The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

by Tom Shippey

  His companions in the ship sought him far across the sea. They wept and cried out and scanned the sea-bottom. Then up he sprang and sang aloud and thrust hard at the rudder: ‘Go back again! The queen makes me an invitation, from the mermen’s land!’

  ‘Share out my goods, my pots and coats and brooches, give my clothes-chest to my niece and my shoes to my mother!’ The steersman stood angrily at the prow, and turned towards the sea, said: ‘Fare you well, and may Hell take you, near the deep sea-bottom.’

  * Tolkien wrote three versions of the fifth and seventh lines of this stanza. The printed text of Songs reads Byrla! byrla! medu briht … Swinc tomorgen, drinc toniht!, or ‘Waiter! waiter! bright mead … work tomorrow, drink tonight!’ Tolkien rejected this in his corrected version, writing at the bottom ‘briht is not an OE form'. In the left-hand margin he wrote: Byrla medu! Byrla wín … Scenc nu his and scenc nu mín, or ‘Serve mead! Serve wine! … Now give him his and give me mine'. In the right-hand margin, in a more careful hand, he wrote the version used in text and translation above.

  * This is a quotation from the first few words of Beowulf. One might paraphrase the refrain as saying that Tolkien wished for other epics more firmly centred on monsters.

  APPENDIX C

  PETER JACKSON’S FILM VERSIONS 1

  Fifty years after the first publication of The Lord of the Rings, the ironies pointed to in the first paragraph of this volume have only become more obvious. Far from passing into the ‘merciful oblivion’ predicted by Philip Toynbee, far from being a work few adults will look at twice, as declared by Alfred Duggan, The Lord of the Rings has found a new and even larger audience in a new medium, the three films directed by Peter Jackson and released in successive years 2001–2003. These are arguably the most successful films ever made. As of January 2004 the three between them had taken some 1,279 million pounds at the box office, a figure certainly multiplied by VHS and DVD sales, especially of the extended versions which will give a final total running time of close on twelve hours.2 It is impossible to estimate how many viewers this will represent, since one DVD can be seen by many people, and conversely the box office takings are inflated by repeat viewers, but it is safe to say that hundreds of millions of people have seen or will see the films. There will almost certainly be more viewers than readers (though of course they are often the same people).

  Yet, amazingly, the Toynbee/Duggan reaction continued to be powerful, even during the making of the films. I have to confess that for what immediately follows (as for what was said above about Tolkien’s local reputation, see above and note) I can acknowledge no source other than gossip, though this time it is the gossip of Los Angeles, not Oxford. Perhaps one day the full story will be revealed. But it is said that while Peter Jackson was making the films, the moguls of Hollywood, alarmed at the ever-increasing scale and cost of the production, sent to New Zealand a ‘script doctor’, whose job it was to get the films back on track. The ‘script doctor’ immediately saw the faults in the Tolkien plot. Having heroes riding (or in this case walking) to the rescue of a threatened people was of course perfectly familiar and acceptable, as in The Magnificent Seven: but there was no need to have two threatened peoples, Rohan and Gondor. One of them could be cut out, which meant that the battle of Helm’s Deep could be amalgamated with the battle of the Pelennor Fields. A love-interest for Aragorn was also clearly vital, but once again there was no need for two of them: either Arwen or Éowyn should go, preferably Arwen, and Aragorn should then marry Éowyn instead of politely dissuading her. One could then make a further saving by eliminating the figure of Faramir. Meanwhile, though there was some doubt about the wisdom of having such small and unheroic figures as hobbits as heroes, they might be retained as a gimmick: but four of them were one too many. And it was absolutely vital that one of the hobbits should die. With changes like these, the Lord of the Rings could be converted into a perfectly acceptable, run-of-the-mill movie script – at the expense, of course, of cultural contrast, originality, emotional depth, and a few other inessentials.

