Tolkien wrote the essential story - for our time: An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people of the world allow themselves to be influenced by it; they embrace despair and abandon goodness and all resistance; or they are corrupted and even help the enemy. The primary actor is a wise old man who travels around, not using great powers, but waking them up, reminding them of who they are and their strength rousing them to action (the scene with Theoden is a great example).
How could Tolkien, in the 1940s and 1950s, write a book for the post-2016 era? Remember what he saw as he wrote it: An evil force that heavily used propaganda to spread their horrible ideas, and masses of people not only in Germany or Italy, but the rest of Europe and the US, refusing to acknowledge or oppose the reality of the evil, the grim future; and many even supporting it.
Tolkien arguably turned it into a myth for future generations, like the real-life Trojan War was turned (eventually) into the Iliad and Odyssey.
>An evil force that heavily used propaganda to spread their horrible ideas, and masses of people not only in Germany or Italy, but the rest of Europe and the US, refusing to acknowledge or oppose the reality of the evil, the grim future; and many even supporting it.
Yeah, not much has changed in that regard. Though we likely have very different ideas of what that evil is nowadays.
> we likely have very different ideas of what that evil is nowadays
Because you don't know that, I see a comment that attempts to disrupt good people from doing anything, promoting despair. Quoting my GP comment:
>> An evil force works not by open destruction, but through lies to cause despair and corruption. The good people of the world allow themselves to be influenced by it; they embrace despair and abandon goodness and all resistance; or they are corrupted and even help the enemy.
Well...I've read some intellectual biographies of Tolkien, and a common complaint is that it's hard to pin down his views on much of anything outside of literature. He wasn't a systematic thinker, but tended to write what sounded good at the moment without much regard for consistency with what had been written before. He had to do a lot of later editing to remove logical conflicts in his stories. Remember that the impetus for his fiction was to create a world in which his created languages could live. So, positing a coherent ideological message in his story is a bit of a stretch. Also, Tolkien's wasn't one to focus much on real world social and political issues. I think the most notable example of him writing about politics is in a wartime letter to his son, when Nazi antics forced politics into his normally narrow interests.
All that said, no good postmodernist would object to modern readers finding meanings in literature that weren't consciously in the author's mind.
> He wasn't a systematic thinker, but tended to write what sounded good at the moment without much regard for consistency with what had been written before. He had to do a lot of later editing to remove logical conflicts in his stories. Remember that the impetus for his fiction was to create a world in which his created languages could live.
What is the basis of that? It doesn't match what I've read Tolkien saying. Tolkien knew exactly what he was doing, was a leading scholar in the field of myth, and thought very deeply about it. If you want to understand, read his essay On Fairy-stories.
> no good postmodernist would object to modern readers finding meanings in literature that weren't consciously in the author's mind.
What does that means specifically? Who are you referring to? What is the basis of that? What does it have to do with this discussion?
His objection wasn't to "metaphors or whatever", but specifically to the technique of allegory. He was a professional expert in literature; it meant something very clear and specific to him (as did the word 'metaphor'). The full quote is,
"Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
Elsewhere:
"... the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human 'literature', that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily it can be read 'just as a story'; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it ..."
Not writing allegory (a very specific kind of comparison) doesn't mean nothing in the book is a metaphor. It's willful ignorance to pretend LotR has no ideology or non-narrative (moral, epistemic, metaphysical, etc.) content. Tolkien just doesn't want people to say "... and so the orcs are the Germans."
> positing a coherent ideological message in his story is a bit of a stretch. Also, Tolkien's wasn't one to focus much on real world social and political issues.
Maybe this is why I love LoTR so much. It’s just a story!
"The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights. Moreover, though Gandalf rarely displayed his power, everyone outside the Shire suspected that he did possess power and belonged to an elite, and today there is great distrust of elites.
I think a lot of idealistic people today concerned with justice, would prefer a myth by which organizing in pursuit of said justice is bottom-up, starting from the most disadvantaged and intersectional, instead of the Maiars’ top-down.
> I think a lot of idealistic people today concerned with justice, would prefer a myth by which organizing in pursuit of said justice is bottom-up, starting from the most disadvantaged and intersectional, instead of the Maiars’ top-down.
Hence the standard trope plot of all JRPGs: “Using the power of friendship to kill God”.
On the other hand, while the great old powers were waging fruitless war, it was the little people who struck the decisive blow, so perhaps it’s a lesson for our time of how both bottom-up and top-down can collaborate.
This is a profound misreading; royal birthright, aristocracy, and the ruling class are not taken to task or shown to be "fruitless" at all in Tolkien, and while today we may read Frodo as "the common man" his contemporary presentation is firmly (pastoralist and conservative English) upper middle class. The Baggins are landed gentry, not "the little people".
Sam is presented as British working class, and is arguably the hero of that part of the story. He is the least corrupted by the ring, despite carrying it and using it. And the Mordor chapters in Return of the King are all written from Sam’s perspective.
I agree that ruling classes are not taken to task; in fact they are celebrated throughout the books. On the other hand, the wise and powerful rulers cannot win on their own. Only the secret mission of Sam and Frodo could achieve victory.
