Sunday, February 12, 2017

LOTR videos

If you're a Lord of the Rings nerd, you might enjoy these two YouTube videos:

1. "What You Need to Know About the Lord of the Rings Spinoff"

2. "False Facts About The Lord of the Rings You've Always Believed"

Both videos' narrators are at pains to pronounce Tolkien's name "tohl-keen," which is apparently how Tolkien pronounced his own name. (GRR Martin, of A Song of Ice and Fire fame, also pronounces it "tohl-keen" in interviews.)

(I wouldn't have minded the phrase "false facts" if "facts" had had scare quotes around it.)



5 comments:

Charles said...

Dude pronounces Tolkien's name properly but says "Sore-on."

Tolkien nerd card REVOKED!

Kevin Kim said...

Maybe he's Canadian and says "Sauron" the way Canucks say "sorry."

Charles said...

He (and by this I mean the first narrator) said a lot of other things weird, too. Like "bawl-rog" and "va-LAR" (with the accent on the second syllable). I think the only thing he actually got right was Tolkien's name, to be honest.

I only just watched the second video because I was so triggered by the first one. The second one just annoyed me even more. What is it with "Sore-on"?!

Beyond that, though, he says some really stupid things. Like Samwise not being tempted by the ring at all. He was indeed tempted (he pictured himself as Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age), he was just able to overcome that temptation due to his great humility and down-to-earthedness.

Also, getting to Valinor is as easy as building a boat and sailing there? I don't even know where to begin with this. I'll just say that no, it is not that easy at all. Only the elves and a few chosen ones are allowed to go--no one else would be able to find it.

And, yes, all of us Tolkien nerds were annoyed by the elves at Helm's Deep, but to imply that the elves didn't care about Middle Earth or weren't "paying attention" to what was going on is stupid. The elves fought the "long defeat," fighting on even though they knew that the cause was hopeless. This doesn't mean that there was no hope of defeating Sauron, but that the age of the elves was passing and there was nothing they could do about that. And yet they fought on. Maybe not at Helm's Deep, but elsewhere.

(Although, in the second video's defense, the actual title in the video itself did have scare quotes around "facts.")

Kevin Kim said...

Right: the video itself put scare quotes around "facts," but the video's title, below the video itself, didn't.

So I guess what I should have written was:

"If you're a Lord of the Rings nerd, you might despise these two YouTube videos:"

Charles said...

I would have written: "If you're a LOTR nerd, you will probably be frothing at the mouth after you watch these two YouTube videos. Viewer discretion is advised."