Today we’ve got a little comedy, in addition to all the nerdiness. And not of the Brendan Loy Top Ten list variety, either — I’m talking actual, legitimate, published comedy. :) Scroll down and enjoy!

(Warning: SPOILERS BELOW if you haven’t read the books!)

Burning Question of the Day:
Will the scene where Sam abandons Frodo for dead on the slopes of the Morgai in Mordor, and takes the Ring for himself to complete the Quest, be the most emotional, gut-wrenching scene in the history of movies, or what?

Okay, so that’s kind of a rhetorical question. :) I don’t have any elaboration for this one. You’ll understand when you see it.

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

Frodo in Shelob’s Lair. Ooooh, spooky. :)

Nerdy Middle-Earth Fact of the Day:
Today I answer the question: “Who and what are Gandalf and Saruman, anyway?”

Gandalf and Saruman are two of the five Istari, or Wizards, who were sent east from Valinor by the Valar, the mighty gods of Tolkien’s world, to help the free peoples of Middle-earth battle Sauron. The Istari first appeared on the scene roughly one thousand years after Isildur took the Ring from Sauron, which is roughly two thousand years before the events of Lord of the Rings.

According to Appendix B of LOTR, “They came out of the Far West and were messengers sent to contest the power of Sauron, and to unite all those who had the will to resist him; but they were forbidden to match his power with power, or to seek to dominate Elves or Men by force or fear.” Obviously, Saruman is eventually so ensnared by his desire for the Ring that he disobeys this prohibition utterly, and thus he is cast out of the Order of Wizards. He is demoted and replaced by Gandalf, formerly the Grey, who returns from the dead “until my task is done” (as he says in the movie) to become Gandalf the White.

Saruman (a.k.a. Curunir, “the Man of Skill”) and Gandalf (a.k.a. Mithrandir, “the Grey Pilgrim”) are not the only Wizards who make an appearance in the Lord of the Rings books. Radagast the Brown, another of the Istari, also plays a crucial (if unwitting) role in the Fellowship of the Ring, first helping Saruman capture Gandalf and then helping Gandalf escape. But all of that was left out in Peter Jackson’s attempt to condense the opening sequences of the first movie.

The other two Istari are not mentioned by name in The Lord of the Rings books, but it is believed that they travelled off into the East somewhere, and do not turn out to be major players in the War of the Ring.

One of the reasons Gandalf is so powerful even among his fellow Wizards is that he possesses one of the three Elven-Rings. This was given him by Cirdan, master of the Grey Havens, who perceived with his great foresight that Gandalf would need it before the end. “It will support you in the weariness that you have taken upon yourself,” Cirdan tells him. “For this is the Ring of Fire, and with it you may rikindle hearts in a world that grows chill.”

This Ring, Narya the Great, may be what Gandalf is referring to in Moria when he tells the Balrog that he is “a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor,” though this is not certain. It is also possible he was talking about the “Secret Fire,” a.k.a. the Flame Imperishable, which “seems to represent that aspect of Ilúvatar through which he was able to grant free will and true life to the beings he created.”

Tolkien Quote of the Day:
For a little change of pace, today’s Tolkien quote is not actually from J.R.R. Tolkien. Instead, it is a quote from the Harvard Lampoon’s wonderful satire, Bored of the Rings, which was given to me as a Christmas present last year by Becky’s brother-in-law Soren, a fellow LOTR nerd.

In Bored of the Rings, the Shire is the “Sty,” the Hobbits are “Boggies,” and two of the principal Hobbit characters are Frito Bugger and his uncle Dildo. :) The whole book is hilarious, but I will quote from the prologue, “Concerning Boggies,” which is (of course) a direct takeoff on Tolkien’s prologue, “Concerning Hobbits.” In Joe Loy fashion, I was boldface a few selected favorite lines. :)

First though, for context, note that the real prologue begins, “Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people.” A few selected lines from it: “It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours… But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered. The beginnings of the Hobbits lies far back in the Elder Days that are now lost and forgotten. Only the Elves still preserve any records of that vanished time, and their traditions are concerned almost entirely with their own history, in which Men appear seldom and Hobbits are not mentioned at all… But in the days of Bilbo, and of Frodo his heir, they suddenly became, by no wish of their own, both important and renowned, and troubled the counsels of the Wise and the Great.”

Okay, enough of the real deal. Let the satire begin:

Boggies are an unattractive but annoying people whose numbers have decreased rather precipitously since the bottom fell out of the fairy-tale market. Slow and sullen, and yet dull, they prefer to lead simple lives of pastoral squalor. They don’t like machines more complicated than a garrote, a blackjack, or a luger, and they have always been shy of the "Big Folk" or "Biggers," as they call us. As a rule they now avoid us, except on rare occasions when a hundred or so will get together to dry-gulch a lone farmer or hunter. They are a little people, smaller than dwarves, who consider them puny, sly, and inscrutable and often refer to them as the "boggie peril." They seldom exceed three feet in height, but are fully capable of overpowering creatures half their size when they get the drop on them. As for the boggies of the Sty, with whom we are chiefly concerned, they are unusually drab, dressing in shiny gray suits with narrow lapels, alpine hats, and string ties. They wear no shoes, and they walk on a pair of hairy blunt instruments which can only be called feet because of the position they occupy at the end of their legs. Their faces have a pimply malevolence that suggests a deep-seated fondness for making obscene telephone calls, and when they smile, there is something in the way they wag their foot-long tongues that makes Komodo dragons gulp with disbelief. They have long, clever fingers of the sort one normally associates with hands that spend a good deal of time around the necks of small, furry animals and in other people’s pockets, and they are very skillful at producing intricate and useful things, like loaded dice and booby traps. They love to eat and drink, play mumblety-peg with dim-witted quadrupeds, and tell off-color dwarf jokes. They give dull parties and cheap presents, and they enjoy the same general regard and esteem as a dead otter.

This was all in the Third, or Sheet-Metal, Age of Lower Middle Earth, and the lands of that age have long since dropped into the sea and their inhabitants into bell jars at the Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not Odditorium. Of their original home, the boggies of Frito’s time had lost all records, partly because their level of literacy and intellectual development could have been equaled by a young blowfish and partly because their fondness for genealogical studies made them dislike the notion that their elaborately forged family trees had roots about as steady as Birnham Wood. It is nevertheless clear from their heavy accents and their fondness for dishes cooked in Brylcreem that somewhere in their past they went west in steerage. Their legends and old songs, which deal mainly with oversexed elves and dragons in heat, make passing mention of the area around the Anacin River, between Plywood and the Papier-Mache Mountains. There are other records in the great libraries of Twodor which lend credence to such a notion, old articles in the Police Gazette and the like. Why they decided to undertake the perilous crossing into Oleodor is uncertain, though again their songs tell of a shadow that fell upon the land so that the potatoes grew no more.

Hee hee hee.