scrubjayspeaks

Challenge #6

Share your favourite piece of original canon. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I've been revisiting The Lord of the Rings books, and I recently finished Two Towers. This was previously the section I found least interesting, but this read-through hit different.

Éomer and Faramir both have speeches about what they will decide to do when they capture, more or less, members of the fellowship. Éomer has to decide if he will let Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli go on their way--with loaned horses, even--when he has orders to detain and bring back to King Théoden anyone he hasn't summarily killed. Faramir is under similar orders from Gondor when he meets Frodo, Sam, and Gollum.

They monologue their way through the moral dilemma, weighing options and motivations. Both of them invoke ideas of manhood and honor in a way that really grabbed hold of me. They ultimately both decide that trust, and compassion, and solidarity are more important than blind adherence to rules and authority. It's not that they're disloyal to their leaders. But they decide that their honor will not let them betray vulnerable strangers.

I've been paying particular attention to what being a good man means in the series. It's full of men who recite poetry, and speak tenderly of friends, and feel deeply the sufferings of their times. They're brave and steadfast, prepared to endure terrible things. They don't glory in the terrible things, though, or even in their ability to bear up under them. It is strength without hardness. It is strength that longs for, and works toward, the days when it will not be needed.

There's a lot of advice floating around about how to pass as a man. And a lot of it amounts to "wear drab colors, be less expressive, be harder and more withdrawn." Which all seem like a wretched way of defining manhood. They might be necessary to pass, since those do seem to be the expectations of men in our current overculture. But I keep looking for models of manhood that don't settle for this flattening of a person.

Challenge #3: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Tell us who, from one of your fandoms, would you most want to have dinner with (or tea, or a random afternoon visit), And why?

Immediate thought was one of the Fellowship hobbits. Probably Pippin, because I love him and he's a good mix of fun and thoughtful by the end. Sam would be a delightful choice as well. I doubt we would spend much time sitting about, though, when we could go out into the garden and talk plants instead. However, I realized that I would love to be invited to dinner by a hobbit; I am frankly terrified by the prospect of needing to play host to one myself.

Speaking of gardening, though, I would quite enjoy a friendly visit and afternoon in the garden with Kurama of Yu Yu Hakusho. And if, you know, he happened to slip me a few seeds of the more manageable demon plants from the Makai, well! I wouldn't say no. Actually, in that vein, Reverend Mord and Pastor Drom from Hidden Almanac would be absolutely delightful to spend a day with. Provided I obtained sufficient alcohol to keep Drom amused. Given their propensity for misadventure, though, I suspect their visit would be hazardous for my safety and sanity.

Really, I doubt I'm up to the task of playing host to any of these people. High standards and tendencies toward epic adventure are sort of outside my scope. You know who can come visit any time and who will absolutely find the menu at my house acceptable? Lucky the Pizza Dog from the Hawkeye comics. Lucky can totally come over for snacks and scritches.

I focused on fictional characters, because that's a lot more palatable and more plausible than real humans (and less likely to bite me in the ass X years down the line when it comes out they're a terrible person). But I couldn't help thinking--I would really like to sit down with Guillermo del Toro and talk about monsters. That seems like it would be nice.

In a vast improvement over yesterday, I spent most of today with one of the nearly silent coworkers. Instead of being beset by people carrying a conversation from opposite ends of the room via low bellow, I sat next to someone who probably said a dozen words in some seven hours together. I ran a pleasant job without any expectation of being an actual human and so listened to The Return of the King all day.

(I also finished reading the ebook of Murderbot Diaries #1 yesterday and moved on to #2 today. Murderbot is the most relatable character I've encountered in ages: "I don't want to be seen by people, I'm smarter than most of you but can't be bothered to try too hard, and I just want to consume downloaded media in peace." I expected to like the series--bot feels!--but I didn't realize I would race through the first story with barely restrained glee. I definitely didn't expect to connect so strongly with the titular character. Leave me to my media!)

I've been slowly working my way through library copies of the Middle-earth stories, as I've been able to get a hold of them. Return of the King wasn't available locally and I hadn't had a chance to borrow it from another branch before the lockdowns stopped all interlibrary loans for a time. I read the Hobbit once as a child, and the only thing I remembered about it was the moving elf feast in the woods, where the Company keeps getting plunged into darkness and left behind. I have no idea why that of all things would be the part that stayed with me. I didn't understand the story at the time, having no framework for high fantasy and no one to read it with me, and never tried to read the Lord of the Rings despite owning a set of paperbacks of it.

I...also didn't watch the movie of it until last year. Look--I'm not great with endings. I'm scared of them. If I never get to the ending, maybe the adventure never ends. Maybe it can all end well, the way I want it to, instead of however the storytelling might have decided to end it. So yes, I saw the first two movies in theaters when they came out and just deliberately never watched the last one.

Let me tell you: even having watched the movie version and been thus prepared, listening to the Ride of the Rohirrim is a LOT to cope with emotionally while in the open spaces of the production floor, in full view of people who may find it peculiar if I start weeping into my machine's guts. To say nothing of Eowyn's fight against the Witch-King!

But those are, in fact, all things I remembered from the movie and knew about in a general sense from pop culture osmosis. What stuck with me today was the scene where Gimli and Legolas enter Minas Tirith after the battle and survey the state of the city on their way to be reunited with the two hobbits resting up there.

"There is some good stone-work here," he said as he looked at the walls; "but also some that is less good, and the streets could be better contrived. When Aragorn comes into his own, I shall offer him the service of stonewrights of the Mountain, and we will make this a town to be proud of."

"They need more gardens," said Legolas. "The houses are dead, and there is too little here that grows and is glad. If Aragorn comes into his own, the people of the Wood shall bring him birds that sing and trees that do not die.

--Book V, Chapter 9 (text via)

There are a few similar moments when people describe a future of Aragorn's rule that holds more cooperation between the races of Middle-earth than there currently is. The stories so often mention how there used to be better relations between various kingdoms and races, in ages past, that have now fallen into either isolationist indifference or active enmity. It wasn't always so, it seems, and here we have the suggestion that it need not always be so. Craftsmen could be put to work; places could be made fine and lush again for all to enjoy.

One of the things I loved most about the first Hobbit movie was the flashback at the beginning that shows the town of Dale in its heyday, filled with a lively market of dwarves and Men trading happily. I guess that was always the thing I longed for most when I see this world--to see what all these people could make when they worked together, instead of jealously guarding secret knowledge and keeping to their own private realms. So it cheered me immensely to see Gimli and Legolas of one mind, both thinking how their people's respective skills could be brought to bear on the remnants of the White City.