Trilogy Tuesday is getting closer by the minute!!! So here we go again with my latest Lord of the Rings tribute. Remember… there may be spoilers below if you haven’t read the book!

Copyright Violation of the Day:
Courtesy of TheOneRing.net…

Pippin looks into the Palantir, and screams in agony as Sauron questions him.

Burning Question of the Day:
Will Peter Jackson pay tribute to the crappy movies that came before?

Prior to this epic rendering of Lord of the Rings, the only previous attempt at putting Tolkien’s story on screen came in the form of two of terrible animated films, Ralph Bakshi’s theatrical flop The Lord of the Rings in 1978, and Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass’s made-for-TV cartoon musical, The Return of the King, in 1980. Yes, I did say musical. Which brings me to my point. One of the songs in that version of Return of the King is a little ditty that begins, “Frodo of the Nine Fingers, and the Ring of Doom…” You can download an MP3 of some fan singing it (rather badly, appropriately enough) here. Keep in mind, when I was about nine years old, I used to love this song. :)

Anyway, the song, unlike most things in the cartoon, is not entirely at odds with Tolkien’s storytelling. Although I’m sure J.R.R. would not have approved of the cheesy tune, there is a line in the chapter “The Field of Cormallen” in which a minstrel of Gondor says, “I will sing to you of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom.” And from that springs my question. During the Field of Cormallen scene in the movie, will Jackson show the minstrel of Gondor? And if so, will he have him sing the song? And if so, will he give it the same tune as the song in the animated movie? I think that would be a great inside joke, a little “shout-out” to all the fans who suffered through those awful movies and have finally been rewarded by these great ones.

Nerdy Middle-Earth Fact of the Day:
In Return of the King, moviegoers will be introduced to Shelob, the giant, evil spider who very nearly brings Frodo and Sam’s quest to a painful and premature end. Shelob is unquestionably bad-ass. But she is not the bad-ass-est spider in the history of Middle-earth. That honor would go to Ungoliant — Shelob’s mother.

In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien describes Shelob as the “last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world.” That sounds cool and all, but if you want to know who the hell Ungoliant is, you have to read The Silmarillion’s history of the really, really, really ancient world. That I have done, and this I can tell you: “In a ravine she lived, and took shape as a spider of monstrous form, weaving her black webs in a cleft of the mountains. There she sucked up all light that she could find, and spun it forth again in dark nets of strangling gloom, until no light more could come to her abode; and she was famished.”

Ungoliant was the chief sidekick of Melkor, a.k.a. Morgoth — the Lucifer figure of Tolkien’s world, and the original Dark Lord, who taught Sauron everything he knows (talk about bad-ass!) — in his plot to vanquish the Light of The Trees, steal the Silmarils, and escape from his imprisonment to reclaim the lordship of Middle-earth. “A cloak of darkness she wove about them when Melkor and Ungoliant set forth: an Unlight, in which things seemed to be no more, and which eyes could not pierce, for it was void.” Thus the Light was replaced by the Great Darkness, and though this Darkness eventually receded, the original, paradise-like beauty of the Light could never be re-created, except inside the Silmarils in which it had previously been captured, and thus the Silmarils became the most treasured objects in Middle-earth, and would rule the fates of Men and Elves for thousands of years to come. (Got all that?)

Anyway, Ungoliant eventually turned on Morgoth, attempting to take the Silmarils for herself and devour them (and possibly him), but she was foiled when Morgoth’s Balrogs were awakened by their Lord’s terrible cry of anguish, and they attacked Ungoliant and drove her away empty-handed. She retreated to a dark region called Nan Dungortheb (in the common tongue, the “Valley of Dreadful Death”), where she mated with other evil spiders and produced a bunch of evil-spider offspring — including, we presume, Shelob.

But Ungoliant evidently wasn’t a very good mother. She eventually left her evil babies to their own evil devices, and travelled away south, always searching for more light and happiness to devour. “Of the fate of Ungoliant no tale tells. Yet some have said that she ended long ago, when in her uttermost famine she devoured herself at last.”

Tolkien Quote of the Day:
From The Return of the King, in the chapter “The Land of Shadow,” as Frodo sleeps in Mordor and Sam stands watch:

Frodo sighed and was asleep almost before the words were spoken. Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was a light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.