This is right after Gandalf says, “A balrog. A demon of the ancient world.”
I just love how PJ chose to cut to Legolas’ face because he is exactly who you should cut to at this moment. You need an elf to show what it really means. Other than Gandalf, the rest of the Fellowship can sense something is gravely wrong, but they don’t understand just how grave. Like Gandalf, Legolas knows the terror. He understands the gravity of what lies around that corner. He’s got a piddly little bow and he is mere steps away from a demon of the ancient world. This frame shows a kid coming to the realisation that he is way out of his depth, that this mission will take him to places he only knew to exist in legends of the Elder Days, a time long gone, barely history.
He’s probably one of the youngest elves in Middle Earth at this point. He probably grew up on stories of the balrogs, slaying the ancient High Kings of the Eldar and tearing Middle Earth apart, thousands and thousands of years ago. They are legends in old crumbling books, read illicitly by a little elfling who was kept up at night by the terrible tales.They are the monsters under the bed and the shadows in the heart of the forest. They are the beasts behind the winged hordes of hell, that older elves, who’ve seen the worst that Arda has to offer, always assured him were no more than distant nightmares, stories relegated to dust and ancient memory. Except now they are real. They are here. They are coming.
The best part is that in the books he just starts screaming when he lays eyes on it
In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its left hand it held a whip of many thongs.
‘Ai! ai! wailed Legolas. “A Balrog! A Balrog has come!’
Legolas can be relied upon to have the correct reaction to everything.
It is not necessarily normal, or socially appropriate, or sane, but it is always 100% correct.
i’m sobbing
while I love all this interpretation, Legolas is in fact one of the oldest elves running around Middle-Earth at this point.
Legolas first appears as a minor character in The Fall of Gondolin, which is about the sacking of an ancient (First Age) elf city by a great and terrible army, including multiple balrogs, sent by Morgoth, an evil god who was Sauron’s boss. Glorfindeldied the first time tackling a balrog by himself. (Eru Ilúvatar just sends the Elves on back after they die if they don’t want to stay in the Grey Havens.)
Legolas was one of the scouts (being “long-eyed”) who brought refugees of Gondolin to safety. One of those refugees was a seven-year-old Eärendil. Eärendil, you may recall, is the mariner who had a Silmaril on the prow of his ship and was made into “our most beloved star.” (This starlight is captured by Galadriel in a vial of water and given to Frodo and Sam, which Sam uses to scare off Shelob in Cirith Ungol.)
And who might the sons of Eärendil be? None other than Elrond Half-Elven, father of Arwen and leader of Rivendell, and Elwing, far-back ancestor of Aragorn.
Legolas saved Elrond’sfather from balrogs when Eärendil was a child. Legolas is something like EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS OLD at the time of LOTR. And the thought of a balrog STILL scares the shit out of him.
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms)was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905.
The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
people who think its unethical to eat chicken eggs are like people who think bees should keep all their honey. they literally produce more than they need and your unwillingness to even buy local means you are doing nothing to help them, support your small farmers you heathens
This is not true.
1) honeybees do not produce “extra honey.” And beekeepers don’t take some of the honey, they take all of it.
2) chickens have been artificially selected from naturally producing eggs once a month to producing eggs every couple of days. Their bodies are not sustainable and the health complications of this rapid egg production kills chickens.
Hey idk who like. Lied to you about the way honey farms work, but could you stop spreading misinformation? Are you a beekeeper?
Because I am!
Beekeepers make sure hives are fed before there is pollen in the air, protected from predators and the elements, and have enough honey to sustain themselves. We don’t take all of it.
But overproduction of honey leads to stagnation in the hive. It puts stress on the queen to lay eggs, and when they inevitably fill up all their space with honey (instead of filling up the multiple empty, clean boxes of frames beekeepers might put on top of the main hive box), the queen can get so stressed she dies. If there’s a spike in the weather and the hive hasn’t prepared new queen brood, that’s it! The colony is dead. Because there wasn’t enough space for eggs and honey in the hive.
Beekeepers take excess honey. We are constantly monitoring the state of the hive, checking for parasites, analyzing the eggs for diseases, and making sure they are fed and healthy (usually with sugar water and pollen substitutes until they have made enough honey to sustain themselves in the early spring months). If a queen dies prematurely, we make every attempt to replace her to save the colony.
