My Working Thesis Won't Work

Dwarves at the Council of Elrond in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, I've got a working thesis for my research project, but I don't think it will work in the long run, since it seems kind of obvious to me.   I need to come up with something that more people will disagree with.  For now, I'm going with "Each of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring is a hero in his own right and on his own hero's journey."  This doesn't really take the archetypes into consideration, and that's what I'm most interested in, which is why I'm not happy with it. 

Just now I thought, or remembered, that I'm confined to the first film (which I have sort of been ignoring), and I'm wondering if you can really tell from FOTR alone that each one is a hero.  I mean, it's obvious once the entire trilogy is over, but at the end of the first film, Frodo and Sam have gone off on their own, Boromir and Gandalf (supposedly) are dead and the rest are split, with Merry and Pippin captured by orcs and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli trailing them.

And, I just thought of something else that deserves its own post, so that's all for now.

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Elrond's Council and the Heroes

The eponymous Fellowship from left to right: (Top row) Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Boromir, (bottom row) Sam, Frodo, Merry, Pippin, Gimli. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This week, I'm supposed to be answering the question, "What have you found in a scene (using the model)?"  The scene that made me choose The Fellowship of the Ring for my research project is the council scene at Rivendell where representatives of the various groups of Middle Earthers (there has to be a better way of putting that!) are trying to decide what to do about the ring.  What I thought from the beginning is that all of the men arriving for the meeting look like heroes.  The way that they each have their own moment onscreen seems to be saying, "pay attention!  This guy is important."  And the rest of the scene bears that out.  Each of them is on his own quest, with his own priorities and agenda, which leads me to what I think is the biggest discovery I made:  they all volunteer for those reasons, not because of the reason Elrond and Gandalf see as overwhelming, that the ring must be destroyed.

And just now, writing this, it occurs to me that their individual reasons (I'm just guessing at this point) determine the outcomes each of them will experience.  Does that make sense?  We'll see. 

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