[Essex]

Eurtyus, my replies are in BOLD to your post as it would get confusing using quotes all over the place: (a few of my previous quotes you answer are left in)

Maybe for a film (or radio drama) adaptation, but not for a book

Pretty much corroborates my main point. You say it yourself, a film is not a book. Therefore changes have to be made.

I am not disagreeing that changes have to be made. This does not mean, however, DUMBING DOWN in many cases.

PS Tolkien built this book as part of his history of arda. he was a professor of anglo saxon as you may be aware. his stories are supposedly set 7,000 years ago, so he has (correctly) decided to give a more 'ancient' air to the language.

In regards to the above point. That is true of the Silmarillion. It was not originally true of the LOTR. That Tolkien later changes his mind is apparent from the sudden shift in the books tone subsequent to FOTR and especially after Rivendell. LOTR was originally started as a sequel to the Hobbit. Nothing more. Hence why Aragorn was originally a Hobbit called Trotter with wooden shoes!!

I don’t understand your point. The story starts in the shire (i.e. middle England). It then moves on to the broader world, where the language of the characters changes. What’s the problem with this? And yes I’ve read the return of the shadow. It shows the work tolkien did to make this story as perfect as possible. 10 years with numerous re-writes.

one of Jackson's worst decisions in my view was giving the orcs cockney accents. this is an example of the improper use of language. (I am almost a cockney (i.e. not within the sounds of bow bells where I was born, but about 10 miles away), and it was embarrassing to hear them speak like this).

Actually I can see why this decision was made. There is a precedent within Tolkien’s own writing. The Trolls in the Hobbit talk with a distinctly Cockney feel and this may well be where the idea came from.

Good point. But the trolls were not altogether evil. The orcs are. I hate to hear them with my kind of accent!

What motivation did the following have to 'follow' the ring in the film: 1/ Merry 2/ Pippin 3/ Legolas 4/ Gimli NOTHING. At least these characters had motivation in the book.

In my opinion their motivations were not much better handled in the book. Sometimes comically so. Legolas basically appeared to be on a jolly although it was hard to tell given his comparative muteness.

OK, motivations.

1/ Merry and Pippin. In the film they (out of the most ridiculous of coincidences) happen to ‘bump’ into Frodo and decide to follow him!!!!!!!! The biggest case of dumbing down in the entire film, really. In the book, they set up a conspiracy and explain their situation fully to Frodo in Crickhowell. In the council of Elrond they just run up and say the line ‘tie me up in a sack’ and Elrond then let’s them go. In the book the motivation for them to be allowed to go are explained by Gandalf to Elrond through FRIENDSHIP.

2/ Legolas. He turned up at the council of Elrond to apologise for the woodelves letting Gollum escape. This is motivation for legolas to earn some redemption for their mistake.

3/ gimli, son of gloin, whose father’s company’s trip through the mountains help get them into this situation in the first place! Also, he was sent to find an answer to sauron’s asking for details on the ring bearer and putting pressure on his people in the north. Helping to get rid of the ring was a perfect anecdote to this.


As to your other point,

The most IMPORTANT thing in ANY story, be it film radio or TV, is not character (that is second) but PLOT. Tolkien’s is flawless.

Whilst I disagree to some extent with the first point. Great characters can effectively do very little in terms of plot and still make a story interesting.
BUT NOT IMPORTANT

Whereas a great plot will still be hamstrung by paper-thin characters if we debate it we will get in endless debates about their relative importance. They are not paper thin. We feel for these characters. Just because we don’t see what they are thinking internally in their heads doesn’t mean they are paper-thin!

However as regards the second point. Well I regard that as well wide of the mark. Firstly I will say that I cannot think of any work of art that can be termed flawless. Perhaps only Ein Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart and Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony come close to me. Fine, well Tolkien’s lotr then, comes CLOSE to flawless for me.

In fact, take Salieri’s comment about Mozart’s music in the film Amadeus, “take away one note and there would be diminishment, take away a phrase and the structure would fall.” That is about as close to a description of flawless as one could get. Does it apply to LOTR. In my opinion, clearly not. Music and literature are two different mediums. You are using one to try and justify your position on another.

So what do I think are the flaws in LOTR? Well a couple would be as follows;

1. The Dark Lord Sauron. A being of supreme evil, already somewhat of a cliché even by the time LOTR was written. Hell even the Wicked Witch had more characterisation than Sauron. The best villains for me are the ones you can understand. You may not agree with them, you may hate them, but you should be able to see why (in their opinion) what they are doing is desirable. Can this be said of Sauron? Not really. Why does he want to conquer Middle Earth? What would he do with it when he has conquered it? Why? Because he was the lieutenant of Morgoth. He is willing to enslave the whole of middle earth because it was not set to the designs of his master. He wants to destroy all that was created because his master, who was thrown down by the powers that be who created middle earth.

