2013-06-06, 18:58 | Link #381 | |
Behold! We are the Nine!
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Sendai, Japan
Age: 38
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2013-06-11, 17:16 | Link #383 |
Obey the Darkly Cute ...
Author
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: On the whole, I'd rather be in Kyoto ...
Age: 66
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Having now seen Legolas' little forest buddy sidekick (the redhead), I'm pretty much okay with her inclusion. After all, Legolas himself is the flipping son of the king and he wasn't even mentioned in the book. The Mirkwood sequence has plenty of room for retroactively connecting the dots back from LOTR to the Hobbit and I figure Tolkien would have retro-rewritten the Hobbit to connect up with LOTR later if he'd lived long enough.
One thing I'll say is that there's more Peter Jackson flair seems like in this one than in LOTR (though nothing beats the hilarious Army of Dead swarming something behind Aragorn as he chats). With the wood elves, I get a feeling of beautiful lethality - like jungle panthers and tigers.
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2013-06-12, 05:33 | Link #388 |
Sleepy Lurker
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Nun'yabiznehz
Age: 38
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Well, they said they would be using John Howe's (the well-known book illustrator) design as template for Smaug's appearance, so if you were hoping the dragon would look like Alduin or Deathwing on steroids, you're terminally out of luck.
One of the dragons in Tolkienverse, Scatha, was even described as a "long-worm" (probably a nod to wyrm, which can mean "serpent" in Old English), so it is by no means strange or illogical to envision Smaug as a long, thin and sinuous beast and not some sort of big, scaly, flying cistern.
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2013-06-12, 09:13 | Link #392 |
Did someone call a doctor
Join Date: Apr 2007
Age: 40
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Well, the european one was more.. buff lizard than the eastern version which is basically a flying snake, but compared to todays dragons that have clearly put time in with the protein powder the old european ones were positively snake like. The were often shown as... slim.. and serpent-ish... while still looking kinda like a lizard. In part I think it had to do with religious views towards snakes and so on (The Beast in Christianity being a seven headed dragon, with a sinuous neck and body, which is representative of the devil, IIRC been a looooooooooooooong time since I've done anything with religion).
Google St Georges Dragon, for comparison.. with say... I dunno, Deathwing?
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2013-06-12, 09:38 | Link #393 |
Sleepy Lurker
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Nun'yabiznehz
Age: 38
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European Dragons were originally nothing more than winged serpents - it was only after a while and through artistic refinement and cultural splicing that they gained legs (wyverns) and even arms - and became stouter (probably because they were relegated to being a colorful avatar of greed and avarice).
But this interpretation has roots that go way deeper than even the onset of Christianity; it was already present in the Fertile Crescent (the Zoroastrian culture does have a series of dragon-like creatures, which IIRC served to inspire the later European dragon appearance) and in Ancient Greece (though they were suspiciously similar to either giant snakes and hydras). Most of the dragons back then were already associated with evil or greed. The Christian scriptures (either the official texts or the pseudepigrapha) likened the Devil to a "red dragon" or something like that (the "Beast from the sea" that appears in the Book of Revelations is actually a chimera, that happens to borrow anatomical features from dragons). This is by no means innocent because if you read the Genesis, the Devil actually takes the shape of a serpent to tempt Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. And after the deed was done and both humans were expelled from Eden, God punished the snake by removing its legs (yep, you read that right: until then, snakes had legs), condemning it to forever roam the world by crawling instead of walking. So the truth is that the Devil was first a snake, then it became a dragon because of the popular "snakes and dragons share the same family tree" belief. /Off-topic. Tolkien, however, took more inspiration from the Norse/Germanic myths, so I believe he was more partial to the imagery of Fafnir (the hoard-guarding, greedy dragon *cough*), Beowulf's dragon (what a coincidence, JRRT translated Beowulf before doing LotR), Nidhogg, etc...many of whom were snakelike and not Alduin-like.
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2013-06-12, 10:13 | Link #394 |
Megane girl fan
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
Age: 55
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Well, if one does an image search in google, you can easily see that ol Smaug has been represented as both buff lizard and long and sinewy snake with legs and wings. Take your pick.
Endless "Missing scale" Soul
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2013-06-12, 12:26 | Link #398 | |
Megane girl fan
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
Age: 55
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Spoiler for Book spoiler:
We'll see what the movie does. Endless "Speed well" Soul
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