4/9/02

Regis Michelena

So many elfish chicks and only One Ring

            I hefted the axe in my hands and turned toward my approaching foe. He snarled and swung his overly large and painful-looking sword in the general vicinity of my head. I shouted something unintelligible in my thick Scottish accent, ducked, and then it hit me.

            No, no the aforementioned overly large and painful-looking sword.

            But that would have sucked. Bad.

            It dawned on me that I don’t have a thick Scottish accent. Or an axe. But mainly, it was the lack of a Scottish accent that snapped me back into reality.

            For one reason or another (probably another), I had been in a daydream in which I was a dwarf fighting Orcs and whatnot in Middle-Earth, also known as Lord of the Rings Land. I’d say that I am hooked on the J. R. R. Tolkien classics, except for one thing: it took me over three months to read the book The Fellowship of the Ring.

            So I’m not exactly dedicated. Just a minor setback, that’s all.

            Luckily, it didn’t take me nearly that long to see the movie. I still haven’t figured out how this one works, but apparently it does.

            For those of you that get out even less than me, allow me to inform you of what the rest of the civilized world has been aware of for several months. The Lord of the Rings is a really long book originally released in three parts – Fellowship, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King- that were recently filmed as one really long movie to be released as a trilogy. This isn’t the only thing the books and films have in common- they have the same plot too!

            Is it just me, or are the similarities just plain eerie?

            Here is the eerily similar plot: A long time ago there was a gratuitously evil guy named Sauron that made a bunch of magic rings and gave them to the peoples of Middle-Earth- Elves, Dwarves, and men (but not the Hobbits). They all thought that Sauron was a really swell guy until they found out that he had an evil master ring that controlled the other rings- a “One Ring,” if you will. Then things got ugly. There was a big war and it wasn’t pretty.

            Luckily for everybody but Sauron, some guy cut his fingers off, including the finger wearing the One Ring. Sauron and his forces pretty much vanished. Instead of destroying the ring, they guy kept it. After a while, he got killed and the Ring got lost. After three thousand years or so, a Hobbit named Bilbo Baggins found it in a cave.

            The ring was passed on to his nephew Frodo, and everything was peachy until the spirit of Sauron decided to send out a bunch of Orcs and Nazgûl and other things that my spell-check doesn’t recognize to get it back.

            So Frodo leaves town with the ring and three of his buddies: Sam, Merry, and Pippin with the intent of meeting a wizard named Gandalf in a bar. Gandalf isn’t there, but they meet a shady looking guy that goes by “Strider.” When Gandalf doesn’t show and the bad guys come calling, Strider leads the comical Hobbits (who all have different accents despite being from the same town) to the Elvin city of Rivendell.

            There they decide that they must destroy the ring. The only problem is that this can only be done the same place the ring was forged- Mount Doom, which isn’t a nice place. But not just anyone can take the One Ring on this ever-important quest, because it is evil and corrupts the wearer. And so Frodo gets to be the Ring Bearer. (Note the irony that the Ring Bearer is from the race that never got a ring in the first place.) The lack of females means that there is no Flower Girl to come along, and so everyone is sad. But then somebody points out that they aren’t planning for a wedding, so it’s okay.

            Accompanying Frodo on the mission are his Hobbit friends, Strider, Gandalf (who made it to Rivendell), another man named Boromir, Legolas the Elf (whose friends call him “Tex” because he is one hell of a shot with his bow and arrows), and an axe-wielding Dwarf named Gimli. So the aptly named “Fellowship of the Ring” sets out on a mission full of action, Orcs, and hot Elfish chicks.

            I thoroughly enjoyed the plot elements and character development. Elves and Dwarves are like pork chops and vegans- they don’t get along- but Gimli and Legolas become good friends. If two fictional characters in a fantasy novel can get along, surely there is hope for the real world. It almost makes me cry.

            Almost.

            So get down to a book store or to the second-run theater and get into the realm of Middle-Earth before it’s too late. Sure, you don’t actually get to have an axe, but it’s still a lot of fun. Plus, it’ll help distract you until the next Star Wars movie comes out.

But above all else, remember the three magic words: hot Elfish chicks. And that the ring you find in a cave might be really evil and try to kill you.

But mainly the hot Elfish chicks.