For those who are too impatient to sit through all three of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, allow me to present my personal favorite scene.
There is plenty of scope for analogies between the Hitchwatchers and the members of the Fellowship of the Ring. For example, both sets of heroes love wearing tights! Of course, any attempt to forge a one-to-one correspondence between the two groups would be sacrilege to Tolkein's characters. But as in Middle Earth, so too in our world the Dark Lord is gathering his forces and threatening to overrun all our various peaceful innocent shires with his Orcs, Goblins and Black Riders. So this is no time for us to be bickering and dropping our particular One Ring.
How does Christopher fit into this tale. Well, had he been offered a part in the film, it might well have been as Hitchli the intellectual dwarf, whose baroque baritone vocals filled the caverns of Moria with feisty fight-them-in-the-grottoes speeches, but he would have turned that role down once it became clear that it involved hand-to-hand combat against Sean Bean.
Arguably, J.R.R. wrote The Lord of the Rings in part as an act of exorcism. Certainly, it grew out of the unimaginable suffering he witnessed and endured as a result of the First World War, which claimed the lives of many of his friends. I have no wish to get into the habit of ventriloquizing the dead, but I suspect that he would have been much chagrined to have lived to see Middle-Eastern governments and the peoples of the Islamic world in general targeted as enemies of the West as if they were the forces of Sauron. Because Sauron doesn't work that openly. He operates in ways that are dark. He works through men, enslaving them through their own vices and then using them as his tools to enslave others. He is not himself a man but a malignant, sinister and amorphous force.
Isaac Asimov's take on LOTR was that Tolkein was a bit of a Luddite and that the Dark Lord represented technology, which he blamed for many of the world's ills. But Henry Gee, who wrote The Science of Middle Earth, points out that he was not anti-science but that he feared and opposed letting science control people. Gee also tells us that Asimov was among Tolkein's favorite authors.
If you can't finish on a song, then finish on a Joke.
Question: Why is Hitch like Galadriel?
There's a clue in the above clip. My answer will be posted here tomorrow. In the mean time, let's see if anyone else can guess, or else come up with a better one.
Update
And the answer is: Hitch is like Galadriel because they both diminished and went to the West. She sailed from the Grey Havens and he flew from Heathrow.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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