Lord of the Rings

So shall it be. Dear-bought those songs shall be accounted, and yet shall be well-bought. For the price could be no other.

At risk of completely squandering my credentials as a Tolkien geek: the Drury Lane production of Lord of the Rings is absolutely sensational.

The programme makes fascinating reading. One Andrew Breeze was responsible for "Shelob language translation into 12th century Middle Welsh". The "Hobbit nonsense lyrics" were "reviewed" by Tom Shippey. Someone called David Bell acted as "Balrog origami adviser". Well, if there's one thing you need advice on in a production of this kind, it's certainly your Balrog origami.

It's a pretty silly idea. Take a thousand-page book, with dozens of major characters, several centuries worth of back-story, masses of exposition and two major battles, and turn it into a three hour musical. But none of that stopped Les Miserables from becoming one of the most successful musicals of all time. Not that Lez Miz had any 4th century Middle-Welsh spiders. But it did have a number of good tunes. There isn't one single good tune in the whole of Lord of the Rings which is a bit of a drawback for a musical.

Take Act III. Act III begins with Aragorn (Jerome Pradon) addressing his troops before the big battle. They're hopelessly outnumbered, but he'd very much like everyone to follow him to the gates of Mordor and get slaughtered, although if anyone chooses to stay at home he won't think any the less of them. One might have expected the theater to be shaking to some rousing crowd-pleaser along the lines of "Do You Hear The The People Sing?" But no: Aragorn speaks the lines. He speaks them very well, and the orchestra plays inspiring music in the background, but it's still an odd way to open an act. Even odder is the ending, in which Frodo's departure for the Undying Lands is represented by, er, the voice of a narrator saying "And so, Frodo departed for the Undying Lands," as opposed to, say, a song.

This is not to say that there aren't any songs. A few of them are based on poetry from the book: Gimli pauses in Moria to sing a song which mentions Durin; Bilbo (Terrence Frisch) sings a few lines of what might be "The Road Goes Ever On", and Frodo's party-piece in Bree has certainly got moons and cats in it. But the Ents march off to Isengard without showing the slightest inclination to sing "We go, we go, we go to war!" and, bizarrely, Aragorn's men recite "Praise them with great praise!" to the victorious Hobbits as opposed to, well, singing it.

Three sets of people seem to be responsible for the score: I'm guessing that the Finnish folk group (Värttinä) provided the rustic airs for the Hobbits and Ents; Bollywood composer A. R. Rahman presumably contributed the exotic music for Rivendell and Lothlorien; and musical director Christopher Nightingale can probably take the blame for the instantly forgettable "pop" numbers. When the Fellowship leave Rivendell, Arwen sings a song to the effect that she's going to miss Aragorn and hopes he'll come home relatively soon, ideally after having defeated the forces of darkness. Quite harmless, but one really felt that it had been left in the script under a note saying "placeholder for show-stopping romantic ballad."

The one semi-good musical moment comes when Sam (Peter Howe) and Frodo (James Loye) are in Cirith Ungol wondering if they'll be remembered in stories after they are dead. This crucial scene becomes an actually rather touching trio between the Hobbits and Gollum. If I tried very hard, I might even manage to call some of the melody to mind.

That said, none of the songs are actually offensive, several are pleasant, and the background music (which is more or less continuous) is quite atmospheric. But really, this isn't a musical. The producers are bandying around expressions like "total theater". I would be more inclined to say "theatrical interpretation of Lord of the Rings, using dance, mime, acrobatics, physical theater and modern ballet, puppetry, film, flying elves, Balrog origami, oh, and also some songs." Looked at on those terms, it works really very well indeed.

First of all, it's a fantastically good-natured show. When you take your seat, a group of Hobbits are already on stage. Rather fat, twee Hobbits: the kind of Hobbits you might imagine having Irish accents. They are chasing fireflies around the stage, and out into the auditorium; encouraging kids in the audience to join in. Just before the curtain goes up, they release all the flies, and burst into a very energetic folk-dance. If I were the sort of person who was inclined to say that sort of thing, I would say that this was an attempt to translate into theatrical terms the Preface to Lord of the Rings. It establishes the status quo, it tells you what kind of creatures Hobbits are and it sets up a contrast between normal Hobbit life and the dark and frightening adventure which is going to follow. More importantly, it makes the audience complicit in the theatrical illusion from the word "go". It puts us in a good mood; it makes the show start with a round of applause. We are on the show's side before we have even got as far as Bilbo's birthday party. By the time we get to the second interval, when orcs run round the auditorium and jump out at unsuspecting members of the audience, we're pretty much eating out of the producer's hand. And having been showered with rose petals during the curtain call we feel that it would be positively bad manners not to come out thinking that we've had a terrific evening.

In fact, what this show feels most like is a pantomime: the grandest and bestest pantomime you ever saw. No-one yells out "She's behind you" when the giant spider creeps up on Frodo, but I don't honestly think anyone would have minded if they had.

