Trimming Tolkien: on the faithfulness of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings

Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the Misty Mountain top of contemporary mainstream cinema. Amply funded by New Line Cinema, the independent New Zealand director has made an accessible but scarcely comforting epic first instalment of his three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s triptych, streamlining the narrative without deviating from it and evocatively rendering the book’s eerie and elegiac atmosphere. In depicting the first stages of the Hobbit Frodo Baggins’ harrowing odyssey to rid Middle-earth of the Ring of Power sought by the necromancer Sauron, Jackson captures sublimely that mythological realm – from the Merry England-like Shire to the Breughelian proto-industrial dystopia of Isengard, from the threatening fug of the Prancing Pony inn at Bree to the terrifying subterranean labyrinths of Moria.

But if Jackson has done The Lord of the Rings proud, has he done Tolkien proud? Is his film simply a populist interpretation or does it reflect at least a modicum ofTolkien’s literary ambition?

In a sense, he was on a hiding to nothing, given that there’s a Mordor-like host of sceptical readers to please, at least some of whom are fully cognisant of the book’s philological origins. As production got under way, The Lord of the Rings reportedly became the most discussed subject on the internet, with devotees arguing the merits of casting decisions in particular and speculating on whether or not Jackson’s vision would match their own perceptions of the book. Christopher Tolkien, the third of the author’s four children, the official historian of Middle-earth and custodian of his father’s works, was opposed to the film, believing The Lord of the Rings “peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form”; his own son Simon, a barrister and writer, has been vocal in his support of it.

Tolkien himself did not favour dramatisation of his work. “Here is a book very unsuitable for dramatic or semi-dramatic representation,” he wrote to the adapter and producer of the 1955-56 BBC radio version prepared shortly after the trilogy’s publication. Above all, he feared the Disneyfication of The Lord of the Rings, which he had written to give voice to his invented Elvish languages, had dedicated as a national myth to England and had tried to instil with a tone that was “somewhat cool and clear and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic, should be: ‘high’, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry.” The author was, however, intrigued by the thought of a movie. ”As far as I am concerned personally, I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization; and that quite apart from the glint of money,” he wrote in June 1957 to Rayner Unwin, son of his publisher Sir Stanley Unwin and his champion at Allen & Unwin. “I think I should find vulgarization less painful than the sillification achieved by the BBC.”

Chaste worldview Tolkien’s remarks were prompted by an approach by an American film company which hoped to make an animated feature. He admired the production sketches (“Rackham rather than Disney”) that one of the Americans, Forrest J. Ackerman, showed him, but detested the “story-line” – the very word smacked of jargon to the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. He sent the synopsis to Rayner Unwin with the following note: “A proposed abridgement with some good picture-work would be pleasant, & perhaps worth a good deal in publicity; but the present script is rather a compression with resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation: a pull-back towards more conventional ‘fairy-stories’. People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation; Lórien [the Elvish wood] becomes a fairy-castle with ‘delicate minarets’, and all that sort of thing.”

The following June, Tolkien sent Ackerman a meticulous critique of the synopsis and the project came to no more. He had been dead five years by the time Ralph Bakshi made his animated 1978 film of The Lord of the Rings in response to reports that John Boorman was planning an (unrealised) live-action version. Bakshi’s film clearly intended to honour both Tolkien’s story and its lyricism, but he ran out of money before he could finish it and United Artists released it in a woefully incomplete state. Which leaves Radio 4’s 1981 version, adapted by Brian Sibley in 13 parts, as still the best and most thorough adaptation.

“The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different,” Tolkien observed in his letter to Ackerman, “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.” While a writer of a book is seldom the best judge of a film made from it, Tolkien’s worries about “compression” and “exaggeration” offer compelling criteria for assessing Jackson’s film.

There have been compressions and elisions, of course. The prologue concertinas nearly five thousand years of Middle-earth history, beginning with an Elvish lament encompassing the victory over Sauron, who appears in armoured, corporeal form at the cataclysmic battle of Dagorlad, the slaying of his victor Isildur and the passing of the ring from the slinking Gollum to the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins (as recounted in The Hobbit). Although American reviewers have been irked by this ‘back story’, it is a mini-masterpiece of editorial economy and steeps the audience from the beginning in Ringlore and its role in the destiny of Middle-earth.

Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens necessarily condensed the plot by leapfrogging the adventures of Frodo and his fellow Hobbits Sam, Merry and Pippin in the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs, so there’s no Old Man Willow, no Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, and no Barrow Wights. Felicitously, at his birthday party Ian Holm’s Bilbo tells of the Trolls the wizard Gandalf turned to stone and Jackson dabs in a shot of them, without further commentary, as Aragorn, the future king of Gondor, and the Hobbits rest before heading on to Weathertop. There is no Gildor, Galdar or Glorfindel, the last Elf’s task of rescuing Frodo from Sauron’s emissaries the Black Riders having been given to Liv Tyler’s limpid but steely Elf maiden Arwen. We get a quick long-shot and a partially obstructed close-up of Gollum, who will figure much more prominently – as Frodo’s alter ego – in the second instalment, The Two Towers. And in keeping with Tolkien there are no women characters beyond Arwen and Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), the lady of Lórien, and the comely Hobbit wench Rosie. Since the Elves are fallen angels in Tolkien’s cosmogony, it’s hard to make much of a case for sensualising them. Tyler, Blanchett and Miranda Otto, who plays the warrior maiden Eowyn in The Two Towers, are non-voluptuaries who fit in with this chaste worldview. Then again, Sauron’s eye, which sucks at the souls of those tempted by the Ring when it appears in the seeing stone the Palantir and Galadriel’s mirror, resembles an all-consuming vaginal slit, in contrast with the horizontal eye that adorned covers of the book.

It is to the screenwriters’ credit that we miss none of the omitted characters. Jackson moves the story along with a Stevensonian concentration on incident while montaging moving shots of the topographically diverse terrains over which Tolkien’s prose lingered to give the impression of great distances being covered. Aerial shots of mist-wreathed mountains and their forested slopes and of the Fellowship picking its way across a hostile landscape far below us are reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God. And, in its way, Frodo’s quest – made ineffably poignant by the sad-eyed, passive Elijah Wood, who looks like T. Rex leader (and Tolkien buff) Marc Bolan must have looked at 15 – is as hubristic (and Herzogian) as Aguirre’s.

All the fights fall into the category of “exaggeration”. Gandalf’s duel with his treacherous fellow wizard in Orthanc looks like it was choreographed in Hong Kong; the Fellowship’s fight with the Orcs and the cave Troll is a flurry of cuts and laboured humour; their subsequent surrounding suggests a circle of wagons being attacked by Indians; and the slo-mo advance of the Uruk-Hai – whose leader looks like a snarling member of the rock band Kiss – and its attack on Aragorn briefly betray the taste for schlock horror Jackson demonstrated in Braindead (1992) and The Frighteners (1996).

Tolkien would have been appalled by this as much as by the structural changes we can expect in the film of The Two Towers, where the stories of books III and IV, which follow different parties of the sundered Fellowship, are being intercut. “It is essential that these two branches should be treated in coherent sequence,” Tolkien had written to Ackerman in 1958. “Both to render them intelligible as a story, and because they are totally different in tone and scenery. Jumbling them together entirely destroys these things.” Tolkien’s resistance to the expedient (and obvious) method of sustaining simultaneous interest in two separate narrative strands, which Ackerman and his colleagues and Jackson and his arrived at 40 years apart, indicates he did not think in dramatic terms.

Jackson bullishly defends such changes along with his need to make a movie that will appeal to non-converts to Tolkien. Yet despite some lapses in taste, this first instalment is astonishingly Tolkienesque in aura. This has partially been achieved by the inscription of Tolkien himself in the scene in which Gandalf (played by Ian McKellen, who studied the author’s voice and mannerisms from a video of a 60s BBC interview) pores over ancient scrolls in a dusty chamber in the citadel of Minas Tirith, and of the literary artefacts and scripts cited or shown in the book. These include the famous map of Middle-earth charted by Christopher Tolkien for the original edition, Isildur’s scroll detailing what he discovered about the Ring, Bilbo’s illustrated book of his travels, the doorway to Moria with its moon-illuminated riddle in Elvish, Balin’s rune-covered tomb and the scorched and bloody Dwarvish Book of Marzabul that is found beside it. Since Tolkien was saddened when Unwin deemed it too costly to pay for red ink for “the Elvish “fire-letters” that appear on the Ring, one feels he would have been thrilled to see their glow reflected on Frodo’s face here. Just as Tolkien’s philologically derived nomenclature anchors the entire tale, so Jackson’s use of these literary devices authenticates an atmosphere that is both mythic and naturalistic. Dizzying digital effects also enhance the film’s visualisation of the book’s plentiful Sturm und Drang. At warp speed, Andrew Lesnie’s camera plummets from the top of Orthanc, Saruman’s obelisk on which he has stranded Gandalf, into the bowels of the earth beneath it, where Orc smiths are fashioning terrible instruments of war and a bad-tempered cave Troll is woken from his slumber in the muck. Despite the cliched Wagnerian chants that accompany the Black Riders and the New Agey panpipes that hymn the Fellowship’s sojourns in Rivendell, the soundtrack can’t quite mar the polarised moods of gothic (if not quite expressionistic) dread and calculated feyness. The film’s Rivendell might have been art-directed by that 30s painter of fantasies Maxfield Parrish and its Lothlórien does for Galadriel and her Elves – tough Nordic striplings – what the spectral burlap forest did for Shakespeare’s gossamer fairies in the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These empyrean Edenic domains and the Elves, whispery and pallid, who inhabit them- seem to be fading even as Frodo and co. pass through them.

