[Fingolas]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR>It has NOTHING to do with "tossing" in the British sense of the word. John Ryes-Davies is old enough to remember when when this bar game was popular, and probably thought it was a funny "in-joke" - which it is, if you remember the 80s! <HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>Hey Birdland,<BR> <BR>I’ve really wondered about this. I cringed when I heard this line in the movie. Not because of any politically correct concerns, (dwarf tossing in the 80’s), but because of the placement or timing of the line.<BR> The way that Tolkien structured this scene in the book, and the way that PJ directed the scene in the movie followed a well known formula. First you slowly build the tension. Remember, nothing happens in Moria for a while, but you can feel it coming. Build the tension…Gimli distraught at Balins tomb. Add more tension… orcs attack with cave troll. Add even more…Frodo injured, run for your lives. You get the picture. Keep building the tension in the reader/audience until the big climactic scene, Gandalf and the Balrog plunging into the abyss. Then you have to provide a release for the reader/audience. In the movie this comes when they emerge from Moria into daylight and weep at their loss. A release of tension for them and the audience. The point is…if you put a crack like “Nobody tosses a Dwarf” into the middle of this scene, you run the risk of breaking the spell so to speak. You could lose that tension that you’ve been building. Especially if you use a line that has more to do with the 20th century than Middle earth.<BR> At first I thought that this had to have been a mistake. That this line wasn’t supposed to be funny, and PJ didn’t realize that the audience would take it that way. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that this was wrong. <BR> With PJ being from New Zealand, and Davies being from Britain, there is no way they wouldn’t know the connotation of “Tossing”. So I assumed that it had nothing to do with dwarf tossing as we Yanks know it, and everything to do with British slang.<BR> <P>Did you read or hear an interview with Davies where he talked about this?? <BR>How do you know that it has nothing to do with British slang usage?<BR>Just curious.