[Sauron the White]

wch - Tolkien describes them as running. They did not walk. JRRT also used the term "striding" which I take to mean a type of race walking where you are power walking at a pace much faster than a walk pace. They mixed is some race-walking with the running, but he mainly describes running.

I said in the beginning that I condede Legolas being able to perform this feat given that Elves are so very different and there is written evidence of that.

And for purposes of civility allow me to say that given the description of Aragorn, I could stretch myself to allow the possibility that he could possible do it IF there was far more walking involved than running.... and IF the terrain was almost completely flat without obstruction ..... and IF he had proper footwear to allow him to rack up those miles without long periods of recuperation .... and IF he was not tracking and looking for signs along the way. But okay, for purposes of debate, lets say Aragorn, being really special and unique could do it also.

Now we come to the most problematic of the bunch. Gimli. How tall is Gimli? My guess would be about 4 feet, maybe 4 feet 2 inches. Is that right or wrong? And he is a dwarf with a massive chest and very strong upper body and shorter, stunted legs. He weighed in the area of 200 pounds give or take and I would guess that most of his bulk and power was abovethe hips an his legs were the weakest part of his body. That type of body is the direct opposite of what body type is conducive to running or even power walking. If I am wrong, please scour the list of marathon finishers and name the one person with that type of body who ran a marathon recently.

And what was Gimli wearing on his feet? And what was he dressed in? And what weapons did he carry? Do you think for a minute that any of this was conducive to a long distance ultra- marathon of three days while they stopped and tracked repeatedly along the way? And all this on top of the fact that Gimli was untrained in such an undertaking?

But to believe JRRT, it was simple will power and desire that allowed him to overcome all of these practical, physical and scientific realities. Okay, thats called willing suspension of disbelief. You believe because you want to believe. You believe because you really like the story and the characters and want to go with it and not be a pain in the butt.

Fine. We all do it. Thats the way lots of books and films work.

But William, my point from the very start was a simple one. Many people here on this site love the books and will give them the largest dose of willing suspension of disbelief possible. We can accept that fact that an untrained dwarf can run 145 miles in three days over varied terrain while a modern marathon runner could not do it. Fine. But when it comes to the movies, watch out brother because the charts and graphs and maps and logic and reason and deduction and common sense all comes out in massive quantities to prove that Peter Jackson is either
a- a jerk
b- a moron
c- a heretic
d- a bad filmmaker
e- all of the above

What made me post about this was the excellent use of film stills on page one of this thread by Knight of Gondor. Using the exact stills from the film, he shows that the distance between where Denethor catches fire to the distance where he plunges to the ground was impossible to cover by a man engulfed in flames. I congratulate him on his effort. It is honest, straight forward and can be checked and rechecked for accuracy.

And then poster after poster piles on pretty much taking the position that Peter Jackson is indeed either a,b,c,d, or e from my above list. And what does this do? It reinforces preconveived beliefs that
a- the book is something on the level of Holy Writ and should never be altered, changed or deviated from, and
b- those LOTR movies sure did suck and lets laugh at them some more.

There is one other problem with this thread as I see it. I have just viewed the Denethor plunge scene on my DVD player. It is the same one as seen by the hundreds of millions of people who paid over a billion dollars to see it in the theaters. From the time Denethor starts his flaming run to the time he flies off the end of the rampway, exactly ten seconds of film time elapses. Ten seconds. What everyone in the theater saw was a man on fire for ten seconds. How many films over the years have given us a man on fire for far more of a length of time than that?

Theviewers of the film DID NOT SEE the series of stills that Knight of Gondor put up on the first page here with a description of the length of each area and an estimate of the time it would take to travel each. If we had seen Denethor completely run that entire length in flames and it take two to three minutes the result would have been absurd.

But that is not what was in the film and that was not what the viewers saw and that was not what was in the mind of those viewers. For them, it worked just like the rest of the film did.

Willing suspension of disbelief. That is at the heart of this. I use it when I read the books and I use it again when I view the films. I love both and cherish both.