It looks absolutely terrific. When Bilbo first puts on the Ring, he disappears before our very eyes. (I can only assume that they literally Did It With Mirrors.) The show is certainly spectacular, but it's spectacle of an engagingly old-fashioned kind. This isn't some Las Vegas extravaganza with animatronic horses and a live dragon. The Black Riders are actors holding what look to be paper horse's heads in front of them. Shelob is worked by men with sticks. The Balrog is a gigantic puppet -- very possibly made out of folded paper -- backed up by smoke, lights, sound effects and a wind machine blowing ash into the audience.

It would have been possible, given the amount of money being thrown at the show, to construct photo-realistic sets to compete with Peter Jackson: but where would have been the fun in that? The show engages your imagination with a specifically theatrical kind of illusion, and much of what happens on the stage follows a specifically theatrical logic. When Frodo puts on the Ring in the Prancing Pony, we see Sauron's Eye, projected onto the back drop. We see the Black Riders; they recognize Frodo; they converge on him and one of them stabs him. They are driven off by Aragorn, who announces that Frodo must be taken to Rivendell before he fades into the spirit world. Do we say that "They've skipped 50 pages of narrative and somehow gone from Bree to Weathertop"? Or do we say "They've changed the plot, and decided that the Witch King stabbed Frodo in the tavern rather than on the hill"? Tolkien's historical and geographic logic has been laid aside and replaced by stage logic. Two occasions when Frodo foolishly puts on the Ring and attracts Sauron's attention have been impressionistically combined into a single incident. This shortens the action, of course, and probably makes things easier to follow if you haven't read the book. But the segue from "Hobbits having a knees-up in the pub" to "Frodo mortally wounded" is a splendid coup de theater in its own right. The journey from Bree to Rivendell is similarly an abstract and symbolic piece of physical theater in which the four Hobbits and Strider navigate a revolving stage, weaving in an out of Black Riders and Orcs who are dancing around them.

So yes, this is a massively condensed version of Lord of the Rings. There's no Faramir or Eowyn; no Palantir; no Oliphaunt; no Dead Marshes; no Paths of the Dead; no Minas Tirith; no Corsairs; no Lord of the Nazgul – not even any rabbit stew! But it manages to retain a lot of arguably important details which weren't in the movies: Sam's box of magic earth; Galadriel's Ring; Bilbo's valiant offer to take the Ring to Mount Doom. Even Tom Bombadil gets name-checked!

In fact, the writers, Shaun Mckenna and Matthew Warchus "get" Lord of the Rings in a way that Peter Jackson simply didn't. Over and over again, they zoom in on what is important in the story and then – disregarding details of geography and time-line – find clever and witty ways to present it to the audience. We are never told that there are nine rings for mortal men, seven for the dwarves, or five lords a-leaping. The Black Riders are never identified as "ring wraiths". On the other hand, great importance is attached to the fact that Lothlorien depends on the power of Galadriel's Ring and that, once the One Ring is destroyed, Lothlorien will come to an end. It only gradually dawns on Frodo that the elves he saw in the Shire were leaving Middle Earth and the realization that the end of the One Ring means the end of the Elves is what tempts him to hold on to the Ring at the very end. We understand Galadriel's desire to take the One Ring in a way that we simply don't in the cinema version.

And yes, the show even leaves in a version of the Scouring of the Shire: it ends with paper flowers blooming all over the stage as Sam uses the elvish soil to repair the damage done by Saruman. Galadriel says that although the elves are leaving Middle-earth, this means that Lothlorien will in some sense survive. This coming together of Elvishness and Hobbitishness (completely omitted from the movie) is arguably the whole point of the story.

I must admit that I wiggled a bit when Boromir turned out to be an Anglo-Saxon looking warrior, who needs the Ring to rouse his father ("The Steward of the Lands of Men") from a spell laid on him by Saruman. In the event, Aragorn breaks the spell by revealing that he is the descendant of "The Great King"; and therefore true ruler of "The Lands of Men". He leads them in one final last stand against the forces of darkness (backed up by some "really surprisingly friendly trees") before going off to the gates of Mordor to distract the Dark Lord's attention away from Frodo. So, Boromir is a Rohirrim and Denethor is Theoden and Pelannor Fields is completely missed out? Not really: it's just a question of the whole "epic" sub-plot being condensed into a single thread, just enough to show how the events in the wider world impact on Frodo's quest. As a representation of Tolkien's imaginary world it makes about as much sense as saying that Henry VIII led the Welsh against the Spanish Armada. As a piece of theater, I thought it was inspired.

The cast are universally strong, although there is a sense they've been picked for their acting, dancing and tumbling rather than for their singing. The star of the show is undoubtedly Michael Therriault's Gollum. He never stops moving, standing upright when the Smeagol side is dominant and crawling across the stage when he is Gollum. I don't think he supplants Peter Woodthorp as the definitive Gollum, but I preferred him to Andy Serkis. Malcolm's Storry's Gandalf is rather more peppery than we might expect, greeting Frodo in Rivendell with an angry "You put on the Ring!" but this makes the final scenes, when he says the Hobbits can now sort out the Shire without any help from him all the more poignant. Saruman (Brian Protheroe) looks and sounds almost identical to Gandalf – another important point about the story which this production "gets". Given that Denethor and Theoden are all but omitted from the story, Merry and Pippin don't have that much to do, and are rather reduced to comic relief. I could have done without Pippin's yokel accent or the slightly laboured running gag about him being scared of forests.

