I suppose it should go on record that my wife and I walked out of Peter Jackson's The Two Towers. We walked out at about two hours twenty minutes, by mutual consent. In our opinion, too much violence had been done to the story at that point for it to be possibly redeemed. As my wife puts it: "When my only reaction to every scene was to scoff, it was time to leave."
BUT. Here's a long post (some spoilers!) by a Tolkien fanboy which is all about how wonderful the movies are (hat tip: Lileks) And this guy is serious -- and a serious fanboy, too. He speaks Elvish -- at least one flavor. He can write runes. He memorized the pseudohistory of Numenor (the other mythical western island).
And he is totally wrong about Peter Jackson's movies. They are a travesty of Tolkien's vision.
Perhaps Jackson is successful in pleasing the "seriously hard-core fans". Perhaps there is a certain kind of "incurable Tolkien purist" who is satisfied when the backdrop of a film is sufficiently near to his imaginings. But the movies fail to capture the essential moral character of Tolkien's story -- which is a Christian story set in a pre-Christian world -- and therfore are nothing more than well-funded action flicks with a Tolkienesque setting.
If you understand why The Scouring of the Shire is the most essential subplot of the trilogy then I believe you will understand what I mean. (It's hardly a subplot, actually; it would be more fair to call it the main plot.)
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to go off on my analysis of Lord of the Rings right now because the baby is waking up. I will try to come back to this later. For the moment, think about Faramir.
I saw a strange news story linked at LGF about Sharia in Canada. WorldNetDaily writes:
Canadian judges soon will be enforcing Islamic law, or Sharia, in disputes between Muslims, possibly paving the way to one day administering criminal sentences, such as stoning women caught in adultery.
Pretty impressive, eh? Except that the Law Times article from which the WND article seems to be sourced is much less scary:
Syed explained that until recent changes in the law, Canadian Muslims have been excused from applying Shariah in their legal disputes.
Arbitration was not deemed to be practical because there was no way to enforce the decisions. Syed said the laws have recently changed with amendments to the Arbitration Act.
"Now, once an arbitrator decides cases, it is final and binding. The parties can go to the local secular Canadian court asking that it be enforced. The court has no discretion in the matter.
"So, the concession given by Shariah is no longer available to us because the impracticality has been removed. In settling civil disputes, there is no choice indeed but to have an arbitration board."
The article is confusing because the same language is used to describe religious obligations as legal obligations; and in fact the issue is precisely about the difference between those obligations. I think I can summarize it like this: according to a particular interpretation of Islam, a Muslim living in a Muslim country is obliged to follow Sharia, but a Muslim in a non-Muslim country is only obliged to follow Sharia as closely as possible. So far so good.
In Canada, before recent changes to federal contract law, it was not possible to have truly binding arbitration. Therefore there was no means by which Muslims could use Sharia to resolve their disputes: if a Sharia arbitrator was asked to decide a case, the losing party was under no obligation to accept the decision.
Now, with the introduction of binding arbitration where the courts enforce the arbitrator's decision, it is possible for a civil dispute between Muslims to be resolved under Sharia: the two parties sign a binding arbitration agreement to take the matter to the Sharia arbitrator (not truly a court -- just an arbitrator), the arbitrator decides the case, and then the decision can be enforced (if necessary) by the normal police power of the state, including seizing property, garnishing wages, etc.
So under the interpration of Islam that obliges Muslims to live under Sharia as much as possible, since it is now possible for Muslims in Canada to settle civil disputes with other Muslims under Sharia, they must now do so.
Note that there is no legal recognition of Sharia by Canadian courts; this whole thing (including the overwrought lead-in about stoning) is merely a result of the new existence of binding arbitration as an option in Canada. Similarly there is no reason that you couldn't choose to have your case resolved in the Court of Rock-Paper-Scissors, if such a thing existed and both parties agreed. It looks like WorldNetDaily is deliberately scaremongering.
(Predictably, Eugene Volokh is all over this, in fewer words and more sense.)
The important question is: is there a reasonable argument for a slippery slope from optional Sharia for civil cases between Muslims to mandatory Sharia in criminal cases? This is the question that WND ducks; they just assume the slippery slope and slide right to the end.
It's hard to construct such an argument. I will think about for a while and see what I come up with. Here's what I have so far: it describes how non-Muslims could find themselves in Sharia court:
Starting with Sharia via binding arbitration between Muslims, we can easily extend to Sharia via binding arbitration between a Muslim and a non-Muslim in those cases where the Muslim gets to dictate the contract. It's common for a contract to be dictated by the more powerful party in some circumstances: a e.g., by the landlord in a tenancy agreement, by the vendor for a software license -- in such a circumstance if the vendor or landlord so chose, they could include a binding arbitration clause referring to the Sharia court. The odds are good that the consumer would not notice until actually pursuing a claim, which would then be conducted in the Sharia court. So non-Muslims can find themselves in the Sharia court merely as a result of buying certain services or products from Muslims.