one of my favorite lotr facts is that gondorians speak sindarin as a first language and yet when faramir was talking to frodo and sam about cirith ungol he was like “we don’t know what’s in there.” like faramir. cirith ungol is sindarin for “pass of the spider.” do the math
some of my favorite tags on this post
Don’t forget that Frodo also speaks Sindarin, which makes this even worse.
Faramir: Hey, don’t go up the Spider Stairs.
Frodo: Why? What’s up the Spider Stairs?
Faramir: We don’t know, Frodo. We just don’t know.
We now know why denethor thought so lowly of faramir.
To be fair, shelob was likely forgotten about by that point.
some fun facts about this: the black cat started trying to get in right at the same time that the museum was hosting an exhibition of Mitsuaki Iwago’s photography of cats, and after the photos of this started circulating, the museum started to sell merchandise based on the cat trying to get in:
David Eubank, a Special Forces soldier turned aid worker, was filmed as he ran out in the open amid ISIS sniper fire to rescue the girl as two other men covered him with rifle fire.
“I thought, ‘If I die doing this, my wife and kids would understand,’” Eubank told the Los Angeles Times.
According to the Times, Eubank’s dramatic rescue played out on a street in the Iraqi city of Mosul, where ISIS snipers were firing at civilians who were attempting to flee. Wearing only a T-shirt, a bulletproof vest, and a helmet, Eubank is seen running out into the street approximately 150 yards before picking up the girl and bringing her back safely behind a tank.
Eubank, 56, served for a decade with the US Army Special Forces. After leaving the military, he founded an aid group called the Free Burma Rangers, which seeks to bring “hope and love to people in the conflict zones of Burma, Iraq, and Sudan,” according to its website.
Tolkien gets a lot of credit for the work that he put into crafting the sounds of names (“Ungoliant” sounds evil, “Galadriel” sounds beautiful, etc.) but as far as I’m concerned, his best named character ever was Bilbo’s dad. Bungo is boring from the first syllable. Amazing.
And Belladonna sounds exactly like the name of someone who would start some shit.
Wide Spread Interests 