Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author, but I also run the activities of our centre. And joining me today is my good friend Jacob Rennaker, who is sitting over in Seattle. And Jacob is an expert on Tolkien, keemba also works within the games industry of and obviously knows about fantasy from the putting it on a board and getting you to play with it side of things as well is that fair to say Jacob yeah completely fair good all right so there's a new game in town or a new film in town which some of you might already have heard about but you'll now hear a lot more which is at the end of the year, there is going to be a new Lord of the Rings film. No, this isn't The Hunt for Gollum. That's some way off. This is an anime version of The War of the Rohirrim.
[1:08] Now, some of you may be scratching your heads thinking, where is The War of the Rohirrim in Lord of the Rings? So I'm going to pass that one over to you, Jacob. If people want to know the source material for this film where should they look so you have to it's in the books that you have of lord of the rings actually so you already you probably already have it uh but you have to flip all the way to the end of the return of the king in appendix a and then once you get to appendix a you have to keep flipping uh until you get to uh the house of aurel so yeah there's a so keep keep Keep going, keep going, very, very end. And so, yeah, so it's in Appendix A at the end of Return of the King. And it's going through the different kingdoms. And it's called The House of Eil, not The War of the Rehirim. Because The War of the Rehirim is the chosen title for this film.
[2:04] So that is... Not a novel. What you have there is, I think, three pages, more or less. Plus there is one of these Tolkienian timelines where it goes through the dates for the Rohirrim, which actually has a lot of little details within it which aren't in the prose three-pager.
[2:30] So do read on past the prose three-pager. Would you like to just sketch out what the house of al is in terms of that three page it's it's a summary isn't it yeah it's just it's a summary because it's it's uh trying to this is something that to tease a future podcast on uh on tolkien's letters uh something that that's interesting understanding tolkien's purposes and the publisher's purposes for putting in uh this material because there's so much as you know reading through lord of the rings there's so much history that is implied uh that the characters speak about places that they visit uh right artifacts buildings areas place names um and so there was a desire to put more of that out without including the entire silmarillion uh into yeah with with the entire lord to publish it with lord to the rings which is what tolkien preferred um and so the compromise uh was adding some appendices that could put relevant portions of the history and this was so difficult for tolkien to say like what is most important from this entire span of history that i've created for this entire.
[3:48] World uh and so the appendix area so this is kind of highlighting significant elements from the larger legendarium that he felt shed a particularly relevant light on the happenings of lord of the rings particularly so we have um elements in there like the house of gondor um going through the history there and so this is kind of coming after uh that broader history um and also you know you have your history the new menorah of course is coming into play there and weaving in and out um of that so that's where this is and so summarizing so it's coming after it's not the first element from uh the appendices there's uh with appendix a there's a number of other uh you know kingdoms um and peoples that it's kind of following trajectories and kind of snippets from uh larger uh background material but this one yeah so this is going specifically from house of ariel uh and uh how the roharim uh kind of become established where they're living how they even came into uh yeah came into a people peoplehood uh to be called uh you know a roharim and then kind of the waxing and waning of their kingdom different forces that came in tried to right so how even when they came in themselves who was pushed out right so we have.
[5:14] People that existed and were living in that land um uh yes the dunn lendings right so these are and right and they're done lendings and this is interesting uh i think for the purpose of this conversation this and the the film is the uh the primary antagonists for the uh for this particular.
[5:36] Section that they're going to be it's a sliver of something that is happening within the entire scope of uh the kingdom of rohan this is one particular several year stretch of time within that where the primary antagonists are the dunlendings and so these are people who were descendants of humans who did not leave for newman or at the beginning of the second age So the people kind of stayed behind and they were settled in this area and then are eventually pushed out thanks to Numenoreans kind of coming in, displacing them.
[6:15] Rohan becoming settled in the area. And so these are people who are actually, you could say indigenous to that area. I wouldn't say necessarily indigenous. If anyone, there's nothing that's completely indigenous. but they're people who are right so we're kind of like who have had a long standing relationship with the area who have been living in the area who then kind of get displaced by rohan and then are kind of trying to work their way back into the lands that they feel they so let's connect this to the films i'm not sure i think it's only in the extended version but if you have seen the extended version there is a scene in i think in the two towers where saruman is walking amongst monks, a lot of hairy guys with sort of torches. And he says, the horse lords have stolen your lands. It's your time to take it back. And then you see them sort of invading. And along with not just the Saruman's orcs who are attacking, these people are also involved.
