Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century by Nick Groom

Author:Nick Groom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time… The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialisation has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.130

But Jackson knew that he was not only making the films for diehard Tolkien fans (and no-one knew more about Middle-Earth at the time than Christopher Tolkien) – he also had to attract an audience of cinema-goers who had perhaps never read the book. He stated this quite plainly: ‘Our adaptation can’t be faithful. You can’t just take the book and go and shoot it.’131 Yes, he took liberties with the text, but he also visualized Middle-Earth with a spectacular brilliance, and populated it with unforgettable characters. Jackson cast established stage actors (Ian McKellen) against unknowns (Orlando Bloom), stars of horror (Christopher Lee) with family favourites (Sean Astin) to create a mix of acting styles and experience. Likewise, he promiscuously shifted tone, register, and genre – fantasy and bromance, war films and comedy – alluded to martial arts movies, Biblical epics, and video gaming, and blended extraordinary CGI monsters with expressive close-up characterizations – quite literally so, in the case of Gollum – as well as being ‘the culmination of all the films I have made’.132 There are candid references to other films too: Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, for example, has shown that Jackson quotes from the film The Wizard of Oz (1939) in scenes such as the arrival of the Hobbits at Bree, where, like Dorothy and her companions entering the Emerald City, the four travellers are confronted by a closed door and have to knock to be allowed in.133 Other references perhaps reach even further, by luck or design. Théoden’s defining moment in The Return of the King occurs when his lieutenant Gamling says that the armies of Mordor cannot be beaten; Théoden’s reply reverberates with the Anglo-Saxon ‘Northern Courage’ exemplified in the poem The Battle of Maldon: ‘No, we can’t, but we will meet with them nonetheless’.134

In any case, Jackson’s films could also have been even more radically different. Sceptical as one might be of John Boorman’s innovations, Peter Jackson not only story-boarded, but actually filmed many scenes, later deleted and kept from the extended DVD editions.135 In The Fellowship of the Ring these include Pippin playing in a band as Hobbits leisurely ‘strip the willow’ (a beautifully distinctive folk dance step); Gandalf portrayed as having given up smoking and instead eating toffees, lapsing and resuming the habit – only then to discover that Rivendell is a non-smoking establishment; Sauron forging the Ring by holding gold that melts in his palm and then piercing it with a blade to mix his blood into the molten metal; and flashback footage to a young (i.e. clean-shaven) Aragorn and Arwen ‘frolicking together in the woods’.136 Moreover, one ending of

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