Personally I think that as well as their local status, their class can also be analyzed from a global perspective, where the hierarchy of the wider world goes Eru > Ainur > Maiar > Eldar/Edain > Other Men/Elves > maybe Dwarves > everything else including Hobbits. In global Arda it matters not that Frodo was amongst the wealthiest and highest-status Hobbits - they are viewed as marginal by the other races, and it was this very marginal status that caused the “higher” races to overlook their potential, which is a large part of how they succeeded.
I’ll also defend the idea that the military strategizing of Great Men was for nought. We are told quite clearly that the ring is the only hope for free peoples; that even if it is kept from Sauron, his forces will inevitably win. The Elves recognized this hopelessness (as part of the overall decline of “magic” in the world) and were slowly abandoning Middle Earth. Aside from Aragorn and possibly Faramir, the ruling Men are depicted as weak and flawed. The elite Elves and Men had ultimately failed - even after defeating Morgoth, Sauron had prevailed; even after defeating Sauron, he had returned. Further battle was positioned as noble but most definitely fruitless, unless the ring could also be destroyed. The greatest contributions of Men are taken to be those that assist or buy time for the Hobbits. No, they’re not taken to task for this multi-generational failure, and royal birthright prevails, but then Tolkien as a Catholic wasn’t aiming to demonstrate anything about class liberation - hence my reading of the story as being one of cross-class collaboration, and the wider point being that achieving meaningful change is likely to involve “big people” and “little people” finding ways of working together.
> Aside from Aragorn and possibly Faramir, the ruling Men are depicted as weak and flawed.
Prince Imrahil is also a great noble of Gondor. And in Rohan, we see Éomer and the late Theodred without notable flaws. Flawed but nonetheless worthy nobles include King Théóden, Lady Éowyn, and Boromir. Steward Denethor is a complex case. King Brand of Dale is largely outside of the story proper, but is also seen as a great leader.
The Marxist analysis seemed to me flawed, particularly in presenting dwarves as below men in the social hierarchy. The men of Laketown had an elected leader; the dwarves had a kingdom, and though driven out of it they had regained some measure of wealth in their lands of exile. They were indigent at Laketown, but that's because they'd lost much on their travels. Nonetheless, they were fêted. Once re-established, the kingdoms of Erebor and Dale were close allies, and dwarves and men lived in harmony.
Yes, but in Tolkien it was little white cis males. As can be seen from the recent television adaptation, a myth for our time requires the involvement of, if not the leading role for, women and BIPOC in that struggle. Obviously Tolkien will still have an appeal for people interested in old literature, but it is hard to say that it is the myth for our time with its distinct concerns.
I don't see the little hobbit as a 'man' or as 'white', but as a small creature of good nature that is innocent enough to carry the greatest of burdens.
On a side note, I enjoyed Joe Abercrombie's "The First Law" cycle. It subverts the "wise old man enlists young hero's services for a lofty endeavor" trope to great effect.
There are no essential stories for "everyone". Cause everyone is different. What the cactus needs and what the redwood needs are not the same thing. The stories they need will always be different.
There are no common needs and desires, and no common stories? That doesn't seem to match the data, at all. LOTR, as one example, is among the best-selling fiction of the 20th century.
> "The primary actor is a wise old man…" And that is why it is hard to call that a myth for our time. Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights.
At the risk of making this political, our present era also has an old man who has earned the respect of younger generations by being well-informed, consistent in his views, with a strong moral compass and deeply concerned about the welfare of all people. I would argue that Bernie Sanders is the Gandalf of our times.
We also have a lot of Denethors and Sarumans and Wormtounges. Our Dark Lord isn't a person, but maybe it's an ideology -- that if we can just maximize shareholder value everything will work out fine. Tolkien didn't like allegories and insisted that the ring wasn't symbolic of anything, but if it was our ring we can't bring ourselves to cast aside is fossil fuels.
What's changed is we've as a culture realized that age doesn't automatically bestow wisdom. A wise old man is a valuable part of culture and society. But not all old men are wise and it doesn't seem to be a function of being old. Bernie has held his beliefs for decades. He was wise when he was younger and that's persisted (or developed further with the guidance of time and experience) into his current age. Wisdom is something that has to be cultivated for a lifetime and we simply don't do that as a society or a culture. Did we ever? I'm not sure.
I think there are a lot of people who still care about wisdom and try to work on it. Our popular culture and economic and political systems don't always do a good job of encouraging or valuing wisdom.
I think there are probably a lot of old men and women like Bernie out there, they just aren't very visible. What's unusual about Bernie is that he's managed to become famous and is in a position of power.
> What's changed is we've as a culture realized that age doesn't automatically bestow wisdom.
That's no new realization, but a continuing pattern, generation after generation. The youth of the 1960s took that idea much further than today's kids.
I'm not really talking about the current generation (especially since I'm not a part of it). I'm talking along longer timespans as a longer process. Hundreds to thousands of years. The old being wise goes back a long time, and we didn't just realize it's bullshit yesterday.
Fair enough, but the mistake of (some of) the young is to call it bullshit - first they think it's scripture (which it is to younger children, and which they need to believe to feel safe) and then, when they discover that older people are flawed humans, they think it's all bullshit.
It's neither. Older people often do know many things that younger people don't yet, but older people are very human too.
> Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights.
Citations needed, really. While young people do not look at old with awe or submissively, claim that they somehow uniquely or unusually look down at us seems wrong to me. And also, the little that exists seems to me more of reactive to hostility some in older generation seems to have quite openly.
