Let Us Hunt Some Orc

When Frodo flees for Mordor, Boromir dies, Merry and Pippin are captured and those who remain behind have lost the purpose of the Fellowship (to defend the carrier of the One Ring), there remains practically no hope.

Their number of 9, matching, body-for-body, their opposites, the Ring-Wraiths, has disintegrated with shocking acceleration:

Gandalf to the Balrog
Boromir to the arrows
Merry and Pippen to the orcs
Frodo and Sam to the mission

Leaving 3: Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas, an exile, a mourner, and an alien. A large group was decimated, its purpose thwarted, its new mission unclear.

They had options: return to Rivendell and regroup, seeking revised orders from authority, disband, or focus on the next possible objective: to rescue the captives from an army.

In the real world, group decay results in full dissolution 9 times out 10.

What about that 10th time? What are the dynamics that separate a renewed sense of purpose, an enriched belief in success against even greater odds?

A seed grows that causes a man to stand up after a hurricane of violence and a crisis of identity and say, "Let us hunt some orc."

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race that is marked out for us.

Giants: Easier to Believe than the Alternative

These humans have an enormous physical range.

Robert Wadlow stood 8'11" and 490 pounds. He died from a foot infection when he was 22, and, I believe, still growing. Gul Mohammed stood about 1'10" and less than 40 pounds.

The sepulchre of Antaeus, the giant king of North Africa, is a megalith five meters high. When the ancient Romans excavated his burial mound, they indeed found giant bones, to their shock.

Of course, we can take comfort in the fact that our enlightened modern archaeologists casually point out that many elephant fossils can be found in the area.

Because, you know, those stupid ancients couldn't tell the difference between a human skeleton and that of an elephant.

Sure, the most logical explanation is that the ancient Berbers came across some common elephant bones and said to their people, "Oh, yeah, remember that one super-revered giant king of ours that we had so long ago? We, uh, found his skeleton at the, uh, quarry where all those dead elephants are. What say we bury him in a new tomb?"

Yeah, I'm sure there wasn't some goatherd in the crowd who piped up: "Uh, guys. Why did our long-lost dead king have tusks?"

Doesn't it make more sense that King Anteus was a really big guy who died and was buried by his people who revered him, and whose bones were later uncovered by the Romans? Why must we insist that a people who certainly would have known what elephant bones were somehow convinced that it wasn't blasphemous at all to pretend that a dead animal was their legendary king? Oh. That's right. Because ancients are stupid and we are more smarter.

Ah, this modern age. Where the least likely explanation now passes for the simplest.