Unfinished Tales - Part Three - I - The Disaster of the Gladden Fields

[Saurondil]

Originally Posted by Tuor in Gondolin

It's remarkable how much more likeable/human this chapter makes Isilidur then PJ's cartoonish picturing in the prologue of the movie FotR. Ditto for the awful depiction of Numenorean defending against an orc attack. The book section description hearkens to Harold's shieldwall against that Bastard William.

I'd thnk such a "rehabilitation" of Isildur was much of the point of Tolkien's writing this section.

## The account of Isildur in the films was very unfair - it was so one-sided, as if that failure were all there was to him. And to make Elrond the speaker of some of the harsher remarks (several of them not even in the texts) was worse. Which is not a criticism of Hugo Weaving's Elrond, BTW: I think he played the part superbly - even with all the "Arwenisation". IMO it's very important that "Isildur took the Ring, as should not have been", for reasons that were, to say the least, excusable: he had excellent reasons for making a terribly misguided decision. To present him as a stubborn fool leaves out some essential details of his choice. If he's been as PJ pictures him, the grievousness of the decision he made would have been far less.

This section shows (what the Akallabeth had shown already) that there is much more to Isildur than his failure to destroy the Ring. I wish Tolkien had written about the time between the death of Elendil, & the point at which TDofTGF begins. At least there are glimpses. I thought the info about Meneldil was especially interesting - the notes to the text gives him a character & a date of birth, whereas previously he was no more than a name with a death-date. One person we don't hear about is Isildur's Queen - something is said of his other relatives, but I don't remember that anything is said of her. Maybe she died before Year 2 T. A. This section would be superb in a film - one largely about the Second Age, say. The story has buckets of pathos, plenty of action, suspense, heroism, emotional ambiguity - it's memorable and vivid, even on the page. All the characters are multi-dimensional - not one is a cardboard cut-out.

Thanks for pointing out the similarity between William of Normandy & the Orcs - I never noticed it before