[7:18] So there is a potential here for a narrative about waves of colonization and colonialism. It's not only in it. Well, maybe it is colonialism, but as a UK person raised on history about how Britain happened, it's very familiar. So we have in our sort of first century after Christ, we have waves of people coming in over the North Sea and the Channel, who then settled different parts of particularly England and then push other people further and further over. So that's where the Angles and the Saxons come from. So this idea, I think that's probably what Tolkien is thinking, because that's the kind of school education he would have had as well, that the creation of kingdoms is these waves of people traveling in and taking over other lands, sometimes intermarrying, sometimes warfare. It's a very mixed picture. so it's a very it feels very familiar to me this story um the trajectory here is rather in the uk you think of it as people coming in from a sort of southeast and eastern direction.
[8:39] Rohan they're coming in from the northeast so they're dropping down through so if you think of your map of middle earth and you think of the spine of the misty mountains the people of rohan are coming in at the top of the map and dropping down on the eastern side of those mountains, and then forming a friendship with the people of Gondor.
[9:03] They're like the Anglo-Saxon kings, they're the chief guys of the region. They form an alliance because they come to help them in the Battle of Celebrant. That's the sort of history background. Rohan, just to connect Hector, in case you're still scratching your head and thinking, who are these guys? They are the horse culture who in the films, you've got the wonderful Bernard Hill, who died recently, his King Ferdinand and his nephew, Emma, who's the next king, and Erwin, Ferdinand's niece, is the one who kills the Witch King. It's that group of people. But this film isn't about that war. It's going to be set a kind of like halfway up the history line because if you look at the connection of the kings you've got.
[9:55] Aeol as you've heard coming in and settling and then Tolkien says in his source material and the king about whom other stories are told is Helm now we've heard about Helm before haven't we where have somebody who's watched the film heard about Helm, There's a particular location. The sound of the name should sound familiar. That's Helm's Deep, where we have in The Two Towers, the film you would have seen, a great deal of action happening there. There so this is this place is named after uh this uh helm hammer hand it says full uh full name i don't think people necessarily called him mr hammer hand uh but that's yeah that's what he's referred to here yeah king hammer hand yeah king help yeah it's interesting i'm not sure yes he must have been so in terms of he's not an immediate generation it would be like say we're taking the current royal family in the UK, it would be like talking about an ancestor of theirs back in Tudor times. You know, there's quite a lot of generations and quite a lot of years past.
[11:09] But he is regarded as being the great hero. After the founding king, and that's where you get Shadowfax and the Miras and all that legend of the horses, but they're more like mythic, whereas Helm is more historical, if you can sort of feel the difference between those two. Okay, so that's, you know, these three pages do produce a lot of material. So let's, before we look at what they might be doing, let's talk about why it's being made and who is making it. So the answer to why it's being made, there is one cynical answer, which is New Line and The Warner Brothers need to keep hold of the rights. And part of that is to carry on making Lord of the Rings films. They're not yet ready to start again and do another Lord of the Rings films in the same way as Sony keeps on making Spider-Man films to keep the rights.
[12:05] They are mining the appendices to Lord of the Rings for this source material. And I presume the choice of doing an animated film means that they felt it was going to cost less and they could keep their rights ticking along.
[12:23] So that's the practical commercial side of it, because I'm not sure there was a huge demand out there, you know, making for a Helmhammer hand biopic. Biopic yeah yeah but on the other hand it does have a relationship with the team who made lord of the rings because philippa boyans who was the one of the three screenwriters on that one along with peter jackson and fran walsh is sort of part of the team on this one and she is teamed up with a younger generation of writers. Let's get their names correct. And that is, let me just check.
[13:05] Yes, her daughter, I believe, Phoebe Gittins, if I got that right, and her daughter's partner, Artie Papagiorgio. So that is quite an interesting choice in and of itself, is that they're thinking of involving, within the family literally, but a new generation of writers um and the the filmmaker on the sort of actual producing the anime style is kenji kamiyama and i was looking at his filmography and i think he was last most sort of famously associated with a spin-off of the blade runner universe called black lotus which which I'm afraid I don't know much about. So I'm not a great consumer of anime. I don't know if this has come across your desk at all or your screen.
