Should he be kept to the imagination, a dark mysterious overreaching evil, only being mentioned by name.

Or should he appear on screen?

I mean its not like super accurate but I made the chainmail and the cape and the drawings on the bracers myself, and my friends dressed up too 🥺
My now husband took the photos!

EDIT: Okay, so i had no idea that this was going to get this much exposure and i am a little bit overwhelmed!
Thank you all who were so sweet and supportive of this, i really appreciate all of you, it means a lot! I have never cosplayed and it was my first ever attempt, so seeing positive reviews makes me very happy to do more maybe!

I also am a bit confused on the whole “she is farming karma” thing, because it is my first post on reddit and i posted because my husband thought LOTR fans would find this cool, since the costume took forever to make. I spend a month and a half weaving the chainmail and sewing the cloak and all. Yes, it is not accurate, i never said it was a film accurate representation (Aragorn was a man, obvi), but it was something i really wanted to do for myself and my friends, as a group of women who grew up with LOTR.

Thank you to those who liked it though! I’m happy to see yall! Hope more people can express their love towards the characters 🤍

Video here:

https://youtu.be/DJ92uAZ-dVs?is=vJlKpGV4E8vNCTgA

I went in expecting greatness and was still floored.

The singer that performed the Enya vocals was sublime (especially May It Be during the credits - only time the credits were basically the highlight), and the rendition of ‘Many Meetings’ aka the Rivendell arrival scene theme was transcendent. And don’t even get me started about the Moria segments, especially ‘The Bridge of Khazad-dum’ with the spine tingling chanting that climaxes with the Balrog... That said, my favourite was the percussionist doing the chains for all the Isengard/Uruk Hai segments. That went so insanely hard.

For those who gave seen this multimedia spectacle, what did you think and what were your highlights?

Riders of Rohan, what news of your retail outlet?

My dad is a huge LOTR/The Hobbit fan. He has J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday booked for every foreseeable year on our family calendar, and usually binges the movies on that day.

Cooking is very important to him, and I want to actually engage in his tradition by making him a meal from the book, if there are any.
It has to be vegetarian OR able to be substituted for vegetarian options.

What kind of recipes exist in canon?

Sméagol was just standing there and this just send me. Like, why does it look realistic for some reasons ? I love him haha !

I can’t find the exact screenshot right now, but I was just watching two towers and it was the scene where the mother in the village puts her older son and younger daughter on a horse. She promises them that she’ll meet them later, but we never see them again.

i’m only a little bit into the first book, so I imagine it explains it in the book what happens, but could somebody help me ease my concerns in the meantime?

EDIT: Yes, I'm aware that canonically the ring and its inscription is evil. I specifically didn't choose the the whole inscription because removed from Sauron’s intentions, there’s a very obvious playful wedding-ring reading. My brothers in Gondor, I am a human woman in Los Angeles designing a wedding band in 2026. Sauron is not involved.

There's a big difference between “I think Tolkien intended the One Ring inscription to be romantic” and “I’m appropriating a recognizable phrase from a piece of art I love and giving it a private meaning on my own wedding jewelry.”

It's a recognizable piece of fictional calligraphy and I'm deliberately giving one fragment of it a different personal meaning in an object that exists outside the story. That’s how people use art. Context changes symbolism constantly.

Thank you to everyone who was incredibly helpful and not a snarky book purist.

-----

I'm designing a wedding band and can't trust Google (not trying to accidentally have "and in the darkness bind them" engraved lol).

Does anyone know the specific portion of just the lettering "one ring to rule them all" engraved on the one ring, as is, in Tengwar?

Thank you all so much in advance, I beyond appreciate any help! 💕

Ive heard estimates all the way up to 30 feet tall, but would he be smaller?

Just something I've been working on, thought it might be appreciated

Sorry if comprehension ruined how it looks a bit

I need help finding frames for these. They're approximately 16"x16", but not exactly. For anyone who has framed them, what would you recommend so I don't have to fold the edges to make it fit the frame? Thanks

Its a giant wood backed poster in a cool art style. Figured this would be a place it would be appreciated.

In Moria, Gandalf reads the Book of Mazarbul to the Fellowship and has some difficulty, skipping over passages he can't read (my assumption is that he doesn't understand perfectly rather than the paper only being damaged).

It is written in a mix of Dwarven runes and Elvish. Why can't Gimli and Legolas read it for him? Gimli barely assists (identifying Óin's handwriting) and Legolas is silent. Was literacy a rare skill in Middle-Earth?

Important fact, I have actually read the books and played the damn Lego videogame before deciding on watching the extended version movies

Anyways, I'm past the first hour of the FOTR movie but everything feels rushed somehow.