  The script doctor’s advice was ignored, and Jackson’s films perhaps convinced even the moguls in the end that there was something they did not know about popular appeal. Nevertheless, the changes proposed do say something about the individual and even eccentric nature of Tolkien’s work. So often it does not do what one might expect. The thought occurs, indeed, that many of the criticisms made of it by Edwin Muir, or Christine Brooke-Rose, or even Leonard Jackson (see above, here and here) would be much more accurate if levelled at the stripped-down, dumbed-down version Hollywood would have preferred. As often, the critics were criticising what they pretended to have read, not engaging with the work itself. But the success of the films does raise a more important issue. For many people, The Lord of the Rings now means the film version, not the books. In what ways are the two versions different, and would Tolkien himself have approved of the difference?

  It should be remembered that Tolkien did live long enough to see a film script and to comment on it – the script indeed survives, with Tolkien’s marginal notations, in the archive at Marquette University, Milwaukee, while there are extensive selections from his letters of protest in Letters, pp. 260–61, 266–67, 270–77. That 1957 script was beyond all question an extraordinarily bad one, unambitious and careless, and Tolkien’s comments are appropriately blistering. Still, three points deserve to be extracted from them. First, Tolkien had no objection to a film version per se. Second, he realised straight away that for a film version his book would have to be cut; and he was sure that in such circumstances outright cutting would be preferable to compression. Better to take out entirely such semi-independent sections as the involvement with Tom Bombadil, or the Scouring of the Shire, or (he noted particularly, see Letters, p. 277) the return of Saruman, than to try to squeeze everything in at racing speed. What would happen if one chose that alternative would be, all too likely, that the Prime Action – Tolkien’s term for Frodo and Sam making their way into Mordor – would be downgraded in favour of the Subsidiary Action, the wars and the battles and the heroes.

  The third point is more debatable. Tolkien (writing it should be remembered with a degree of ‘resentment’ about a confessedly poor script) protested that:

  The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; 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. (Letters, p. 270)

  Leaving aside for the moment the question of ‘the core of the original’, one could challenge Tolkien’s phrase ‘wholly different’. The ‘canons of narrative art’ may well not be wholly different, but in different media they could well be substantially different. But is this just a matter of a change of medium, or does it affect the nature of the entire work? In what follows I try to answer the question just put.

  One very evident difference between writing a book and making a film is money. Someone like Tolkien, writing on his own in the spare time from his ‘day job’, had no one to consider but himself. All that he was investing was his spare time, and as Dáin says to the messenger of Mordor, ‘the time of my thought is my own to spend’ (LOTR, p. 235). Someone like Jackson, controlling a budget of many millions of dollars, had to think about producing a return on the investment, and so to consider popular appeal. Every now and then, accordingly, one can see him ‘playing to the gallery’. Legolas skateboards down a flight of steps on a shield at the battle of Helm’s Deep (JTT 51, ‘The Breach of the Deeping Wall’).*

  Gimli twice plays to a joke about ‘dwarf-tossing’, once in the scene with the Balrog, where Gimli refuses to be thrown across the chasm – ‘Nobody tosses a dwarf!’ (JFR 36, ‘The Bridge of Khazad-dûm’) – and once at Helm’s Deep again, where this time he accepts the indignity in the cause of duty – ‘Toss me … Don’t tell the Elf!’ (JTT 53, ‘The Retreat to the Hornburg’). Tolkien would have understood neither addition: they are ther
e for a teenage audience. Something similar could be said about the extra role given to Arwen in the first film, where she replaces Glorfindel in the scenes after Frodo is stabbed on Weathertop. This makes her into a better example of the strong active female character now preferred, but the rewriting rings a little hollow. In Tolkien it is Frodo who turns to defy the Ringwraiths at the edge of the ford of the Loudwater, but his defiance is weary, lonely and unsuccessful. Jackson has Arwen turning and defying the Ringwraiths, ‘If you want him, come and claim him!’ (JFR 21, ‘The Flight to the Ford’). Of course they do want him, they have every intention of claiming him, and Arwen’s defiance actually makes no difference: not much is gained by introducing the stereotype of the ‘warrior princess’ – except that, as has been said, this is the kind of thing a modern audience expects, or may be thought to expect.

