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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6105731" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ahhh, I think I can answer that.   Because the Lord of the Rings is not about throwing the Ring into Mount Doom.  The anti-quest featuring the anti-hero (in that he lacks some of the features normally associated with heros, but notably not the ones that are are using lacking) is merely the setting of the story.  So as long as the story is progressing in its main themes, it doesn't really matter if it is advancing on Mount Doom at all.  In fact, the largest part of the story isn't about advancing on Mount Doom.   Once the fellowship breaks, all the big awesome heroes go off on this minor sidequest to rescue a few minor friends of no real consequence and abandon the quest to destroy the ring.  Most of the story is in some sense a digression from that point on.  Even Moria is a complete digression.  It's just this random obstacle thrown into the path of the Ring bearer.   My wife happens to think that the chapters in Moria are the worst chapters of the book because they do almost nothing really to advance the story save provide an excuse to get rid of the parties safety net Gandalf.   And Helm's Deep is completely unrelated to the major story.  It's a side quest to a side quest by character's whose importance to the quest is at least apparantly greatly diminishing at this point because they've gone 300 miles in the wrong direction.  The reader at this point has lost track of Frodo, and is led to assume that Frodo is going on while we are going without him completely unclear about when if ever the reader or Aragorn will return to the ring quest.   In fact, when Tolkien went to adapt his text for the movies, he threw the entire Helm's Deep story arc out as being tangental.I feel you are pretty much completely missing the book.  You are skipping all the parts that Tolkien considered important and were all the real action takes place.  Did you ever notice just how quick Tolkien resolves his combats?   His fights are over in a few sentences.  Pelennor Fields, the standard by which all fantasy battles are judged, is mostly over in about four pages of text.  If you are skipping from fight scene to fight scene, you've like missed the whole book, and you are probably wondering, "That's it? What's all this stuff in here between now and the next cool fight scene."  Or did you ever notice that all his climatic fight scenes are deliberately anti-climatic?  In the Hobbit, a minor character kills the dragon in flashback.  Then, Tolkien tells the story of the battle of the five armies from the vantage of a disinterested observer, who gets knocked unconscious just as the battle is getting interesting and has to have the story told to him in flashback.  Then in the LotR, we totally don't get to see Gandalf fight the nine except from a vantage point similar to a soldier observing a distant artillery barage, and when Frodo confronts the Nine, he gets unconscious and we mostly miss the scene and have to have it related to us afterwards.  Gandalf fights the Balrog - again off stage and again related by flashback.  Then, later, we get to Ents assault on Orthanc and just as it begins, Tolkien cuts away from it and we don't get to 'see' it until Merry and Pippin relate it by flashback.  Then at the battle of Pelennor Fields, Gandalf is about to throw down with the Witch King, when suddenly the Witch King turns and runs off, only to get killed by a girl and a hobbit stabbing him in the back.  And I could go on and on in that theme.  Tolkien is trying to communicate something.  I'm not sure its getting through.The Old Forest side trek serves several narrative purposes, but the easiest one to explain is that it is critical to communicating to the reader who Frodo is.  Frodo's treatment in the text can be divided broadly in to three large sections.  In Fellowship, Frodo is shown to be heroic in a classical sense particularly in his will and courage.   This is the part of the story where the reader develops admiration for and concern for Frodo, and it is essential because Tolkien is going to pull the rug out from the reader later.  In the second portion of the story, Frodo is presented to the reader primarily through Sam's eyes, and primarily through this relationship between Frodo and Smeagol/Gollum, and Sam is revealed at several points in this portion of the story to be a somewhat unreliable witness.  Sam's assumptions about Frodo are incorrect, and critically Sam's assumptions are the same assumptions that the reader is now making.  In the third part of the story, Frodo is a wreck.  He has been physically, mentally, and spiritually crushed by the burden of the ring and is reduced to a truly pathetic and pitiable state seemingly unworthy of compassion by the normal standards of what makes a hero (.  Unless the reader has developed a sincere admiration for Frodo, the tendency of the reader is to disdain him and instead give their admiration to Sam or even more often to the classical hero Aragorn.  This however is on reflection a mistake, not just because both Sam and Aragorn reject that interpretation, but because Tolkien has already shown us Frodo's warrior heart in the first book.So what happens to the text if you destroy Frodo's oppurtunities to have shining moments of awesome that stir the reader's heart toward him?  You end up only with the crouching, cringing weakling with his hand shielding his eyes from the burning wheel.  You essentially destroy the character, which is exactly what the movies do to Frodo.What happens in the Old Forest trek?  Well, it is Frodo that passes his saving throw and breaks the spell of Old Man Willow, and then who finds Tom Bombadil.  Then again, it is Frodo that breaks the spell of the Barrow Wight, picks up the Barrow Wight's sword and hews off the vile creatures hand and then, wounded, cold, in the dark finds the strength to sing the lore song that summons Tom Bombadil and returns him and his friends from the chthonian underworld back into the light of the green world (that Tom embodies).   This shows of strength of will and character are critical moments in devoloping Frodo as our protagonist.  Of course, the movie doesn't stop its carnage and assault on Frodo there, but procedes to rob him of his glory in every single scene of the Fellowship.  It's Arwen - not Frodo - who draws sword turns and stands down the assembled Nine - who have previously driven off Gandalf himself - saying, "Go back!  Go back to the Land of Morder, and follow me no more!  By Elbereth and Luthien the fair, you shall neither the Ring nor me!"  It's futile - he can't stand against The Nine alone - but it is awesome.  In the book, it's Frodo who drives off the cave troll by himself.  In short, Frodo in the book gets to establish that he is awesome; Frodo of the movie spends the entire trilogy looking green and sick and weak and cowering until the moment he heroicly throws Gollum into the fire and restores the traditional Hollywood definition of awesome so that no one will have to think about what they just saw.When Tolkien edited his own work, he cut out all the fights, cut out most of the Aragorn story line and all of Helm's Deep etc, and more or less made the entire movie about a conversation between Frodo, Sam, and Gollum.On the other hand, I've never liked 'door stop' books and like you don't read them any more.  I can do completely without Eddings, Jordan, Martin, Brooks and the whole host of Tolkien immitators.  I can't even manage to finish one of their books any more, and mostly no longer try.  But, like Tolkien I agree that one of the major flaws of LotR is, it's too short.</blockquote>

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