The Lord of the Rings is the most popular and one of the most recognizable fantasy stories. J.R.R. Tolkien’s book has sold over 150 million copies worldwide and has lived in hearts of so many for generations. It even inspired a massively successful film series that brought new standards for cinema and special effects.
But as much as I adore the films and indeed the books, one can’t help but think that their classification as a “children’s book” is very generous. Every time I see it in the children’s section of the library my eyebrows rise. Even the PG rating for the first movie seems a little bit relaxed. Many classic moments or elements may seem second nature to fans, but when you really boil them down, you realize how inappropriate some moments really are. So from my Door of Moria shoulder tattoo down to my thankfully hairless toes, I wish fans of both the book and the films all the best as you venture into this article.
25 This Is Just A Bad Habit To Have
Let’s start with the oliphaunt in the room! The obsession with these pipes. They play a very important role in the story of The Lord of the Rings, with a whole section of the preface even called “Concerning Pipe-weed,” explaining its history and what it means to hobbits.
At first thought, it is considered to be tobacco, particularly from a lifelong pipe-smoker like Tolkien, but at times (particularly in the films) it can look like something else.
Take, for example, the scene of Merry and Pippin waiting at Isengard. After smoking their pipe, they become giggly, relaxed and have a great desire to snack! This reaction makes the effects of their pipes comparable to something else. Another example of this is when Saruman says to Gandalf: “Your love of the Halflings leaf has clearly slowed your mind.”
24 Off With His Head!
The Fellowship of the Ring is considered to be the least risky of all three films and the only one to claim a PG rating (at least in my homeland of the UK). But the film subtly manages to sneak past one of the most graphic moments in the whole film trilogy.
Towards the end of the first movie, Aragorn is battling with the Uruk-Kai leader Lurtz after he defeats Boromir. The battle is long and pretty epic, with lots of good hits from both sides. Aragorn ultimately wins, slicing his enemy’s arm off and hitting him in the stomach. Finally, his head is knocked away. While Aragorn’s defeat of Lurtz may seem an obvious end to the fight, there is no attempt to hide the gross moment, which is pretty extreme for a PG film!
23 Poor Little Precious
Sticking with the first installment, there is another moment that seems a little too much for a PG-rated flick.
While in the book we are told the Gollum is hurt repeatedly in Mordor, we are, thankfully, spared a lot of details. The film, however, is a little more detailed. When Gandalf is explaining the history of the Ring to Frodo, we cut to Gollum at the mercy of Sauron’s men. To the film’s credit, we don’t see a lot of what’s going on. We do see Gollum’s hands convulsing in pain and his desperate pleads with his captors. The blatant depiction of this bad act is, while very heartwrenching and important to the plot, a rarity in a PG-rated film. Good luck explaining all that to your kids, because they’ll certainly have some questions!
22 What’s Your Name Again?
Names such as Merry, Pippin, and Bilbo seem sweet or whimsical, but if you really pay attention to some of the names Hobbits willingly give to their children, you’ll find that some of them are real eye-openers! Names like Proudfoot, Bullroarer, Bulger, Folco, or Dinodas bring a childish ripple to the room. And they are probably on the more innocent side of things.
In what part of the world are you really allowed to name your child Asphodel, Longo, or Grubb, and people are just fine with that? The Shire, I guess! In their defense, English isn’t a language that existed in Middle-earth, so any pronunciations and imaginations are all our doing (but I’m not going to mention the name of the servant at the Prancing Pony).
21 More Than A Pint
While one could argue that the accusations against pipes are up to interpretation, the same can’t be said of the constant drinks Hobbits seem to have.
We like to think of The Shire as somewhere where you can live a sweet and idealistic lifestyle. But all the cheering, dancing and passing out next to your pigs raises other questions. The drink is obviously a big part of Hobbit culture, with Frodo and pals spending every night prior to their quest at the Green Dragon, and their excitement at the prospect of pints. To put that in context, Hobbits are around three foot six, which is about the height of a six-year-old! (Obviously, they aren’t six-year-olds, that’s just to show how much a pint really is to someone that small.)
20 Countless Widows
While young viewers do have to witness the demise of yet another Sean Bean character when watching the film, the creators do a pretty good job of brushing over the countless other losses that occur during the adventure. While mortality is ever present in the books, it’s a lot easier to gloss over that when reading to your kids than when you watch a film. Even if very few of the main characters fall themselves, during the battle scenes we see many men get hurt, along with scenes in The Two Towers, where we look at the bodies surrounding the warriors.
What about the families of all those people? What were their names and how did they live? It’s a lot easier to sneak bad moments past when we don’t ask those questions!