[13:58] No, no, I'm not as well versed there as I will be before December comes. So I'm not sure how important the anime part of this is, because there could be, I mean, people could be out there saying, there's a whole history of anime films um which i need to be educated about but we've seen other animations attempts to animate lord of the rings of course but i think noticing the style of anime and looking at the sort of treatment of war you're getting something which is quite quite, well, it's not exactly comic book. It's closer to reality. The way it's.
[14:47] They're using underlying performances, voice actors and faces to sort of inform their characters. So it's not like they're completely surreal fantasy figures like in the original Lord of the Rings, the Bakshi version cartoon. I think it's got more of a closer association with a sense of real world speed of movement and human body proportions and all that kind of thing there is there is very little.
[15:23] Actually released yet about how it's going to look um but that's right the few shots i've seen that's what it suggests right and there is definitely to the anime style there is a sort of dynamism uh and a sort of kind of like heightened reality um to a certain point so So definitely because this is action, they're going to be able to use some visuals that you can't do if you're doing kind of like a hyper-realistic form. Some of the angles, some of the expressions are definitely going to be more stylized at certain points to heighten the mood and movement. So this will be really interesting. i know that's yeah one of the things that um has been mentioned is that the the story here fits one of the reasons to choose anime is because the the certain dynamic for action um sequences.
[16:23] Uh and this there will be a good deal of action here but also another reason is that the anime medium if somebody is a fan of tolkien the the kind of intersection between fans of anime uh anime fantasy and tolkien broader fantasy there's a good deal of overlap so this isn't a completely foreign medium um for um many fans of tolkien yeah and absolutely if i'm sure there are listeners out there who know far more about this than than we do so i'd be really interested when we see a bit more of the visuals, we're not yet able to really judge. Be very interested to hear what you think about it and what direction they've taken.
[17:10] And of course, we must mention the cast because the cast tells us what line they've taken through the story. So we've got Brian Cox, famous from Succession amongst other things, as Helm Hammerhand. We've got Gaia Wise as his daughter. They've given her the name Hira, which they've invented for her because she is unnamed in the Tolkien three-pager. We've got Luke Pasqualino know as wolf who is the um well we'll get into the story in a second and we've got sean dooley as freka who is wolf's father and we've got lawrence ubon williams as freyla hildeson who is the uh the airman figure in this he is the nephew who comes in at the end it is a tragedy uh potentially this nexus of characters, because lots of people die. And I've written in my notes, this feels a bit like House of the Dragon with horses, because there is a lot of inter-family ruthlessness going on. But interestingly, we also have Miranda Otto as Erwin, who isn't alive at this time, And it suggests they're giving her a narratorial role to make the connection to the Lord of the Rings backstory. You know fandom one wonders if she's going to be doing like a kind of galadriel.
[18:36] Preface type introduction it'd be interesting to see what they do with that character because if you do read the appendices you will find out that after the end of lord of the rings she is happily ever after with faramir in athelion so one can imagine her telling these stories to her own children i'd love it if we kind of had a glimpse of that just yeah yeah you actually anyway but that's on my wish list and i um yeah and i think and i think that the the kind of like oral uh narration that that fills like fits well with this culture right with this kind of this kind of like anglo-saxon culture of like oral history like your beowulf um that are kind of your oral performances and so the way that the the tolkien even writes the way that he's appendices are presented is very much in line with traditional kind of historical records where sometimes they'll be giving you a list of kings and then suddenly there's kind of a detour where they tell flesh out an entire story and then kind of go back to the rest of the less notable kings and their happenings and so the way that it's it's it's laid out in the appendices fits very well with kind of a larger kind of oral storytelling tradition and so i think this is a fun move a a way to connect it for people who are familiar with the films, it gives them a base of kind of like familiarity.
[20:03] They say, oh, I know this character. I know the sound of her voice. And that kind of provides this bridge for those people who aren't familiar with the appendices or the larger legendarium, kind of helps to ease them into it. So I think that's a brilliant move on their part.
[20:17] Okay, so what is the story? I think if they're going to do a three-act film, the standard structure, how it breaks down with those characters is as follows. So Helm is at the height of his power, this great man who is this big leader.
