[Estelyn Telcontar]

In searching for other information, I came across three articles in The Encyclopedia of Arda. They compare the movies to the book, doing so not because they disapprove of the movies, but to help those who saw them without being familiar with Tolkien's books.

Here's a passage that fits into this discussion:

From viewers who have never read the original books, the response seems to be almost universally positive. For those of us who know Tolkien's tales well, though, while we can certainly enjoy the movie on its own level too, it's probably true to say that there's a general sense of discomfort at its distance from the original work. It's beyond the aims of this article to try to judge the rights and wrongs of such changes, but they've generated such a response that it would be remiss not to comment on them, however briefly.

At one extreme of this argument is the view that sees the movie of The Two Towers purely as a work by Peter Jackson and his colleagues. This view was succinctly expressed by the commentator Mark Lawson in his column for The Guardian newspaper. Writing of negative responses to The Fellowship of the Ring, he expressed the view that 'This hostility to interpretation is anti-cinematic. The point of movies is to rip up the words and reassemble them as pictures which may - which should - differ in key details.' It has to be said that - at least in a general sense - he is absolutely right about this. One recent popular example of this is the adaptation of Ted Hughes' wonderful fable The Iron Man, which was turned into an animated feature film, The Iron Giant, in 1999. That film jettisoned almost every character and situation from the original book, deleted its entire second half, relocated the action in time and in space: in fact, it fundamentally modified the original in almost every way, and yet the result was a charming and engaging tale in its own right (to the extent that visitors to the Internet Movie Database consider it the 198th best movie ever made, at least at the time of writing). So, there clearly isn't anything intrinsically 'wrong' about making radical changes like this.

But this freedom of interpretation must surely be valid only up to a point. If we were to see a film version of Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending, say, it's hard to imagine the critics accepting that 'reassembly' in a positive light. When Thomas Bowdler attempted to revise and adapt Shakespeare's works to his contemporary (early nineteenth century) audience, his reward was to be immortalised by the scornful word 'bowdlerise'. So, there is a line beyond which an adapter strays at their peril, at least for some exceptional works.

Of course it would be preposterous to compare Tolkien to Shakespeare (or Peter Jackson to Thomas Bowdler!), but it can be argued that his work has a particular exceptional quality of its own. Tolkien is unique in that his stories take place in a fully realised universe, and one that (to a great extent) pre-existed the stories themselves. The Lord of the Rings is an historical novel, and the trivial fact that its history is a fictional one is really beside the point. Its consistent adherence to its own underlying reality is a key (perhaps the key) strength of the book. Even the tiniest of changes within the story can potentially have profound effects on the fabric of its universe, and it's that universe, as much as the stories he set in it, that is Tolkien's true legacy. Perhaps that consideration can help define what's a reasonable change to the original story - the extent to which it enhances or diminishes the broader tapestry into which the story is woven.

For those who would like to read the comparisons, here are the links: A Movie-goer's Guide: FotR, TTT, RotK