Frodo's appearance

dietlbomb

Member
From time to time Prof. Olsen has commented on the casting of a very young Elijah Wood as Frodo in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Re-reading the first few pages of "The Shadow of the Past", I noticed this passage for the first time:
As time went on, people began to notice that Frodo also showed signs of good 'preservation': outwardly he retained the appearance of a robust and energetic hobbit just out of his tweens. 'Some folk have all the luck,' they said; but it was not until Frodo approached the usually more sober age of fifty that they began to think it queer.​
I don't know enough about acting or directing to judge Wood's performance, but I think they might have got the actor's age right.
 
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I agree with you, I have a feeling that casting a young actor as Frodo made sense in light of that passage, and the power of the Ring over its "owner". It makes sense that he would appear, for example, a little younger than Sam. Sam has aged past his coming of age by the time the journey starts (and is still working out-of-doors), while Frodo stopped looking older at 33 (and is not a blue collar worker).

With no disrespect to Ian Holm, I often wish that we could have had a younger Bilbo in the film adaptations, too. Bilbo is supposed to look unchanged from the time he took possession of the Ring, even though he "feels" old. But Bilbo looks well over "hobbit-50" at the time of his 111st birthday.

I think part of this is due to the difficulty a movie audience might have in conceptualizing a VERY old man looking just as he did 60 years before. Still, I think this is one of the eeriest and most unnatural aspects of the Ring that can be clearly seen by the outside world. I also think it's ironic that outside observers consider this side effect to be an unreasonable amount of good fortune, while it actually becomes trying and bizarre for the "owner" over time.
 
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