A Hopeless Errand in a Long Defeat

Loren Rosson has a great post, called Tolkien vs. Jackson: One Man's Hopelessness, Another Man's Hope, at "The Busybody." He uses Jackson's film adaptation to highlight a major difference between it and the book: Jackson's masterpiece is about hope, but Tolkien's masterpiece is about hopelessness -- not an absolute hopelessness, since hope does occasionally pop up, but certainly a general hopelessness. Tolkien's characters are fighting a battle they all know they will lose; they are on quests that they intend, at most, to buy time in the face of inevitable defeat. They make it through not on the basis of hope but on the basis of cheer and courage in the face of an apparently irresistible doom.