I know there’s an urge to patronize everyone who works in the farming industry, but try to understand the differences between small scale agriculture and industrial farming. There IS a difference. And stop spreading misinformation.
If you’re this passionate about ethical consumption, look into some of the ecofeministresearch on non-hierarchal interspecies relationships (working on building animal-human relationships in a non exploitative way).
But yeah! Stop spreading misinformation! Please 🐝
Also if I can harp on the chicken part?
Yea Chickens are some of the most abused animals on big factory farms and I’ll be the first to admit it’s criminal and more needs to be done to regulate this.
Yes selective breeding over time has caused an increase in the ammount of eggs produced by chickens and factory farms have some messed up practices to get more eggs from them including forced moutling.
THIS IS WHY YOU SUPPORT LOCAL FARMERS AND THEIR EGGS
Many people take to raising their own hens because of America’s immoral treatment of hens in factory farms like you’re not helping the poor chicks by starving these farmers financially you’re just hurting the one people trying to change things and making the OPTION of cage free organic cruelty free eggs even harder to find
First of all, chickens didn’t ever “lay one egg a month” because they’re clutch layers. Not only that, but many chicken folk are raising heritage breeds, not commercial hens,. Your average commercial production hen (leghorns, Isa browns, etc) produce 5-6 eggs per week, laying an egg a day (which is actually how junglefowl, ie wild chickens, lay. The difference is that jungle fowl lay their clutch and then brood). Heritage breeds often don’t because they haven’t been bred for egg production, they’ve been bred out of a sense of heritage. Older breeds our ancestors around the world kept for various reasons. Often these breeds are the ones that lay 3-4 eggs in a week instead of daily, which is less often than wild fowl when it’s laying season. In addition, several heritage breeds are being kept for conservation reasons, as the breeds were nearly lost.
And backyard hens are often spoiled pets. They get fed rich, hearty, varied diets. Usually a staple chow and then extras like leafy greens, bugs, fruits, veggies. Often they get table scraps. I’ve seen countless people make warm oatmeal on cold mornings to give to Their Ladies. They make them chicken sweaters, and aprons, and diapers so they can visit inside the house for snuggles. Enrichment is increasing for them every day. Most people allow their birds to free range during the day when it’s nice out. They give them names.
They also lay eggs, often infertile ones but even the fertile ones aren’t “babies” like you’re thinking. They are absolutely inert without incubation for over 24 hours straight because chickens lay a clutch of 8-15 eggs and need them to hatch at all the same time so they don’t start incubation until the hen stops laying and sits on them. Brooding is just as hard if not harder on them than laying is, because they stop eating and drinking except once a day, and hold in their poop so they only poop once a day instead of eliminating waste every 15 minutes or so like they would normally. This can cause them to lose a lot of weight and some birds will sit on eggs until it seriously threatens their health. So normally you don’t WANT them to brood if you can prevent it, unless you know they have fertile eggs AND you want babies or know how you’re going to re-home them. It’s also not possible to safely fix a bird; anesthesia is an extremely dangerous risk that often leads to death and no vet in their right mind would risk it just so you can prevent a chicken hen from laying eggs.
IN SUMMARY: The eggs they naturally produce by existing and being well cared for are edible, nutritious, and taste good, you cannot safely prevent them from laying them, and leaving the eggs in with them can lead to negative health consequences.
So what would you have someone do? Throw away food just because your pet produced it instead of the dirt? That’s illogical and wasteful.
Like, if you just don’t want to eat eggs, then don’t. I don’t particularly like eggs either! I keep chickens as pets, and they produce a bunch of eggs I don’t eat, so I sell them or give them to other people. BUT if you’re not eating eggs from backyard chickens because of some misguided idea that it’s cruel, you’re just wrong, and you should stop spreading that lie.
sometimes I look at posts like this and think “surely this is a false flag. nobody who champions a cause is that uninformed about it, right? RIGHT? surely this is somebody pretending to be a vegan/ARA to set up a “look at the vegan getting completely owned” post.”
then i go to their blogs and (when they’re not deactivated because of the vegan getting completely owned post) oh my god they are real, they just don’t actually know anything about the thing they hate. they have no idea how beekeeping, small-scale chickenkeeping, or anything in the animal ag industry actually works. they’ve completely bought into the lie that small-scale production is just as bad for animals and the environment as factory farming.