A total pedant might say that it would have been a good idea for the cast to agree in advance about the pronunciation of "Gollum" and "Earendil". I thought that there was slightly too much use of areal ballet: the Elves in particular seemed to spend most of their lives dangling from the ceiling, which made them feel a little too much like the Victorian Peter Pan fairies which Tolkien abominated.

Really, this is the best dramatic interpretation of Lord of the Rings to date. It's far more intelligent than either Jackson's movies or the cartoon, and much more creative in its use of the material than the old Radio 4 plays. I think that the Professor would have hated the liberties that are taken with the "facts" of "history"; and I think that he might have found the Elves a bit too, well, fey, but I think he would have thoroughly approved of the use of stage trickery to engage, rather than to replace, the audience's imagination. McKenna and Warchus have produced something really very special. May the hairs on their feet never fall out!

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of Do Balrogs Have Wings?, which contains all my essays on Lewis and Tolkien, including some previously unpublished.

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Asexual Pride

"....and I think in the same way there are things that men can read which can send out signals, I think, which are deeply unattractive to women."

"Such as?"

"Well, sci-fi and fantasy. I think if you're the sort of man who's reading one of those lurid books with sort of triple breasted amazonian women on the front cover and inside it's all about swords and sorcery and so on then I think what you're communicating to any woman is that you're still an adolescent"

"Unless the woman is into that kind of thing, of course, I mean, it's possible"

"It is, it is, but I have friends who love that sort of stuff and many of them are still looking for women who are also similarly interested in that particular subculture. "

"Stick your nose in a book and you could find love. How the right book can find you the right partner." Today, BBC Radio 4, August 1st

Blogger wastes lunchtime in pedantic discussion about Peter Jackson. Ends up quoting Python.

What I did on my summer holiday (1)

Saturday morning -- The Cambridge Tolkien society are doing their dramatic reading (actually, a full scale performance with singing and sound effects) of highlights from the Brian Sibley radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings. We have got as far as Shelob's lair. And I'll need your star-glass Mr Frodo; you did lend it to me, and I'll need it, for I'll be always in the dark now... I glance around the audience to confirm I'm not the only person who appears (inexplicably) to have something in their eye.

Over the course of the convention, I think I attended a total of 33 (*) lectures on different aspects of Lord of the Rings. It is doubtless very interesting and important to learn about the root of the elvish word for 'tree', to wonder about the influence that Shakespeare or William Morris might have had Tolkien's writing; or to compare Melkor with Milton's Satan. (They were both evil. The end.) I am even prepared to own up to a little light filking. But it was nice to be reminded of why the 50^th anniversary of the publication of the Lord of the Rings is an event worth commemorating. Just how many books are there which, even on the twentieth reading, can still make you laugh and cry. Sometimes on the same page. Sometimes at the exact same moment. Now sir, you shouldn't laugh. I was being serious.

Saturday lunchtime -- Stagger out of Martin Barker's lecture on sociology, thinking 'I now have a spare hour to get some lunch.' Find printout pinned to door saying 'Extra talk: Michael Scott Rohan on Tolkien and Wagner.' It was that kind of weekend.

The root of the elvish word for 'Tree' is the same as the root of the elvish word for 'Light'.

Some people imagine Elvish to be an artificial language, the sort of thing that you could learn and have a conversation in, like Klingon and Esperanto. In fact, Tolkien left only a grammatical structure and a few hundred words of his made up languages. His primary interest was in philology. How language develop; how words form; how mythology informs language and language informs mythology.

(The award for 'lecture I understood least of' goes to the promisingly entitled 'Tolkien as I knew him', which turned out to be an elderly Swedish academic explaining the finer points of the Anglo-Saxon and middle English PhD that Tolkien had supervised him in. But it contained one fascinating scholarly anecdote: Tolkien met a French academic, and was able to say to him 'I expect in your dialect you pronounce such-and-such a word in such-and-such a way' -- purely by applying the rules of philology and sound change)

Within the mythos of the Silmarillion, 'the light that was before the Sun and the Moon' came from the Two Trees of Valinor: so of course 'tree' and 'light' are the same word... because they are the same concept. (c.f Gil-galad, star-light; Galadhrim, tree-people.) In a lecture entitled 'Galadhremmin Ennorath', John Christie pointed out that the images of 'trees' and 'light' are consistently connected in all of Tolkien's writings from the terribly early poems about Earendal down to the Lord of the Rings and beyond. And there is also an association between light and hair: (Galadriel's hair is said to resemble the light of the Two Trees) and between light and gems (Feanor captured some of the light of the Trees in the holy gems known as Silmarils). One example of the images appearing in conjunction occurs in Sam's song in Cirith Ungol – shortly after he has taken Galadriel's star-glass from Frodo:

Or there may be tis cloudless night
and swaying beeches bear
the Elven-stars as jewels white
amid their branching hair.

