Tag Archives: Verlyn Flieger

Tolkien Studies, from ancient Greek to modern literature

09 Friday Apr 2021

Posted by in Conferences, Tolkien

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This week offers quite a range of talks by Tolkien scholars, and all online of course, so even if we can’t meet in person, we can attend sessions that would normally be out of reach.

The Tolkien at Vermont conference is back this year with a one-day event on the theme of Tolkien and the Classics. The keynote speaker is the Very Rev. John Houghton, who will be giving a talk on “Tolkien’s calques of classicisms: Who Knew Elvish Latin, what did the Rohirrim read, and why was Bilbo cheeky?”

Other papers at the conference trace Tolkien’s connections to Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, and more. The conference takes place on Saturday, April 10, from 8:30 – 6:00 EST, free on Zoom. Check out the full schedule and how to request the Zoom link on the Tolkienists.org website.

Also on Saturday, April 10, the Tolkien Society AGM will feature Professor Verlyn Flieger as the annual guest speaker, talking about “Waiting for Earendel.” Members of the Society will get a Zoom link, but the general public will be able to watch on Facebook and YouTube. Go to the Tolkien Society announcement for more details.

From the classics to modern literature: earlier this week, Signum University sponsored an author chat with Dr. Holly Ordway, author of the recently published Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth beyond the Middle Ages. Dr. Ordway discusses the importance of acknowledging Tolkien’s interest in contemporary literature. You can find this Signum Symposium on YouTube.

Seers and Singers: Tolkien’s Typology of Sub-creators

25 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in Publications, Research, Tolkien

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A Wilderness of Dragons Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger
A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger, edited by John D. Rateliff.

I was very pleased to have an essay recently published in A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger, edited by John D. Rateliff and published by Gabbro Head Press, not only because I’m in fabulous company – take a look at the table of contents! – but mainly because I’m a great admirer of Verlyn Flieger. 

My essay, “Seers and Singers: Tolkien’s Typology of Sub-creators” discusses three of Tolkien’s works, “The Notion Club Papers,” “Leaf by Niggle,” and Smith of Wootton Major. I talked about some of my ideas when I gave a paper at the 2017 Tolkien Society Seminar, but this essay goes into much more detail and is part of a larger project I’m working on about Tolkien’s typological imagination.

I’ll quote from my introduction and give a summary of my main points in the hopes that you might be interested in buying A Wilderness of Dragons and reading more.

The Great Music sung by the Ainur gives rise to a vision of Arda and, attracted by what they have sung into potential existence, the Powers descend into the world to achieve its creation. Music and Light are of the essence of this created world, and as time goes on these primordial elements splinter into ever diminishing recapitulations. Music becomes manifest in song, in words, in voices, in the sound of waters flowing. Light illuminates the sky, the earth, the vision of creatures. As Flieger points out, “Both words and light are agents of perception” (Splintered Light 44) and both “can be instruments of sub-creation” (Splintered 46). Light and Music become manifest as vision and language, or image and word – either or both acting as the catalyst in the sub-creative process as described by Tolkien …. The seers and singers in these stories represent a typology of sub-creators – a repeated categorization of types – who demonstrate the powers of splintered music and light, word and image.”

(“Seers and Singers,” A Wilderness of Dragons, p. 258)

The Sub-creative Process

Tolkien, The Hills of the Morning
Tolkien, “The Hills of the Morning”

The three stories that I picked for commentary deal with the sub-creative powers of light and music or image and word by describing how different characters create art, whether it be through language, storytelling, vision, painting, blacksmithing, singing, and even baking. These activities always occur in collaboration with someone else; Tolkien does not subscribe to an image of a lone, heroic artist. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” reinforces much of what we see in these three stories.  I also include in a discussion of Smith of Wootton Major how Tolkien used the cooking metaphor in some of his unpublished essays and how it might apply to this story.

Faërian / Elvish Drama

Tolkien, "The Elvenking's gate from across the river"
Tolkien, “The Elvenking’s gate from across the river”

All three stories take us into faërian or elvish dramas so that we can examine their characteristics.  I discuss the faërian drama as a palimpsest, allowing the participant a kind of double vision. All three stories also suggest that participants are guided in their experiences by an often unseen force.

