Interview with Figwit

How did you become a Lord of the Rings fan?
My dad told me to read the book. It’s as simple as that. From the moment I finished it, I knew I had fallen in love.

We know why Boromir is your favourite character. But what are your reasons for disliking poor Sam?
Ahum. I guess Sam is just one of those characters you instinctively don’t like, or don’t feel too much sympathy for. It’s not that I don’t understand his importance to the story, more that I don’t really *feel* anything for him.

Adding to that, the movies portray Sam as ‘the real hero’, and I have a very big problem with that. To me, it’s most important to understand that Frodo – even though he fails his task – by taking the weight of responsibility on him and at the same time showing kindness and compassion to Gollum, not only fulfils his own destiny, but also succeeds in his task. Sounds contradictory, but those who read professor Tolkien’s letters will understand how important the idea of Frodo’s failure going hand in hand with his success are to the story.

The weight of Sam’s responsibility is limited to taking care of his master. In itself, that is a noble task and Sam takes it quite seriously. But I don’t like seeing ROTK, knowing that thousands of fans all over the world look at Frodo as standing in Sam’s shadow – when it really is, at least as I understand it, the other way around. So, Sam is an important factor in Frodo’s success, but not the only one…

Why just Boromir? What in the character made you fall just for him?
That is a very difficult question. What attracts me most to him, is the fact that he is such a brave man in terms of facing his own mistakes. After he attacks Frodo (which I personally think he did more because he found he had the right to, than because the Ring drove him ‘mad’), he doesn’t run. He returns to the camp, accompanies Merry and Pippin and ultimately dies as part of the Fellowship – of which he never really was a part, because he only accepted to travel with the Fellowship on his journey home.

If you compare it to how we generally handle our own feelings of guilt, it’s really exceptional courage that Boromir shows here: we would run away from our responsibility, as Gríma does in ‘The Two Towers’. It would be the most logical thing to do: after all, Boromir seems to be responsible for the breaking of the Fellowship, he broke his own oaths and showed just how weak he can be.

Boromir taught me, however, that we humans are just that: weak. And that it’s okay, as long as you don’t hide from your own imperfections and mistakes. You don’t need to exceed yourself, just learn that being honest about it makes you a better person.

And he taught me this at a moment when I really needed to learn. For that, I am eternally grateful to him; and to the good professor.

What’s the easiest and what’s the most difficult thing in leading the Book Club discussion
The easiest thing is following the discussions, modding the forum. I love that part of the job, because I have already learned a lot from it. The most difficult thing is reading boring bits, and coming up with questions about them. For those who think that there are no boring bits: try coming up with a new and intriguing question about Hobbits walking.

But, of course, I love my job. You won’t hear me complain. And I have some great help, with atalante_star doing the Masters of Mythology and helping me out when I can’t come up with decent questions; PotbellyHairyfoot always coming up with these great quotes; and of course Nienna-of-the-Valar helping out with the Illustrations…

What is for you, as a philosophy major, the most interesting aspect of Tolkien’s writings from a philosophical point of view and how do you think he deals with it?
Gosh, you guys certainly did your homework!

Personally, I think his view on ‘evil’ is the most interesting part for me, as a philosopher; and tied in with that of course his view of what is ‘good’. He seems to consider evil from all possible viewpoints (and you can find many references throughout his works to philosophical and theological concepts like Absolute Evil (think of Morgoth), but also Kant, Leibniz, Aristotle, Horkheimer and Adorno…) but in the end, if you look really close, all his evil characters seem to have an external motive that makes their evil at least understandable.

In the end, it all comes down to fearing mortality, fearing death. Corresponding to that, his good characters all have major flaws. He doesn’t write in stereotypes at all, and that is very interesting because in an epic work like ‘The Lord of the Rings’ stereotypes make the story a lot more easy to digest. I think this depth and this honesty about what makes a human being tick, are at least in part responsible for the immense popularity of the books.

I also admire his ideas about modernity, tying in the creations of machines with concepts like ‘fall’ and ‘mortality’. He writes about concepts described by German philosophers Horkheimer and Adorno (though I don’t think he knew them) on a much more daring and at the same time accessible level than any philosopher ever could. The character of Saruman is archetypical for ‘the Enlightened Man’, and his downfall very similar to the catastrophe that was the 20th century…

Also, his take on mortality (as a cause of evil, for instance, but also as a cause for technological innovation) is very refreshing in a century that tries to remove ‘death’ out of our sight and even out of our lives – while death should play a central part in it.

What change from book to screen do you actually prefer to the original novel? And which element of PJ’s adaptation did you like the least, from a bookie’s perspective?
There are many changes I like, but if I’d have to pick one I’d say ‘Aragorn’. I prefer movie Aragorn over the book version, because he has much more development, and he’s easier to relate to. Viggo Mortensen portrayed him beautifully, and that helps, of course. And, since I’m also a big Arwen fan, I love the changes made to her character in FOTR and TTT. Not ROTK though, that was just too weird – even for me. Though on the other hand, her seeing Eldarion and confronting her father are amongst her most beautiful scenes.

As for the change I liked the least… It’s difficult to say. I think, and this is a very general comment, I know, that the Rohirrim were really butchered in TTT: Éomer banished, Théoden twisted (the ‘enchantment’ and subsequent exorcism, his grumpiness, his lack of confidence…); Éowyn melted; Elves at Helm’s Deep…ROTK made up for some of that (Bernard Hill was amazing in ROTK), but it was too little, too late.

The Rohirrim are my favourite people, because they feel so real in the books; and they are so brave and so full of life. They don’t fear death the same way other races do. They fear going down without a fight, living a bleak life. And I can relate to that. However, this didn’t come across in the movies at all.

On the other hand, I have to say that the props and clothes and music and everything to do with Rohan were amazing….

When posting, do you think a lot about your answer before or do you post spontaneously?
Both. I often print out a thread, and write my response in between correcting homework or preparing classes. I also look things up then. That’s how I write most of my replies in the Sequence by Sequence threads and in the BC – mainly because I always want to read what people before me already wrote, because I really joined this site to learn more.

But sometimes I write spontaneous replies, and they’re not necessarily shorter. That’s often in the Movie Forum.

Are you secretly in love with Figwit or why the name?
That’s a really stupid story, really. When I signed up here, my brother and I actually shared an account – because we were really only interested in the Gallery. So we picked the only name we could both live with, and that was Figwit – because we both thought it was so funny that an extra had become the centre of heated debates and adoration.

Then I discovered the Forum and I started reading the things Aulë and Gil-galad wrote, and my brother discovered the RPG – and he decided to create an account for himself, and I got stuck with Figwit. But I love my name now.

Would you call yourself a LotR expert and would you say your expertise extends to most other areas of Tolkien’s world?
No, certainly not. I love LOTR, and I would maybe say that I’ve got a few ‘fields of expertise’ (Boromir and the Dwarves, Saruman, the movies…), but I’m certainly not an expert.

If you were to become a being in ME, would you choose to be corrupted?
Mmmmm… If it were just a one day-experiment, yeah. Otherwise, no. Too much chance I’ll end up at the wrong end of some huge, shiny sword.

How likely do you think it’d be for you to survive in ME?
Very unlikely, unless I ended up in Minas Tirith or Hobbiton. I’m not one for outdoor cooking, let alone outdoor living.

If Gandalf (or any other character) were to knock on your front door, what would you do or say and why?
Eep. Scream?! Unless, of course, it were Boromir – but then my beautiful book Boromir, with his long silky black hair and his beautiful stony-grey eyes and… *sigh*. In that case, I would immediately give him a tour of the house, which would inevitably end up on the couch. Eh…