Imagine The Fellowship all sitting around the campfire halfway up Caradhras retelling the events of the Hobbit to Boromir and Aragorn Rashomon-style with Gimli going "my dad tells it this way" and Legolas going "well, my dad tells it this way" and the Hobbits all going "but Bilbo tells it this way!" and, even though Gandalf was fucking there for half of it, he refuses to weigh in on anything because watching them argue is more fun and also he doesn't remember because it was over 75 years ago.

Even better: Gandalf remembers it perfectly fine but he keeps making shit up and agreeing to multiple different versions just to throw everyone off

Too good to hide in the tags!

Just remember 60 people signed on to stab Caesar and he only had 23 stab wounds, the real moral of the story is group projects have always just been like that

happy stab day! let’s discuss the themes over lunch!

Brutus casts:

be sure to leave out milk and cookies for brutus tonight

You can leave as many cookies as you want but he’ll only et two

this remains the funniest addition anyone’s made to one of my posts

tbh nothing is weirder to me than manly grimdark dudebro lord of the rings bc it’s just??? the epitome of light and love to me???? no narrative embodies hope and gentleness and healing like lotr does why must you insist on talking to me about badass aragorn vs. useless frodo. that’s not the point brad

I feel like this is also why so many of the post-LOTR Tolkien ripoffs are so terrible! It’s people pulling from Tolkien when they fundamentally don’t understand what makes Tolkien work. You get all these stories written by people who don’t think Frodo was worthy of his plotline and so they give it to their Aragorn expy instead, and it’s dull and boring and totally lacks the themes and the heart that make LOTR an important, enduring story.

#lord of the rings is about beauty and love and good and hope and gentleness in the face of overwhelming sadness and darkness#less about the battlefields and more about frodo and Sam holding hands through Shelob’s lair#and Galadriel’s star-glass in the darkness of mordor#overwhelmingly the point is beauty and love#even though those things are tinged in sadness#the reason I can never get into any other fantasy stories is because they focus on the battles and the hardship#and not about the beauty and the love and the sadness#‘I will not say do not weep for not all tears are an evil’ (tags from @greyacedipperpines)

when Aragorn shows up in Gondor no one cares who he is until he gets to the Houses of Healing, because the proof of true kingship is not being able to fight real good, it’s having “the hands of a healer”

so Aragorn calls his friends back from the darkness with little more than a gentle touch and a loving voice (and some plants, but it’s pretty clear that the plants alone aren’t enough) and that’s when the rumors spread through Gondor that the King has returned because the love of a king has this great power

like… that’s the big moment. washing his friends’ wounds and telling them they’re going to be okay. this is not macho! it’s not badass! I mean… in a way it’s actually really fucking badass that someone can get stabbed by a knife made of evil and Aragorn doesn’t even have to raise his voice when he says “not today,” but it’s not, like, standard fantasy badass.

Tolkien lived through a war. War is not entertaining and epic, it’s horrifying and terrible. That’s why all the climatic moments of LOTR aren’t battles, but decisions of love: Sam going back for Frodo, Bilbo giving Bard the Arkenstone, Aragorn healing Merry and Eowyn…

Where modern fantasy falls short is they think a war setting is the key to Tolkien’s success, so they describe warrior-man and the gorey, rapey, traumatizing things he does/sees (looking at u, SOIAF). But it’s not about fighting the war, it’s about living through it and loving despite it. Bilbo Baggins slept through his battles, Frodo and Sam (arguably, the main heroes) never fought or killed, a woman & hobbit defeated the witch-king out of love for their lord, not for power or fame. LOTR isn’t a story of war bc Tolkien had already seen that, it’s the story of hope.

PUNIC WARS THREE

PUNIC WARS FOUR

Okay, YES!?

But the funniest thing about this is that I think you've actually discovered the one single piece of content that could have simultaneously upset both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis so bad that they are, as we speak, clawing their way out of the grave ready to fight.*

*whether they're going to fight you or just each other is not clear yet, we'll just have to wait and see.

ok but when did sauron ever make gifts?

The ring?

FIIIIIVE GOOOLDEN RIIIINGS

but they were all of them... deceived

for a partridge in a pear tree was made

NINE GO-OLD RINGS

Seven for the dwarves

Three for elves

None for hobbitses

And One Ring to rule them all

Shortbread Cookies

Follow for recipes

Is this how you roll?

The Tolkien society is mad that someone used an image they have a copyright on because they bought the physical copy and God fuck the Tolkien society so hard.

Holy shit they made a Tolkien nft

non-fungible tolkien

Anyways. Here’s the full image. It cost me £0

Now we have the set. That’ll be £0 each.

"non-fungible tolkien"

I am dead

the fact that we only have “herculean task” and “sisyphean task” feels so limiting. so here’s a few more tasks for your repertoire

feel free to chime in i ran out of ideas much faster than i anticipated

Promethean task: opposite of a Cassandraean task. You have the right information, and SOMEONE has to share it. But it's all in the delivery and if you're the person to identify the problem you WILL be hated forever.

Oedipal Task: (1) Attempting to avoid an unspeakably awful outcome and in doing so creating the circumstances that will bring it about. (2) Trying to solve an problem and discovering that you are in fact the problem you are trying to solve.

Odyssean task: you’ll complete it but it’ll take 20 times longer than it should and involve multiple side quests and mini-adventures

Pandorean task: some people fucked around and now it's your job to make sure they find out

orphic task: circumstances beyond your control force you to go some place you really really don't wanna go. nobody in that place wants you to be there either. come back changed forever without the one thing that sent you there in the first place.

has this been done before idk but if it hasn’t that’s a travesty

And after Shepard and Grunt leave, there’s a phone call that goes:

“Kahlee, how do you feel about grandkids”

“Fuck’s sake, David–”

an additional bonus for my fellow shenko trash fans

protest signs for a free palestine.

...this is not unlike the experience of trying to explain the Silmarillion to someone who has only seen Rings of Power

#jesus.#orpheus and eurydice#as a poem#using a poll#this is probably the greatest exploitation of mediums i have ever seen op#every reader has the chance to become part of the text by voting#not the subtext#the TEXT#and i love me some ephemeral works in concept#you had to be here for this one week#and then the text is locked#(barring any edits to the original post of course)#and i just think that's so beautiful#beauty springs from the simplest things viewed askew#and all you need is a poll that accepts long enough strings (via couchcrusader)

and then THE FINAL RESULT. where “look behind” came so so so close to winning, but “i trust that she is there” came out ahead by 0.1%. so maybe, maybe, we did it right this time. maybe this time we were able to save her.