The Necromancer was definitely not Sauron. For one thing, he is defeated before the end of The Hobbit, allowing Bilbo and the wizard to travel through Mirkwood without fear or difficulty. Maybe Tolkien or someone else decided to revise his role, but originally the guy gets beat without ever making it onto center stage.
I’d love to see a movie of The Hobbit that tops the cartoon original from back in the day, but I doubt it could ever match the sixties singing and gorgeous artwork that made that film such a classic.
“A specially large one hit the chief wolf on the nose, and he leaped in the air ten feet, and then rushed round and round the circle biting and snapping even at the other wolves in his anger and fright.”
The Necromancer most certainly is Sauron, because Gandalf says so in Fellowship of the Ring, IIRC. They thought they defeated him at the time, but in reality he was getting ready to abandon his guise as the Necromancer, and move back into Barad Dur.
Nah, yeah, nah, he is. The defeat was a sham, an evil evil sham. Or that’s how JRR retconned in LOTR anyway. Necromancer is Sauron and he headed off to Mordor after allowing himself to be kicked out of Mirkwood.
No. It is a tragedy only if it is Turin’s character that drives him to his doom - that’s what tragedy is; terrible things arising directly from the character’s own flaws. If he had no choice, then he’s simply being fucked with, and it isn’t grand, it’s somebody pulling the wings off butterflies.
But it is is character that drives him. He’s Siegfried in Middle-Earth, a hero in the old Norse or Germanic mode. He’s going to stand up and fight regardless, and he can, too - not many men or elves could’ve taken Glaurung - and it’s that willingness to take on the enemy that gets taken advantage of and turned against him every time. Is it the curse doing it? Well, what does it mean to say he’s cursed - is the character trait, of defiance, the curse, since that is the means of his undoing? If he’s cursed by having it, doesn’t that mean the rest of us who feel similarly are too?
On that note was the love between Romeo and Juliet also wrong and “here is what not to do?”
Romeo and Juliet were free to choose their own paths. They had a lot of bad ones to choose from, and maybe low odds of finding a good one out of the situation, but their lives were determined by their own choices, and they had a fair shot at accomplishing any particular thing. It was bad luck and overreaction that killed them in the end.
In the Silmarillion, it is made clear from the moment Morgoth kills the trees that the elves Must Not go haring off making their own decisions. Their place is to obey authority and let Manwe make up his mind. When they defy that, that is their crime, and the moment the Valar stop helping them any further. Things like the massacre of the Teleri made things worse, sure, but the original sin was that of deciding to take matters into their own hands. From the moment they did that, every single thing that happens, from the Elven armies arriving in Middle-Earth in all their glory to Fingolfin’s duel before the gates of Angband to the fall of Nargothrond and Gondolin to the final scattered bands of refugees along the southern coast, is there to show that they never had a chance, everything was futile, and the only hope they ever had was to repent their sin and pray for help from the Valar. Which is exactly what Earendil eventually does, and the reason the Valar finally intervene.
I didn’t comment on the quality of the film at all, Bill. I just said I can’t get excited about it. That’s because it would be a letdown after the serious tone (relatively) of the LOTR.
b) Why didn’t Sauron march on Middle-Earth before the ring was discovered, when all thought it was lost, when he could be confident the world of men wasn’t going to suddenly use it against him, unlike in the war of the ring?
a) Hiding out, gathering his power, getting the orcs together, and studying his enemy.
b) Because his power had yet to return to him, and it took time to gather legions of Orcs, Southrons, Easterlings, etc.
c) Also, the power of Elves and especially Men was greater earlier. Sauruman also would likely have been against him before thoughts of the Ring corrupted him.