None of these questions are clearly answered and all you are left out is a cardboard cut-out villain. No, it’s called mysterious. What, do you want a Jackson type end to the book. Out comes sauron and battles Aragorn at the black gate!!!!!???? You see another excellent version of this mysterious foe in Dracula by Bram Stoker. He is hardly seen throughout most of the book, but is STILL an amazing villain. You do not need to see these villains, just seeing their ‘work’ is enough.

He is evil because, well he just is, and all you need to know is that he opposes the good guys. For a great villain study the character of Jaime in a Song of Fire and Ice. For the first two books he is seen through the eyes of other characters and you hate him. But by book three you start to see things through his eyes and whilst it does not diminish the evil that he does. You can, at least, see why he thinks it necessary. The mark of great writing in my opinion. Tolkien was writing a character of pure evil. I have not read SoFaI so I cannot reply to this.

2. The ring. The ring was the only thing that Tolkien could think of to tie his two books together. He had originally planned to have Bilbo try to return his treasure but then settled on the ring as the important element. As a result some aspects of the Ring seem a bit haphazard. Firstly why does Sauron forge it? Well for power would be the obvious answer but do we really see any examples of the power this grants him. No. We don’t. Indeed shortly after forging it he is shown the worthlessness of his ring when the Numenoreans scare him rigid. No they don’t! This was a power play. He pretended to be ‘scared’ as you put it as this was his plan for their downfall. And it worked perfectly!!!!!!!!

It is interesting to note that he brings about their downfall without needing to rely on the Rings great power at all. In the book it does not appear to avail him any in the battle with Elendil and Gil-Galad either. In fact it seems to be more of a problem than a benefit. What this is showing, is that the ring is not altogether powerful. Tom Bombadil shows this perfectly in the book, and this is why he is such an important character. It still took the last alliance (or penultimate as Jackson no doubt calls it) 7 years to oust sauron from barad-dur, with the deaths of the 2 main protagonists to boot! Doesn’t appear to avail him? I think it does!

3. The Orcs. It has to be said that creating a race for your book that is born evil and incapable of anything other than evil is a little lazy. Basically it allows your pure-blooded heroes to slaughter thousands of them with total impunity. Far better to have some more shades of grey in there I think. Why? You have your shades of grey perfectly written by Sam’s thoughts on the (easterling?) who falls near his feet in ithilien. These people drawn into battle are not purely evil, but the orcs where created as a killing machine specifically for the purpose of evil.

4. Not dealing with the more interesting moral questions. One of the ones that interests me is the question of the Dunlendings. In the distant past they were evicted of their land by the blond haired, blue eyed Rohirrim. When they ally with Saruman to attempt to get their land back they are given a damn good kicking. Why is no attempt made to deal with the legitimacy of the Dunlendings claim to live on that land. Was it right that the Rohirrim evicted them from the lands? Seemingly it was fine. Why? Because the Rohirrim are the good guys so don’t ask questions. Much like questions were not asked when the native Americans were being thrown out of their land in the USA, for example. These things happen. It’s called the survival of the fittest. It happens all over the world and will continue forever unfortunately. This part of Tolkien’s history, is therefore TRUE TO LIFE. It deals with the morality of the point by showing in some cases it is inevitable that these things happen.

5. Lack of real loss. Tolkien vehemently hated being accused of this but I am afraid it does ring true. Frodo apart, no-one really suffers any in this story. Given that the heroes are often going up against near impossible odds the fact that they all come home again with hardly a scratch is very unrealistic and all the harping on about Frodo getting no credit and having to leave home won’t change that.
Losses other than Frodo’s
1/ sam – loses his beloved master
2/ pippin and merry to a lesser extent lose their friend and cousin.
3/ the hobbits lose their INNOCENCE
4/ Bilbo has lost his ring!
4/ gimli ‘loses’ Galadriel
5/ arwen loses her father
6/ Elrond loses his daughter
7/ Galadriel, for a time, loses her husband
8/ the elves finally now lose middle earth (i.e. lorien will fade, rivendell probably) and have to return to the west.
9/ Gandalf will no longer see the shire and the hobbits, which he loved.
10/ eowyn and eomer lose their uncle who was a ‘father’ to them
11/ merry loses theoden who was a ‘father’ to him.
12/ Faramir loses a brother and a father.
13/ Gollum loses his life!
14/ faramir, eowyn and merry almost die.
15/ Boromir loses his life
16/ wormtounge loses his pitiful life
17/ saruman is not allowed back to the west
18/ denethor goes mad and kills himself.

