The Silmarillion

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Originally Posted by BitVyper

To be fair, he's probably about the equal of Manwe, but Manwe is friends with a dozen or so other guys who are almost as powerful as him. Melkor did pretty good all things considered, but yeah, Sauron's the scarier villain. It's just that he got to play the game on a lower difficulty setting.

I think it states somewhere that he's more powerful than any one Valar, but he still cowers away in his fortress whenever Orome came wandering into Middle Earth. I can uderstand him getting his arse kicked repeatedly when they all gang up on him though.

[BitVyper]

I think overall he's more powerful, but a lot of them seem to be better at their specialties. And to be fair, he did kick the Valar's asses off Middle Earth for a long time. It also seemed like a lot of the stuff he did really took it out of him - obviously Ungoliant did, but that was later. I think he was spreading his own power kind of thin, which was fine when he had all his defenses in place, but as soon as he had to deal with the Valar personally, it wasn't so great.

Manwe was stated somewhere to at least be really really close to him if not his equal.

[RickZarber]

Yeah, Tolkien stated explicitly somewhere or other that the more power he spread out in conquering and controlling, the less power he retained in his physical form. Enough that he could actually be hurt by mortals. Thus the hiding. To be fair, he caused far more death and destruction through the sheer vastness of his forces that Sauron ever did.

Sauron didn't make the same mistake; he poured all of his power into a piece of bling. :P

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Yeah later on his power dropped as he spread out, I read that much last night. But to begin with he was more powerful than the others, though they had numbers on their side.

[Magus]

Main thing I remember from this is the one guy who fights Morgoth manages to wound him but then spends like a century hanging by one arm from a manacle at the pinnacle of Angband (or one of those fortresses), though Tolkein foreshadows the Gandalf rescue from Isengard by having someone come save him on an eagle (I think. It's been a while since I read this so I'm probably blurring stuff together). In any case, giving Morgoth a limp isn't that great a payoff for a century of torture, but that's just me.

The Silmarillion would make a great series of films but obviously it can't be done in one. Not even a trilogy, I don't think. It'd have to be an epic seven movie Harry Potter bid. But I'd totally watch all seven of those movies.

HBO could maybe pull off a long-running series but you know the special effects wouldn't look good enough.

[BitVyper]

Sauron didn't make the same mistake; he poured all of his power into a piece of bling. :P

That was more due to lack of choice than anything. He didn't have power to spread out like Melkor had, so in order for The One Ring to do what he wanted it to, he had to be pretty much directly connected with it.

Oddly enough, his biggest victory of all, fucking over the Numenoreans, had nothing to do with the rings. Funny how Sauron is the one who managed to piss off Eru so much that he changed the shape of the world so that no one could get to Valinor.

[The Sevenshot Kid]

I would love to see a Children of Hurin mini-series on HBO. That would be straight up awesome.

[BitVyper]

Turin gets his own show. It's called "That's Our Turin" and every episode is Turin screwing up royally and then changing his name to run away from his past while someone goes "that's our Turin!"

It's not even stories from The Silmarillion after awhile. Like one time he has to get an apartment in New York City, but he thinks the landlady is an orc, so he brutally murders her. Then he runs away and meets a beautiful woman, so they get married and then it turns out that she's the ex-landlady's daughter. Hilarity ensues.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

I would herby like to nominate Beren as the "Man with the Largest, Most Shiny, Most Brass Coloured Balls in all the World". Seriously, dude has balls so huge that all other men would stand back in surprise and go "Whoa, those are some massve balls yo!"

Only survivor of a group of a dozen Men who steadfastly refused to give up even though they were surrounded and pursued by Melkors legions, he then wanders for 4 frikken' years in the wild under constant pursuit until Sauron himself made it a personal mission to drive him off (cos he sure as hell couldn't kill him!). He then is the only Man, Elf, Dwarve or anything else that ever found a path through the giant spider infested lands known as "The Mountains of Terror", before wandering straight through the supposedly impassable magical barrier created my a damn Maiar, gets caught by the King, demands the hand of his daughter, saying that he wants nothing else, be it jewels or land or iron, to which the King replies, "Well shit dawg, if land and mountains and an armies worth of weapons mean nothing to you, then go bypass all of those things and bring me a Silmaril from the crown of The Dark Lord of all the Earth, who sits on a thrown in the deepest pits beneath the Earth surrounded by pure evil with only a few dozen thousand Orcs, Wolves, Vampires, Dragons and Balrogs between you and him."

To which Beren replies, "Kay", and goes off to do just that. Of course he kepts captured, by Sauron no less, but after he's rescued he gets to spend time with his woman, and could easily just run off with her but then thinks to himself, "Naw, actually, I'm gona head back north and try and break into the Impregnable Fortress of the Dark Enemy again, cos shit, nothin' better to do!"

Seriously, that's pretty hardcore.

[BitVyper]

The crazy part is that he succeeds. Huan is my favourite character from that story though.