Genealogy / Tradition

Tolkien, "The Tree of Amalion"
Tolkien, “The Tree of Amalion”

All three stories establish what I call a “genealogy of sympathy,” ensuring that the subcreative inspiration is passed on, thus creating a tradition.  The inheritance is not always within a family, and the inspiration and valuing of sub-creative powers is not often appreciated by others.

Typological Patterns

Tolkien, detail from Three Friezes
Tolkien, detail from “Three Friezes”

Tolkien loved repeated patterns. In discussing typology, I’m discussing the narrative patterns that Tolkien establishes in his work. In this essay, I’m focusing on the seers and singers who are sub-creative collaborators. As I state in my conclusion:

Because of its recurrence in various texts, a type accumulates significance. Each seer and singer is a distinct character in a unique narrative, but each also partakes of a repeated pattern of meaning in Tolkien’s fiction. The appearance of a type brings into the narrative its associated meanings.”

(“Seers and Singers,” A Wilderness of Dragons, p. 277).

Anyone who has read Verlyn Flieger’s work will recognize the immense influence she has had on my views. This volume compiled in her honour by John Rateliff proves that she is the inspiration for a long and wide-ranging genealogy of students and scholars following in her footsteps.

Tolkien, detail from Three Friezes
Tolkien, detail from “Three Friezes”

The book is available in hardcover and paperback and will soon be available as an e-book as well. Gabbro Head ships through Amazon.com to anywhere in the world.

Image sources: Most of the pictures above by Tolkien appear in J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, HarperCollins: “The Hills of the Morning,” fig. 1; “The Tree of Amalion,” fig. 62; details from “Untitled (Three Friezes),” fig. 59. “The Elvenking’s gate from across the river” appears in The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, also by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, HarperCollins, fig. 50.

Viewing and Re-Viewing Tolkien’s Art

17 Sunday Feb 2019

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The Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition in Oxford last summer and now at the Morgan Library in New York turns a spotlight on Tolkien as an artist. Being able to see a range of his work, from his patterned doodles on newspaper crossword pages to his Hobbit illustrations, demonstrates how visual art was integral to his creative imagination. There’s something special about seeing the art in person, as if you can move one step closer to the actual hand that produced the work. And sometimes a visit can give you a chance to see the artwork in a new light.

One exhibit that surprised me was Tolkien’s sketchbook opened to the picture, “Alder by a stream.”  I had seen the reproduction in Hammond and Scull’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator (fig. 7) and it’s in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (page 129).  Seeing it in real life, though, revealed a smaller notebook than I had imagined, which made the actual watercolour a lovely little pastoral image. (It measures 90 x 130 mm / 3.5 x 5.2 inches). And it was only then that I realized that it was painted around 1906, when Tolkien was still in his early teens.

This image of “Alder by a stream” by Anthony Burdge comes from the New York Tolkien Conference Facebook page. You can see many more photos of the New York show on their public site.

And here’s another image that I wish I could go back to re-view, Tolkien’s illustration of Rivendell.

"Rivendell" by Tolkien
Rivendell, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Those of you who can go to the Morgan Library in New York to see it in person, or even those of us who will make do with a reproduction now have another fact to incorporate into our viewing.  Recently in brief comments by Christopher Tolkien on the occasion of his visit to the Aubusson tapestries illustrating some of Tolkien’s artwork – another event that recognizes Tolkien as an illustrator – he told a story of how one night when he was a child he came to his father while he was painting the image of Rivendell and what happened then. You can hear the story at 3:45 in the video below (in French, with English and Spanish subtitles).

Christopher Tolkien and the “Aubusson weaves Tolkien” project
https://youtu.be/rQmh_Sfq88Y

How can we look at “Rivendell” without thinking of the child’s tear and the father’s patient kindness that are forever part of the image now, for me anyway. I wonder if some people visiting the Morgan Library will think of this late-night scene between Christopher and his father when looking at “Rivendell.”