I do not think this proves that "Young people’s contempt for the now-elderly generation (they’re Boomers) has reached incredible heights." Like at all. Especially since it popularity was an actual response to members of older generation bashing younger one. As in, it was literal response to that and relatively rarely used outside of context of the older people complaining about younger ones.
I do not see younger generation rejecting everything that comes from older people, definitely not much more then what our generations or the one before seemed to do.
Your English and your post history suggests that you are not from the Anglophone world. The generational tension I was talking about is a feature of it, I do not claim that it exists in the same way elsewhere.
I don't think you can criticize "deus ex machina" as a plot device when it's, from go, literally "ex deus" - Gandalf is on a mission (/ missions) from god, and Eru's not gonna let him get off so easily.
The more critical part is "from go" - deus ex machina is considered bad because it's a narrative rupture. In a story of wars openly involving divine beings, there's no such discontinuity. It is also usually associated with stories that wrap up a bit too tidily, and that's also not the case in LotR.
Gandalf dies 2/6 of the way through the story and comes back 3/6 of the way through. His death may be the climax of the first two books, but his return is merely a plot beat and many of the remaining problems have yet to even be revealed, let alone solved.
It was based on the Bible and the Resurrection. Tolkien was an observant Catholic and openly talked about the religious elements in LOTR. For example, the description of Gandalf's white rainments are similar to Jesus's in the Gospels.
He doesn't return more powerful, he returns with a different mandate. He is no more or less powerful as he was before, rather he is "licensed" by Eru to reveal more of it as Saruman has abdicated that role, and Gandalf had been the only faithful Istari of the five - dying being a critical part of that.
>What Gandalf did was what the Authority wished. The "wizards" were failures as they had been and needed enhancement to match the gravity of the crisis. Gandalf's sacrifice was accepted so he was returned in an enhanced state (more power and wisdom). The old Gandalf could not have dealt with Théoden or Saruman as he was able after his enhancement
I had not read this review before, and I was surprised how positive it was. I can't imagine Auden and Tolkein would have got on well. But they both loved countryside, and so maybe I am wrong.
> I can't imagine Auden and Tolkein would have got on well. But they both loved countryside, and so maybe I am wrong
They became friends later in life, perhaps because of Auden's championing of his work, although they fell out when Auden wanted to write a book about Tolkien.
Wow. So this is what an actual book review by someone that knows how to actually write looks like. Yes, Tolkien is a literary mastermind, but set that aside for a minute: I feel lucky to have read the review itself.
If modern book reviews in mainstream media were still written this well, I think more people would read books!
Is the “NY Times Book Review” a separate publication or just the books section of NYT? Because NYT and WaPo book reviews are hugely disappointing to me.
I recommend giving The New York Review of Books a try. Their stable of guest writers is legendary, from J. M. Coetzee to Zadie Smith.
They established a kind of genre of review where the review isn't so much reviewing the book as it is retelling it in magazine form. In many cases I've had no desire to read the book itself, because the review was so in-depth and comprehensive, not to mention well-written.
I spent a couple of hours reading through reviews there on your suggestion - thank you!
But I feel like I would only read those reviews after finishing the book myself as part of a post-read “imaginary book club session” because, as you say, it seems the reviews really do stand in for reading the books!
ISTM a lot of book reviews by official reviewers, meaning those employed to write reviews, are often horribly gushing. Books have now unfortunately become just a product to be sold and the reviewers are part of the marketing. If I want an honest review I go and read a bunch of reviews off Amazon, accounting for the shills that are there as far as I can.
What really bothers me is I know there are some very good books out there that are well worth reading but aren't well known just because the authors aren't, and again, books now are being sold as a brand, just as much as soft drinks.
In the UK we have a radio 4 programme where people read and critique each other's recommendations. I can't bear it because they're so pretentious, but I also because the books they go for are almost always (AFAICT) from mainstream authors – these people want a nice, safe, conventional environment. They're just boring people.
That's not really a fair quote. Having first read your quote, then read the actual piece, I feel duty bound to put your quote in it's full context, which changes it's meaning considerably:
> The first thing that one asks is that the adventure should be various and exciting; in this respect Mr. Tolkien’s invention is unflagging, and, on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps
He's clearly suggesting that in one very particular respect, he values the 39 Steps so very highly that it can be used as a kind of measuring stick.
It may not seem like such a big deal, but partial quotations of this nature are the source of so much internet misunderstanding and drama these days.
> on the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps.
That is, it's an engaging narrative up there with a book that's been adapted into four films, a stage play, and enough radio dramas it would be tiresome to count them all. So, yes, high praise for Tolkien's ability to tell a story people want to continue reading.
I certainly agree that it is an engaging narrative.
When I was a teenager long ago and I have seen for the first time this book when I have borrowed it from a library, during a couple of days I did almost nothing else until I have finished reading the entire trilogy.
For me this has happened very seldom with other books, and with none of this size.
I’d never read this review and I must confess I am very relieved to find two authors that I greatly admire, and lean on often for strength, to be on each other’s wavelength.
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Currently listening to the LOTR audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. Highly recommended. His characters are heavily influenced by Peter Jackson's movies; it put me off a bit at first, but I've really come to like it now.
The Serkis ones are good, but I really love the old Rob Inglis versions. Someone described them as the closest thing to Tolkien himself reading the books.
Surprisingly I think some of his voices (eg, Gandalf) do match the vibe of the films better; even his Gollum isn't too far off.