This kind of thing almost scares me. Lord of the Rings is so dense; Tolkien put so much into the book without drawing attention to it. In fact, he probably didn't 'put it in' at all: light and trees and hairs and jewels just come out together because he is thinking in Elvish. How much more of this stuff would there be to discover if I knew more Quenya?

Friday Night : The Cambridge Tolkien Society also revived their 'Reduced Silmarillion Company' revue, which was first performed at Oxonmoot in 2002. There are not too many social settings in which you could get uproarious laughter out of, say, the textual history of 'The Fall of Gondolin' while depicting the Silmarils as three cans of beer. The story of Beren and Luthien was done in pantomime style rhyming couplets, but it appears that some real lines from the 'Ley of Lethian' were smuggled in.

It was a lot funnier than I am probably making it sound.

But I wonder who had the brilliant idea of staging this satyr play first, and following it up with the Greek Tolkien society's extremely serious performance entitled either 'Oedipus and Turin' or 'Doom and Fate: where myths meet.' It will be remembered that both Turin and Oedipus marry a close family member, and both of them have a black sword, apart from Oedipus. I take my mithril coat off to the Greek people: can you imagine a group of Brits saying 'I know, when we go to the Athens Tolkien convention, we'll put on a play involving some excerpts from the Silmarillion and some excerpts from Hamlet. And in case that's too easy, we'll do it in Greek.' A fairly literal dramatisation of the last few pages of Turin's story made out a pretty good case for it structurally resembling a Greek tragedy (messengers coming in with terrible news and begging to be allowed to keep silent, and all that). The substantial excerpt from Oedipus Rex made better theater; presumably because Sophocles was a slightly better playwright than Tolkien. This successfully made the point about the difference between Doom and Fate. Turin marries his sister because the malicious dragon wants to harm in, and because Morgoth has cursed him. Oedipus marries his mother because...well, because life's like that and fate's a bastard.

But still, I felt sorry for the guy playing Turin. He walked onto the stage in a pretty good costume and started declaiming serious lines at a pasteboard dragon, and all anyone in the audience (well, me at any rate) could think of was the R.S.C version we'd seen ten minutes before in which Turin was depicted as an over-enthusiastic school-boy delivering lines like 'I know, I think I'll go forty leagues out of my way in order to commit a pointless act of genocide against a civilian population'!

Thursday: Inexplicably, all conventions have opening 'ceremonies'; equally inexplicably, people go to them. It's the only point at which all attendees are assembled in one place, and can be addressed by the convention committee. I'm glad I showed up this time. The 'one or two surprises' turned out to be a short speech by Priscilla Tolkien, the Professor's daughter. Priscilla sometimes feels a little like the Tolkien society's equivalent of the Queen Mother. At the Oxford conventions, the society committee is always very protective of her -- clearly, a very old lady doesn't want to be mobbed by fanboys, or more importantly, by journalists. According to tradition, I was briefly introduced to her at my first Oxonmoot, but it was nice to hear her make an actual speech, and even better, to hear her do a brief question-and-answer session in a packed lecture hall the next day. Not surprisingly, she politely avoided all controversial and scholarly questions -- but it was extremely moving to hear the little domestic details.

To think: we are actually in the same room as the little girl who first received the Father Christmas letters. All a bit overwhelming, really.

It appears that we have learned to stop worrying and love Peter Jackson.

Well, that may be an exaggeration. When we are consciously or specifically debating the movie, we are likely to be very critical of it. Priscilla told a story about having re-typed the early chapters of Lord of the Rings for her father, and being terrified to the point of nightmares by the Black Riders. Someone asked if she had seen the movies. With her very English (almost headmistressy) tact, she said that she would 'rather not go into that'. The questioner just wondered if she had still found the Black Rider's frightening in the film. 'Oh, good God no!' she exclaimed, adding something about 'spectacle and sensation'.

Thunderous applause.

On the other hand, Martin Barker gave a talk about a massive sociology project which he is involved with, researching the impact of and response to the movies. His statistics show that the more times someone has read the book, the more likely they are to like the movies. Applause from floor. 'I wonder why you applauded?' he asked.

Voice from floor: 'Because there is too much Jackson bashing!' More applause.

(He has also discovered that people who first read the book in the 1960s are more likely to miss Tom Bombadil than people who read it more recently...)

But in general, the movies seem increasingly to be accepted as another text; a fact to be taken into account, a piece of data that you need to refer to. An American academic talking about 'The theme of sacrifice' mentioned that Frodo says to Galadriel 'I know what I must do, it's just I'm afraid to do it'....and left the lecture room relatively unscathed. This would not have been the case three years ago. The aforementioned talk about light and hair used stills from The Fellowship of the Ring alongside texts from The Book of Lost Tales. A very helpful piece in the 'religion' stream pointed out that although a lot of the specifically Christian elements of the book vanished from Jackson's screenplay, the film retained a lot of very Catholic looking visuals. (The evenstar looks like a cross or a traditional star of Bethlehem; Minas Tirith looks like a cathedral; Aragorn's mum looks like a Madonna; and the Red Book looks like a Bible.)