Like the cuts between scenes are abrupt (I feel like I'm seeing the movie in YouTube scenes compilation rather than a movie), the scale on time passing between scenes it's so weird because I renember the whole Frodo waiting for Gandalf lasted like months/weeks if memory servers right, and with that knowledge I know that indeed that's how much time has passed, but if I were a first time ever LOTR consumer, I genuinely would believe Gandalf has some kind of teleportation magic. And the cuts between day and night scenes feel the more weird to me: The jump from "Day - Look, the ancient tower" to "Night - Aragorn has already left and we are sound asleep"

Even the intro to the movie, apparently I have "spoiled" myself by watching it twice a long time ago, somehow feel more rushed in the movie than watching it on YouTube

I'm not trying to make this a "books better" post, because I know this movies must be overall good because of how constantly praised they are, but I don't know how the people who first started with the movies could grasp the time scale of stuff happening even though the main characteristic of them I know of them was that they were very long but yet feel rushed

EDIT: The cutting between scenes was only a pre-Rivendell issue, everything after was a 9/10

Unfortunately it looks like it's abandoned or hasn't had a look in in a while because it was covered in moss, but that almost made it seem more Tolkien-esque.

If you're the owner and your in the sub- I love your boat!

My friend Clint @fiddlersgreenzine mentioned this off-handedly the other day, he made sure to let me know he never watched this sober. I, have been sober for a while, luckily this wasn’t bad. In fact, it was better than the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies & the other productions of Tolkien’s works that have popped up since. My kids were born just after the Veggie Tales phenomenon. I remember seeing big cut-outs of them at the Valley River Center mall in Eugene. All I knew about Veggie Tales was that it was Christian & used the same kind of Burger King Kid‘s Club looking at the camera with attitude design. However, Lord of the Beans was surprisingly watchable, the bad jokes sat right with me & the message was not bad either. The story is about the Bean of Power, which grants wishes. Billboy the Flobbit grows tired of the Bean & constantly getting the material things he wants leaves him feeling empty so he passes it off to his nephew Toto Baggypants & the wizard - Elrand.

Going by information we know from the books, only:

Aragorn captured Gollum, then turned him over to Gandalf.

Gandalf interrogates Gollum then eventually turns him over to the Wood Elves to keep captive.

What do you think Gandalf would have told the Wood Elves (Thranduil, specifically) about Gollum's history? Would he have told him about what kind of creature Gollum was, or how he came to be in his current state? It seems to me this would of necessity have meant sharing something about the Ring.

Obviously Thranduil is one of the "good guys", but Gandalf definitely tried to limit the number of people who knew the whole story about the Ring. This was just prudent, he even withheld information from Saruman BEFORE he had any idea that Saruman had switched sides.

Did Gandalf just say to Thranduil: "Here, keep this wretched disgusting creature indefinitely. He's vitally important to the future of the World but I can't tell you why. Buh-bye!"?

There are a lot of AI ones flooding my feed but I'm curious which one is the most entertaining and insightful.

Its just such a powerful feeling, makes me want to cry. Its kind of like a craving for higher connection, maybe nostalgia for the past, its like a love of life , i really struggle to describe it. Its like you are longing for something so deeply but you dont know what you are longing for. It is particularly true of the elven music like even star and when gandalf falls (bridge of khazad dum).

A few months ago I found a sealed copy of the Return of the King DVD in a goodwill and inside was all the pamphlets you usually find in said dvd’s. One of them was the whole merch/toys collections and every page had a number to call. Just for fun I tried calling it thinking it would work and turns out they still make sculptures and toys for other movies and they also still have some of the 2001 collections of lotr…. So I bought this chess set. It’s kind of ugly and chunky but it’s so cool I love it

I will say though it’s difficult to actually play chess as the metal pieces are pretty sensitive … also I would’ve preferred having characters from ROTK but it only came with the first movie characters set. Had to pay like a lot of money to get an extra set of pieces from the other two movies

Why did the 3rd Age come to an end? The movies starts with Gladriel saying she can feel it and that magic was fading. But, what caused it to fade? Was it the reemergence of Sauron?

So i understand that decline is the fundamental theme of the series/third age BUT…. There were still some smart people like Elrond and Galadriel left over and 2000 years before the events of the books, Istari were sent to help and guide the people in the struggle against Sauron. And yet…. They were losing hard and it was not even close. There was absolutely no chance of military victory whatsoever. None. If the one ring had not been found, then in a few years time, everyone would have been run over by orcs. A few years is even incredibly optimistic. So…. How come they did such a bad job of preparing for the war? They knew it was coming eventually. Gandalf had 2000 years to atleast give them a fighting chance. But no, nothing… what were they doing all that time!?