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Before the movie trilogy: I had let Tolkien and LotR slip rather thoroughly out of my everyday life, although it did keep trying to resurface invarious ways. The movies drew me back into the legendarium.
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Helen, I couldn't have described it better! There is something in the distant past that was pulled upon by the movies (I didn't pick up the books again until right after I saw TTT, though!). I had a sudden longing to read the books again after that movie, and it wasn't for fascination with any ONE character; it was perhaps a longing for the entirety of Middle Earth itself! (I suspect the Ents did it, really!). I found that, right after my re-reading, that I was hopelessly in love with Pippin, so much so that I wrote an essay about him and posted it here on the Barrowdowns, which I had culled from dozens of Tolkien-related and movie-related sites as my favorite of all of them. I certainly wasn't a Leggybopper or pulled into the movie for a single character--until after I re-read the books! Then, I watched everything Billy Boyd did in FOTR and TTT, and on a slower scale, I watched
everything Elijah Wood did, Frodo being a slower but more intense obsession in the long run. (Even slower, but quite different, is my low-level Aragorn fancy, but, no, I'm NOT an Ary-bopper!) Add one term to the list, though--I'm a Frodophile! [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]
Anyway, the real blessing of the movies was that it plunged me back into Middle Earth in its depth and richness. I don't think I EVER would have read of the rich Gates of Gondolin in "Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin" or marvelled at the harmonic beauty of the Ainulindale or felt the pangs of melancholy at a mind's eye view of Cerin Amroth or Haudh-eh-Elleth if I had not picked up the trilogy again to see "what really happened" after so many years of forgetfulness.
I can say that the onscreen characters have their own reality, although it is not strictly Tolkien's; I have no doubt that Elijah/Frodo REALLY saw the wheel of fire when he spoke of it to Sean/Sam in the Plains of Gorgoroth, and for that alone, he will always be Frodo, if not the Tolkien version, still he went to a place that gave me a greater insight into both Frodo's and Sam's characters at that moment. It has enriched my experience of the books, although the characters and story as shown is not identical.
That's all I can think of at the moment; my head is full and it keeps my thoughts from flowing properly! [img]smilies/frown.gif[/img]
Cheers!
Lyta
P.S.
Finwe, I have met some that I might almost call "Ary-boppers" but I don't think they were that scary (maybe I haven't met a REAL one!). Most of them were also Leggyboppers! One girl just said, "I like the Elf thing and the Ranger!" [img]smilies/rolleyes.gif[/img]
<font size=1 color=339966>[ 1:25 PM January 02, 2004: Message edited by: Lyta_Underhill ]