[20:39] He has two sons and a daughter, and a rival upstart leader called Freca who is part Rohirrim but there also seems to be a suggestion that he is part Dunlending as well. He comes to the council and he asks for Hira's hand in marriage for his son Wolf which it's suggested as if this is some sort of inappropriate ask. Helm says to him let's go outside after the meeting and sort this out and they have a, he feels insulted so he strikes a blow but causes Helm Hammerhand, he manages to kill Brekker with one blow which wasn't, I think the feeling is that he's not intending to kill him but it's like the fatal moment which then starts up the tragedy in a big way.
[21:37] So we have Wolf, the son, and Hira, who is our main POV character, according to what we've heard about this film. You presumably need to establish some kind of relationship between Hira and Wolf, whether or not this is something they actually want. Or if Hira is being herded into a marriage she doesn't want, and so on. There's lots of choices here. So that's the first act. The second act is Wolf invades four years later to get his revenge and Helm is driven into Helm's Deep and it's a terrible, terrible winter, a huge suffering across the whole of the region. He loses both of his sons. The daughter isn't mentioned in the Tolkien account.
[22:25] You could make it so that she is now the wife of Wolf, which would give us the point of view, like see it from the other side and the divided loyalties or you could mean that she you could also write a story where she offers herself as like a sort of peace you know i will go and stop him killing all our people you could make her like a sacrifice all sorts of things you could do with there so that's an unknown um but anyway helm dies standing up in the snow driven sort of mad by grief he's he goes out at night for revenge and that's quite a dramatic image of him sort of dying just standing up he won't ever lie down that's the image there and wolf is in occupation of meduseld which is the golden hall and here are not quite sure where she is but that's the kind of low point at the end of the the second act and then the third act where is where we get this new chap frila the nephew who is the airman of this story he's been um holding out up in dunharrow now dunharrow for those of you who follow rohan uh territories is the one near the entrance to the paths of the dead it's the one up on the cliff where in the film elron comes to bring the sword to Aragon in the book, in the film.
[23:50] Anyway, he makes a surprise attack on Wolf and kills him in Meduseld and re-establishes his line and brings the body of Helm, Hammerhand, to Meduseld for a funeral.
[24:04] So that's the end of the last act. Cheerful story. I'm sure you all agree.
[24:09] And there's plenty of scope to work out where Hero fits within it because we know she's tomboyish. Bit like erwin is and as the main protagonist she's presumably making some of the story happen she isn't just a passenger in it so i don't yet know quite what story levers she is pulling.
[24:32] It's also quite tragic, so I could see Hera ending up miserable or dead, but one rather hopes if she could be allowed a future, as Erwin herself is, that there could be a way out of this and some happiness for her. It would be nice if they could find a way of giving it a bit of a bittersweet ending, shall we say. Um so that's what i see them doing the material and i am prepared to be surprised but if they stick to their source material that's roughly what they're playing with they obviously don't have to do it in that order but that would be a obvious order to do it in so looking at that.
[25:18] Outline and story jacob what do you what do you think are the challenges for making us care about it as as watchers of this yeah that's good and i think the by by framing it with eowyn telling the story that kind of is a cheat for making us care about it because this is a character that we care about deeply when the with the film and so if this character is telling a story if she's framing it in a way that the story is meaningful to her and say perhaps she finds a resonance with this character of Kara, if, if she identifies with this character, and says that, or at least implies that clearly, then us as an audience, we're going to automatically be rooting for that character. So I think that's, that's, I think that's a way.
[26:11] A a sneaky but and convenient but effective way of getting us to care for at least one of the characters right from when i was reading the source material itself it's like helm just seems like like a kind of a jerk and just like rowdy boisterous anybody has some real zingers uh against uh frecka right who says like like oh you seem to have grown uh since the last time but just just in the waistline just in your belly am i right uh and so like there's a few of these different things for it and then so then it says like everybody in the court laughs so he's this kind of just like big a gregarious uh strong guy who doesn't seem to be terribly compassionate he's just kind of like life of the party uh kind of i don't know if this is a good comparison with something like thor how at least in the marvel cinematic universe how thor is just you know kind of this big uh not terribly like sophisticated thinker but just kind of like can can make people laugh and can punch really hard when you need him to. And so that's, so getting us to identify with Helm is I think a little bit difficult, but I think this is the reason why they chose Brian Cox to play this character. So in succession and in X-Men, X-Men two, when he played this military leader who has like a family who is like.