I haven't heard Serkis's narration, but it's hard to beat Inglis. I certainly wouldn't object to narration influenced by Jackson's films -- though I have my share of problems with Jackson's adaptation, I think he did a fine job of casting and directing.
> "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it.
When I was a teenager, my mum suggested I read Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps it was The Hobbit. Whatever. There were some guys on horses, and maybe a spider. That's all I remember. It was boring as fuck, and I gave up at about page 70,000 - or so it felt like. I was still young enough that I hadn't realised that you could just give up at page 2 if you wanted.
Anyway, dear reader, I guess my point is: if you hate this fucking shit too, you are not alone.
I bailed on Fellowship about 50 pages from the end, I think. Gandalf had just fallen a few pages back. Hated it, enjoyed basically zero pages I’d read. And I’ve read and enjoyed plenty of other fantasy, and routinely read long fiction books (mostly “classics”) that’d bore a lot of folks to tears. My favorite book is To the Lighthouse and about a third of it’s about an empty house. I finished every page of Lichteim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature (all three volumes!) and hot damn was a lot of that boring. I like the Telemachus books of The Odyssey.
LOTR, though, was too boring for me, just couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t stomach one more elf song or backstory of a tree. Though I acknowledge that’s probably some very-specific pathology of mine, rather than the book’s fault. I do seem to be wrong, in a sense, in this judgement.
Oddly enough, I later read The Hobbit, and loved that.
I do enjoy the Peter Jackson films (extended, especially for ROTK, which kinda sucks in its theatrical cut)
Having recently slogged through some fantasy/sf tomes weighing in at 900 pages or more, I have to say that they make Tolkien - or Dickens for that matter - seem terse by comparison.
To make matters worse, some of these monstrosities aren't even complete in themselves but are the first (or Nth) volume in an excessively long series.
Perhaps novellas aren't commercially viable anymore, but I miss them.
It is difficult to tell a coherent story that ends in a satisfactory manner within a preset number of pages. Endings, outside of "and this is how everyone died", are inherently arbitrary and artificial, and it's tricky to disguise that. And if you're blessed with imagination, there is always one more character to do justice to, one more neighbourhood to explore. (Or, if you're Tolkien, one more etymology to plant.)
At the same time, there is a certain type of curious, intelligent, often young reader that delights in those details. They want to know more about that character who spoke two sentences but made a big impression; they want to know how the neighbourhood the protagonist walked through came to be so peculiar.
The market for massive 18-book series is a product of the happy match of that type of writer with that type of reader. But it's totally OK to not be that type of reader.
> there is a certain type of curious, intelligent, often young reader that delights in those details
> The market for massive 18-book series is a product of the happy match of that type of writer with that type of reader. But it's totally OK to not be that type of reader.
Indifferent/stupid/old readers should probably keep reading Tolkien, Dickens and other authors known for published brevity - Melville or Tolstoy perhaps.
I never could get past the first chapter of The Hobbit. An Unexpected Party just drones on and on. The Lord Of The Rings also had its long slow introduction, but at least it wasn't as tedious as The Hobbit's.
You might enjoy the comic version of The Hobbit by David Wenzel more than Tolkien's original. It was how I was introduced to Tolkien, and was, frankly, the high-point of Tolkien for me personally.
I wouldn't give a lot of deference to a book review by someone who'd write that. I'm sure his titanic reputation is well-deserved, but "readability" isn't his strong suit.
Ah yes. That fine scholar who authored among several notable works the outstanding “To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History”. A landmark work that every successful actor has read and every aspiring author must read.
Tom Shippey, a very well known and respected Tolkien scholar gave a talk about the book vs the Peter Jackson movies. It also ended up in an edited version in one of his books (I cannot remember if it was "Tolkien: Author of the Century" or "The Road to Middle Earth".)
In short, he argues that Jackson actually did the best he could to present the book in a format that movie studios would accept, and even then was able to press through on some typically non-Hollywood elements (such as having at least nine main characters split across two to three major story arcs).
Here is an online transcript of his talk, "Tolkien Book to Jackson Script: The Medium and the Message":
Jackson was the anti-Tolkien. The book and movie stories had the same character names, many of the same events, but otherwise were completely opposite. A few things off the top of my head, great and small:
Tolkien's books were primarily about the corruption of power, and showed that the Good and Wise avoided it. There's the Ring, of course, but also Gandalf traveled around motivating people, rarely showing any magical ability at all. Aragorn's sword was broken until the great test required it. Jackson glorified power.
Tolkien's magic and world were places of beauty, darkness, and art beyond human experience; Tolkien never visualized Sauron, who was left to our imaginations. Jackson's world was of commonplace, manipulative horror film techniques and action hero tropes.
Heck, Tolkien's Gandalf had supreme confidence (for good reason); Jackson's was an anxious old person. Tolkien's Aragorn was the epitome of duty and commitment, always putting life and limb on the line for it; Jackson's didn't want the job!
> Tolkien's Aragorn was the epitome of duty and commitment, always putting life and limb on the line for it; Jackson's didn't want the job!
There's a reason for it. A movie requires the protagonist to undergo a character arc, where their perspective on the world changes.
... Except that in this story, Aragorn already dealt with all those issues, and by the time of the Fellowship is just doing what he's spent his whole life working up to.
