Best Of

@Lionduck said:
The Lord of the Rings is an example of a mythological story loaded with the seeds of moral guides or codes, lessons drawn from the telling al hidden within.

Yes, The Lord of the Rings is about good and evil made tangible. Sauron is said in the prelude to Fellowship to have poured “his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate” into the One Ring at it’s creation, and so it stands as the symbol of evil power that must be destroyed. Along the way, the quest reveals much about the nature of good and evil in the hearts of those who encounter the Ring, from Boromir who is seduced by it, to Faramir and Aragorn who stay true to the path determined by the Wise. It is about goodness and virtue and providence in the end.

A theme that runs through the story is the wickedness of industrialisation, in what happens to Isengard for instance, and in Saruman’s crossing of orcs with men to create the Uruk-Hai. In a way the good land from which the hobbits come is the idealised rural England of the Shire, a land of gardens and farms and public houses where ale is drunk. The idea is that wild nature is magical, but in cultivated nature goodness can be found.

The thing about the story is that it brings so many things that might otherwise take a long lifetime to realise, into the open and makes them obvious. The benefits of long life as enjoyed by the Elves is shown in their nobility and wisdom.

I was revisiting this thread, and just watched The Last Ship again, to see why it resonated so clearly with me, besides Sting’s wonderful music of course. There is something majestic about those huge steel ships rising above the shipyards on the Clyde, and it’s tales of doughty foremen and musical welders… real salt o the earth kinds of people.

It reminds me of my mothers stories of her childhood and growing up with a father who worked in the fish hall, filleting fish for my grandfathers company and making deals with the fishermen for their catch and bringing the fish in boxes on ice to restaurants in nearby towns. So many stories about that time. But people who were not very different from the shipyard crews that Sting sings about.

Sting says in the intro to the film I linked that before his foray into musical theatre he was unaware to what extent each song, each line in the work would be scrutinised, and he thanks his wonderful collaborators. It’s excellent that so much of the songs is in dialect, with accents of the region.

There are other mythological works, not the least of which is The Lord of the Rings. We just recently watched the Extended Editions of the films again, they are a wonderful telling of the story and here too language is important, in the songs, the history of the races, the scripts they used.