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<blockquote data-quote="Paul Farquhar" data-source="post: 9476911" data-attributes="member: 6906155">It's not a &quot;casting choice&quot; issue that the movie fixed, it was the changing perception of gender roles. In this case, why would anyone be attracted to a women as a life partner whose only contribution is a bit of needlework? Art cannot exist independently of it's audience. And that's not &quot;medievalism&quot;, a &quot;woman's place was in the home&quot; was still the prevailing attitude when LotR was published, and when I was a child. Tolkien thought he was being frightfully progressive when he wrote Eowyn. But now, attitudes have changed, and therefore so has how the audience views the characters. And they have continued to change in the 23 years since the PJ movie. It's not that the TV series &quot;goes further&quot;, it's just that culture hasn't stopped changing.And then there is the Creative Writing 101 mistake of not introducing a character (Glorfindel) and not do anything with them. But I'm willing to forgive the amateurishness as part of the book's charm. But amateurishness can never be seen as a plus in a movie version.And, of course there are changes demanded by the medium, such as the removal of the episodic misadventures of the hobbits between Bag End and Bree. This material would work fine in a TV series, but it would have undoubtedly been a worse movie had PJ included it. A movie is an artform intended to be viewed in a single sitting!Those dates don't matter to the story in the text either, and medieval literature never bothered with dating anything.When The Hobbit was first read to us at primary school, I imagined the elves as the 4 foot tall skinny people dressed in green that are commonly depicted helping Santa. And there isn't much in the Hobbit to contradict that. Notably, with Bilbo as the viewpoint character there is no reference to anything elven being scaled for people who are significantly bigger than hobbits. Whereas we do see that in Beorn's house.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Paul Farquhar, post: 9476911, member: 6906155"] It's not a "casting choice" issue that the movie fixed, it was the changing perception of gender roles. In this case, why would anyone be attracted to a women as a life partner whose only contribution is a bit of needlework? Art cannot exist independently of it's audience. And that's not "medievalism", a "woman's place was in the home" was still the prevailing attitude when LotR was published, and when I was a child. Tolkien thought he was being frightfully progressive when he wrote Eowyn. But now, attitudes have changed, and therefore so has how the audience views the characters. And they have continued to change in the 23 years since the PJ movie. It's not that the TV series "goes further", it's just that culture hasn't stopped changing. And then there is the Creative Writing 101 mistake of not introducing a character (Glorfindel) and not do anything with them. But I'm willing to forgive the amateurishness as part of the book's charm. But amateurishness can never be seen as a plus in a movie version. And, of course there are changes demanded by the medium, such as the removal of the episodic misadventures of the hobbits between Bag End and Bree. This material would work fine in a TV series, but it would have undoubtedly been a worse movie had PJ included it. A movie is an artform intended to be viewed in a single sitting! Those dates don't matter to the story in the text either, and medieval literature never bothered with dating anything. When [I]The Hobbit[/I] was first read to us at primary school, I imagined the elves as the 4 foot tall skinny people dressed in green that are commonly depicted helping Santa. And there isn't much in the Hobbit to contradict that. Notably, with Bilbo as the viewpoint character there is no reference to anything elven being scaled for people who are significantly bigger than hobbits. Whereas we do see that in Beorn's house. [/QUOTE]

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