Denethor's plunge

[alatar]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

I will give Alatar the courtesy of an answer then hopefully, we can go on to new things like wings on balrogs.

Thanks for playing along as I try to make my point (yes, I have one).

What I know about is long distance running. I can talk about that with some level of confidence. I cannot discuss walking - sorry. But that is fine because WALKING is not what JRRT describes either in his tale so it is a point that does not have to be discussed. Again, walking at a normal pace DOES NOT prepare a person, or their muscles, for running or even striding. My best guess would be for the average person without training, the best they could travel in a single day would be perhaps 20 miles if they mixed running , striding and walking. After that, their glycogen and muscles would be depleted. If the dogs of hell were on their tail, perhaps they could do it again the next day. And if bones were strapped to their backs to entice the dogs, perhaps they could do it a third day.

You are a long distance runner. I'd guess that the percentage LotR Movie viewers/Book readers that are long distance runners is small (for USA yr 2006, I estimate significantly less than 7.9% of all persons). Most/some people, like me, have a cursory experience with running, especially long distances. Tolkien and PJ subconsciously or consciously know this. So if you, who I assume would provide a low estimate for the number of miles a person could travel in a part of a day, can get us to 60-70 miles (for three or three+ days), then it's not hard to see how others, with less experience, can (wrongfully; yes, I know) let slide the event that three heroes could travel twice that distance. As you yourself have stated, when you first read the running scene before you became more knowledgeable about foot travel, you skipped right by it. But now...

And I know that we're both riding this horse into the ground for other reasons. You want more honest criticism of the Books, and others want (and enjoy) to continue to criticize PJ's efforts. The points made are that Tolkien is superior, at least in the medium that he uses, in providing a more internally consistent 'secondary world,' whereas PJ does not as well in doing the same.

Maybe it would be helpful (and keep me from the ever-looming boredom) for you to note other examples of where Tolkien fails in creating a SW for you in the Books section of the forum. Start a thread there and I'll happily post.

Guess we could also start yet another PJ inconsistency thread, but my SbS posts cover much of that ground, and so maybe someone else would want to get that horse out of the stable.

[Sauron the White]

alatar... I wonder if it is not the nature of the beast that those who tend to really know the ins and outs of something are the least satisfied when someone outside of that area attempts to utilize it in a book or film?

Some of the people who know the books the best find the most fault with the film.
My experience with running and the whole Gimli thing. Perhaps this is normal and to be expected to a degree.

Before I retired after 33 years of teaching, I was seriously into local union politics. We went on strike a couple of times and there were two newspapers in town - one pro union and the other anti-union. It did not matter that we were feeding both papers most of their information because almost always the stories they ran were either a) filled with errors of fact, b) stories which completely missed the serious points, or c) made up of half-truths and partial errors. And this was from writers and a paper I respected and looked to as my normal daily news source. It taught me a lesson about such things.

Probably if you asked a professional football player about football movies they would have a laundry list of complaints. I imagine lawyers could talk your ear off about errors made everyday on shows like Law & Order and courtroom dramas. I rarely saw a movie about education get the life of a teacher right. Even in the ones that were critically praised.

So maybe this should running debate just die from exhaustion and glycogen depletion of its own.

[alatar]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

alatar... I wonder if it is not the nature of the beast that those who tend to really know the ins and outs of something are the least satisfied when someone outside of that area attempts to utilize it in a book or film?

And maybe that's why some of those here, when you say that the 'Purists' here at the Downs cannot believe Tolkien ever made an error, find some of your posts 'peevish,' if I use that word correctly.

Anyway, while reading HoME last night (again) I saw that in one of the original versions of RotK, Denethor was to survive the Battle of the Pellenor.

Was Denethor so crazed that he was absolutely sure that his last leap would destroy him utterly, as why else immolate himself if not to avoid capture and humiliation for himself and his subsequent corpse? What if he'd been caught by a Nazgul and dunked in the Anduin, then to be brought before the Eye in Barad Dur, even if semi-charred? Quite a risk.

And another thought: In many, if not all space movies, there's always sound in space, which is physically impossible due to lack of a medium in which the sound can carry. Some persons note this (usually science nuts with little else to do), and yet is has become pretty much part of the 'language' of space movies. To have no sound when something explodes may leave the audience dumbfounded.

Like dancing around in lava fields in movies, many people just accept this physical unreality as it makes sense to us ground/earth-dwelling persons that live in air. Like in the Star Wars movies. Yet, with the exception of a few science nuts, you won't hear much about this in the reviews of these movies (which have no associated canon - at least the first flick didn't). Still, people find flaws within the movies due to the inconsistencies presented by George Lucas.

And if he can get it wrong (internally inconsistent), so can PJ. It's not the sounds in space, it's Jar-Jar Binks.