parallels

I mean if we’re going to be following the LOTR parallels then it means that Mike and Will are going to decide to travel to the UD together, then Lucas and Dustin are going to infiltrate their plans and follow them in. And then at some point Dustin and Lucas leave and it’s just Mike and Will again.

A pair of soulmates embarks on a perilous quest, defying a Dark Lord. One half of the couple loses a part of his arm and is also imprisoned by the enemy, prompting the other to rescue him by starting to sing a song which he finishes. Together, they bring the dark lord to his knees and are rescued by eagles. They are then tragically separated, despite their eternal and unbreakable love for each other. But eventually, they are reunited and granted a new life of peace together in a far green country, before it is time for them to cross into the afterlife hand-in-hand.

Am I talking about Beren Erchamion and Lúthien Tinúviel?

Or am I talking about Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee?

Sometime later:

The Rings of Power 1x06 "Udûn" | The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (insp.)

“Don’t leave me here alone. Don’t go where I can’t follow.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that Mike Wheeler would say this to Will Byers. Duffers, please please give us this parallel in S5.

rewatching lotr, as you do, but there's something hitting about Isildur getting killed by three arrows (to the back) while abandoning his men versus Boromir getting killed by three arrows (to the chest) while doing everything to save Merry and Pippin and the influence of the ring over men, idk but my heart did a thing when i noticed it :(

i like to think they would be happy in middle-earth

isnt it insane that merry and pippin spent like the span of weeks apart in different countries and immediately made new besties whose lives they save in their final battles. like merry strikes the blow on the witch king that lets eowyn kill him and pippin pulls faramir out of denethor's pyre. and then eowyn and faramir ended up marrying each other. isn't that wild. were merry and pippin conspiring in the houses of healing like hey i think my new best friend would be great with your new best friend how quickly do you think we can get them to fall in love. was there great hobbit cacophony when faramir kisses eowyn on the ramparts. i think yes.

Okay but I do get really tired when people rag on Narnia's Biblical parallels for being too overt. Like, yeah dude. It's written for kids. Most kids don't do subtlety. I knew my Bible better than probably 95% of third graders, and yet my parents still had to clue me in. I've talked to people who grew up secular and didn't realize Narnia was Christian until well into adulthood. The Christian parallels in Narnia are at a pretty perfect level for most kids, and the fact that we as adults continue to get new spiritual meaning from it as we grow is a real testament to the depth of Jack's writing.

hey guys. hey guys remember that au I made

if i had a nickle for every time a pair in the middle earth legendarium defied a dark lord, saved each other by song, lost a limb, and got rescued by the eagles, i would have three nickles which isn't a lot but it's funny that two of the most queer-coded relationships get paralleled to tolkien's 'ultimate ideal of a romance' couple like this twice it happened thrice

they were insane for this

Fingon 🤝 Lúthien 🤝 Samwise Gamgee

Saving your loved one from evil with the power of song and sheer determination

Maedhros 🤝 Beren 🤝 Frodo Baggins

Losing an appendage

Omg, when you really think about Smeagol’s relationship with Deagol … it’s insane how similar and yet how critically different it is from Frodo’s relationship with Sam.

Smeagol refers to Deagol as “my love.” That in itself is just … wow. A good many pairs of close platonic friends in LOTR refer to each other affectionately like “my lad,” “my dear,” etc. But never “my love.” So … it seems to me that maybe these two actually were a couple at the time. They’re said to be cousins, but we don’t know exactly how distant their relation was. Plus romances between cousins were quite common back in the day, long before the realization that “first-cousin romance” was incest. And I wouldn’t put it past someone like Smeagol to be in an incestuous relationship. He always was a little…disturbed.

But … the implications of that, good grief. Deagol was the Sam to Smeagol’s Frodo. They were close. They loved each other. Then the Ring came along. It tore them apart. Then the Ring came to Frodo and Sam. They loved each other. And the Ring did not tear them apart; on the contrary, the journey caused by the Ring’s threat only brought them closer together.

Smeagol was willing to kill the love of his life to get that Ring literally 10 seconds after first seeing it. He didn’t care for Deagol enough to avoid harming him if it meant possessing the Ring. In that case, you can’t even call it love, can you?

But Frodo? He possessed that Ring for 17 years and then carried it around his neck for 6 months, and he never once even considered hurting Sam in any way. (That movie scene where he points his sword at Sam was a scriptwriters’ invention; it is nowhere to be found in Tolkien’s text.) Even when Sam took the Ring, Frodo’s rageful “give it to me” brainwashed mindset lasted for only 2 seconds before he came back to himself, apologized, and went back to doting on Sam, insisting that he eat something before they continue on. Deeper into Mordor, Frodo held onto himself enough to warn Sam not to try to take the Ring again because he knew he was on the verge of losing himself and didn’t want to hurt Sam. Unlike Smeagol, Frodo harbored a love which the Ring could not overpower or corrupt. That’s real love.

And I think a part of Smeagol was able to recognize this. This was why he hated Sam. Every time he looked at Sam, and saw him with Frodo, he thought of Deagol. In the poignant scene on the steps of Cirith Ungol, Smeagol saw something in Frodo and Sam (as they slept cuddled together) that he realized he never had. He saw what he and Deagol could’ve been, but never could be because he himself doomed their chance. And he was so moved that Frodo and Sam had found what he couldn’t that he very nearly repented and changed his mind about taking them to Shelob … Then Sam woke up and yelled at him. And it was as though Deagol was yelling at him from the grave, reminding him of how wretched and horrible he was, and refusing to offer forgiveness or compassion. And that was what killed what was left of Smeagol.

The fate of Middle-earth was ultimately determined by the fact that Frodo had a greater capacity for love than Smeagol did.

while i do have a soft spot for “hobbits age slower than humans so 33 for them is our physical 18” i rlly dont think that’s how it is bc they get to about the same age as humans before death by old age, i also really dont think we appreciate enough a few things about what this means narratively and thematically

tolkien really said no child soldiers, no 20-something year old soldiers, they’re not really adults yet, they barely know anything of the world we’re sending them to die for it and that’s not okay, not when there are other options

he also addresses this with the hobbits specifically, frodo and bilbo are 50 when they go on their journeys, FIFTY, and we can see that they handle them differently than the others. while bilbo changes afterwards, it’s not in a coming of age like we would see if 50 really was the equivalent of ~27, he just accepts a part of himself he’s been suppressing for years, for him it’s accepting that getting older and being an adult doesn’t restrict you from the excitement and opportunities of youth. similarly frodo doesn’t change much either outside of his ptsd, all of his change is trauma, not maturity

now sam and merry are both past the age of majority, but they still grow into themselves in a way bilbo and frodo do not, they mature

but pippin, sweet beautiful pippin grows the most out of all of them. he’s the most childish, always running after his cousins and you can tell he’s not even 30, this is HIS coming of age story, before this journey he’s known nothing of true responsibilities, but by the end he’s ready for when he eventually has to take over as thain of the shire

and i think that this is a really beautiful way of saying something that has started to get really popular in the last few years

instead of being terrified of that big 30, we should be excited for it, we should embrace it wholeheartedly, because it’s the time when we’ve finally started ironing out the last of the kinks in being an adult, we’re growing into our responsibilities and and we can start learning how to cultivate that balance of responsibility and excitement and FUN that makes life living instead of surviving

Star Wars : Return of the Jedi (1983)

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)