Iconic scenes/movies you dont get

[Madame Adequate]

In all the excitement about Supes I got distracted from the main thrust of this thread, which is to defend The Lord of the Rings as one of the most truly epic pieces of anything ever. In 5000AD they will say "Six thousand years ago was The Epic of Gilgamesh. Three thousand years ago was The Lord of the Rings." No I am not going to stand by and take this from Steph OR Wesley, the books are the height of the art. It isn't just the ur-example of what high fantasy should be, it is pretty close to the ur-example for all epics. The only people who have done it better are Apollonius Rhodius, Homer, et al. The sheer scope of detail, the depth of the whole thing, the impossible scale of it. I like world-building, I do it whenever I write to an obsessive, even counterproductive degree, and I cannot begin to fathom coming close to Tolkein's work. The writing itself isn't the snappiest ever put to paper, granted, but it's a very long way from bad. As far as the Shire from Mt. Doom, in fact

Also the movies are yeah the same thing but for movies. Peter Jackson made the most epic of epics ever made and if you don't consider the consecutive releases of each one to be defining events around Christmas in your youth you are just... poo.

PS: Darling, we're naming the child Þorinn Eikinskjaldi if it's a boy and Éowyn if a girl.