> Jackson's world was of commonplace, manipulative horror film techniques and action hero tropes.
Totally agree. The movies failed to evoke for me any sense of magic and mystery. I guess the what-you-can't-really-see and what-defies-your-expectations are not most people's cup of tea.
I like to compare Jackson's LOTR intro to that of the (often mediocre but brilliant in some parts) Ralph Baskshi's. The projected shadows, the choice of colours, are much more evocative than Jackson's literal storytelling.
Jackson's LotR is probably about as good as you could get mass-market movies made at the time; the Hobbit, of course, was about as bad as you could get at the time (likely if it had been compressed back down to one or at most two movies, it might be salvageable: so much so that various competing "cuts" now exist, search "hobbit cut").
More and more I come to realize that the things we argued about so much at the time are actually pretty good; especially removing Bombadil - because there's no way that would have worked correctly. The elves barely worked some of the time; Bombadil would have failed utterly.
It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised.
It was one of the happiest parts of life - to be able to read the books and venture into that world.
It's been spoiled for me by the ridiculous movies like The Hobbit (holy god, Peter Jackson turned Dwarves into ridiculous comedy clowns, covered Radagast with birdshit) , the endless licensed garbage and whilst The Lord of The Rings movie was quite good it hacked the story instead of treating it with reverence. The movie should have changed nothing, regardless of what "modern audiences" expect.
The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script.
Thank goodness there's a single example in this world of a great work not being commercialised - Calvin and Hobbes.
UPDATE:
A counterpoint to my grumble about the hacking of Tolkien's work:
Anyone who would like to listen to the most fabulous audiobook of The Hobbit that was ever made:
Honestly I think any LOTR fan should be so grateful for those movies. It could have gone wrong in so many ways. At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. Remember, the books didn't have a big pop culture presence at the time. Fortunately, Jackson and others involved were really passionate about doing it right, and convinced New Line to take a big risk on it. Maybe they should have changed nothing, but I think that's unreasonable. It's a different medium, where storytelling and pacing are just different, and also we live in reality, and people are looking for returns on their investment.
The Hobbit movies are different story. I don't know if we'll ever know entirely what happened, but from what I can deduce, there were too many studios involved looking for huge returns, and they made big changes too late, including moving expanding from 2 movies to 3, and switching directors.
The Harry Potter movies are pretty faithful, but they remove tons of content. The books get much longer as the series go on, but the movies don't, so 4, 5, 6 are really flying through scenes just to get through the main plot.
> At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made.
The problem, if you will, with a great but imperfect work of art is that no one else will attempt the same work again. Because it has already been done and it's hard to top a smashing success.
If it had been a bad LotR movie, one would be able to hope, probably reasonably, that a good one might eventually be made. It would be a dissatisfying situation, just like that 1978 film. But the 2000s LoTR films were, indeed, quite good. And so they will likely be the final word.
There’s no way it will be left alone; I don’t think you need to worry about any “final words” from Hollywood. They’re already moving on another large LotR project that might actually just be the main story remade already.
It seems pretty inevitable that there will eventually be a TV series style live action LOTR— in theory that should give the breathing room necessary for the story to unfold over 30-50 hours rather than 8-9.
Given how TV series are lately written and how latests adaptations of loved books went, I really really hope they wont make one for LOTR too.
Yes, in theory longer format should have more space to breath. In practice, we will get dialogs that will make you cringe, removal of everything that is not straightforward action, compression of everything nuanced into a single talking point and massive change in characters and plots.
I think it really could depend. Yes, there's a strong possibility that you get excessive cutaways to appendix content and a lot of invented side-drama to pad it out, but it's also conceivable that a longer take could include much more of the original dialogue. As a very silly and trite example, take Eowyn's iconic "I am no man" line from ROTK. In the book, that line is an entire speech, and it's fabulous:
> “But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”
In any case, this is just one small example, but it's easy to imagine that with a longer treatment of Bilbo's birthday party, the hobbits might have been able to be more fleshed out as well, and less of just dumb comic relief. That said, even the 1981 BBC radio play that's considered by many purists to be the gold standard as far as LOTR dramatizations is only about 13h, so perhaps I'm being pretty optimistic to imagine that doubling that runtime could go anywhere good.
> It seems pretty inevitable that there will eventually be a TV series style live action LOTR— in theory that should give the breathing room necessary for the story to unfold over 30-50 hours rather than 8-9.
Great, so it will for LotR the same as what was done in the films for The Hobbit.
If you are doing LotR in more than double the runtime of the LotR extended editions (which are 11h36m), I am…beyond skeptical.
I'm not sure that's really true. Take, for example, the Harry Potter movies. They were great, but imperfect, and were really well received. But they are still being readapted into a TV series.
Hollywood recently came up with something called a "reboot". It's where they take a movie that was successful in the past, and remake it with modern actors.
Which is interesting because the first one was quite different from the book, the second one tried to stay closer, and both have their points.
I think a remake of the LotR will happen some day, but not for quite awhile (a re-animation of the CG may happen first) - mainly because it was already filmed in high-def and on "modern" equipment.
If it does get made again, it's likely to be in a TV mini-series format, perhaps less on sets and more on dialogue/acting.
He filmed all three together, not the second two. That makes it even more insane, especially at the time when no one had done this and fantasy movies were far out of vogue.