People wishing to stay up all night had the opportunity to watch the extended versions of the movies on a projection TV. On Day 3, the sign outside the video room offered a 'prize for the best heckle'. So we obviously haven't all made friends with movies. Maybe it's more of a watchful peace.

(My entry in the clerihew competition failed to win a prize.

Elijah Wood.
Is not particularly good.
His fidelity to the text is not exactly slavish
But at least he isn't John Rhys-Davies. )

A film-studies lecturer gave a talk on a soft-porn movie called Lord of the G-Strings, and for the first time ever, the Tolkien society admitted the existence of slash fiction.

Saturday: That journalist was spot on about the way the audience spontaneously mumbled along with Tom Shippey when he quoted All that is gold does not glitter / not all those who wander are lost. This is called 'spotting a telling detail', and is, I guess, how one gets to write feature pieces for the Guardian.

I have often wanted to present certain of my colleagues with a diagram of a human figure, with two labels, clearly delineating the 'arse' and the 'elbow.' In the same way, certain academics seem to require recognition guides enabling them to clearly distinguish between 'wood' and 'trees'. A very interesting scholarly lecture made out a good case for the 'endless knot' or pentangle on the shield of Sir Gawain in the middle-English poem 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' which Tolkien edited and translated having been recognisable to medieval English people as a three-men's Morris board. (Pentangles engraved in church pews are therefore less likely to be pagan survivals and more likely to be a means of passing time in boring sermons.) Someone from the floor got in before me with the obvious question: 'Is it significant that Gawain has a game-board on his shield, given that playing games is so much what the poem is all about?'. 'That hadn't occurred to me' said Mr Speaker.

Mr Film-Studies Man was surprised that we laughed when he referred to a character called 'Ara-porn' in Lord of the G-Strings. 'It didn't really occur to me that this stuff was funny,' he said.

As the weekend progresses, I started to feel that I didn't need to hear any more about how Tolkien was influenced by, or the influence he may have had upon, Shakespeare, William Morris, G.K Chesterton, Phillip Pulman and a large number of people I had never heard of. I am also not sure that I need to be told that, say, the myth of the Ents and the Entwives in some ways resembles modern gender politics and in other ways doesn't.

One occasionally ended up feeling sorry for the academics. It must be rare enough for them to be addressing students who have actually read the text under discussion; and unheard of to have an audience who have all read it dozens of times. One speaker made the mistake of implying that Frodo only goes to the Undying Lands in spirit, and had to deal with quotes from the Silmarillion in the question and answer session. Another one asked how anyone could possibly know the Rhyme of the Ring, since it was spoken by Sauron on Mount Doom...and lots of people told him.

A ten year moratorium should be established on referring to Tolkien's metaphor of the 'soup of story' in lectures about sources and influence.

Most obscure subject for a talk: 'Middle-earth re-enactment in Estonia'.

Tolkien never quite made up his mind about Galadriel's back-story. In one version, Feanor asks for three strands of her hair (which, it will be remembered, resembled the mingled light of the Two Trees.) She refuses him. Centuries later, Gimli unknowingly makes the same request. Because of his courtesy, she grants it to him. He says that if he survives the War of the Ring, he will preserve the threes hairs in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of his house forever. At this point, Beth Russel, who was giving a talk entitled 'Galadriel and her lovers' speculated out loud; 'I wonder if he put them in one crystal, or in three.' I swear that there was a gasp of astonishment from the audience. Because, of course, three crystals, each containing a hair of Galadriel (which resemble the light of the Trees) would be an obvious symbol of the three Silmarils, which Feanor made, and which contain the actual light of the Trees. Given that Feanor made the Silmarils because Galadriel had refused him her hair, the symbolism is irresistible. I repeat. It scares me that Tolkien's legendarium (as we like to call it) has this much depth and complexity: that every time you study a passage, you find new connections which you hadn't spotted before.

'I bet there weren't any women there,' said a colleague by the water-cooler on Wednesday. Actually, I would have said the ratio of Ents to Entwives was very nearly 50/50; including married couples with kids; older looking people with grown-up children; aging hippies with scraggy beards; and someone with the badge-name 'Gramps.' On the other hand, despite the international flavour of the event it was, as the fellow said, hideously white. More people were inclined to begin sentences with '...at my church' or '...well, as a Christian, I...' than would probably be the case at a Star Trek convention. I was twice asked 'What's your field', expecting the answer 'What did you study at college?' not 'What's your job?'

Tolkien's books contain a lot of singing; and most of the songs have now got established tunes; I guess that everyone agrees the tune of Gil-Galad was an elven king is the one which Stephen Oliver wrote for it, despite that fact that someone demonstrated that it can be sung successfully to 'When the saints go marching in.'

At lunch time on the last day, there was an impromptu musical session in the canteen on the top floor. Some of it was more or less normal convention filking; Tolkien fans being as capable of silliness as anyone else. (Thar's been a courtin Pippin Took / On Ettenmoor bah t'at etc etc etc.) There's also been an outbreak of rather good Beatles filks which I sadly didn't get the words of. (All you need are rings, rings, rings are all you need.)

But before long, someone was doing a heartbreaking Bilbo's Last Song in a version I didn't know, and someone stood up and did In Western Lands un-accompanied.

