Thursday, August 05, 2004

Sauron's Glorious Revolution

It seems that the use by the Lord of the Rings film trilogy of a haunting Celtic soundtrack was much too effective because it has now polluted young British minds with an amusingly bizarre version of one of the key historical events on the Islands. A poll of one thousand young people on the Big Island found the following consensus opinion:

The Battle of the Boyne was fought with elves, orcs and even a few hobbits in the ranks, a new survey suggests...About one in 10 young people in Britain confused fact with fantasy and said they thought the famous battle of 12 July [1690] was straight out of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings best-selling book and blockbusting movie trilogy.

The scene where William of Orange defeated King James II in the famous Battle of the Boyne was at Helm's Deep, not Ireland, they believed.


As the story goes on to note, this would be laughable except for the fact that the Battle really was a major event with Pan-European dimensions, and depending on one's point of view, it may have set the stage for parliamentary democracy, a coup, or repression of the Catholic minority, and it certainly affected the subsequent evolution of the United Kingdom.

But leaving that aside, let's look at the fun side of the survey; they really ought to tell us how the survey respondents related Kings William and James to the Rings characters and how the rest of Ireland related to the Rings locales. For no particular reason, we'd guess that William was Sauron, and James II would be Theoden, but after that we're stuck, not least because in the actual battle, our Sauron wins. Suggestions welcome. But in the meantime, there is surely a new marketing ploy for Irish tourism: why go to New Zealand to see the Rings sites when you can visit them all in much closer County Meath?

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