19 Stop Living, Bilbo!
Speaking of minor characters, the Sackville-Bagginses are probably the most evil Hobbits in the whole of The Shire! I think I’d rather spend an afternoon with an orc than those money-grubbing jerks. These characters may be played for comedy in the films, but really they’re very wrong.
Bilbo is so afraid of them that he literally hides from them at his own birthday party. Earlier, when Gandalf is visiting, they are banging on his door, causing Bilbo to say “They’ve never forgiven me for living this long!”
I really want to know what would have happened had Bilbo let them it? Would they have ended him or literally demanded that he perish so that they can have his house? The whole thing is ridiculously creepy.
18 Living In The Shadow
As a younger child, I know all too well how frustrating it is living in the shadow of an older sibling! Boromir and Faramir’s father Denethor makes no effort to hide his favoritism, insisting that Boromir goes to Rivendale as he does not trust Faramir to do so. This relationship gets darker during the third and final installment when Denethor admits that he would rather Faramir had perished and Boromir had lived.
This gets very bleak when you try and imagine how long this had been going on for. While it’s used in the story for dramatic effect, this story is literally heartbreaking. One fan theory suggests that Faramir’s mother perished while giving birth to him, causing Denethor to resent him. If this is the truth, then Faramir has had to suffer this his entire life!
17 The Easy Life
The shock of the quest probably hit some members of the Fellowship a lot harder than others, most notably Merry and Pippin. As much as we’d love to love these cheeky little ragamuffins, if you take a good look at them you realize that they’re actually rich, lazy jerks!
It’s made clear in the book that Merry, Pippin, and Frodo are Shire nobility and don’t need to work. While Frodo holds onto some grasp of humbleness, Merry and Pippin certainly do not, getting into shenanigans knowing there will be no consequences are stealing the crops of hard working Farmer Maggot for the sheer lols of it all.
While both characters learn and grow over the course of the story, becoming more grateful what they had back home, once you notice what jerks they are at the start of the story, you can never forget it!
16 Jackson Makes Éowyn Cry All The Time
Something I’ve often said of Tolkien is that, while he does not write many female characters, the ones he did write are very inspirational. Éowyn is a very strong female character as she stands up for what she believes in and does what she feels is right, regardless of what is expected of her. As much as I adored the acting of Miranda Otto, I don’t think Jackson gave a lot of respect to this.
Not only did his films focus more on Éowyn’s affection for Aragorn than her role as a warrior, he requested that Éowyn cry in nearly every scene she was in, something that I found very insulting to the character. Otto herself mentioned on this in the audio commentary for the film, saying that she disliked how often she was asked to cry.
15 Elrond’s A+ Parenting
I’m sure we all know how difficult parents can be at times and know how annoying it is when they use guilt to get their way. But this practice, it seems, is not a modern parenting technique, being used first by an elf many thousands of years old.
During his pep talk to Arwen in the films, trying to convince her to leave Middle-Earth, Elrond gives Arwen a reality check, telling her what staying for Aragorn would mean. While Elrond may be showing the harsh reality Arwen needed to see, it’s also pretty manipulative! The whole speech reeks of the parental classic “I know what’ll make you happy more than you do,” and even ends with the classic guilt-trip, “Do I not also have your love?” Imagine still getting grief from your father at 2700 years old?
14 No RSPCA In Mordor
When so many people are being ended in a film series, it can be easy to gloss over the number of animals who are in peril in Middle-earth, particularly in Mordor.
Sauron appears to have no empathy for any living creatures, giving how his army is willing to whip, enslave, and hurt animals to get them to work or fight. I know that these are meant to be the bad guys, but the film so happily glosses over the idea of whipping beasts to open the black gate is really creepy.
The biggest example of this is probably the trolls. Far from being the sophisticated beings they are in The Hobbit, the trolls in The Lord of the Rings appear closer to animal kind than humankind. As a result, Sauron enslaves them for his army, keeps them in chains, and forces them to fight. Poor trolls!
13 Uruk-Hais Are Mistreated Mutants
This moment is so easy to gloss over in the films and the books. And good thing, too, because when you sit down to think about it, it’s very wrong! Uruk-Hai are mutant cross-breeds between the orcs (who were elves hurt to the point of becoming these creatures) and goblin men (the singing Barry Humphrey-types that live in the mountains). And Saruman’s method of getting these two to cross-breed seems to be burying them in mud and hurting them until they become an Uruk-Hai!
Saruman’s methods of mutation aren’t looked into with much detail, thank goodness. All we know is that it involves a lot of force and pain. This is shown when Lurtz rises from the mud and his first thought is to throttle the orc above him.
