[Child of the 7th Age]

I have been reading this thread for a few days and was intrigued with your interchange and decided to jump in. First, only the foolhardy would dispute your basic premise that the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's other writings have certain flaws. If Tolkien was alive today, he would be the first one to admit this. His Letters are filled with self-reflective passages that pinpoint what he regarded as the greatest of these flaws.

The real questions boil down to these three:

• 1. Are the flaws such that they prevent us from understanding or appreciating the story as a whole?
  
• 2. Are their instances where PJ has done a "better" job of interpretation than the original author?
  
• 3. Are the particular instances you cite in the book legitimate instances of "flaws"?

I think we're all in agreement on the first point. No one on either side is suggesting anything different. The problem lies with your second and third questions.

First, in regard to PJ making improvements...Yes, I do think there are certain instances of this. My own favorite example is the character of Boromir. If you look in the Letters, you can see that there were some unique personal reasons why Tolkien "favored" Faramir in his story. This personal bias colored his handling of Boromir, even though he was trying to show an honorable character who was ensnared by the Ring. PJ's Boromir is a more sympathetic character than Tolkien's and I actually think this is an improvement and ironically more in line with what tha author meant to convey.

But, in general, I would say that PJ hits the mark best not when he "changes" Tolkien, but when he faithfully depicts what is contained in the writings. You yourself mention the example of the two Tolkien illustrators who provided the artistic input for the visual depiction of Middle-earth. I think PJ is right on the money here; nowhere does the movie ring more true for me than in these visualizations.

On changes in general.....Some changes are definitely necessary in plot and timing but I do think there are instances in the movie where PJ would have been better off sticking closer to what Tolkien set down on paper. And nowhere does this ring more true than in the case of characterization. PJ's changes do not "improve" the book; they merely take away from the integrity of the story. Frodo and Faramir are two cases in point, which I won't get into because these have been discussed to death down in Movies.

It is on the third point where I most strongly disagree with you. And here I'm going to zero in on your central criticism.

1. No one really suffers in this story.

So basically you have come up with 3 deaths and some people leaving Middle Earth. I am sorry but compared to real warfare these ‘losses’ are ludicrously lightweight. Who comes back to find their children slaughtered, 1,000’s of people massacred for racial reasons, their womenfolk raped, ethnic enmity set in place that will poison the future for hundreds of years? These are the real consequences of war. See WWI, WWII or the Crusades. See the wars of conquest fought in Latin America. Some of the things that go on boggle the mind. Admit it or not the LOTR is horribly clean and nice in comparison.

These points you make are related and I think you are off base on both of them.

First, the specifics.... Let me approach this as an historian, which I am. Tolkien is writing about warfare before the modern era. The kind of war you describe in the paragraph above simply did not come into existence until the technology was there to support it. Not that war wasn't hellish in any period, but the widespread conflagration or an intentional mass genoicide would make no sense in the context of this book.

Warfare just wasn't like that. It was self-limiting because the weapons were self-limiting. Yes, you could have a plague come through and wipe out one-third of Europe's population, but warfare itself wasn't going to do that.

Tolkien simply wasn't interested in depicting that side of the story. His model (also his training) was "mythological" -- the old epics focus on individuals and their fate rather than depicting deaths on a massive scale. Tolkien was more interested in depicting the impact of evil on the soul than in showing mass deaths and confusion. He never said the wider deaths weren't there and sometimes alludes to them but in a very personal way. I am immediately reminded of the scene where Sam has an enemy soldier fall dying into his lap and he wonders where the folk was from, how he got involved in the war, etc.

This kind of personal approach is far more effective and poignant to me than depicting general carnage and mayhem. What if Tolkien had ripped out that scene with Sam and instead put in a general description of all the battle dead? Would that have been a more powerful statement? Personally, I don't think so. It's when you get down to the level of the individual that it begins to touch your heart.

You mention "1000s of people slaughtered for racial reasons." Obviously, that wasn't a factor in this story. But I will say this. I have read widely in the history and literature of the holocaust. I have read books that listed and even showed photographs of the bodies piled up -- the kind of general horror that you suggest Tolkien might have wanted to include. But none of these had the impact on me of a simple book like Elie Wiesel's Night which showed how the world of one or two folk was totally distorted. Statistics and general carnage do not make me weep, but I can not read those passages of personal loss without having an emotional response.

This post is too long and I won't get into the specifics of loss in the LotR. You are oversimplifying things by saying only Frodo is involved. Just look at the relationship of Elrond/Aragorn/Arwen -- in one sense this is a "lose, lose" scenario. Whatever happens, someone will lose, a fact that is made amply clear by Arwen's death scene, when she still can not truly accept the bargain she made so many years earlier. As far as Frodo goes, I would say that the sense of loss is overwhelming. Here is someone who has voluntarily given of himself, who has done the "right" things, the things that any of us would hopefully step forward and do. Yet, even as he sails away to the West, we are left wondering if he can put the pieces back together within the circles of Arda. Yet to this day, we don't have an answer for that and neither did Tolkien. We have the wonderful depiction of the curtain pulling back to reveal a sparkling new land where healing seemed possible, but we also have the poem "The Sea Bell" ascribed to Frodo which suggests a far less optomistic outcome.

Indeed, to me the sense of loss in LotR is overwhelming and is admittedly one of the reasons that I return to this book again and again. An entire era is passing away. Something has been preserved but so much has been lost. There will be no more Elves, the dwarves are dying out and, as Tolkien said, hobbits are rarely to be seen today. Man will remain dominant but all alone. Think about it... All alone.... That is our fate as a race. In many respects, I find that scenario chilling and one which is all too frequently mirrored in our own personal situations. The "loss" is there all over the book...you just have to be tuned in to sense and feel it.

Sorry about this monstor post, but I felt the need to say these things.

[ October 23, 2003: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]