> Ditto the reforging of Anduril. I watched the director's commentary of the extended edition of Fellowship recently, and Jackson said why he changed the handling of Narsil. It seemed a pretty good reason, and it's quite simple: visually, the image of a warrior hero pulling out a broken sword would have gotten a laugh instead of being treated as the important revelation it should be. Dave has an issue with the way the handling of the sword was changed too, but for me this is just a shrug. Who cares about a sword, when the complex portrayal of characters and cultures is on the line?

The broken sword was one of the only things that really got to me in the *book*. The scene at the inn where Narsil is introduced was great, but a few minutes after reading that scene, I found I couldn't stop wondering how it all worked. Either Aragorn is wandering around in the Wild doing all his secret-protector-of-the-Shire activities with NO SWORD, or he has another one in addition to Narsil, which seems only slightly less strange and unworkable, because I did not picture these as being the kind of sword where you could easily wear or carry more than one at a time.

In the end, I came to two possible conclusions. Either Aragorn is LIEK A NINJA and is indeed going about his business unarmed, which is possible because this is a fantasy novel and Aragorn is L33T, or else Narsil is not shattered into multiple shards (as I first pictured it, and as it is portrayed in the film) but perhaps just snapped in two, and the main part can still be used if necessary.

It didn't bother me *too* much, because in this style of fantasy epic I'm generally quite happy to accept stuff as A Dramatic Heroic Situation which requires no further explanation, but even when I was nine, it was the only part of the trilogy that really niggled in my mind.

Brunnen-"Dave and I seem to spend an abnormal amount of time talking about swords, don't we?"G