tolkienjackson1

When The Lord of the Rings was first published in three
separate volumes in 1954 and '55, its sales surprised the
publisher, Allen & Unwin of London. The story was "a work of
genius," Rayner Unwin thought, but so far off the beaten track it
was possible they may not even recover production costs
(Carpenter 218). But through the '50s and into the '60s, sales
increased rather than dropped off, and translations started to be
made overseas. Then in 1965 a cheap pirated edition of the books
hit the shelves in America, especially around college campuses
where The Lord of the Rings was already becoming a sort of
underground classic, and what amounted to a cultural
phenomenon exploded.
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings seized the imagination of
a whole generation of college students, and others. Well into the
1970s, seemingly everyone around my age had read, and reread,
or was reading, or was planning to read, the book that was known
mistakenly as "The Trilogy" because it kept appearing in three
volumes, even though it is just one novel about a thousand pages
long . I remember a friend telling me in 1973 that he'd read The
Trilogy twenty-two times, and was on his twenty-third. I was
skeptical, but weirdly, the claim did not seem beyond possibility.
The Lord of the Rings is one of the most intense reading
experiences in twentieth century literature, and in those days the
books, plus its prequel The Hobbit, which is a children's story,
were all there was.
We speculated often on what a movie might be like - what elf- ,
dwarf- and orc-teeming Middle-earth would actually look like to
your cinematic eye. But most readers, I think, believed any
movie would be doomed to failure, and maybe better not
attempted. Tolkien himself, an Oxford University professor of
philology, had said in his essay "On Fairy-Stories" (in 1938) that
"Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy … Fantastic forms are not
to be counterfeited" (49). Fantasy stories, in other words, could
not be successfully translated to the stage (or screen, presumably)
because of the virtual impossibility of giving imaginary creatures
and places visually convincing form. Still, by 1957 in the
beginning of the book's commercial success, he apparently had
not ruled out the possibility of a movie and met with some
American filmmakers who wanted to make an animated version
of the story. He dismissed the idea, though, when he saw their
plans, which he thought at best disrespected the story (Carpenter
229).
The world of Middle-earth seems far more complex and
multilayered in its plot, setting, characters and themes than any
movie could cover adequately. Because of the story's mythic
scope even an adequate summary is impossible. But very
generally, The Lord of the Rings is about hobbits (a race of small,
wry-witted, humanlike creatures), and one in particular who by
no design of his own comes into the task of saving Middle-earth
from an overweening evil being, Sauron. Sauron's ancient ring of
power has been found and accidentally come into the possession
of the hobbit, Frodo Baggins. Frodo's quest is to journey to
Sauron's own desolate homeland and throw the ring into the
flames of the volcano where it was forged ages ago.
Middle-earth's life or death hangs on the fate of the ring because
if the ring is destroyed, Sauron is destroyed with it, but if Sauron
regains it, nothing and no one will be able to prevent him from
enslaving and darkening everything. Along the way Frodo is
helped by hobbit friends, ancient elves, dwarves, a wizard,
humans and other fantastic beings whose lives and fates all
interlock in the story's present space-time, and also in the
millennial history of Middle-earth, which is more detailed in
some cases than is much of the history of the world we live in.
As if the scope of the story, the diversity of the characters and
the variety of the settings were not enough, any movie also
would be measured against the intensity of the reading
experience. The story is told in a way that is absorbing beyond
even the accomplished realism of Stephen King. Middle-earth
and its characters are astonishingly, almost scarily vivid.
"Scarily" because although as real-seeming as any book ever
written, The Lord of the Rings makes no reference whatsoever to
our everyday world, and is strictly faithful to Tolkien's own
definition of the term "fantasy" - which includes "images of
things that are not only 'not actually present,' but which are
indeed not to be found in our primary world at all" ("On
Fairy-Stories" 47). The Lord of the Rings exists in its own
complete realm and yet is more real in the mind than the
memory of this morning's breakfast. Tolkien's creation (or
"sub-creation" as he termed the activity, echoing Coleridge) is so
vivid that at times you'd swear it actually happened. This is what
seized the imagination of my generation.
That experience is, frankly, unavailable through film, as is the
collective awe we felt decades ago. But when reports surfaced in
the late 1990s that Peter Jackson was making The Lord of the
Rings into a movie, most of us (even those who had drifted away
from Tolkien into other literary dimensions (or dementias) in the
'80s and '90s) were curious, skeptical and also hopeful - special
effects, after all, by the time of Star Wars had leapt light-years
beyond the technologies of The Wizard of Oz, which was made
at the same time Tolkien wrote of fantastic forms being
uncounterfeitable.