12 Religious Subtext
While Tolkien denied rumors that The Lord of the Rings was symbolic of World War II and that they were not written with the intent of spreading a religious message, there are many theories linking his work to religion. As a religious man himself, it would not be unreasonable to think that Tolkien saw some religious elements in his work. One rather touching theory about religion in The Lord of the Rings is that it represents people of all faiths coming together against a common evil.
The carefree Hobbits are seen as the Pagans or Wiccans, the Dwarves are representative of Judaism (with Tolkien himself saying “I think of the Dwarves as Jews”), the race of men with their questionable morals and values are the agnostics or atheists and the ethereal all-knowing, beautiful elves are representative of Christianity or Catholicism.
11 Saruman Can Control Minds
Saruman of Many Colours is perhaps that most terrifying villain in The Lord of the Rings. While he can be seen as a coward for jumping ship to Sauron, as he believes that he cannot stop him, it is also terrifying to think that a good person and leader can abandon their ideals so quickly and fully. Saruman can not only throw you against walls without even touching you or create an army of mutants, but he can literally climb inside your brain like a parasite and control you.
His control of King Theóden is perhaps one of the most terrifying moments in the story. Theóden doesn’t even seem to be aware of his possession, not knowing or showing any emotion to his own son’s passing. The thought is the stuff of nightmares!
10 Frodo (Almost) Perishes All The Time
As epic and thrilling as The Lord of the Rings really is, one can’t deny that the drama goes down significantly when your hero is constantly pulling through, particularly in the movies.
Frodo is nearly defeated by the Ringwraiths at Weathertop, saved at the last minute by Elrond. Then in Moria, he is grabbed by a squid and stabbed by a troll, only to be fine both times. In the second film he falls down a cliff, only to land safely at the bottom and falls face first into the ghost-filled marshes, then immediately pulled out injury free. So by the time Sam finds him paralyzed in Shelob’s cave, everyone is pretty confident that Frodo will be fine! I don’t think anyone thought Frodo had actually fallen off the cliff into the lava.
9 Small Moments
One of the most frustrating things about discussing the films with someone who hasn’t read the books is that there are very small moments that explain major plot-holes or questions. With just a few lines of text from the book, so many film moments would make a lot more sense. For example, the infamous “Why didn’t the eagles take them there?” argument. In The Hobbit it is explained that eagles are selfish creatures who don’t want to help others and are scared of men, only helping Gandalf because he once saved their king.
Another question I’ve been asked is “Why did the watcher grab Frodo first?” Well, in the book, Pippin asks this question himself. Gandalf explains that evil creatures are drawn to the ring. Sure, many these excuses don’t seem the best to you, but they at least answer those questions.
8 Frodo Steals The Spotlight
One can’t really blame the film-makers for wanting to put more of a limelight on their main character, but the amount of noble moments Frodo steals from his Hobbit friends, particularly Sam, seems pretty insulting at times. While maybe a minor moment to some, a pet peeve of mine is when Sam doesn’t get to look into the mirror of Galadriel, in order to give Frodo some private time with the Queen.
Another moment that Frodo took, was at the Door of Moria where Frodo solves the riddle that had taken Gandalf hours, allowing them to enter the mines. However, in the book, it is Merry who solves the riddle! Actor Dominic Monaghan discussed this in the audio commentary for the film, saying that when he asked about this was told: “we want more of Elijah and less of you.”
7 Legolas Vs. Gimli
Legolas and Gimli are my all time favorite characters in the fandom. Despite their rocky start, due to the long feud between their races, they soon realize that they are simply meant to be together and by The Two Towers have become inseparable.
A memorable part of their relationship is their competition where they count their defeated enemies, the higher number being the victor. But this concept is more than a little grim. While Legolas and Gimli are probably the most hardened warriors of the Fellowship, with the exception of Gandalf, turned the amount of living things that you’ve defeated into a game is really disturbing, even if their enemies are “the bad guys.” As cute as I find Legolas and Gimli, when I remember this about them, I find them terrifying.
6 The Strange Game
While Legolas and Gimli’s special game is very weird, the moment from the drinking game scene really makes me cringe. During a deleted scene in The Return of the King, Legolas and Gimli challenge each other to a drinking game, overseen by Éomer. A little while in Gimli gets absolutely out of it, while Legolas stays relatively okay, causing Gimli to pass out. (Legolas would never say “game over,” that bit was just silly!) However, while in his cups, Gimli says this cringe-worthy line “It’s the dwarves that go swimming with the little hairy women.”
While the last film was rated 12 and certainly wasn’t suitable for children, I don’t think this line was suitable for people of any ages. My adult ears feel vulnerable after hearing it!