The truth is, of course, that conventions are the normal and sensible part of life, and everything outside them is crazy. What could be more rational than an environment where everyone knows the same corpus of stories and wants to study them, talk about them, make up serious plays about, burlesque them, sing about them; where everyone can be assumed to be friends with everyone else because everyone loves the same things. It seemed rather a shame to have to go back to the weird fantasy world where you have to interact with people who don't love Lord of the Rings.

Quotes.

"The title of my talk is "Pennas Echuir Enydon", on the origin of the ents. Yes, I came all the way from America to show you my Pennas."

"Tolkien said that he cordially disliked allegory, which must have made writing Leaf by Niggle a very unpleasant experience for him."

"How is it that everybody says that they don't read slash, and then goes on to make generalisations about it?"

"I was doing some research into Star Trek fans....Don't laugh. People laugh at you."

"Well, he didn't like spiders, but I never heard him mention beetles..." (Priscilla, answering a question on Tolkien's attitude to the popular music of the 1960s.)

(*) Frodo as Sacrificial Hero; Tolkien: the critic and the fiction writer; Invented and Borrowed Myths; Tolkien and Williams; Wise Sayings in Lord of the Rings; Tolkien as I knew him; The Science of Lord of the Rings; Tolkien's lunar creation myth; Influence of Climate on myth; the loss of the Entwives; Tolkien's theory of reading; WWI and the passage of the Dead Marshes; Tolkien in Fiction; Tolkien and Oral Tradition; LOTR international audience project; Tolkein and Wagner; Peter Jackson and catholicism; Tolkien and Christianity; Satan and Melkor; An ecumenical approach to Tolkien; Tolkien the pagan; Tolkein Dirty: The Lord of the Rings and sexploitation movies; the Inklings in their political context; the Question of the Round Arda; Death and Mortality; 'Galadhremmin Ennorath; Sir Gawain's pentangle; Hobbit names aren' from Kentucky; They might have been giants (the origin of the ents) ; Snergs, Hobbits and Pygmies; Narratorial authority in Lord of the Rings; Tolkien and Shakespeare; Galadriel and Her Lovers; the Ace Copyright Affair; Tolkien in the 60s.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of Do Balrogs Have Wings?, which contains all my essays on Lewis and Tolkien, including some previously unpublished. Alternatively, please consider making a donation of £1 for each essay you have enjoyed.

Well, I'm back, he said uncertainly.

Off to Birmingham...

...for the Tolkien 2005 convention on Thursday. So I although I have things to say about Tony Blair and Conan the Barbarian (that's two seperate essays) don't expect me to post anything here for about a week.

Goodness me, "Keys of Marinus" sucks.

How movies work

"I'm sure Tolkien might have probably turned in his grave, but it was in keeping with the vision that Pete had for Legolas and stuff which, you know, was very important."

Orlando Bloom

I just realised that I haven’t written a review of Lord of the Rings in over a fortnight....

I learned one thing from watching the extended cut of Return of the King. Whatever else Peter Jackson may be, he is a very good editor. When he decides to consign something to the cutting room floor, the rest of the world should have the sense to leave it there.

The extended Fellowship of the Ring felt very much like, well, an extended Fellowship of the Ring. The same film, with a couple of new bits added. The opening “Bilbo does exposition” passage was a self-indulgent error, as was Sam’s recitation of his verse from “When evening in the shire was grey...”. But it was nice to get some back story about Aragorn’s mother, Beren and Luthien, and Elves going to the Grey Havens. The additional scenes also sorted out several point of internal continuity, such as “Why is everyone wearing elvish broaches in the second half?”

The extended Two Towers, on the other hand, was a very different film compared with the un-extended version. While most of my first order questions (e.g. “What the heck happened to Tolkien’s book?”) were left un-answered, most of my second-order questions, such as “What’s the deal with the horse?” were sorted out. The extended movie may not have had a great deal to do with the second volume of Lord of the Rings, but it did make sense on its own terms.

Digression.

One of the best bits of the extended Two Towers (hereafter X-TTT) is the flashback to Faramir and Boromir at the battle of Osgilliath. It is a very Good Thing to see Faramir and Boromir together as two brothers. (If they weren’t going to do a scene together, why not get Mr Bean to be do both roles?) It’s nice to see Denethor in a Daddy role to both of them. It established all the things we needed to know about the characters – Denethor is barking, Faramir and Boromir really love each other although they see each other’s faults; Denethor, quite unfairly, prefers Boromir. And it explains why Faramir speaks the line “A chance for Faramir son of Denethor Captain of Gondor to show his quality” as if it has some significance. (In the book, he’s quoting a remark made by Sam. In the theatrical Two Towers (T-TTT?) the line comes from nowhere and is pretty meaningless. But in X-TTT it turns out that he is remembering something his father said. Cool.) Of course, no such scene exists in the book, and arguably Denethor was never at Osgilliath. But that only demonstrates that you can be Very Faithful to Tolkien and still Make Stuff Up.