My biggest issues were the total butchering of the timeline Jackson made to move make the Battle of Helm's deep happen. The whole trek from Meduseld, the warg attack, Aragorn's near-death, and the march of Saruman's orcs all happened in the same day and night, I can even ignore the barrenness of the Pellenor Fields (those should all be farmland!) and even dropping the Scouring Of The Shire. Other than those flaws, I thought the movies were pretty good.
In one of the earliest screenplays, Frodo and Galadriel have sex. And Gandalf basically waterboards Gimli into revealing the password to Moria. It's a wild take on the material.
I don't think the original Lord of the Rings trilogy would really be filmable as a 1:1 book to film adaptation. As a book fan I think Peter Jackson did a pretty good job with it in general; the behind the scenes footage really shows that they did care about the source material. Fellowship particularly I would still say is great, Two Towers and ROTK have some moments that are either downright ridiculous or against the spirit of the novel but they're still okay as films.
The Hobbit on the other hand really feels generally awful. I watched a fan-cut of it that cuts all 3 movies down to about 4 hours of content and it felt just about watchable.
>The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script.
I think you can attribute this more to JKR being still alive and in control of her creation than well-meaning production studios / directors.
As a potential heir to the stewardship, Christopher Tolkien was very much alive at the time the movies were being made and was famously opposed to a lot of the artistic choices being made.
Rowling apparently maintained some artistic control on her movies, whereas Tolkien had sold the rights entirely, so Christopher didn't have much of a say beyond complaining.
I think the thing that really "solved" it for me was realizing that the vast majority of the people who watch LotR will never read the book, let alone the Silmarillion. And those who DO decide to read those after seeing the movie - the movie won't destroy it for them.
"Stanley & I have agreed on our policy : Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author’s veto on objectionable features or alterations."
I don't think it was explicitly stated there, but I think it is clear they went for "cash". Though I recall some of his letters saying that the unexpected success of LotR meant that he wished he'd retired earlier. It was clear that there was a lot of financial struggle in his life, but that's not to say he wrote for the money of course!
One thing Amazon could do is adapt the Lord of the Rings into a TV show. 60 one hour episodes could be interesting.
Personally I prefer the books to the movies and dislike many of the changes.
I'm following the "Other Minds and Hands" podcast/video. Corey "Tolkiien Professor" Olsen and Maggie Parke talking about adaptation especially for Tolkien but also lots else.
> One thing Amazon could do is adapt the Lord of the Rings into a TV show. 60 one hour episodes could be interesting.
Presumably Amazon decided on an original prequel series for reasons; perhaps that they didn't see a need for an LOTR series after the Peter Jackson films (and other adaptations), or perhaps there were rights/exclusivity issues.
I found the first season of Rings of Power visually stunning, and some of the characters and environments were appealing as well, but it's hard to beat the original material. On the other hand, I feel like Wheel of Time could turn out great by cherry-picking the best parts of its source material.
I too love the books, I've read the trilogy at least 16 times and the Silmarillion at least 3 or 4 at this point (haven't gotten into the others yet but hope to one day). Yes, the tv series can be entirely forgotten. So can the hobbit trilogy - I personally don't mind if the tone is a bit more lighthearted, the book was as well, it was meant to be more of a children's book after all. But certainly much of the extra material could have been removed, and I don't think it needed to be a trilogy, two movies at most. The book has far less material than the LotR trilogy books do and the third movie dragged on forever on pointless battle scenes.
But as for the original Jackson trilogy movies, I think it's entirely possible to appreciate those as someone who loved the books. There are only two major gripes I can think of which are particularly inexcusable and a few smaller things I would've liked to change but which are excusable either for not being particularly consequential, or because of time constraints. Overall though blocking the two major complaints out of my memory, it's quite well done. For a twelve hour film to have only two major gripes compared to the books, I'm not actually sure if there are any other film/book adaptations with a ratio that good.
One has to be the ghost army wiping out all impact and meaning from the mortals’ battle and sacrifice in the Return of the King.
I’m in the camp that the quality and faithfulness in Peter Jackson’s movies were an insanely improbable miracle—lightning in a bottle that we should be thankful happened once and you could never hope to capture again. But I’m still flabbergasted at the decision to make the ghost army omnipotent. They were so thoughtful with everything else, especially the changes they made—you can see this clearly in the behind-the-scenes discussion. So what in the world happened here?
I actually don't consider that a major gripe. It's certainly a very weird decision and I'd prefer the original version, but it doesn't ultimately affect all that much imo, it mostly just means the humans did a bit less orc killing in the movies than they had to do in the books.
But yeah, I agree with you, I'm happy it turned out as it did for the most part, some of my favorite movies for sure.
The treatment of Sam (and the Sam/Frodo friendship) in Return of the King movie, and the treatment of Faramir as a character. I kind of get what they were going for, it just went way too far overboard imo and probably shouldn't have even been attempted. I'm assuming a bit of knowledge in the unpacking of these below for brevity but hopefully it is not too unclear for those who may have only watched the movies.
In the books, Faramir was pretty much the one redeemable part of the house of stewards. Yes, the ring may be tempting, but I think that was already sufficiently shown throughout earlier moments in the movies and there was no need to throw Faramir under the bus. He was already a relatively minor character in the books, why do him dirty like that? Everyone, both the characters in the book and the readers outside the book, looked up to him. One of his men broke a rule (punishable by death) to save him in the books and from the context you can imagine most of his reports would have done the same, but if all you knew of him was what you saw in the movies, it gives a very different impression. He came around in the end but at the very least he should have done the right thing sooner than he did in the movies.
