That line isn't in the book, if I remember correctly. The closest thing to it is a short snippet in UNFISIHED TALES (the essay "The Hunt For The Ring", part iii), where Gandalf and Saruman argue at a meeting of the White Council (a hundred years or so before THE HOBBIT). Saruman is trying to dissuade the Council from okaying Gandalf's plan to attack Dol Guldur (which he suspects to be Sauron's summer home). Gandalf smokes his pipe, which annoys Saruman. He rips in to Gandalf: "When weighty matters are in debate, Mithrandir, I wonder little that you should play with your toys of fire and smoke, while others are in earnest speech."

Gandalf came back: "You should not wonder, if you used the herb yourself. You might find that the smoke blown out clears the mind of shadows within. Anyway, it gives patience, to listen to error without anger. But it is not one of my toys. It is an art of the Little People away in the West; merry and worthy folk, though not of much account, perhaps, in your high policies."

Saruman gives Gandalf a ration of cold disdain. Gandalf blows a bunch of smoke rings at him, but when Saruman tries to grasp them, they dissipate in his grasp. (Get it? GET IT??)

I think that pipeweed is just tobacco (would a fusty Oxford prof know about marijuana and cite it approvingly in the early 1950s?)

Although it would explain why Hobbits were always so hungry...

OK, "Google" comes up with some Prof. DeLong citations. Source of quote, movie or book? My guess is movie - the extended version, with the extra thirty minutes of scenes, is great. Hoever, I am on 20th century VHS, and can't find the scene.

As to the notion that Gandalf is one toke over the line, that would explain this passage from "Return of the King", Fields of Cormallen:

"In the meantime, you can try Gandalf", [said Pippen]. "He's not so close as he used to be, though he laughs now more than he talks."

Although at the end of the chapter titled "Homeward Bound", we get a suggestion from Gandalf that he has reformed:

"I have been a stone doomed to rolling, but my rolling days are ended."

Obviously, a typesetting error misspelled "stoner". But why was he rolling? Must have lost his pipe battling the Balrog.

OK, movie it is. Scroll down to the bottom.

In which case, this is a Hollywood touch, not JRR Tolkien. Hollywood altering a classic to promote drug use? Now I am scandalized.

Or maybe it is a subtle "thank you for not smoking" warning. Tobacco - addictive, can cause high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, and draw the wrath of wizards.

The rest of the comments on "improving the book" are quite good. I especially loved Arwen's enhanced role, and some of the plot holes needed closing.

However I hated, not disliked, but *hated* the "Let's hunt some orcs!" Save it for Arnold.

I actually find it refreshing that Tolkien is so honest about the cognitive and psychosomatic effects of nicotine. Here in the US, for most of my life, people basically denied that it had any, as a way of not confronting the issue. It's only recently, now that smoking has become such socially unacceptable, that people speak openly of needing a smoke, and knowingly of their own cravings and desired effects.

Footnote to this vital discussion: Tolkien says flat-out in the introduction to "Lord of the Rings" -- before the story even gets going, goddamnit -- that pipeweed is "probably a variety of Nicotiana". (By the way, Middle-Earth, at the time of the story, contains both Nicotiana and potatoes, and the original version of "The Hobbit" mentions tomatoes -- all exports from the New World. Maybe the Undying Lands are really the Americas? This sort of speculation is very interesting if you have absolutely nothing else to do with your time.)

And although I'm still amazed that Peter Jackson managed to make an even halfway satisfactory movie out of a book that I would have sworn was utterly unfilmable, I'm still scandalized that he portrayed Lothlorien as dark and gloomy, Galadriel as cold and standoffish, and Elrond as downright nasty-tempered (especially toward Men). This is just part of the movie's really big flaw: it totally removes all the book's haunting undertone about the connection between Middle-Earth and the supernatural beauty of the immortal lands of the West (as conveyed mostly through the Elves), and its mourning about the ultimate (and necessary) loss of that beauty. And that's the most important aesthetic element in the whole damn book! Maybe the remaining two parts (or the extended version of the "Fellowship" movie, which I haven't yet seen) will correct this, but I doubt it.

Bruce:

The extended version does correct this. The Lothlorien section is greatly extended, with more bright sunny scenes and Galadriel displaying warmth, joy and charm. Also, Frodo and Sam witness a company of elves passing through the Shire on their way to the Grey Havens, and discuss the fact that the Elves are leaving Middle Earth and sailing to the West.

Bruce is right--pipeweed is pretty clearly tobacco, acccording to the passage he cites. But Tom is perhaps unfair to criticize, "Let's hunt orcs." Maybe that's not quite as elegent as the equivalent passage in the book, "We will make such a chase as will be accounted a marvel among the thriee kindred . . ." But only a few pages later, Aragorn introduces himself to Eomer, "I am called Strider. I am come out of the north. I am hunting orcs."

Re: "Let's hunt some orcs".

Perhaps my reaction was just one of the burdens of parenthood. If you have seen "Mulan" a hundred times, then Eddie Murphy's character leading a charge into battle by saying "Let's kick some Hunny-buns" does not bear a reprise.

"one of the burdens of parenthood"

Watching these thisgs with your little one is one of the joys of paretnhood, too. I was amazed to have our 3-year-old lectrue me on the differences between the troll in Harry Potter I and the troll in LOTR ;)

I've read that Tolkien was never comfortable with the stoner culture that adopted him 15 years or so after he published LOTR.

As for "hunt some Orcs" -- its certainly not as bad as "they sang as they slew" which is how Tolkien describes the men of Rohan in battle before the gates of Gondor.

"They sang as they slew" is perfectly Anglo-Saxon, thank you very much. "For the joy of their battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City."

