Friday, August 26, 2011

Follow Friday - Thirty-One Is a Happy Prime


It's Friday again, which means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Caught in the Pages and Jenni Elyse.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: In books like the Sookie Stackhouse (True Blood) series the paranormal creature in question "comes out of the closet" and makes itself known to the world. Which mythical creature do you wish would come out of the closet, for real?

I love Tolkien. I think everyone knows this by now. So I want elves to return from the Undying Lands and declare themseves to be real. And when I say elves, I don't mean the long-blonde haired Orlando Bloom styles elves. I mean these guys:

If you don't tell me what I want to know,
I'll imprison you for a hundred years
I first saw the Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit when it aired in 1977 and I was eight. The image of large-eyed, thin-limbed, arrogant, and autocratic elves has been my conception of elves ever since. In my world, elves aren't pretty, or nice, or even friendly. They are alien. They live forever. They think they are better than you are. If you show up in their kingdom uninvited, they'll assume you are up to no good and throw you in prison for a hundred years until you fess up to whatever nefarious deeds you are planning. And if you kill a dragon, they will show up and demand that you turn over some of the dragon's hoard to them. If you don't agree, they'll lay siege to your entire mountain kingdom to try to make you change your mind.

We want the treasure,
but we hate goblins more.
At least until an army of goblins and wargs shows up. Then they'll turn on them. And that's just in The Hobbit. In the Silmarillion, the elves defy the Valar, kill their own kin to seize their boats, or travel across a hellish domain of ice floes in the name of revenge, so that they can wage an unwinnable war against Middle-Earth's equivalent of Lucifer. And when a man showed up who wanted to marry one of their daughters, they gave him a chance to prove himself worthy - by stealing a prized possession from the crown of the Middle-Earth version of Lucifer. The elves imagined by Tolkien are fey, spiteful, and dangerous. And I wish they were real.

Go to previous Follow Friday: You Can't Trust Anyone Over Thirty, Except Me

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10 comments:

  1. Great answer and great descriptions of the characters. :)

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  2. @Jenni Elyse: Thank you. If I can clear the backlog of books I wam working on I will eventually get to rereading and reviewing The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the various movies that were made of them.

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  3. Lol, I like how you specified your elf preference!

    I'm a new follower BTW. Here's my Follow Friday: http://goldiloxandthethreeweres.blogspot.com/

    I'm having a giveaway right now as well if you're interested!

    Goldilox

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  4. Hopping through. Sigh...I still need to finish the LOTR series. I think I'd like it more now that I'm a fantasy fan.
    My Hop

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  5. Wow! I too miss the days of nasty elves - nasty creatures that go bump in the night. Now they've been tamed and turned into romantic figures, like Orlando Bloom - he is very cute tho!

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  6. YES. Another Tolkien fan! One of my recent posts is about elegaic poetry in old english literature and it's influence in King Theoden's speech before the Battle of Helm's Deep in the movie. I also am a huge fan of science books (I love Carl Sagan).

    New follower. Please stop by and visit me at Lari Is Writing.

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  7. @Goldilox: I figure if we are going to choose what kind of mythical creature is turning out to be real, we should specify which version of the myth we want.

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  8. @Alison Can Read: The Lord of the Rings starts off slow, much slower than the movies do. BUt that gives it more charm in my opinion. You get a sense of what normal is in Middle-Earth before the war starts. You get a sense of what "normal" hobbits consider to be a grand adventure before Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippen get involved in world-changing events.

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  9. @Julia Rachel Barrett: I like elves that are more than just pretty people. Maybe it is my reading in Welsh mythology that makes me think elves should be otherworldly, alien, and dangerous. And Tolkien captured that. Tolkien's elves will shut out the world, and might kill you just for trespassing.

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  10. Lari: One thing I found interesting about Theoden's speeches in the movies is that so much of them was taken from Eomer and Aragorn. Clearly Tolkien liked Eomer a lot more than Peter Jackson did.

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