As far as the Sam (and Frodo) thing goes, admittedly it's been a year or two since the last time I read the trilogy and it's easy to confuse the books/movie in my memory, but I don't remember seeing any signs of contention between them the way it was shown in the movie, and certainly if there was, it was not even close to the same degree. Among other things, I think the movie was trying to show the darker side of the ring's effects, but again, it's already been shown multiple times throughout the movies and they just went overboard with it. Frodo pretty much had the highest trust for Sam (even in the movies this is basically true outside this incident), and would Sam really give up and abandon Frodo that easily because of a few crumbs? Tangentially, I don't remember Sam being particularly cruel to gollum in the books, and that's really the root of this breach of trust in the movies. That entire aspect of Sam shouldn't have been there to begin with, and if it wasn't, the staircase scene would also make no sense to show that way.
The reason I find these two particularly inexcusable is that I simply don't see how they added much to the movies in terms of story or character development. There's an argument for it but it's just weak imo, Tolkien had it figured out just fine thank you very much. I also don't see how it would have helped in terms of budget, reducing film length, etc. I can excuse other omissions or slightly weird things if there are budget/time constraints, you can't reasonably ask for the impossible, I just don't see it in those two cases.
Fair enough, I exaggerated a bit there, I was mainly getting at the fact that in the book Faramir's compassionate/gentler/selfless nature was kind of a direct contrast with the power-seeking nature of his older brother and father. To have him try and take the ring by force seems to remove the entire purpose of his character. He's practically just another Boromir but with a chip on his shoulder.
i have never found that believable - if the ring is represented as capable of corrupting anyone, why not faramir? why not send faramir to mordor with it, rather than frodo?
I mean there's degrees of temptation. I don't think that simply being in the ring's presence was generally portrayed to be an insurmountable temptation. Some situations were specifically mentioned as causing the ring's power over a person to increase (eg length of time someone used the ring would put them more under its temptation) so I don't see why it's so hard to believe that someone could send off the ring bearer. In any case if that's an issue for you, how do you get around other more fundamental issues, such as how eg Aragorn manages to escape the temptation?
I have two different major gripes. First, the power of the ring is not put into a proper context and, second, the film's exposition ruined the role of Gandalf and undermined the otherworldliness of Galadriel.
Let's put the ring into context. Imagine you were walking along and you came across an ordinary looking smartphone. Amazingly it works and you can make calls on it. Anywhere in the world. For free!
That's not bad. But it turns out this phone has a dangerous superpower. For, you see, Stalin developed missile guidance before the Americans and leaked the details. But there's a back door and this phone you hold in your hand is the key to it all. With the right knowledge, this phone could launch any missile from any country at any time. The phone has a primitive AI which attempts to phone home every now and then but no-one has answered it for years.
And here's the kicker: Stalin is still alive! Barely. Now just a disembodied brain in a vat hidden somewhere deep in Russia. And he wants his device back now that there's a massive arsenal for him to command.
Every agency in the world wants to get their hands on this thing. But you've got to somehow get it into the Kremlin so it can be plugged in to some ancient terminal and deactivated. But you’re not alone. Oh yes, you’ll have some help from a few random individuals who represent various interests, have a few fighting moves and are pretty good at keeping you hidden but without having any authority to make stuff happen for you on your journey.
So that's the position the Fellowship find themselves in. Does the film manage to convey any of this? No.
Moving on, the way the information is surrendered to the reader in the books is much more gradual than the film. In the books, Gandalf is the reader's and the hobbits' touchstone. When he's away the reader has no clue what's happening and it's not until the hobbits get to Rivendell -- after many close shaves -- that the full details are finally revealed.
Not so in the film: Galadriel narrates the whole thing before the opening credits!
This ruins the film twice over: Gandalf becomes redundant, reduced to opening the door to Moria and taking on the balrog. Thanks to the magic of cinema, the director teleports us everywhere so that we can witness Gandalf battling Saruman. Gandalf battling the necromancer. Gandalf battling the balrog. Instead of us learning all this from Gandalf himself after he reappears suddenly later on.
And Galadriel, the mightiest elf in middle earth, has had her grand entrance already: right at the start, as a voice over.
For me, the hobbit who undergoes the biggest Hero's Journey is Pippin. He starts out as a carefree young hobbit and comes back to lead the Shire in the uprising against Saruman. Again, the film chose to ignore this pretty decent character arc in favour of a bunch of CGI effects.
Visually, the films are great. It's a shame the screenplay is utter drivel.
I mean I agree that the Hobbit films are drivel but the LOTR trilogy is just amazing. It has a twinge of 90s affect that you have to ignore (similar to how the original Star Wars trilogy has a 60s-pulp-adventure feel that is rather dated now). And there are a bunch of discrete problems (the ghosts, the "cool legolas moves", too much slow motion) that we roll our eyes at. But otherwise they work, overall, and very much deliver on the premise. The information is delivered differently than the books but it gets at the heart of the universe anyway... imo.
If you don't like the recent commercial depictions of the LotR series… don't watch them? Of course you have the right to criticize and complain about them. But to let their existence "spoil" your enjoyment of the original works seems excessive. The original works were not somehow changed by the creation of new works, and so neither should your ability to enjoy them change.