[27:34] Who is manipulating his own child uh to wipe out mutants his childhood turns out to be a mutant to wipe out audience so brian cox's play character so that's that but then in succession it's a father who's working through his children and kind of pulling strings so he has a history like on screen of being a kind of like a a patriarchal strong figure who manipulates uh his children and And so for people who like that sort of family dynamic, like you were saying, you know, like House of the Dragon, you know, so where Game of Thrones, the family, like intra-family dynamics are a draw. This is something that people who like that sort of dynamic will connect to.
[28:23] That might not be the largest popular audience that might connect with Helm. But like for those people who like that sort of character it seems like they're really leaning into that with casting brian cox and that yeah so i've called it um house the dragon with horses but it could also be succession with um old english like bell yes you could see a version of this which is like the cynical take on a king manipulating his family he could perhaps be close to his i mean this is speculation so i won't go too far down this line but you could imagine and it's like rejecting the partnership bid of an upcoming business in the case of Frecker and his side.
[29:09] So you could see it almost like in business terms. The problem for me about this is though there is this tragic.
[29:19] Almost like Greek tragedy level of drama in Tolkien's Silmarillion material and in this material, even his choice of telling the ending of Aragorn and Eowyn has this bitter quality to it. It's definitely there in Tolkien. My feeling is it's not what Tolkien lovers like about him, that actually we are drawn to his characters like Aragorn, who is a sense of a good leader we are drawn to the brave and courageous characters like erwin who will but the things in society that are keeping her back and the hobbits who are these little little men with great hearts, that's what makes us love toki not turin to rumba and and lots of stories.
[30:12] So but you could say you could say that they're taking a punt and they're saying well well, people are used to that kind of Tolkien, but maybe the new generation raised on Game of Thrones would like to see this generation.
[30:29] Version sort of succession and bear with session version of it let's give it a go because the resources are at this level i don't know i'm i won't like it if that's what they've done i know i won't and i don't think yeah that that's that's really interesting because like if then comparing to other franchises that have done something similar so like star wars has rogue one and andor so this seems to be more in those like the lines of like rogue one is a classic tragedy right it's like like i won't spoil the ending i will for anyone but like it's it's a classic dramatic tragedy um and same with it with andor it's not finished yet but definitely you see this is something that's exploring um themes of war about the complexities the ambiguities of uh of war of politics and this story and that's a lot of what tolkien does in the you know material in Silmarillion is just this, right? So the things that, some of the bright spots that people remember and love and cling to are the Beren and Luthien, right? This dramatic love story where it actually ends up well, right? So it's kind of a comedy of sorts in the classic definition of the sense.
[31:45] But most of the Silmarillion, right? It's following, it's what Tolkien describes as this in the Mouth of Galadriel, the long defeat, right? So this is that history is not meant to be at this ever-increasing progress of getting happier and brighter, that humanity and the peoples of Middle Earth also, in Tolkien's worldview, they're the same. Uh that it's kind of this this long defeat this decline with kind of uh moments of eucatastrophe right with these kind of like unexpected joyful moments and those unexpected joyful moments and the triumph of um the human elven you know elvish dwarvish uh spirit over the kind of relentless uh press of uh of evil of sorrow of sadness those those kind of upsprings as wellspringings of moments of joy and happiness and victory that that helps to punctuate and those are only possible because the rest of it is so relentless in its kind of decline and so this i think hopefully and i would i would hope that philippa boyans who seems from what she's done with the original film trilogy um seems to like really understand that and understand the world. And so I don't think this is just going to be the complete bleakness I would be surprised I would be surprised if this is just a complete bleak.
[33:12] You know the wreckage of war um and the damage and trauma that that and that's all that it focuses on without having moments of hope uh of uh of happiness of joy of unexpected joy um but it definitely on the the whole of the scale of say like the lord of the rings films that definitely had a more heroic uh bent this one i know that you know she said that she wants this to at least explore the idea of like wreckage of war and honor revenge family but as well as one of the things that she has mentioned there is that she wants to focus on resilience so that's where i think instead of like a overwhelming victory showing how people can be resilient in these complicated because the situations where clearly rohan is not just the complete unalloyed good guy who has done no wrong with what helm does he clearly does kind of oversteps everybody is at fault and so how do you navigate this landscape where there isn't a clear good a clear bad for the you know monolithic good and bad how do you navigate that when you're kind of caught in between how can you be a good human in in this sort of really complex and violent setting thing.
