More thoughts on perspectives.

The exercise we did on Tuesday got me thinking about the perspectives in LoTR and to a lesser extent The Hobbit.

It is something that you don't really think about but that is so absolutely crucial to our understanding of the story.

There are scenes where it is crucial to be in the perspective of the important characters, to know what they know, and there are other scenes where we must be in the perspective of one of the side characters to see it from the proper perspective of awe at something awesome.

This is something that Tolkien juggles so perfectly that when reading the books I barely thought about it, but looking back so many things would be different if a few of these choices had been changed. What would the journey through Mordor have looked like if we only saw it through Frodo's eyes? Only Sam's? if we had not had pieces of Gollum's perspective? Even if the facts had been the same it would have been a totally different story.

In many stories I find the way that the author jumps back and forth between multiple groups separate in space and often time to be grating, when they cut away just as something important is happening, especially when they go to characters I care less about. However Tolkien handles this almost seamlessly, and with a great sense of the unification of the purposes of all the characters, even if their situations are different.

TL; DR: this whole post is me ranting about how the more I think about it, the more I am in awe of J.R.R. Tolkien's writing skills.