The X-TTT flashback shows Denethor sending Boromir to the Council of Elrond. This is also Good Thing. One of my complaints about FOTR was that none of the subsidiary members of the Fellowship are properly introduced. Legolas gets no back-story beyond “he’s an elf.” (Aragorn subsequently reveals that he comes “from the woodland realm” and Gimli calls him “a princling”, but that’s it.) So by all means, tell us how Boromir came to be at the Council. And ever skip over the “Seek ye the sword that was broken, at Imladris it dwells” part, if you like.

But, but, but, but, but.

In the flashback, Denethor already knows that Isildur’s Bane is a the One Ring; and he is specifically sending Boromir to Rivendell so he can bring it back to Gondor. This retrospectively changes Boromir’s character. The implication of the first film, as with the book, is that Boromir has major misgivings about the idea of destroying the Ring; but that he sincerely, albeit reluctantly, promises to fulfill the will of the Council, and in the end is tempted by the Ring and attacks Frodo. This new flashback implies that he was Denethor’s spy the whole time, under orders from Dad to pinch the Ring. When he promises that he will help Frodo go to Mordor; either he has his fingers crossed behind his back; or else he is consciously reneging on the promise he made to his father. This puts a whole different slant on the “Boromir picks up the ring in the snow” scene. He’s not a good man being tempted by the Ring’s intrinsic evil: he’s a hypocrite thinking “Should I obey Dad, or obey Elrond.” It means that Sam is largely mistaken when he tells Faramir that “He tried to take the ring from Frodo after he had sworn an oath to protect him.” It would have been more accurate if he had said “He tried to take the Ring from Frodo, because he had sworn an oath to his father to do so.” (Did Sean Bean know that this was his character’s motivation when he played out those scenes?)

Various people have compared Denethor with King Lear: both are old; both of them go mad; neither of them are blind; and both of them are Kings, except Denethor. But it occurs to me that the “mad-old-king who stupidly sends his good son away and puts his faith in his bad son” does have some resonance with the story of Lear and his daughters: more so with the Gloucester sub-plot. Is it possible that Tolkien had read Shakespeare?

End of digression. Back to Return of the King.

Nothing in X-ROTK radically changes the structure of the film. I was hoping that the extended version might clarify some of the grosser absurdities of the theatrical version, but I was mainly disappointed. The bit about “Arwen’s fate being tied to the ring” was gibberish in T-ROTK, and remains gibberish in X-ROTK. The new version adds a pointless scene in which Aragorn looks into the palantir and sees, first Sauron’s eye, and then Arwen lying mostly dead on the ground. I have no idea what this scene means. Neither, I imagine, does Peter Jackson. Some explanation must exist, because there is a bit in the trailer where Elrond says “You gave away your life’s grace...”, which was presumably going to tie Arwen’s illness back to her rescue of Frodo in FOTOR. But this doesn’t make it to either version of the movie. (Merry and or Pippin doesn’t ever get to say “We will see the Shire again!”, either.)

A couple of plot-lines are slightly fleshed out. There is an extra scene of Aragorn talking to Eowyn, which tends to confirm my impression that film-Aragorn is a bit of a cad. Book-Eowyn is basically living out an inverted courtly love story. She falls in love with someone far above her station; who is in any case promised to another: he does nothing to encourage her, but she pines and is devoted to him, until she finally transfers her love to someone else. Movie-Aragorn’s one true love has told him that she is sailing to the Undying Lands; and so he flirts with Eowyn on the rebound. He hears that Arwen has not left Middle-Earth after all and dumps Eowyn two minutes later. At least Faramir and Eowyn actually get to meet before falling in love, but the scenes are pretty perfunctory. It turns out that the wise women in the houses of healing like to have crap pop music playing in the background while they work.

Positively good scenes included a meeting between Faramir and Pippin; and a couple of scenes of Frodo and Sam in Mordor, including a quite affecting shot of them throwing their un-necessary gear into a crevasse. I was pleased to see Gandalf confront the witch-king, although I thought it was rather pathetic that they had to come up with an “action movie” motivation for it. (No scene can appear in a movie unless it represents an obstacle which the hero has to overcome. In the book, Gandalf blocks the Witch Kings way at the gate of the city. No obstacle for the hero. Bad. In the film, the Witch King blocks Gandalf’s way to Denethor’s funeral pyre. Obstacle for hero. Good. Is our view of story really so mindlessly simplistic?)

Tolkien-geek-Andrew was pleased to see Jackson’s miniatures team having a shot at visualising the broken statue of the king which Frodo and Sam see at the cross-roads. But movie-fan Andrew honestly wonder’s what it was there for. Frodo’s line about the king’s crown of flowers showing that the orcs cannot conquer forever is deleted, which, typically, seemed to remove the main point of the scene. Sam still gets to say “Look, the king has a crown again”, which begs the response “We can see that you fool.”

