Imprisoned One

 AntipodeanSF published another of my flash fiction pieces, read it here!