Detail from Rivendell

Edit, Feb. 18: I have heard from some people that they are finding it difficult or impossible to read the English subtitles in the above video. For a transcript of the subtitles as they appear in the video, click here.

The Morgan Library along with the New York Tolkien Fellowship are sponsoring a series of talks to accompany the exhibition, and I’ll post details of these along with a few other commentaries on the exhibit in a day or two. For now, though, I’ll take one more look back at the Bodleian version of the exhibition, where a series of talks also took place. One of these featured myth specialist Marina Warner and Tolkien scholars Dimitra Fimi and Verlyn Flieger. Their discussion was wide-ranging: language and mythology and the history of fantasy and so many other things. But at one moment in the Q & A, the talk turned to Tolkien’s artwork and its influence on his writing.

At around 1:07:10 in the video linked below, the speakers discuss the importance of maps and other images to Tolkien’s creative process, and then in a response to a question about the role of images, Verlyn Flieger (at around 1:09:45) gives a brief example to explain how Tolkien “is writing to the image.”

Oxford Podcasts: Mythopoeia: Myth-Creation and Middle-earth. https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/mythopoeia-myth-creation-and-middle-earth

I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence, but Professor Flieger’s example of the sketch of Cirith Ungol drawn in the margins of a manuscript draft is exactly the image that my co-author Jeff MacLeod and I discussed in our Tolkien Studies article, “Visualizing the Word: Tolkien as Artist and Writer” (vol. 14, 2017, pp. 115-31). As Professor Flieger is one of the editors who oversaw the publication of our article, I’m hoping she was channelling our argument!  You can read more about our essay here. 

For more on the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibit, see my previous post a few days ago, “Tolkien’s Favourite Landscape Artist?” and from last June, “Tolkien Art Exhibit at the Bodleian.”

Forthcoming: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger

21 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in Publications, Research, Tolkien

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I’m very happy to announce that one of my essays will be part of a festschrift for Verlyn Flieger, a renowned Tolkien scholar and someone I admire very much. The book, A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger, is edited by John Rateliff. He’s recently posted the table of contents on his blog, Sacnoth’s Scriptorium, and I’ve copied it below as an image and here as a downloadable pdf. The book should be available by the end of the year in both print and ebook format from a new independent publisher, Gabbro Head Press. I’m looking forward to reading the work of the other contributors!

I plan to post more information about my essay, “Seers and Singers: Tolkien’s Typology of Sub-creators” in the next few days.

A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger

 

 

 

Talks on Tolkien II: summer series. Flieger on Kullervo

18 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in Medievalisms, Publications, Talks on Tolkien, Tolkien

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In the winter months of 2015, I posted a series, Talks on Tolkien, which consisted of presentations by Tolkien scholars that had been previously recorded and made available on the internet. As I was watching a live stream this morning from the New York Tolkien Conference Facebook page, I was reminded of how much I like being able to hear other scholars give presentations on their research, and how wonderful it is when you can get access to these talks even if you can’t travel to various conferences and special lectures around the world.

For that reason, and the fact that my previous winter series apparently appealed to quite a few viewers, I’ve decided to do a summer series. For the next couple of months, I’ll post every week a previously recorded video or podcast by a Tolkien scholar, usually with some comments and/or links to more information about the speaker and their topic. Just to be clear, I haven’t recorded any of these talks myself; as with my winter series, I’m simply collecting and curating already available videos and podcasts.

In this summer series, I’m planning to focus on new or forthcoming books and on approaches from different disciplines to the study of Tolkien.

Verlyn Flieger on The Story of Kullervo

The Story of Kullervo. J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. V. FleigerFirst up for this week is a podcast featuring the eminent Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, who has edited Tolkien’s Story of Kullervo. This is the latest in the “new” books by Tolkien that have been published in recent years, including his Beowulf, Fall of Arthur, and Sigurd and Gudrun. The Story of Kullervo was available in the UK and Canada late last summer but only a few months ago in the US, so the book is still fairly new to most Tolkien readers.

