let’s stop seeing sex as the biggest thing you can do to show someone you love them
everyone knows that the real way to show someone you love them is to find them a really cool rock. not a diamond. just a neat rock that you think they will enjoy
Not a rock THE ARKENSTONE
Why just one rock Why not three Why not the silmarils
Okay I know we always go on about Marvel’s uncanny casting ability.
But if you thought they were the only ones, let me draw your attention to this man:
Viggo Mortensen, aka Aragorn son of Arathorn, aka Sexiest Ranger in Middle Earth
would hike, often for more than a day, to remote filming locations, in costume, for the sake of authenticity
was the best swordsman Bob Anderson (swordsmaster/instructor for LotR, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc) says he has ever trained
occasionally writes poetry (more book!canon than film!canon but um hello)
does all his own stunts
lived all over and speaks about 23940209384 languages
you know that scene at the end of Fellowship when he’s fighting the Uruk-hai? And one throws a dagger at him and he hits it away with his sword? Yeah, the guy who threw it was supposed to miss, but accidentally threw it directly at Viggo. Who just casually Aragorned and hit it away.
They actually cast Aragorn to play Aragorn
Can I just add a few things?
Would randomly give chocolates to the hobbits
According to John Rhys-Davis (aka Gimli), whenever you have a large cast, one or two actors will naturally become the leaders. Guess who ended up in that role.
Single-handedly convinced cast and crew to camp out to shoot a scene in the sunrise
Once hit a wild rabbit with his car by accident. Promptly stopped his car and went to see if the rabbit was dead, needed a vet or if the only merciful thing to do was to finish killing him. The rabbit was dead. Viggo realized he was hungry. So he took the rabbit, made a fire by the roadside and ate it.
According to cast and crew, sometimes you’d just see him disappear in the middle of the night and suddenly he’d come back with fish he’d caught
Had his sword with him at all times. Slept with once.
The best horse rider of the cast, hands down. Rides better than lots of pros, according to a horse trainer. Couldn’t bear to part with his horse at the end of the shooting, so he bough him. The next movie of his also involved horses, and he bought his horse in that one, too.
Knows how to survive in the wild. I’m not kidding.
Hand-stitched a few things in his costume for an authentic “I live away from civilization” Ranger feel. Also told the weapons department to make him a small bow because “Aragorn lives in the wild, he needs a hunting bow, or he’ll starve to death” – literally nobody else had thought about that. Also requested a small stone to sharpen his sword. Suggested that Aragorn would take Boromir’s arm guards after his death.
Speaking of hand-stitching, once he was touring Japan with a reporter for an article. Walked into a store, took a tshirt, bought it, cut off the print and hand-stitched it into the hat he was wearing. The reporter was going “?????????” the entire time.
Peter Jackson literally sometimes called him Aragorn by accident
Would you like to hear the story of how Viggo got cast in LoTR?
So, production gets started and the actor originally cast to play Aragorn dropped out and now thre’s a pickle cause you need Aragorn. So someone in production gets in touch with Viggo and after a conversation, he hangs up and his son Henry asks, “What was that about? Was that about LoTR?”
Turns out Henry was a huge fan of the books and is pretty much the reason Viggo took the job.
I realize this is not new information to anyone, but what struck me so hard this time I read the Lord of the Rings was the sense of melancholy. Like it’s painfully obvious to the reader that this world is Not As It Once Was. All of the characters we meet reference this feeling of loss in one way or another.
The elves are the most obvious – with their fading light and their ships sailing away. Treebeard talks about how the woods aren’t as they once were, about the ents who are falling asleep and withering to nothing. The dwarves lust after the glory of their forefathers, be it in mountain fortresses or caverns of mithril – now empty and echoing. Old Tom Bombadil remembers a race of great men and women, reduced simply to trinkets in cold tombs.
And even men, the race set to inherit this new age, even they are experiencing this sense of melancholy, of losing hold of something great. We see their great cities reduced to rubble on riverbanks, or possessed by evil. Aragorn longs to return to his throne to restore the glory of ages past, to somehow rejuvenate that which is dying in the race of men.
And hobbits? At first we see them as living in the present, with no great glory of the past to tie them down. Yet when Frodo returns to the Shire, it is…Not As It Once Was. And I think while the other hobbits are able to shake off this feeling and return to their love of life and the present, maybe Frodo’s true burden is to inherit this sense of loss from the rest of Middle Earth.
And what makes Lord of the Rings (and Tolkien) so extraordinary, at least to me, is how there is still so much hope in the story even with all its sadness. Hope is literally Aragorn’s childhood name, given to him at a time his House is all but finished. Hope is what drives Gandalf and leads his way when others of his order become distracted and give up their purpose. Hope appears to Sam when he and Frodo trudge towards what seems to be their end in the fires of Mount Doom. Hope is there at dawn when Rohirrim arrive at Minas Tirith and blow their horns, and they ride to defend the City of Kings, though they know what they are facing. In fact, for me some of the most brilliant moments in the story are those when hope appears in the middle of darkest despair. Tolkien writes like sadness and hope are merely the two sides of the same coin.
One of the many things I love about the world Tolkien created is the exquisite beauty that rises from sadness; lesser stories would transform sorrow and grief into bitterness, but in Tolkien’s world, it becomes a force for pity and wisdom and love. Some of his best and wisest characters are those who have known great sorrow. Melancholy and sadness are a part of Arda Marred, but like Gandalf says: “not all tears are an evil.”
Perhaps my favourite quote from Tolkien is Haldir’s line from the Fellowship of the Ring, when the company is nearing Lothlórien:
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
in every conceivable way orlando bloom seems like someone’s oc, like he was the design of an arrogant young human mind and not the universe’s cruel game of chance
“he’s a famous actor. he got famous playing the elf in lord of the rings. he’s unsettlingly pretty and he doesn’t age. he punched justin bieber. his name is orlando jonathan blanchard bloom and he was named after a famous baroque composer. original character do not steal”
andtheytoldustotellyouhello 