There are gains to go with these losses, but nearly all of the characters suffer in one form or another.

6. Cardboard characters. See Legolas and to a lesser extent Gimli. I can’t see how there is no time to develop them in a 1,000 page book. With Legolas the shallowness of his character is near ludicrous. Just because we don’t see these characters ‘think’ internally does not mean they are shallow. They build up a friendship together. Legolas pines for the sea and is suffering for it. Gimli pines for his love of Galadriel and suffers for it. They show suffering and joy throughout the book.
As well as that we have Boromir aka Bad Brother and Faramir aka Good Brother. Far too simple by far in the book. Boromir was far too simple in the film. I.e. a baddie from the first scene. In the book you can see his struggle with his pride and warrior feelings. Faramir too simple? He is one of the best characters. A master interrogator, and valiant warrior, but with a sensible head on his shoulders, who also craves for the love of his father.

7. Tom Bombadil. I have already stated how vital Tom Bombadil appears to be. i.e. he isn’t. All adaptations take him out. Why? Because he is an indulgence on Tolkien’s part. He was put in originally because he was based on a toy that one of Tolkien’s children owned and later Tolkien ascribed nuances of him being the spirit of the Oxfordshire countryside onto him. Either way totally non-vital to the plot. He was vital in two areas. 1/ for showing that the ring is not all powerful. 2/ for saving the hobbits at the barrow, and enabling merry to get the sword which helps destroy the witch king, which in turn helps save Minas Tirith.
Frankly nothing made me happier than when he was left out of the film. A stoned, dwarf hippy with yellow books would have invoked laughter from much of the cinema going public. And not in a good way.

8. An inability to start the quest. How many ‘safe houses’ does Frodo visit en route to Rivendell? Answer, too many. Let’s see. He has supper with the Elves, has the same with Maggot, has a nice bath in Crickhollow, the same with Bombadil, gets looked after to an extent by Butterbur too. Those first 4 happen in the space of less than a week. Jesus Frodo, get going boy. But this is the book, not a 3 hour dumbed down movie. So he just keeps on running with no sustenance or rest does he? This is true to life.

9. Convenient events. All too often the good guys have something happen to get them out of a jam. The most talked about of which is, of course, the Eagles. Throughout the Hobbit and the LOTR they show up to rescue Bilbo and Co, help out at the Battle of the Five Armies, save Gandalf from Saruman, pick up Gandalf from the top of the mountains after his duel with the Balrog, turn up at the Battle at the Black Gate and then go to rescue Frodo and Sam. Forget about the Istari, Manwe should just have sent more Eagles. Added to them you have the Ents and Huorns sorting out Saruman and Saruman’s army at Helms Deep and The Deadmen sorting out the fleet of Corsairs near Pelagir. All in all there are too many occasions when the heroes are helped out. But this was a battle of the whole of middle earth! Please don’t think that one group of people (i.e. the Americans in independence day) can save the planet!!!!!! This is not Hollywood. The Eagles were an intrinsic part of the plot of the books. They were not a coincidence. They were part of Middle-earth.

PS (separate to this conversation) The old jibe ‘just give the ring to gwaihir and let him drop it in the crack of doom’ does not work. He was a Maia I believe? He would have been tempted just as Gandalf etc would have been to take the ring for his own.

10. As I have already mentioned you also have the preference of description of surroundings to what goes on inside the characters heads (the latter is always more interesting) and the pompous dialogue that takes over in ROTK. This is a style of writing Tolkien was basing the books on tales of old, and was building a legend/mythology for Britain (that does not have one).

11. The latter point also illustrates that the LOTR is an uneven book. It starts out as a sequel to the Hobbit and then progresses into a sequel to the Silmarillion and the transition is not as seamless as it could be. It was part of the history of middle earth. It is both a sequel to the hobbit AND the Silmarillion. Yes it starts this way BECAUSE WE ARE IN THE SHIRE. I believe this was done purposefully by Tolkien, and reading the history of middle earth series shows this.

I think in total that to describe LOTR as flawless is a stretch too far. Ok, it is near flawless, and the best book ever written.
It’s a good book certainly and we can give thanks that it invigorated (though did not invent) the Fantasy market. But when you start claiming that the book is sacrosanct and that any change is blasphemy I do not. I stated that the films have been dumbed down. Where have I stated that the book is sacrosanct?
well there is really only one solution that one can suggest isn’t there. Make a version that satisfies yourself. In other words, I can’t criticize Jackson because I’m not a filmmaker myself!!!!