J.R.R. Tolkien's World- Film Trilogy vs Novel Trilogy

"Lord of the Rings" has been among the most acclaimed series of novels in the English language. Its success has certainly been virtually unprecedented in the English literature of the 20th century, spawning an entire subculture of both fan enthusiasm and critical theory.

Yet the reality is that J.R.R. Tolkien's work is at least as eccentric as the work of another Oxford Don in a previous century, the Reverend Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of "Alice in Wonderland", among other works. Both Tolkien and Carroll enjoyed academic life and yet displayed unfulfilled desires for more and both channeled their imaginations and produced eccentric and deeply personal works of fantasy.

As epic and brilliant as "Lord of the Rings" might be, it is not a work of literature any more than "Alice in Wonderland." Tolkien was attempting to create nothing less than myth and the wide resonance and power of his tale demonstrates his success. Myth is not subject to the same critical understandings as literature and indeed there were and are no shortage of critics and writers who have simply "never gotten" "Lord of the Rings" and never wanted to.

While the poet W.H. Auden was a staunch defender of "Lord of the Rings", critics who at the time often still viewed literature for its social utility and truthfulness to life often lambasted the novels for failing to meet this criteria. Such critics have typically attacked "Lord of the Rings" for being reactionary, for being racist, for being irrelevant to current social problems and generally for getting in the way of the important stuff. From Germaine Greer to Michael Moorcock to China Miéville, the very sorts of progressives who find Tolkien's optimistic nostalgic conservatism so profoundly repugnant, are also the ones who most inevitably and thoroughly miss the point.

The "Lord of the Rings" is easy to defend on the grounds of poetry and beauty. It is not difficult to attack on grounds of social utility. But it is nearly useless to analyze and dissect.

What most beginning writers must learn is that before you may break the rules, you must learn how to abide by them. Most great literature emerges from a heap strewn with broken rules, but it is a difficult trick to manage. "Lord of the Rings" breaks no shortage of rules and thus seems to justify the criticism against it. "The Fellowship of the Ring", the first novel of the trilogy, at times appears to wander aimlessly, introducing characters like Tom Bombadil who serve no discernible purpose, except to enrich the pleasures of the journey.

Tolkien endlessly describes the woods and the landscapes through which his characters wander, a habit that has driven many of his detractors half-mad. But to Tolkien the woods and streams and mountains are an important character in his writing. The landscape is a powerful moral component in the trilogy. Its corruption or enlivening heralds a victory for good or evil. Tolkien's characters do not wander detached across the earth, they are a part of the earth and a part of history, all of it folding together into a grand myth.

The volume, sheer complexity and stubborn beauty of Tolkien's writing made the prospect of filming them all the more daunting. Peter Jackson, whose first experience with "Lord of the Rings" was not literary but visual, via Ralph Bakshi's disastrous animated rotoscoped film, took on the challenge. The results have met with great commercial and critical success. Yet Jackson's films, while capturing some of the beauty and majesty of the world of Middle Earth and of Tolkien's characters and storytelling, erred in crucial places.

Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh intrude unwelcome modern touches into the story, most blatantly in their expansion of Arwen, into the movie's girl warrior, displacing crucial scenes in the novel and entirely altering the Battle of the Ford, in "Fellowship of the Ring", turning it from an epic struggle by Frodo, into a rescue of Frodo by Arwen. This gravely weakens Frodo's character in the first film and entirely dissipates a powerful dramatic scene, merely to give Arwen a more cinematic introduction.

Further Gollum is brought into line with modernistic approaches to character development. His split personality is graphically demonstrated by having him talk to a version of himself reflected in the water. He is given a flashback at the beginning of "Return of the King" and a contrived and silly plot to isolate Frodo from Sam in order to entrap him. The absurdity of the Lembas scene once again reduces a deeper storyline to a ridiculous ploy.

Unable to appreciate that Tolkien was producing myth, Peter Jackson and Fran Welsh attempt to "explain" the plot, and in doing so degrade it.

This is a pattern that continues on as Peter Jackson has Saruman raining snowstorms down on the traveling party, rather than as in Tolkien's work, the mountain itself. For J.R.R. Tolkien, the mountain was a character with personality and desires and furies. For Peter Jackson, it is simply a scene which he tries to even out in cinematic fashion, by employing it to introduce another depth of Saruman's evil.

This is script centered thinking however and entirely unnecessary. Edmund Wilson prominently complained that we never see Sauron in the novels. Yet that is the point. By not showing Sauron, "Lord of the Rings" transforms him into a terrifying entity too unimaginable for words. By contrast Peter Jackson reduces him to a large hefty fellow in a bulky suit of armor and the repeated symbol of a glowing eye, both of which were present in the novels, yet in cinema the visual special effects reduces what brief sketches in the novel only suggested.

Saruman, once introduced, displaces Sauron, as Jackson makes him the central villain of both movies, up until the third where he vanishes entirely and the scene depicting his death does not appear in the film, only in the extended edition (thus infuriating Christopher Lee.) This leaves the film trilogy more than a little rudderless. It is also a demonstration that while Peter Jackson had mastered the visual power of his movie and the casting, he had failed to understand the story he was telling, reducing it to the analysis of the thousand critics who had come after its publication to pick apart its bones.

Where John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" is a work of epic myth, Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" films are occasionally moving, occasionally entertaining, but ultimately lack the mythical power of the work they are derived from.


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