  There are a number of insertions and alterations like this in the Jackson films, but their effect need not be exaggerated: they pass quickly. More serious is the question of ‘the canons of narrative art’, and here I cannot help thinking that there must have been several occasions where Jackson’s scriptwriters3 said, in effect, ‘but we can’t do that’ – occasions where Tolkien himself seems to forget, or ignore, some of the very basic axioms of narrative. One of these is ‘show, don’t tell’. Tolkien’s narrative is on occasion unusually talkative, ready to bypass major dramatic scenes, and quite ready to leave the reader, or viewer, ‘up in the air’ – as for instance with the Ring. The unquestioned ‘core of the original’, to use Tolkien’s term, is the Ring and what we are told about it: its effect is always corrupting, no one can be trusted with it, it cannot be hidden, it must be destroyed and it must be destroyed in the place of its forging. Without these data the story cannot proceed. But though much of this is told by Gandalf to Frodo in the early chapter ‘The Shadow of the Past’, full information and identification does not take place till twelve chapters later in ‘The Council of Elrond’, while there is a full six months between the two events (April 13th to October 25th) – and seventeen years between ‘The Shadow of the Past’ and Bilbo’s farewell party. This leisurely unrolling does not suit the narrative medium of film, and Jackson’s solution is clear, direct, and arresting: much of the history of the Ring as conveyed tortuously by Gandalf and other speakers in ‘The Council of Elrond’ is taken out and told at the start, with a cool, quiet voice-over accompanying scenes of extreme drama and violence on screen (JFR 1, ‘Prologue; One Ring to Rule them All’). Far fewer ‘talking heads’, and the viewer ‘put in the picture’ from the beginning. This change does indeed come with a price, as discussed further below, but it makes the action quicker and more visual.

  Even more challenging for the scriptwriters, I would imagine, was Tolkien’s handling of the destruction of Orthanc by the Ents. In his narrative we have a markedly slow build-up to the Ents’ decision to march, broken by ‘a great ringing shout’ (LOTR p. 473) and rapid movement to the end of the chapter ‘Treebeard’, which closes with the Ents and the hobbits looking down into Nan Curunír, the Valley of Saruman. Attention then moves elsewhere for almost four full chapters, nearly seventy pages, and the next time Orthanc appears it is a ruin. What has happened in between? This is not explained for another ten pages, and then it is told in flashback by Merry and Pippin between them. Jackson’s scriptwriters clearly could not repeat this. They had a choice between a scene with people talking ruminatively about something that had happened already, or a major action scene in chronological order (JTT 59, ‘The Flooding of Isengard’). In a visual medium such a choice can only go one way. The same is true of Aragorn’s journey from the Paths of the Dead to Pelargir, his rout of the Corsairs, and his arrival in the nick of time at the Pelennor Fields. In the book the Grey Company disappears from sight on p. 773, and reappears almost sixty pages later, in a way which further remains unexplained until this time Legolas and Gimli tell the story, again in flashback, a further thirty pages later. Once more it is a choice between ‘talking heads’ and major action scenes with every opportunity for special effects, and the choice for a film-maker is just as inevitable, as one sees from the scenes in the film of The Return of the King. It is hard to protest about any of these changes. In such cases the ‘canons of narrative art’ are different as between visual and verbal media, and Jackson surely had to do what he did.

  Does it lead, however, to Tolkien’s feared subordination of Prime Action to Subsidiary Action, taking one’s attention off the Ring and on to the special effects? I would suggest that in fact Jackson restores any balance lost, several times, with rather deft transpositions which foreground or bring back quiet but important scenes which might otherwise have been suppressed. ‘The Council of Elrond’ is a case in point. In the film, much of its material has already been used, while it is quite clear that no film-maker could afford to spend a significant proportion of his running time on what is in effect a committee meeting, and one which ends moreover in exhaustion and prolonged silence: ‘All the Council sat with downcast eyes, as if in deep thought’ (LOTR p. 263). In Jackson, by contrast, the much shorter meeting ends with all parties shouting and haranguing each other. Yet the vital words at the end are almost exactly the same in both versions, Frodo saying ‘I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way’ (LOTR p. 264). In Tolkien these are dropped into a silence, in Jackson they have to penetrate a hubbub of voices. What happens in the film is that Frodo says ‘I will take the Ring’, and is ignored. As he walks forward to say it a second time, Gandalf turns to listen. And as the others notice Gandalf listening and fall silent, he says it a third time4 this time completing it almost as in Tolkien: ‘I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though I do not know the way’. The scene in the film makes a point vital to the story, and to the Prime Action, which is that it is the small and physically insignificant characters, the hobbits, who dominate the plot, though this is completely unexpected by anyone except Gandalf, the only one among the wise who ever pays any attention to them. Jackson’s straightening and lightening of the plot finds a justification in just this moment.

