I don’t quite know what inspired me to commit to reading Tolkien’s
epic again after so long. It must be over 15 years, as I don’t think I had
done more than dip into it again since the movies were released. But having now
re-read it in full, and subsequently re-watched the movie trilogy, thoughts are
swarming in my head.
Firstly, to my relief, as I got going with the novels the
magic was still there. And if some of the mystery and magic is not quite as
fresh after repeated readings (the first of which was in the summer of 1972, at
the end of my first year away at university), then there were ample
consolations. For example, I was surprised to find how much of my memory of the
books had been filtered through the movies, and to some extent I was able to
recapture the preternatural largeness of
Tolkien’s vision, his cosmological, historical and linguistic inventiveness,
his landscape, and (above all) his characters. How much larger they are – and how
much more striking in their grandeur and their spiritual and moral dimensions –
when stripped of the imprisoning shapes of earnest thespians, the ever-present
New Zealand skyline, and the conflict in artistic sensibilities between a 20th
century Oxford don and a 21st century Antipodean purveyor of
cinematic blockbusters.
And speaking of that artistic conflict, perhaps the greatest
joy of re-reading this magnissimum opus
as an older and hopefully wiser man was a deeper and more nuanced appreciation
of Tolkien’s literary skills and his spiritual and moral ethos. This last
observation needs unpacking a little.
Reading the trilogy as a young man, I received it
uncritically. I was swept up by the magic both hidden and revealed in Middle
Earth, inspired by the courage and strength of its main characters, enraptured by journeys of
discovery and the comings of age that transpired, triumphant at the destruction
of bad men and creatures. Even so, I found that the Author’s sometimes
overwrought prose and lengthy poetic elaborations sometimes got in the way of
the narrative. And at the last reading, around the time of the Millennium, I
found myself disheartened by what we might call the socio-economic morality
underlying the narratives. Whether fair or not (but not, I suspect, without an element of truth),
it seemed to me that the Author spoke through his characters when they modelled
a conservative social structure: when women were expected to stay away from men’s
business, when the ordinary folk were expected not to meddle in the affairs of
their “betters”, when there could be nothing nobler than to die in a Pyrrhic
victory for the defence of a political order.
I am being too harsh of course, because every writing is a
product of its era. But those thoughts along with the seeming crustiness of Tolkien’s
prose and dialogue, and the superfluous literary flourishes, were a stumbling
block at the beginning of the new millennium: a time when I was personally
engaged in a fresh journey of spiritual, moral and cultural discovery. So what had
changed by the time of this last reading?
Well the world has changed, of course; reactionary and
xenophobic voices proliferate, and Tolkien’s voice speaks prophetically to our
times. But much more significantly, I feel that for the first time I had just enough
spiritual and literary depth of my own to appreciate Tolkien’s far great
spiritual and literary depth. Subsequent to the previous reading, I trained and
was licensed as a Lay Minister in the Church, experienced a wonderful second
career as a teacher of religion, philosophy and ethics, and most recently
published a novel of my own. By virtue of these successive explorations, I have
at last been able to perceive some of the stitches in Tolkien’s literary
creations: to turn a critical but appreciative eye on his storycraft and
writing technique. Most of all I have seen for myself what I had heard often
enough second hand from others: the scale not just of his skill as a novelist,
but of his spiritual and moral profundity.
Perhaps the Catholicism (with a capital-C) of Tolkien’s
world-view blinded me to this before. His friend and contemporary, C. S. Lewis,
produced spiritual and moral tracts that I could better relate to, as well as novels
whose religious message accorded with my own thinking and belief. But now Lewis seems
trapped in a time-bubble of Edwardian values and expression, while Tolkien’s
more open cosmology and thematic development offer insights into sovereignty,
temptation, redemption, good, evil and loss that seem more-or-less timeless.
And the key to appreciating the morality of Tolkien’s
imagined world without judging the Author is the hopeful sadness the pervades
every episode, the musical ‘dying fall’ audible in every dialogue. In Middle Earth, as
in the only sound Christian ethical framework, the supreme moral authority to
which each person must answer is the dutifully-informed individual conscience.
And salvation, while in its essence the unearned gift of a sovereign Power, can
only be truly appropriated by a sacrificial and potentially costly participation
in the outworking of that Power’s purposes in history.
And so there is much in Middle Earth that should not be,
including division and social injustice. There is much heroic and dangerous work
to be done in translating the providence of that higher power into lasting
unity and justice. And in doing that work, much that is beautiful and noble in
the world will be lost forever. Hope is never far from the characters’ lips,
even some of the worst, even in extreme adversity. Yet even in triumph there is
lasting sadness at the inevitability of loss. And yet even in the face of
inevitable loss, good motives engender acceptance and healing.
In short, then, while there were no surprises in the twists
and turns of the plot, re-reading the books was a joy. But what of the
cinematic project?
Long-time devotees of the novels approach any such project
with a mix of excitement and dread. On one hand, there is the hope of seeing
one’s favourite scenes cloaked in concrete imagery. On the other hand there is a
realistic acceptance that no film, even were it of unlimited length, could fully
do justice to a literary work of such size and depth. Tolkien’s descriptive
prose was of a high order, giving an auteur-director like Jackson plentiful clues
for his sets and settings but also giving each reader his-or-her own mental
pictures with which a cinematic realisation has to compete.
The best that the Middle Earth-fetishists could reasonably
hope for then, was that the movies would adhere faithfully to the main
story-line, would listen to the existing fan-network in matters of visual
design, and (perhaps above all) that all the most loved and/or hated characters
would be impersonated in a manner true to the literary originals.
And the first instalment, ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’
fulfilled many ardent fans’ wildest dreams. The characterisations, and even the
majority of the casting, were close to perfection. