At one stage, Tolkien wanted the Lord of the Rings to run to four volumes, rather than the published three. Volume IV would have consisted of a greatly expanded version of the Tale of Years: a narrative timeline summarising the history of Middle-earth from its creation to the “present” day. Readers would have first experienced the War of the Ring from the inside, as a story, picking up tantalising hints about Numenor and Rohan and Gondor along the way, and then, once the story was over, they would see the whole history laid out before them in a linear sequence.
If he'd gone through with this plan, the core events of his imaginary history would have been fixed in print in 1955. Would that have hastened the completion of the Silmarillion, or made it even harder to achieve? Or would the Professor conceivably have decided that his Great Work was now finished and that he could move on to something else?
In the event the supplementary volume proved too ambitious, and we ended up with a rather piecemeal collection of essays at the back of Return of the King. Some people will tell you that the Appendices are disposable—pedantic world-building notes about runic alphabets and hobbit calendars that only the hard-core nerd needs to bother with. But the back matter also contains a lot of narrative. Shortened narratives—sketched out narratives—narratives in the language of saga, not in the novelistic language of Lord of the Rings. But definitely stories. And who doesn't want to hear more stories about Middle-earth?
About half way through the Two Towers, there is an enormous gigantic battle at a castle called Helm’s Deep. Tolkien tells us that it was “called after the hero of the old wars who made his refuge there”. When Theoden rides into battle, the Riders of Rohan shout “Helm has arisen and comes back to war!” In the movie, King Theoden says “the horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound again in the deep!”: Peter Jackson even puts a statue of a big guy with a war hammer [TM] outside the castle. Appendix A fills out a little of the backstory: Helm Hammerhand was a king of Rohan about a hundred and fifty years before Theoden; he was besieged by wild men (Dunlendings) in the castle and fell heroically in the battle.
Flipping between page 528 and page 1065 doesn't make the Helm’s Deep passages any easier to understand. The main text tells us that Helm was a great hero from the olden days; and the appendix confirms that he lived in the olden days and was a great hero. But it does greatly contribute to the illusion that Tolkien was recounting history, as opposed to simply making up a story. You focus in on a bit of background colour and find that there is a solid chunk of narrative behind it. We aren’t just looking at suggestive stripes of brown and green on a painted backdrop, but an actual fully realised tree. Which of course, allows us to believe that behind the appendices are more lives and more stories which Tolkien never told. And if you have the sort of mind that is inclined to play role-playing games or invent fan fiction—and nearly everyone who likes Tolkien does have that kind of mind—then the temptation to imagine what those untold stories would have been is overwhelming.
Does filling in the gaps create a Middle-earth even more real than the one Tolkien left us? Or does imagining the details which Tolkien only hinted at rather spoil the illusion? Some of my friends at college played a long, long Middle-earth Role Playing campaign in which they were Dunlendings. For all I know it is still going on. I am not sure at the time I could have told you what a Dunlending even was. “Our MERP campaign” has not changed Tolkien’s text, or rewritten Tolkien’s appendices. But it has probably changed how those six or seven gamers read those passages.
Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim hangs a two and a half hour movie on those five hundred or so words which Tolkien wrote about Helm Hammerhand. It’s an anime, or as we used to say, a cartoon, but it has Peter Jackson’s name on it in quite large letters; and borrows musical themes from Howard Shore. It begins with a hushed female voiceover, possibly Eowyn, talking about how history is remembered and forgotten. It ends with an Enya-esque dirge over the rolling credits, which feature sepia drawings of the main characters. It is, in short, trying really, really hard to be the fourth part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Possibly Kenji Kamiyama is pretending that the Hobbit didn’t happen. I know I am.
The film sticks really quite closely to the text. Helm really does call the Dunlending lord fatty (“you have grown big since you were last here”) and he really does suggest that they step outside (“the king does not permit brawls in his house, but men are freer outside”). When the King sneaks out of the castle during the siege and starts killing individual enemy soldiers with his bare hands, I must admit I found myself thinking “oh, now you have gone too far this is completely unTolkienesque”, but this is indeed exactly what Tolkien says happened. (the king “went out by himself, clad in white, and stalk like a snow-troll into the camps of his enemies, and slay many men with his hands”). The Dunlending really do think that his wraith carried on fighting them after he died, and he really was found frozen solid but still standing.