Nonetheless, it's axiomatic among most readers that the movie
rarely matches the book. The act of reading involves an
imaginative immediacy and inner complexity - which is to say, a
reality - that differs from the reality induced by a film. A film's
effect is on the eye and ear, which has a concrete advantage, but
out of words are shaped subtle inner distinctions of emotion,
psychology, morality and what Poe called "taste" (but which is
conventionally known as an experience of beauty), that few films
evoke or convey. For Peter Jackson, the problems were
formidable.
And yet, although there are dissenters,* the astonishing fact is
that most people agree he succeeded. The three films, titled The
Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the
King after the three volumes, remain remarkably true to the
original plot. The main characters are extraordinarily accurate to
the visual images we gather from the books, especially Gandalf
the wizard and Gollum, the lone Caliban-like figure whose
animated presence in the movies is a work of cinematic genius by
appearance alone. The settings, especially the meticulous care
given to constructing and growing the landscapes of The Shire,
where the hobbits live, look and feel so much the way they look
and feel to the inner eye that reads the books, that experienced
readers of Tolkien tend to have few quibbles with the similarity
of Jackson's New Zealand countryside to Middle-earth's.
This leaves the problem of whether the book's inner subtleties of
character and theme are satisfactorily realized, and this is where
some aches and pains may set in.
How would a filmmaker cover not only the look, but the
complexities of Middle-earth's history, strifes and peoples? Tom
Shippey, probably the pre-eminent Tolkien critic of our time,
frames the question by quoting from a letter written in 1958 in
which Tolkien expresses his dissatisfaction with the plans for the
animated film; Tolkien wrote:
"'The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly
different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in
exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing
to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.'" ("Another
Road to Middle-earth" 235).
Shippey then asks: "where is the core of that original"? And
eventually he answers: "The 'core of the original' remains the
ring and what we are told about it by Tolkien: its effect is always
corrupting; no one, no matter how strong or virtuous, can be
trusted with it; it cannot simply be buried or hidden but must be
destroyed in the place of its forging" (238). Shippey's argument
then runs along a strand of this very concrete point and concludes
generally that even the films' deviations from certain plot and
character elements are successful because they remain true to
"the core of the original."
Though in places his argument seems labored, in essence
Shippey seems right: the films are extraordinarily successful and
generally true to the book's core. But in a few places things go
quite wrong. The changes may have been prompted by the
technical demands of different "narrative art," which is Shippey's
main argument; but if we rephrase Shippey's characterization of
the original core by universalizing it, some scenes in the films
look troublesome.
The first point Shippey mentions in his enumeration of the ways
the ring is the core of the original story, is that "its effect is
always corrupting." This is a concrete way of saying something
that has been observed many times in Tolkien commentary: The
Lord of the Rings is a story of good vs. evil, which is to say that
at its core is a moral vision of reality. Detractors (as eminent as
Edmund Wilson) incorrectly dismiss The Lord of the Rings'
moral vision as simplistic: good elves and men vie against evil
spirits and monsters, and the good wins. But as Shippey's
statement implies, the book's reality is far more complex than
"good vs. evil." It is about the possibilities of corruption, and the
various strengths and weaknesses of conscious beings to grapple
with it, and with its origins.
This is no small topic. As the world's religions make clear
(Tolkien himself was an ardent Catholic), the problems of good
and evil are perennial, cosmic and unavoidable. We might say,
further, that those problems have been most evocatively dealt
with in myth. Tolkien intended to create a viable mythology, not
only in The Lord of the Rings but in his long chronicle-like work
The Silmarillion, of which the story told in The Lord of the
Rings is a small piece toward the end, almost an afterthought.
Middle-earth is a place of astonishing beauty and also the scene
of unspeakable treacheries, weaknesses and cruelties. The moral
vision that underpins the history of Middle-earth is also its
substance.
So the core and substance of The Lord of the Rings is its moral
vision, as Shippey implies, and its treatment of the perennial
themes of that vision - of our moral and spiritual life - is
reverent, serious and deeply intelligent.** The story makes the
common (and uncommon) virtues believable: loyalty, generosity,
courage, endurance, honesty, good judgment, wisdom,
compassion (or "pity" as Gandalf terms the powerful quality
Bilbo Baggins possessed), and love as a binding force are tested
over and over again in various situations and predicaments across
the book's thousand or so pages. True to life, the outcome of the
tests is often in doubt; and in nearly every situation, the difficulty
is triggered by the corrupting powers of the ring. Indeed, at the
climax of the quest, Frodo actually falters and succumbs to the
ring's spiritual corrosive; and in a strange, ironic twist, Gollum's
lust for the ring - which has over many centuries rotted most of