The Essence of the Tale

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

It's almost bedtime for me, but in brief I would say that the essence of LOTR to me is about duty and sacrifice.

"To me" is undoubtedly the pivot on which this discussion turns, but if we leave things at "it's all relative," the discussion will go nowhere, so let me pursue this line of thought.

I agree wholeheartedly, that duty and sacrifice is a major theme of The Lord of the Rings, but I wonder how a retelling of the story that emphasized this--and dramatically changed the plot--would play out. So here's a thought experiment:

Gandalf does his duty and sacrifices himself. Instead of sending him back to finish the task, we get a different wizard sent to Middle-earth (Alatar the White, perhaps--assuming he also died in the East). Faramir succumbs to the Black Breath, but Denethor has more backbone and pulls himself together to lead the defence of Minas Tirith, and does his duty when Aragorn comes, sacrificing his pride to his rightful King.

Or, for an even bigger one, Frodo still can't make the sacrifice on Mt. Doom, but Gollum is no longer there. To give us the victory, Sam wrestles Frodo, bites off the Ring-finger, and throws it into Mt. Doom.

One thread I see already in this is that, although duty and sacrifice are necessary, tweaking things to emphasize that more would often remove the reward that should come of it, which changes the message rather emphatically. That said, I think that a Faramir who died succumbing to the Black Death would have felt considerably more LotR-esque than the Evil!Faramir we got in the movie-TTT, and might have made more sense for a movie adaptation than what we got.

After all, a movie DOES have to simplify things a little...