I assume that Weta’s CGI models from Lord of the Rings still exist on someone’s pen drive; and have been reskinned for the purposes of the cartoon. Certainly Helm’s Deep and the Meduseld look exactly as they did in the Jackson trilogy. This sometimes creates the impression that painted characters are walking across photographic landscapes; and sometimes their feet appear to not be quite in contact with the ground. But everyone is proportioned like a grown up human-being and no-one’s face is caricatured, and the voices are all done by proper actors and it is mostly possible to forget you are watching animation and just treat it as a Jacksonian prequel. It’s all great fun, if people with beards, clashing shields and shouting “forth Eorlingas fear no darkness” is your idea of a good time. It’s very much a Tolkien movie for people who actually like Tolkien,
If there is going to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—and I am very far from persuaded that there ought to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—then clearly, somewhere along the line, someone is going to have to make stuff up which isn’t in the book. Anyone who has ever written fan fiction or run an RPG is familiar with the dilemma. Where are the narrative blank spaces? Where do the new characters or the new events fit into the established universe? Do you invent a new adventure for Sherlock Holmes which Watson somehow failed to mention? Or do you decide that the Baker Street Irregulars were off having adventures of their own, independent of the Great Detective? Or decide to make up stories about Mr Shereford Doyle who lived at 221A Baker Street and solved crimes when his famous neighbour was out of town?
Phillippa Boyens spotted a gaping narrative hole in Appendix A. According to Tolkien, a local lord with Dunlending heritage turns up at Helm’s hall and asks if his son could please marry Helm’s daughter. Helm is not impressed with the suggestion. Helm and the Dunlending have a fight. Helm, being legendarily strong, kills the Dunlending, by accident, mostly. So the son of the Dunlending vows revenge, and comes back years later with an army. He usurps the throne of Rohan and drives Helm back to what would later be known as Helm’s Deep. Despite his impressive snow-troll tribute act, Helm dies in the siege; and both his sons fall in battle. But after the long winter comes to an end, his sister-son rides over the hill with the cavalry and saves the day and starts a new line of Kings.
Now, according to Tolkien, the Dunlending lord is called Freca; his son, the usurper, is called Wulf; Helm’s sons are Haleth and Hama, his sister is Hild, the nephew who saves the day is Frealas Hildeson and the daughter who Wulf wanted to marry is called…is called….
She doesn’t have a name. Or any agency. Or anything else. She doesn’t in fact have any function at all, except to not marry Wulf. So War of the Rohirrim gives her a name, Hera (which is, I think, Adunaic for “Mary-Sue”), and makes her the main protagonist of the story.
At one level, this is a very sensible thing to do. The focus on an “invisible” character enables the writers to invent new material without contradicting the source. It makes perfect sense that there were shield-maidens in Rohan before Eowyn; and that Eowyn (if the narrator is in fact she) would be interested in telling their story.
The decision to make Hera an all-purpose wonder-wench was a little, I don’t know, obvious. She rides horses wildly with her hair flowing out behind her; she outfights the boys; even giving Wulf a small scar when they were kids; she climbs up sheer mountains and talks to giant eagles and ends up (not a spoiler at all) taking an important message to a wizard whose name begins with a G.
It really is quite a lot of fun. But I kind of wonder if, as the narrator says, Hera was an important person who got left out of history, couldn’t she have been, say, a clever courtly lady working behind the scenes? Peter Jackson was understandably unhappy with an Arwen who sits at home doing embroidery throughout the adventure: but his solution, to put her on a horse and give her Golrfindel’s job, is not especially imaginative.
Tolkien fans are incredibly toxic. Well, fans are incredibly toxic. Or probably it’s just that some toxic people pretend to be Tolkien fans. Quite a lot of Tolkien fans think that the dark skinned dwarves and elves in the Rings of Power are part of a plot to abolish the white race. And quite a lot of Star Wars fans think that Rey Skywalker’s appearance in The Force Awakens was a preliminary step towards Walt Disney forcibly castrating the entire male population.
But in this case, the right wing commentariat are clearly in the right. War of the Rohirrim is absolutely a feminist appropriation of Tolkien. Re-inscribing the female perspective into a text which specifically excludes it is absolutely a political act. It’s somewhat akin to Jean Rhys retelling Jane Eyer from Bertha Rochester’s point of view. Kamiyama doesn’t just point out that Helm’s daughter doesn’t have a name: that would have been a perfectly valid feminist reading of Lord of the Rings. He goes beyond this: he creates a new story, which is extremely faithful to Tolkien—far more faithful than Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, his Hobbit, or god help us the Rings of Power—which asserts the centrality of that marginal figure. This is absolutely an act of political subversion. The act of doing it is arguably more interesting than the way it has been done; but as we have seen, there exists a category of modern art where the idea is more important than the artefact. Masculinist Star Wars fans were ludicrously absurd to feel emasculated by the Force Awakens: they are absolutely correct to feel that their male supremacy is critiqued by War of the Rohirrim.
To which I say, loudly and clearly, fuck them.
I am not sure that we need new Tolkien-esque works; but if we are obliged to have them, films like this that critique and destabilise the canon are the way to go. The existence of blokes who are bothered by this kind of thing is precisely the reason this is the kind of thing we ought to be doing, good and hard.
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