[34:37] Not against nuance. And I think it's very good to show the wider world who won't be reading the appendices that there is all this detail and real understanding of the cost of war and the damage of war in Tolkien and sense of damaged relationships. I mean, the majority of his stories are that. But the frame around it is a belief in love, friendship, and courage. Whereas Whereas if you think of the frame around succession, which is a great piece of TV in its own right, but it is set out with the premise that these things are either punished or don't survive or are not rewarded in this world.
[35:22] Or, you know, they are a plant in the wrong soil in the world of succession. Session so that's why i would be very sad if yeah it became too far on that way the frame is shifted with a belief that this is what the game of thrones generation want to see a sense right every everybody is equally bad yeah everyone's bad the bleak the yeah reality yeah life is we're all doomed like and we're and then you die yeah yeah so anyway we don't know but we wait to see but that's that's the kind of landscape they're working in i i think that the most interesting part of it is to lean into a the story of a woman in tolkien's world because that's the untold story um you get glimpses of it but by making the woman the central character you've got a lot unwritten because tolkien didn't he didn't work this up it wasn't there you know he could have had his own thoughts but he didn't write them down so they are able to do with this character all sorts of things that will help even out the storytelling burden in Tolkien's world of how living in how living through a war feels to primarily from the point of view of a woman.
[36:40] Fascinating yeah yeah and then where and where there are uh bright spots within that record because in if you just read what Tolkien has in this little few page section in an appendix uh is it's not, there isn't anything.
[36:58] Really cheerful about this particular story that he has made explicit right all you have is, hammerhand who is who who kills people with his hands right you don't even have the you know luxury like the distance of a blade or even of a dagger he's using his actual fists to kill people and it said in there that the belief is if he didn't if he bore no weapon no weapon would bite him is the language that's used so like if he's not going to use a sword then he can't be cut by a sword that's kind of the popular belief that kind of grows out there but this is a guy who likes to get down and dirty with his hands a cool like a cruel just let me not cruel but brutal a brutal uh fighter right so somebody who's clearly like very aggressive um and so how do you and and that's he goes out you know i'm sure but they will include there in your kind of second act that you you kind of laid out is him he goes out by himself so after his his children die so he has two not.
[38:01] All of his children right his two sons right so one of his sons dies holding like trying to hold the fort um for the kingdom um and dies kind of like holding the door and then he dies but then a younger son kind of as they're kind of stuck out in this area that becomes known as held deep uh kind of during this long winter uh that that you mentioned julia that she that that he kind of sally's out with a small group of people to try to attack the dunlendings who had kind of sieged him there at helms deep but then he doesn't come back so he's he's he dies and so he's kind of so helm is a father who is clearly it says there that he's kind of growing gaunt um and mad, by his the loss of his two sons they could play with like how does that affect.
[38:46] The daughter right the daughter's still there presumably right but he's like mourning and just like so obsessed kind of like you have with um uh with uh faramir and boromir right so two brothers but a father who clearly loves one to the neglect of the other that's a space that they could play with here how does a daughter in this world like you're mentioning julia a woman in this landscape how does she feel right we see it that kind of from boram from boromir's from from faramir's perspective with the boromir um uh feeling loved so as a child how is that dynamic there if she's not as aggressive does the father not love her or pay much attention to her because she doesn't fit that same mold that he himself is in but so so you have this father figure who then kind of is driven mad by his mourning his sons and then goes out just by himself rampaging just on solo and it says he's all dressed in white so there's a stark image of him going out into the snow dressed in white where he says he looks like you know like a snow troll uh and then he sounds his horn right he lets them know he lets the the dunlendings know that he's coming blows that horn so there's many like cinematic moments here he's blowing this horn and then he just like goes out by himself brutally you know attacks and then comes back and then it says like if he then they presume that he's looking for food while he's out there and says that the the belief arises that if if he didn't find actual food when he was out.
[40:14] Because a part of the siege, everybody in Helm's deep is hungry.
[40:16] If he couldn't find food, he's going to eat a person.
[40:20] And that's not substantiated, but that's like the, but that's the tone of like, we're getting this kind of filtered through the.