But it is the warfare that stirs the blood. The cataclysmic battle of Dagorlad, extrapolated from Tolkien’s chapter “The Council of Elrond”, is a tumult from Albrecht Altdorfer (whose 16th-century paintings Jackson looked at). The devastation of the causeway above the Moria abyss suggests the apocalyptic canvases of John Martin (which Jackson doesn’t know), while the showdown moments later between Gandalf and the great horned Balrog on the bridge of Khazad-Dum is a Goya nightmare.

Painterly and portentous, then, The Fellowship of the Ring has a veneer of romanticism, of great art, although it is not quite that. Like the original Star Wars trilogy (which borrowed much of its iconography from The Lord of the Rings) and Gladiator (with which it shares a taste for epochal ancient battles fought under charcoal skies), it is closer in spirit to pictorially splendid pop culture, the mass exploitation of which is likely to have a detrimental effect on Tolkien’s literary status, shaky enough by dint of his ever-expanding popularity. Certainly it is not an auteur’s film, since Jackson (Heavenly Creatures, 1994) has made nothing comparable and there is nothing in the movie that reveals a shaping personality, for all that it’s a massive feat.

Despite the book’s Jungian symbolism (which presumably attracted Boorman), the film is lacking in subtextual and psychological complexity and moral ambivalence, the frequently made complaint against Tolkien’s original. Frodo’s journeys into the tunnels of Moria (and Cirith Ungol in The Two Towers) might be interpreted as representing a journey into the psyche, as in other and more ancient myths, but there the psychoanalytic trail goes cold. In showing the mushroom-like clouds that engulf the Dagorlad battle plain, the film does, however, intimate an allegorical significance that Tolkien, who was still writing The Lord of the Rings at the dawn of the nuclear age, was at pains to dismiss.

Yet Jackson’s film does justice to the single most important theme in the book and the one least likely to underpin a Hollywood blockbuster. “It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality,” Tolkien concluded in a letter to an enthusiast in 1958, later telling a television interviewer: “Large human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death, inevitably death. All men must die, and for every man his death is an accident, an unjustifiable violation. You may agree with those words or not, but they are the key springs of The Lord of the Rings.”

Death and resurrection – or the magical evasion of death – permeate the film. Sauron’s spirit evaporates at Dagorlad when Isildur cuts the Ring from him, but we’re told he has reconstituted himself to wage war again. Frodo receives one death blow from a Black Rider on Weathertop and another from the cave Troll in Moria, but he overcomes them with the help of Elvish medicine and his Mithril chainmail. Gandalf is dragged to his ‘death’ by the Balrog, but will be reborn as Gandalf the White in The Two Towers. Bilbo, meanwhile, wants to die but can’t because, like Gollum, his life has been stretched out by the Ring; they share with the Black Riders the state of being undead. Boromir, the one member of the Fellowship seduced by the Ring, is slain, but is ‘reborn’, in all but name, as his ‘good’ brother Faramir in The Two Towers. Then there are the Elves – immortal but doomed.

All this is from Tolkien, of course, and yet the piling of incident in the film concentrates morbidity and deathlessness in a way that suggests Tolkien was both resigned to death and yet unwilling to admit it in his fiction. In other words, the film deepens our understanding of the man, a devout Catholic who had lost his father when he was four, his mother when he was 12, and many of his friends on the Somme, from which he was invalided out with trench fever in 1916, when he was 24. In the movie, the parentless Frodo – as much a naive teenager or a rookie as a Hobbit – is himself like a young man being sent “over into the top” into a war from which he suspects he may never return. This makes his answer to the call to duty – “I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way” – worthy of a heroic romance of any era.