The council of Elrond is such a hugeass infodump it's hard for a lot of people to get past.

Kathy, re: Watership Down. There's a political blogger out there somewhere with a blog named "Silflay Hraka". Made me spew Diet Coke on my monitor... (Seems to be rather right-leaning, so I'm not likely to read it much, but I love the sense of humor.) Yet another geek shibboleth.

I got lots of props from my coworkers for my not-even-close-to-encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkein history etc. It was fun.

EW was actually entertaining with Jon Stewart last night.

I wasn't going to watch last night, until I started watching and saw it was a new one. I was convinced that I'd seen him plugging RotK on TDS before Christmas and so no need to watch. And then I realized-- the show I was so certain I'd seen a few weeks ago was during the FotR junket. Man.

Bwahaha!

I thought it was good too -- at least everytime you see him Elijah has new and different things to say.

Okay -- WBBM which is Chicago's local CBS station has a show called Kickin' It. Now, I have NO IDEA if this is local or syndicated or what but on December 18th at 12:30 am they will have Viggo Mortensen as a guest.

There's a political blogger out there somewhere with a blog named "Silflay Hraka".

Ha!

It's easy to tell when I'm reading Watership Down (which happens a few times a year) because I start using "Frith on a hill!" instead of human expletives.

I love listening to Tolkien geeks and peppering them with questions and being edumacated. Saves me a lot of trouble (haven't yet made a successful attempt at the books--I'm sorry, I just can't deal with the writing style!!) and I get all the nifty info.

So, anyway, thinks, y'all. I love lurking on this thread. :-D

A coworker came to me to ask me a question about LotR because I was an expert.

My fingers were poised over this very posting box, but she only wanted to know if Saruman was in the third film, and if not, what really happened to him.

She was impressed with my level of detail, I was merely embarassed.

So here's my question. What was the idea behind casting a bunch of dark-haired actors and putting them in blond wigs? It makes it look like all the elves except for Elrond, Arwen and Galadriel bleach their hair and seems silly, to me. Especially combined with the dark stubble on a couple of the elven men.

It's been a long time since I've read the books, but I don't recall it being said that all elves are blond. Or was it supposed to show that the dark-haired elves (Elrond and Arwen) had human as well as elven blood. (One of Elrond's parents was human, correct?)

I was merely embarassed

I was so embarassed after going to see RotK with the not-my-kind-of-LotR-geek girl who was nice enough to ask me to a free midnight showing.

She called a mutual friend of ours and made several comments as to how she had never met someone so "into" a movie as me. But! But! She had read the books! She knew it wasn't just the movies I was into!

I saw her in bar a week or so after and she just gave me an awkward smile.

Thing is - I was on really good behaviour. I mean, besides the uncontrollable sobbing. I didn't correct her for the most part when she got facts from the book wrong. And I gave her the extremely abbreviated "the books are not an allegory for WWII" speech when she called the Shire "Switzerland."

But yeah - embarassed.

etf: grammar

I don't recall it being said that all elves are blond. Or was it supposed to show that the dark-haired elves (Elrond and Arwen) had human as well as elven blood.

In the books, there are blonde elves and dark elves, and some of each are Noldor or Sindar. It just depends on their family background. And Cirdan is, IIRC, grey-haired -- and bearded? Maybe?.

Just because Galadriel is blonde shouldn't make all the Galadrim blonde, for instance, because a lot of those elves were actually Sindarin, and more closely related to Legolas than the Noldor who came back from Valinor. Hell, Celeborn wasn't even Noldor -- but then Celeborn's kind of a non-entity.

That said, the Half-Elven line and the Dunedain are all said to be dark-haired and light-eyed.

I think in the books most of the elves are dark and isn't there a particular combination of very pale skin, dark hair and light eyes that was the mark of the Noldoli?

Galadriel (although a niece of Feanor) -- came from a lone blonde branch of her family, which is why I was surprised to see so many blond elves in FotR.