This edition includes the unfinished story about Kullervo that Tolkien wrote as a 22-year-old, inspired by the Finnish epic Kalevala. The book also includes drafts of an essay by Tolkien on The Kalevala, as well as Professor Flieger’s commentary on the material.

Professor Flieger’s talk offers an interesting view of this early work by Tolkien. She enumerates the ways in which Tolkien discovers and exercises his creative abilities in writing this story, and she presents ideas about how the story of Kullervo influences the tales that come later in The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings.

Verlyn Flieger at Exeter College, Oxford. from http://www.exeter.ox.ac.uk/node/1897.html

Verlyn Flieger talking about Kullervo at Exeter College, Oxford. 12 October 2015. Image from http://www.exeter.ox.ac.uk/node/1897.html

The audio file can be found on the Exeter College site here. Or you can listen to Professor Flieger right here:

 

To view more about Verlyn Flieger’s many scholarly publications and editions and her creative writing, check out her website, mythus.com

For information about Tolkien’s inspiration for Kullervo, visit the Finnish Literature Society’s site on The Kalevala.

 

 

 

New winter series: Talks on Tolkien

25 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in Medievalisms, Talks on Tolkien, Tolkien

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In my corner of the world, cold winds are lashing up rainstorms and snowfalls for the start of the new year: good days to stay cozy at home, to read, think, and write. To accompany any reading or re-reading of Tolkien in this winter season, I thought that it would be fun to highlight every weekend a podcast or video featuring a different Tolkien scholar: a “Talks on Tolkien” series. Some of the videos and podcasts will be recent; others buried a little further in the files of the web, but all, I hope, thought-provoking and informative.

Because I’m posting the first selection late in this weekend, I’ll keep it short, a twenty-minute video by a foremost Tolkien scholar, Verlyn Flieger, who is one of my favorite critics. In this talk, “Imaginary Creatures — Real Experience,” Professor Flieger, I believe, gets to the core of The Lord of the Rings and argues that it is not the simplistic good vs. evil story many people think it is.

Recently, an opposing opinion has been expressed by the writer Michael Moorcock in an interview on Dr. Karl Siegfried’s Norse Mythology Blog. In Part Two of that interview, Moorcock says that “it’s the simplification, rejection of the world’s complexity, that discomforts me with Tolkien.” Take a look at Moorcock’s argument; listen to Flieger’s in the video. Let me know what you think!

(In case you can’t see the video on your device, try this link: http://youtu.be/q87vHzNFadU)

Coming up in the next few weeks: talks by Tom Shippey, Michael Drout, Dimitra Fimi, John Garth, Janet Brennan Croft,  John D. Rateliff, and more. Check back every Friday or Saturday for the next installment of “Talks on Tolkien.”  And please note: my intention is to curate a series of already-available resources online; I’m not planning on producing any new talks on Tolkien, though I do hope I can suggest some interesting contexts for my selections.

You can find out more about Verlyn Flieger’s work on her website, mythus.com.

Comments / discussions are welcome!

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Jackson’s Lost Opportunity: The Death of Sister-Sons

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in Fan studies, Medieval, Medievalisms, Old English, Review, Tolkien

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Thorin Fili Kili banner

Thorin, Fili, Kili banner. TheOneRing.net

I enjoy many things about Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films – the material realization of various Middle-earth cultures, the creation of the best movie dragon I’ve ever seen, Martin Freeman’s Bilbo, to name only a few – but of course Jackson is not making the films specifically for me, a medievalist with a love of Tolkien’s work. As such, I had hoped that Jackson would have given us a resonant scene focusing on an uncle and his nephews — Thorin, Fili, and Kili — making their heroic last stand in battle together. There is a long tradition of the special relationship between “sister-sons” and their uncles in medieval literature that Tolkien refers to in The Hobbit. Working out that relationship to its traditional end would have inserted Jackson’s scene more firmly in a body of stories about these deeply embedded emotional relationships that are a part of western Europe’s cultural history.[1]

Now wait a minute, you might be saying to yourself. Jackson [2] clearly indicates a strong relationship between Thorin and his nephews, and their death scenes in The Battle of the Five Armies are somewhat connected and set apart from others. Yes, but not exactly in the traditional way I’m talking about.