But an awful lot of the “new” scenes served only to slow down an already top-heavy film. I am really, really, sorry, Christopher: I know that you are fine actor, and that you speak fluent elvish, and might have been an opera singer if you’d had the Latin; I know that you once met the Professor personally and that Attack of the Clones wasn’t your fault -- but truly, Mr Jackson was quite right to cut your big moment. To begin Part 3 with death of the villain who was defeated in Part 2 does indeed feel tedious. Saruman’s death has no dramatic tension. In the book, the main point of Saruman is that his voice can bewitch people, so during the parley in the tower there is a real danger that he will corrupt the party – for a moment, those present think that Gandalf is going to go over to his side. This aspect of Saruman has almost vanished from the movie; so there is very little drama or threat in the scene. Nothing comes of it except that Saruman throws down the Palantir.

While Theoden and Saruman were shouting at each other, I half expected Saruman to reply “Now go away or I will taunt you a second time.” But the confrontation between Gandalf and the Mouth of Sauron was even more pythonesque. I take it that by “mouth”, Tolkien simply means “herald” or “spokesman”. Jackson decides, as ever, to take the text as literally as physically possible. Having interpreted “the eye of Sauron” as a huge glowy thing on top of the tower, he decide it would be a good thing to spend most of his time in extreme close up of the Mouth’s mouth, presumably so we can consider the results of failing to brush our teeth regularly with fluoride. The Mouth has a funny accent and a silly hat. It felt like a horrible hybrid of the Trade Federation from Phantom Menace, and Samuel Becket’s Not I. Of course, the parley with the herald at the gates of Mordor violates Jackson’s Second Rule: several seconds pass without anyone thumping anyone else. But Jackson has an ingenious solution to this problem. When the Mouth shows them Frodo’s mithril coat, Aragorn does what any chivalrous future-king would do under the circumstances, and chops his head off on the spot. Why oh why couldn’t the Mouth have said “Tis but a flesh wound, I’ve had worse” at this point? It would have been so much funnier than Gimli saying “Guess that concludes negotiations.” And humour is what you need at the climax of a twelve hour epic.

Ah, Gimli, Gimli, Gimli: a filmic catastrophe of Binksian proportions, undermining every, single scene he appears in. (Why the hell is he sitting in the stewards chair? Has he no respect for Faramir? Has Gandalf? Has Aragorn?) Yes, Peter Jackson, you were so, so right to cut out the “drinking competition” between Gimli and Legolas from T-ROK. What on earth possessed you to put it back in? When someone is drunk in a movie, why does it invariably happens that they say “I am perfectly sober” and then fall over backwards? Have you ever seen a real drunk behave like this? So why put it in your movie? It’s not big. It’s not clever. It sure as heck isn’t funny. Exactly the same cliché turned up in this years Vicar of Dibley Christmas Special, a programme which provided the final clinching argument for abolishing both the BBC license fee and the ordination of women.

Gimli is there, too in the extended build-up to the “Paths of the Dead” sequence. Spooky tendrils of mist form in the air and reach out to him, he blows very hard to disperse them, and they form again. He says “Ya-ya-ya-yoiks”, and Legolas throws him a Scooby Snack. He’s even there in the ruddy closing credits, making an anachronistic, vernacular “okay” sign. Showing his contempt for us all. Mocking us.

One could also mention the structural cock-up of showing us Aragorn boarding the Corsair’s ships, which served little purpose except to make his arrival at Minas Tirith a soupcon less dramatic. When he threatens to board them the pirate king says “You and whose army?” and Aragorn says “This army!” Making ancient world characters use modern turns of phrase is very funny in Carry on Cleo, here, it just gives the impression that you don’t give a shit.

Similarly, when Frodo tells Gollum that he swore on the Ring to obey him, the CGI sprite replies “Smeagol lied!” Does anyone want to enumerate how many movie-villains have made this joke over the last 20 years. (“But you promised.” “I lied”) If an oath taken on the Precious doesn’t mean anything to Smeagol, then a large chunk of the last 6 hours is rendered meaningless – Frodo wasn’t showing mercy to a pathetic character who was, at some level, trying “to be very good”, but being naively taken in by a conniving little liar. Which means that Frodo was wrong, straightforwardly, from the beginning, and Sam was right. Which totally undermines their characters. But who cares; it was a funny one liner. And funny one liners is what you need on Mount Doom.


Another thing which both increased and decreased my respect for Peter Jackson were the documentaries on the DVDs. I confess to only having ploughed through X-FOTOR so far. In the positive column, I was fascinated to learn about the massive amount of really thoughtful detail that had gone into the movies, asking questions like “What would Dwarfish weapons be like” and getting Tolkien experts and historians in to come up with good answers. But on the other – a slapdash disrespect for the world he is working with. Apparently, Alan Lee spent some weeks making sketches and models of what Moria ought to look like. But one of his sketches showed a hole in one of the stair-wells. Upon this hint, Jackson decided that there should be collapsing stairs, chasm leaps and, yes, dwarf tossing. None of which was in the original script.

“Make me the most detailed simulation of Moria you possibly can – and I’ll turn it into a sodding fairground ride, see if I don’t.”


People sometimes ask me why, if I feel this way about the movies, I watch them so carefully, so critically, and so, er, frequently.

The answer is rather obvious. Because of the good bits.


Has the idea of a camp parody of Lord of the Rings featuring Gandalf the Gay already been thought of? Is there at least a nightclub somewhere called the Gay Havens?

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