The Hall of Fire

We can assume that Gandalf was lying by ommission in the paragraph in LotR (probably accidentally). All the other evidence suggests that the Three do not confer invisibility. They are the opposite IIRC – they go invisible on their wearers. An interesting question is why, exactly, the Three lost thei...

Sass wrote:How old were you?

14 or 15. I wasn't sure that he was going to eat them, but I was certain he was a bad guy of some sort.

Fun fact: First time I read the book I was convinced Bombadil was evil. I kept saying to the hobbits 'No, don't go into his house! He'll eat you!".

Too many fairytales, perhaps?

that explains it as far as the Lebanese go, but not all of the 'lebs' are actually Lebanese...

Curiously, it isn't refugee children either - just normal, run-of-the-mill migrants.This is what makes it odd - if they were raised in an extremist environment, then you'd understand why they wouldn't appreciate western culture. If they were raised in poverty, then you might understand their resentm...

Yep. No-one ever seems to have any problem with first generation immigrants. The London bombers, the Paris rioters and the Sydney gangs were all born in the countries that they caused trouble in.

More information if anyone’s interested: The triggers to the riots were complex. In 2000, there were a number of high profile rape cases involving Lebanese men. In the time before the riots, there had been issues with Middle Eastern gangs harassing people at the beach, making offensive comments to w...

Time to take the bull by the horns. Why do these things happen? Nation's day of shame Luke McIlveen, Kara Lawrence and Peter Trute 12dec05 THEY called it a day of pride, but it will go down as a day of national disgrace. Thousands of drunken youths descended on Cronulla, south of Sydney, yesterday t...

I tend to take the appearance of Father Christmas as being ironic. The White Witch wants it to be 'always winter, but never Christmas' and so the appearence of Santa Claus shows that it is Christmas and that, therefore, the Witch's power is in decline. Still, he seems out of place, especially as he ...

I’ll have a shot at yovargas’ questions. What are Aslan and the Ice Queen fighting about? Why should I care about which side wins? Because the Ice Queen's followers are uglier? Because the White Witch rules Narnia oppressively, turns people into stone and makes it always winter but never Christmas. ...

I think it's a fun story. Nothing great, but still a fun story. The strongly Christian elements bother me less than the inclusion of, say, Father Christmas. I don't necessarily agree with the content of C.S. Lewis' allegory, but I like it when a book or film has a 'moral universe' that I can try to ...

The Appendicies of LotR talk about varieties of Orc-speech. Forgive me for not digging up the quote, but they made up their own languages, which were not very sophisticated yet very numerous.

Edit: See Voronwë's post above.

Saying that atheism is a religion strikes me as being like saying that someone who has eaten nothing has still had lunch. For this specific case, the differences are fairly clear IMHO – atheists are not seeking to have ‘we do not trust in God nor any other deity’ on money, they are not seeking to pu...

Not you as well...

Might I just say how much more reasoned this discussion is as opposed to some others I've participated in recently? Please don't go, Whistler. I honestly feel that we can get somewhere with this.

Part of the issue, I think, is that extremism breeds extrimism. More specifically, for every absurd ACLU cause or controversial Ninth Circuit Judgment, some Baptist preacher or Fundamentalist organisation will come up with something equally extreme and then justify it as defending the faith from des...

vison, to be honest, I believe that the Orcs can only be understood in the context of Tolkien's overall cosmology. As I said in the Orc tangent of the Bombadil thread at b77, I see the Orcs as the ultimate reflection of the Marring of Arda. They are incarnate beings that are almost entirely manifes...

Whether orcs have their measure of free will or are puppets... If they are puppets, animated by their master (as demonstrated by the quote given at the fall of Barad dur), then they have no need of redemption - both because they are not fully sentient creatures with free will of their own, and also...

Tolkien's views on what Orcs were exactly changes throughout his myth. My final opinion is that the Orcs are not sentient - they are animated by the spirit of Morgoth, and their own disloyalty and infighting is simply a result of Morgoth's own chaotic and destructive nature. I can't prove that, thou...

Great to see this bought up again – I haven’t had a serious Tolkien discussion in a long while. It’ll take me a bit of time to sort everything out, but I’ll definitely be back sooner or later.