In The Hobbit, Tolkien simply reports, “Of the twelve companions of Thorin, ten remained. Fili and Kili had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother.” (“The Return Journey,” The Hobbit 268).[3] Yes, they defend each other because they’re family, but more specifically because Fili and Kili are Thorin’s “sister-sons” (sweostor sunu in Old English).

Fili, Kili

Fili, Kili. Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Image 235

Uncle-nephew relationships, and sometimes even more precisely maternal uncle-nephew relationships (therefore, “sister-sons”), are frequently represented as a special bond in medieval literature. In Beowulf, the poet alludes to the story of Sigemund, êam (maternal uncle) to Fitela (line 881), and how they fought together in times of need. In line 115 of the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” Wulfmær, one of the fallen warriors, is identified as the lord’s swuster sunu. Tolkien recognizes the appropriateness of Wulfmær’s place near his uncle in the verse drama “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” which is based on “The Battle of Maldon.”  In this play, two men are searching after the battle for the body of their lord when one of them finds Wulfmær:

This head we know!
Wulfmær it is. I’ll wager aught
not far did he fall from friend and master.

His companion answers:

His sister-son! The songs tell us,
ever near shall be at need nephew to uncle.  (“Homecoming” 127)

Other uncle-nephew relationships can be found in Charlemagne and Roland, Hrothgar and Hrothulf, Arthur and Gawain. The relationship isn’t always positive; in some stories, Mordred is Arthur’s sister-son, which makes his treachery even worse. Théoden and Éomer or Turgon and Maeglin provide some other examples in Tolkien’s work. Verlyn Flieger explains how we can even see the Bilbo-Frodo relationship in this light. [4]

So what does Jackson do with the uncle-nephew bond? In The Battle of the Five Armies, Thorin welcomes Fili and Kili to the kingdom of Erebor, addressing them as his “sister’s sons.” In Jackson’s movies the young dwarves Fili and Kili refer to Thorin as their uncle, and in The Desolation of Smaug Thorin tells Fili that one day he will be king.[5] In The Battle of the Five Armies, when Thorin finally bursts out of the mountain gate to join the battle, the two warriors running closest to him on either side are Fili and Kili. In their last fight, Thorin calls Dwalin, Fili, and Kili to go with him in an attempt to take down Azog. Gandalf comments that Thorin is taking his best fighters with him. In Old English they would be called his heorð-geneatas, his “hearth-companions,” a small group of noble, well-trained fighters who are closest to their lord, and it is reasonable to think that the young and courageous nephews would be among them. Fili and Kili, then, are appropriately represented as sister-sons in most of Jackson’s Hobbit.

But the uncle-nephew bond dissipates in their final scenes. While Tolkien recognizes in “The Homecoming” that “ever near shall be at need nephew to uncle,” in The Battle of the Five Armies the nephews end up nowhere near their uncle in a time of need. Instead, Thorin sends Fili and Kili away to hunt for Azog, and then the two nephews split up in separate searches as well. Fili is killed in the sight of both of his kinsmen (we don’t see him fighting heroically to the end; he’s just skewered and then thrown over a cliff) but both Thorin and Kili are too far away to do anything about that attack. Uncle and nephew cannot stand and defend each other. The killing of Fili enrages Kili, who runs off in a passionate Orc-killing spree, but his end is complicated by the arrival of Tauriel.

Now, I have to make clear that I do not object in principle to the creation of new characters like Tauriel. But her involvement in Kili’s last fight obscures the uncle-nephew bond that defines Thorin and his sister-sons. Instead of Thorin, Fili, and Kili fighting side-by-side until they are cut down, we get a different trio: Kili-Tauriel-Legolas defending each other. Kili’s last look is not to his uncle but to Tauriel; his uncle is too far away to be part of the scene. The special bond of an uncle with his nephews who “had fallen defending him with shield and body,” is nowhere to be seen.