Maybe "pipeweed" has the same analog to Real Life (tm) as does "hobbit". In other words, LotR is fiction and Tolkien can do whatever he wants within the construct of a well-told tale.

Though the streaming video over the Palantir is kinda neat, it doesn't have much bandwith, and the screen saver is stuck.

I thought I had read somewhere that
Tolkein specifically had tobacco in
mind, but that when he realized that
tobacco came from the New World, while
he wanted Middle Earth to be in the
past of the Old World, that he changed
the name to "pipeweed."

Re pipeweed and orc-slewing ... can we look forward to a cinematic episode where one of our heroes declares "Let's roll!"?

The movie downplays some of Tolkien's old fashioned Tory attitudes--the books emphasize the class-stratified nature of hobbit society, with Sam being a memeber of the servant class, in contrast to the other three. So with that and with Arwen-the-warrior, Ron, the movie is much more contemoraneously "politically correct" than the books.

It's also interesting that Tolkien doesn't seem to attract the same sort of anti-wichcraft fundamentalist denunciation that Harry Potter does. Is this maybe due to Tolkien's close association with C. S. Lewis (who read LOTR in manuscript and borrowed some of it for his own books)?

Ah! So the extended version DOES include the talk between Frodo and Gildor Inglorion? They could have left that and the additional Lothlorien scenes in the original version and taken out some of those over-extended fight scenes, in which Our Heroes repeatedly and unrealistically defeat forces 100 times their size (a mistake Tolkien himself didn't make).

The movie also has some lesser flaws -- notably the failure to develop (at least yet) the character of Frodo's hobbit companions, and a few plot holes of its own (how did Gandalf learn in the movie that Gollum had been captured by Sauron and squealed the location of the Ring to him?) But I'll admit that it does a better job than the book in some ways -- such as the depiction of the Ring's sinister lure to absolutely everyone (making it clearer why all the more powerful good guys are terrified to touch the thing and so leave it to Frodo), and the improvements in the characters of Saruman and Aragorn. (Ursula LeGuin, who is a wild fan of Tolkien, nevertheless in a 1974 essay homed in on some of the book's flaws -- such as the fact that Aragorn, at least in the last two volumes, is a stuffed shirt, and that Sam "calls Frodo 'master' until one begins to harbor mad visions of founding a Hobbit Socialist Party.") When all is said and done, I'm still looking forward to the other two movies -- particularly their extended versions.

Tobacco is as "English" as potatoes, in the sense that both were taken into popular culture and regularly grown there. Tobacco was quite competitive as a crop in Gloucestershire, until mercantilist policies gave the American colonies an advantage (those didn't simply remove advantages from the colonials). The advantage remained under free trade, possibly because shipping costs had dropped by then.

Anyhow, part of the background of Middle Earth is the way it reflects the diversity of England - which is far more broken up by counties than Americans might realise. "Pipeweed" may well be foreign to the Baggins' corner of the Shire, yet grown in other quite similar places that they had regular contact with, an analogue of Gloucestershire in that the climate was a bit milder. And, of course, Tolkien modelled the Shire and nearby parts on the way the parts of the West Midlands varied.

I may just live in front of my television this weekend, I am so in love with the extended version. Anyway, an interesting plot twist got left on the cutting room floor, and restored to the extended version.

Remember how Pippin and Merry get enchanted swords when Tom Bombadil saves them from the barrow-wight? With that scene written out, how were they to later kill the Black King?

Well, Galadriel givs them enchanted daggers in Lothlorien. Just the ticket! However, that subtlety got dropped in the movie, as did the rope for Sam, and the light of Galadriel. I have a strong suspicion that those scenes make it into the opening intro of "The Two Towers".

And Ron K, you're killing me. Dave, too.

"Enchanted daggers", eh? Well, that makes her a lot more generous than in the book, when Merry and Pippin visited Lothlorien and all they got were those lousy belts. Actually, when you get right down to it, Galadriel was an appalling tightwad. What would YOU think of someone whose idea of a Bon Voyage present when you were setting out on a dangerous, world-saving expedition was three strands of hair, or a box of dirt with a seed in it? The least she could have done was give each of them an enchanted Elvish Uzi (with mithril bullets).

>Remember how Pippin and Merry get enchanted swords when Tom Bombadil saves them from the barrow-wight? With that scene written out, how were they to later kill the Black King?

If you're referring to the Witch-King of Angmar, he can only be harmed by weapons of Elven craft. They don't need to be specially "enchanted". The fact that it's made by the Elves is enough. They use different materials for the weapon, and the construction process is different. Even the rings of power aren't said to be "enchanted". They were just "made" with the knowledge of ring-craft. Celebrimbor wasn't an "enchanter"; he was a ringsmith.

Also, Merry and Pippen both DON'T kill the Witch-King. They're in completely different places at the battle of the Pelennor fields, so I don't know what you're talking about.

As you must know by now, Sam still has his Elven rope, and Frodo still has his light of Earendil.

>Well, Galadriel givs them enchanted daggers in Lothlorien. Just the ticket! However, that subtlety got dropped in the movie, as did the rope for Sam, and the light of Galadriel. I have a strong suspicion that those scenes make it into the opening intro of "The Two Towers".

Clearly, they didn't.

From further above:

>(how did Gandalf learn in the movie that Gollum had been captured by Sauron and squealed the location of the Ring to him?)

Logical deduction and the fact that Gandalf was wearing one of the rings of power. He would have known the very instant the Eye's attention shifted.

And now I'm done apologizing for Peter Jackson. Despite the excellent scenery, effects, cinematography, acting, etc... Jackson took more "liberties" with the story than I care for. I can appreciate having to alter small elements to give each movie a climax, but many of the alterations did nothing to that end. The moves deserve many awards, but if there were one for "staying true to Tolkien's vision" they would certainly not get that.