The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.
“I miss the Shire. I spent all my childhood pretending I was off somewhere else… off with you on one of your adventures! My own adventure turned out to be quite different.”
Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.
“But,” said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, “I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.”
“So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”
J.R.R. Tolkien — The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King
Never gets old.
Yeah, I guess this is kind of funny. But it totally misinterprets the point of the scene. These memes work best when the captions are LOL versions of the actual subtext.
In this scene, Aragorn’s scornful look is not mocking Boromir for thinking the shards of Narsil are cool. Aragorn knows better than anyone how cool they are (think of the reverence with which he picks up and replaces the sword’s hilt just after this exchange).
In this moment, he’s thinking, ‘Who the fuck is this nobody and why does he think he’s good enough to walk up and play with the weapon that literally saved Middle Earth? Get your hands of my Great Great (x howevermany Greats) Grandpappy’s shit, noob!’
That’s what’s so brilliant about the scene. It sets up, from the moment Boromir opens his mouth on screen, that—however noble and brave he may be as the firstborn son of a Steward—he can only dream of being what Aragorn is.
In conclusion, the point I was trying to make with all that nerdwank was: this meme post would be better and funnier if it represented the moment’s true subtext in a comical light, rather than making up a new one.
In the opening chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo turns thirty-three. This is the age at which hobbits are considered to have come of age.
In the film, Frodo’s adventures started pretty soon afterwards. In the book, it took another couple of decades. In both cases, he was totally unprepared for those adventures, but rose to meet them nonetheless.
I turned thirty-three a couple of weeks ago.
It’s probably time I stopped waiting for my adventure to begin.
(Mind you, I’ve told myself that many times before.)