Peter Jackson knows how to film emotional battle scenes, as he demonstrated in The Return of the King: sweeping music, slow motion, the melee of battle, the depiction of personal anguish.

Return of the King battle scenes

from Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. Return of the King. Aragorn, Image 1808; Eowyn with Theoden, Image 1811; Eomer with Eowyn, Image 1846

Had Jackson completed the Hobbit story with a heroic last stand of uncle and nephews fighting side-by-side on the battlefield, their tale would have participated in a long tradition of sister-son stories and allowed us to feel the emotional impact of that relationship in a visceral way.

Thorin, Kili

Thorin, Kili. Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. The Hobbit: trailers. Image 326.

Too bad the opportunity was lost so close to the end of the movie.

Endnotes

[1] These uncle-nephew relationships are important in other cultures beyond the European, but I am only familiar with the northern European literary uncle-nephew motif. It is likely that the practice of fostering high-born children – having a son educated in his uncle’s home, for example – contributed to the motif in medieval literature.

[2] I use “Jackson” throughout as shorthand. Although he was the director of the Hobbit movies, he was not the only writer. The full writing team consists of Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh, and Guillermo del Toro, who gets a writing credit for his involvement with the project in its earlier stages.

[3] Tolkien inserted this line about Fili and Kili dying in defense of their uncle late in the process of composition. According to John Rateliff: “The idea that the two most likeable of all Bilbo’s companions should also die in the battle…first appears in the continuation of the typescript that eventually (autumn 1936) replaced the Third Phase manuscript” (684, n. 11). Rateliff also points out that Thorin was originally Fili and Kili’s great-uncle, but Tolkien later moved him one generation closer. (See, for example, Rateliff  444 – 445, note 11). In Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, in the section on “Durin’s Folk,” Thorin appears in the genealogy as Fili and Kili’s uncle (1418).

[4] Verlyn Flieger discusses the Bilbo-Frodo kinship in the light of the uncle-nephew motif in her essay, “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero.” The essay has been reprinted in a couple of places, including Flieger’s collected essays in Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien. Kent State University Press, 2012 and in the 2004 volume, Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, published by Houghton Mifflin and partly available as a Google e-book.

[5] Rateliff comments on the line of succession in Tolkien’s conception of the Dwarves’ patriarchal line of kings which excludes the maternal nephews (704). In the early Middle Ages, young relatives in the maternal line might succeed a ruler; it is interesting that in this detail Jackson is closer to early medieval practice than the book.

Works Cited

Flieger, Verlyn. “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero.” Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien. Kent State University Press, 2012. 141-58. Print. Also available in Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism. Ed. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 122-45. Print and Google e-book.

Jackson, Peter, dir. The Battle of the Five Armies. New Line Cinema, 2014. Film.

____. The Desolation of Smaug.  New Line Cinema, 2013. Film.

Klaeber’s Beowulf. Ed. R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. 4th ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Print.

Rateliff, John D.  The History of the Hobbit. 2 Vols. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.

“The Battle of Maldon: Hypertext Edition.” Old English Literature: A Hypertext Course Pack. English Faculty, Oxford. 2009. Web. 14 Jan. 2015.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. 2 Oct. 2014. Screenshots. 14 Jan. 2015.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Hobbit: Trailers.” Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. Jul – Nov 2014. Screenshots. 14 Jan. 2015.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” Lisa’s Video Frame Capture Library. n.d. Screenshots. 14 Jan. 2015.

“Thorin, Fili and Kili Banner in Super High-Resolution.” TheOneRing.net. 22 Nov. 2014. JPEG. 14 Jan. 2015.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Durin’s Folk.” Appendix A.iii. Return of the King, being the third part of The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins, 2007. 1406-19. Print.

_____. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Print.

_____.  “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.” Tree and Leaf, including the poem Mythopoeia. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Print.

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MLA citation of this post:  Smol, Anna. “Jackson’s Lost Opportunity: The Death of Sister-Sons.” A Single Leaf.  16 Jan 2015. Web.  [insert date of access here without brackets].

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What did you think of these final scenes in the film? Any other examples of sister-sons that you want to discuss or add?  Please feel free to comment!