  Another transposition to which I would call attention comes from ‘The Shadow of the Past’. In this chapter, in Tolkien, there is an especially resonant exchange between Frodo and Gandalf. Slowly realising what Gandalf is telling him, Frodo says reluctantly, ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time’, and Gandalf answers:

  ‘So do I … and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’ (LOTR, p. 50)

  For English people of Tolkien’s generation, the words ‘in my time’ carry a powerful echo. In 1938, returning from the Munich conference where he gave way to Hitler, Neville Chamberlain notoriously and quite wrongly announced that he brought back ‘peace in our time’, and the words (themselves taken from the Anglican liturgy) have become irrevocably tainted with appeasement, avoidance of duty, and failure. When Gandalf says ‘all who live to see such times’, then, he could be taken as meaning, in unconscious prophecy, Tolkien’s contemporaries and countrymen; and when he says ‘them’, the pronoun includes Frodo and the Shire-hobbits with everyone in Middle-earth and indeed everyone at any time faced with the need for painful decision. Gandalf then softens the implied criticism slightly by changing his pronoun, including himself, and narrowing the focus: ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us’ (my emphasis). The echo of Chamberlain, however, might well slip past a twenty-first century audience almost a lifetime removed from 1938 and Munich. But Jackson gives the words a renewed emphasis by moving them to a different place and moment. In the first of his films, the words are still said by Gandalf to Frodo, but they are said in another notably quiet scene, in the dark, as the two characters talk in the Mines of Moria (JFR 34, ‘A Journey in the Dark’). Their force is furthermore established by repetition. Almost at the very end of the movie, as Frodo prepares to leave the Fellowship and set out as he intends for Mordor on his own (
JFR 46, ‘The Road Goes Ever On’), he seems to hear Gandalf’s words repeated, with the face of Gandalf (whom he and the viewers think at that moment to be dead) filling the screen. Only the words have once more had their pronouns changed. This time what Frodo hears is, ‘All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given you.’ The statement has accordingly become entirely personal, directed precisely at Frodo’s own single moment of decision.

  This kind of switching between universal truth and individual application is entirely Tolkienian, exemplified several times in the hobbit-poetry which Jackson has cut out. Yet what is cut out in one place has a tendency to reappear in another. Bombadil has vanished entirely from Jackson’s films, but some of his words are reallocated to Treebeard, and there is one moment where the third of the films shows a very careful reading of the original. At the start of the chapter ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs’, Frodo has a dream – except that we are told explicitly that it may not be a dream. In this dream, or vision, or moment of insight, Frodo sees ‘a far green country open [ing] before him under a swift sunrise’ (LOTR, p. 132). No more is said and nothing is made of this dream, or vision, but it returns almost nine hundred pages later. On the penultimate page Frodo, setting out from the Grey Havens, once again ‘beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise’ (LOTR, p. 1007). What is it that he sees? Is it Aman, the Undying Lands? Or is it something even beyond them, something which is not reserved for him alone? In one of the most violent sequences of the three films, as the trolls are battering their way into Minas Tirith, Jackson surprisingly takes up the question. He shows Pippin sitting, frightened, a little way behind the front line, when Gandalf comes over to him and talks to him about death. Death is not the end, he says, smiling. When it comes we will find ourselves walking into the ‘far green country’. Pippin is reassured, but the scene has a point well beyond the momentary reassurance. One feels that here the wise men, Tolkien or Gandalf or Jackson, are talking to everyone, and talking to them about death, a subject well beyond the range of most Hollywood rhetoric. It is a good example of Jackson’s readiness to hold the action and say something quietly, and it shows also at the very least a careful and thrifty reading of the original.