nolikereally:

misbehavingmaiar:

maire-annatari:

We’ve all seen films in which someone sinks or melts in lava.  But really, friends, this is a fantasy.

If you had the misfortune to fall into lava, you wouldn’t sink far.  Molten rock is denser than you.  Even logs float when they topple into floes, so you’d be like a cork in a sea of molasses.  It’s also much hotter than any living creature.  It would partially cool and congeal around a human body, just as it does around trees in its path.

Flesh bakes rather than melting.  Stay in a floe too long and you’ll turn to a cinder.  But volcanic fume inhalation might kill you before you could die from burns.  

Yes, lava is serious business.  It should never be disrespected.  But it doesn’t always mean instant death.  Two researchers have stepped into active floes and been rescued.  Both lived and retained the use of their legs.  Read more about real lava here: When Geologists Step Too Close.

On another note, I didn’t much like Peter Jackson’s decision to show the death of Gollum.  Tolkien didn’t subject us to Gollum’s last moments.  He fell and was gone.  This choice was both more chilling and more merciful, and a lot less cartoony.

^____ THIS. 

And goddamnit, the Sammath Naur was not a convenient sight-seeing walkway for ring-bearers. It was Sauron’s own road to his FORGE, and Sam and Frodo walked down it and into the shuddering mountain in the dark, probably amidst the vast, over-sized, and eerily quieted mechanisms, unlit except by the sudden and occasional streamers of lava shooting like streamers from the distant chasm that transected the path. 

I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO HAVE SEEN THE FORGE, MR. JACKSON. ;__;
I AM UNHAPPY THAT I DID NOT GET TO LOOK UPON THE ANVILS AND FURNACES OF A FALLEN MAIA. Instead I got Pride Rock inside a volcano.  Ah, what could have been.

YES OH MY GOD YES ALL OF THESE THINGS. AND WHY NOT THE FORGE. CAN YOU IMAGINE SEEING THE SURFACES SAURON’S HANDS TOUCHED AS HE WORKED HIS GREAT CRAFT AND POURED HIMSELF INTO HIS RING

small aside: I totally picture Sauron finishing his Ring and then toppling to the floor, suddenly slow and deprived of some essential part of his being, suddenly bereft of the might of his Maiar nature for a few moments, feeling the rasp and strife of air filling his lungs by slow and uncertain pressure differential; and then, weak and gasping, sick from the taste of bitter mortality filling his mouth like some brash liquor, reaching to take the golden Ring from its perch– piercing the wheel with his finger, skin meeting hot metal– and feeling all of himself again, only now flavored with molten gold, only now the faintest hair’s-breadth from his skin.

I imagine him unsettled, beginning the first stirrings of the longing that would drive him for the rest of his days; I imagine him trembling with fear and the few seconds’ knowledge of the weakness of flesh; I imagine how even the sweetness of power would never again surmount the knowledge of how easily, how simply, he could be separated from himself.