> If you don't like the recent commercial depictions of the LotR series… don't watch them?
for me they don't "spoil" the original work and I ignore them, but it is, in a way... deeply, cosmically, saddening, to the see the world do a shit job with a thing that you love. It hurts. It feels tragic that the world could be so shitty, in the same way that reading news articles about horrible people does.
The original works were not somehow changed by the creation of new works, and so neither should your ability to enjoy them change.
Our experience of art is necessarily influenced by the world; works don't just pass pristine and unaltered from their creation into our consciousness. They can be both enriched and cheapened by the cultural detritus they and we float through on the way; whether it's the mythology of an artist died beautiful and young, or the commodification of something once felt precious and unique.
As Stephen King said, no adaptation replaces (or ruins, or improves) the original. No matter what they've done to The Stand (multiple times), the original is still there on the bookshelf.
I felt that the Harry Potter films kind of missed out on what made the books so special. In the books, besides the slowly building adventure/mystery story, all the episodic, mundane day to day drama in the life of the school really felt like living through a school year in a surprisingly realistic way. The movies I saw focused on the adventure and lost a lot of that charm of feeling like you’re back in school alongside the characters.
Amusingly enough, the silly game recently released captured that better than the movies did (though the first did pretty well), even though the school slide was a bit slap-dash.
I feel fortunate that I read those books as a kid before seeing so much as a fan-art drawing. Nothing can compare to the visuals drawn in your imagination from reading Tolkien. Jackson's aesthetic take on the places was largely as wonderful as his take on the characters was abominable, but either way it would be a tragedy for someone to see the movies before reading the books. And you're right that there was no excuse to so mangle the material.
Waterson has a degree of artistic integrity that's sadly vanishingly rare these days.
> It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised.
It saddens you that Tolkien found a publisher? How did you want them to disseminate? By the oral tradition in mead halls?
I know you mean debased beyond the printed word but that happened when Ralf Bakshi made his not very good cartoon and when Leonard Nimoy read the poems.
The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author
They gutted Rowling’s clever ending that tied everything together neatly to replace it with a laser gun fight.
> It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised.
You might note that the author worked hard with Allen & Unwin to have it printed and offered for sale.
If you have the official ‘60s paperbacks from Bellentine you’ll see the back cover is a letter from Tolkien complaining of the unauthorized Ace editions and telling you you should buy only the authorized editions (Ballantine or Houghton Mifflin).
It’s been commercial since the day it first went into print.
It's also arguable that undue concern for commercialization kept the Silmarillion out of print, because he kept trying to bring it to the level of perfection found in the LotR.
The Silmarillion has not reached the level of quality that would normally be required for publication. The only reason it's published at all is the popularity of Tolkien's other work.
"Perfection" really isn't the right concept here. The Silmarillion is not perfectly written. It also isn't adequately written.
While I mostly agree, it’s hard for me to imagine a better adaptation of LOTR than Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Last I checked, 3/3 are in the top ~15 movies of all time on IMDb! It isn’t perfect, but it’s damn close.
What was hacked for you in the LotR movies? The only egregious hacking I noticed in the movies was the character assassination of Faramir.
I must disagree on Harry Potter. All the moves after Columbus stopped directing them were bad. From angry-American Dumbledore, to Fiennes’s bizzare Voldemort, to Hermione being bolstered at the expense of Ron.
I need to re-read it. I probably finished the last book 20 years ago. Then I saw the films. And in the intervening years my opinion and attitude towards it, and the genre as a whole, has shifted toward the negative. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just from getting older.
I get it. I was really into fantasy as a teenager, but now I'm on the wrong side of 35 and nonfiction is all I'm interested in. I feel like there is so much stuff that has happened in real life that fantasy seems hollow.
I’m old and tried re-reading it recently and the low number of female characters and voices is really jarring now. YMMV. There’s so much I haven’t yet read I just moved on.
That's exactly right Bertie, the University of Oxford Literary circles famously consisted of nothing but straight white school chums who gathered together to butter crumpets placed in toast racks while talking at length of fairies and such things.
Such well adjusted literary Dons were incapable of writing coded tales of unspoken love.
Frodo lives with his committed bachelor uncle who's famous for collecting outfits, he goes on a journey with his male best friend, they actually kiss 4-5 times (on the hand and forehead), they move in together at the end and Frodo never marries or has children.
…And the narration calls Bilbo and Frodo "queer" several times and goes on about them comforting each other in their sleep in Mordor. (Yes that word meant the same thing it does now, and yes he knew what it meant.)
I have fond memories of reading this when I was a teenager, it's a pretty grand story and universe. To further elucidate and paraphrase what other commenters have said about the other article posted about reading, it's just not what I am ready to read now.
I usually dump to the Children of Hurin first, because that's more "readable" - the Silmarillion is very Old Testament and takes some heavy archeology to get the stories out.
How could Tolkien, in the 1940s and 1950s, write a book for the post-2016 era? Remember what he saw as he wrote it: An evil force that heavily used propaganda to spread their horrible ideas, and masses of people not only in Germany or Italy, but the rest of Europe and the US, refusing to acknowledge or oppose the reality of the evil, the grim future; and many even supporting it.
Tolkien arguably turned it into a myth for future generations, like the real-life Trojan War was turned (eventually) into the Iliad and Odyssey.