[40:27] I think in sense like the Dunlendings perspective and like their tradition that is held up or that what the people of Rohan hear from the Dunlendings and then are kind of reporting that because it's said as a belief. So anyways, there's, so there's, there's, there's, there's, it's just like, there's a lot of brutality there. But then like you were mentioning, Julia, about this unnamed character, who is also a woman, being a point of view where we can kind of see through some of these, like, by all intents and purposes, from the outside could seem just like completely and utterly hopeless. List perhaps this is our kind of hobbit type character that kind of infuse it that shows this world from a different perspective and can show us where like samwise right who kind of can see the flowers growing right the flowers growing on the statue of the king um that he had the king has a crown again right um that's not something that aragorn notices he doesn't say like oh look there's a patch of light and this is so beautiful but they take some of these other characters who who aren't in positions of power to then kind of like reframe and change where our perspective is coming from.
[41:35] I mean, if I was doing this, the journey for me would be that that character of Hira learns to seize her own power. And because of the horses, I would make it around a love of horses and nature. And perhaps, you know, you could have a sense of freedom and release if the shadow facts of the day, the miras of the day allows her to ride them.
[41:59] Because only the kings of Rohan are allowed to ride them. And it would be a great moment if she gets to ride them. I mean, I would also give her a love story that has some substance.
[42:13] And I would also make her a leader, a strong leader of her people so that she has dignity within it. So that she's as the brothers fall by the wayside and her father goes on this, mad sort of lonely journey i mean i would have her stepping into that breach um but let's see what they do let's see what they do we'll leave them we will come back once we've watched it and report um and see what what choices they've made just to sort of give you a little few tiny little facts about Rohan just to finish off.
[42:53] You will have sort of seen in the film that their iconography and their language is Old English. And for Tolkien, everything in his book was a translation. And he said he chose to give them a form of Old English because that was their relationship to the common tongue, which is current English. Um and it also explains why all the characters share the same letter helm um harmer hearer because the tradition of the anglo-saxon kingdoms was to name their families after the same letter so alfred elfled um there was a i think in mercia there was the b dynasty which you can read about in the textbook so it's a way of there is a link here with those old english civilizations.
[43:51] But the actual sort of seed of the horse lords is probably coming in from ideas of the horse lords who used to ride in from the steps into europe you know there's that connection too so there's a mingling of things going on to create the culture of the reherim and it'd be fascinating to see how this then becomes a visualized form in terms of what do they look like? What are they wearing? And do they look like Anglo-Saxon, Beowulf-type characters? Is that how it's going to look?
[44:28] But we'll wait and see. So we haven't yet decided what our subject for Wearing All the Fantasy World is the best place to be something um joseph jacob but i think that in honor of the reheren we should decide where in all the fantasy worlds is the best place to be a horse lord.
[44:49] Right i mean other than rohan because that's obviously a great yeah yeah yeah right um so where would you like to ride a horse in which fantasy world would you think that would be most fun oh um well to expand because it is fantasy and explicitly fantasy i would take uh uh uh winged horses oh okay you're breaking the book carry on yeah so is that is that is that permissible question um yeah i'm and one one of the the funnest uh horse characters uh that i appreciate is actually from uh disney's hercules the pegasus uh character um uh just the personality of the character and so how that that interacts and then you have hades drives this like dark pegasus character in a chariot so that's fun so you get to be hades uh so the world of hercules at least disney's film hercules uh you have horses that can fly uh and you have the option of a really dark underworld uh being a horse lord of dark horses uh or a really cheerful almost dog-like in personality uh course as your.
[46:10] Uh constant companion so that's where i i happen to be working with that uh property at work right now so that's kind of where my head where my where my head space is so on top of my head that's where my head is and yes well we'll go with i will go with right now the world of disney's hercules uh to be a horse lord of a.
[46:32] Pegasus so I was thinking that um one of my favorite sort of YA uh fantasy writers is a writer called Tamora Pierce so Tamora Pierce in her series about Dane who's a woman who has an affinity with animals particularly with horses and it's very detailed about the way she looks after horses it's her series which is called the Immortals so that would be a great place to have that ability it's not like telepathy with horses but there's a instinct like an animal instinct to know what other animals feel and communicate it's very well done so that's where I'd like to be a horse lord in that way not a lord over them but sort of with them with the animals so that's my pick thank you very much and we wait with bated breath for the war of the Rohirrim to arrive in cinemas. Thank you very much.
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