"Literary" Criticism on a Film Scene: Osgiliath

[newleaf31]

For those of you I'm just getting to know, in my not-online life, I'm a biblical scholar. I teach ancient Hebrew and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible to students studying for master's degrees in divinity, and I do original interpretive work on biblical texts. My particular areas of interpretive interest are literary and feminist criticism. I have

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[newleaf31]

Thank you, my friend, I appreciate your kind words! I was hoping you would comment. I'm always interested to hear your thoughts! I know what you mean about pretentious criticism -- I think that was all I ever read in college, and it is so unutterably tiresome and pointless. But there's nothing I love to do more than take a text (or in this case, a scene) that I love, but which perhaps contains elements that leave me with question marks, and really sink my teeth into it in order to find out how and why it works the way it does. There's always the danger that breaking something down into its smallest component parts means losing sight of the forest in your quest to understand the twigs on each tree, but if you spend some time with the twigs, if you then step back again, ideally the forest is still visible... it may just look different than it did before.

I'm also interested in the way the Ring affects different people in different ways. A lot of it seems to have to do with the person's strength of character before the Ring came to them (Gollum was already a selfish bastard, but Bilbo was much less so). There's the issue of relative power -- the Ring is dangerous to Gandalf and Galadriel because they're incredibly powerful beings who are in a position to affect the lives of many by their actions, whereas Frodo has extremely little power. Prolonged exposure is of course an issue, and personal interests that the Ring can bend and warp (Boromir, Faramir). There are a lot of interesting dynamics, and I'm sure there are others that are much less easily quantifiable.

One thing that particularly interests me about the One Ring is the extent to which its identity is bound up with Sauron's. Does the Ring = Sauron, because it's Sauron's power that's bound up in it? Or is the Ring a more truly autonomous entity, even capable of acting against Sauron's wishes (though probably not against its own self-interests)? I don't know; I haven't been able to figure it out.

I've never read the Elric saga, but I've heard good things about Moorcock. I'll have to check it out.