Sunday Review: Tolkien's books and Jackson's movies

Conflicts within and between them

By James T. Carney

I read Eric Meub’s excellent essay on Tom Bombadil [“Third Monday Musing: Remembering Tom Bombadil”] with great interest. I have never been that enthused about the Peter Jackson movies. I have no great problem with the fact that they drop out parts of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, because cuts are inevitable given the nature of movies, and particularly inevitable in the case of a three-volume work that is the first great epic since John Milton’s works.
    Several things make me extremely unhappy (and critical) of Jackson's movies. First is his tendency to enlarge and add to the story by inserting some of his own inventions—something which, in terms of The Lord of the Rings, leads to even more cuts from the original text than would otherwise have been necessary. There are a number of examples of these additions:

• the whole episode dealing with the relationship between Boromir and Faramir,
• the enlargement of the role of Arwen, and
• the invention of a fight with the orcs and wargs during the retreat to Helm’s Deep.

The list could go on and on.

    The same thing occurs in the second movie of The Hobbit [Desolation of Smaug, which opened in theaters nine days ago], where Jackson tends to insert a number of characters from The Lord of the Rings who had no part in The Hobbit, while inventing a totally new female elf character with two love interests. Of course, some of these inventions in Desolation of Smaug result from the commercial necessity of stretching what should be one movie into three.
    The second matter that infuriates me about Jackson is his obsession with fights—particularly those with monsters. This obsession shows up in his adding a fight with a second monster in the Mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring, as well as his fight scenes in the first two Hobbit movies.
    A third objection to the movies is that sometimes the editing is awkward in not taking into account what has happened before. For example, in The Two Towers, Jackson makes a great to-do about Éowyn’s love for Aragorn. She disappears in The Return of the King, except for one scene in which she is shown inexplicably as the consort of Faramir.

One of the costs of Jackson’s second failing is the elimination of scenes showing the delightful air that characterizes Tolkien’s description of Middle Earth, particularly in the first part of The Hobbit and in the first part of The Fellowship of the Ring. The Hobbit was a book for children, although the end of the book, with the death of Thorin Oakenshield, would have been understood only by an adult or a very advanced child. Indeed, as Eric points out, The Fellowship of the Ring started off as kind of a continuation of The Hobbit and another book for children—thus, the chapter describing Bilbo’s birthday party and his surprising disappearance, which is far more similar in tone to The Hobbit than to the rest of The Lord of the Rings. I agree with Eric’s view that at least two of the chapters dealing with Tom Bombadil reflect this initial approach.
    Something that always bothered me about the first part of The Fellowship of the Ring was the two episodes in which Tom Bombadil rescues the group. The episodes seemed to be duplicative. Eric’s essay gave me an idea as to why there are two episodes. I suspect that Tolkien wrote the story about Old Man Willow first and then, when he revised the beginning of the book, added the story about the Barrow-wights (which is more consistent with the rest of the story) but failed to remove the chapter about Old Man Willow.
    One thing that becomes clear from reading The Lord of the Rings and Eric’s essay is that writing is a creative enterprise that evolves a life of its own. A critical turning point in The Fellowship of the Ring occurs when the group reaches Bree and meets Strider. The tone and the story shift at that point into the epic style. The unevenness of tone and story before then reflects, as Eric points out, the fact that Tolkien altered but did not totally rewrite what was originally written to be a children’s story.
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Copyright © 2013 by James T. Carney

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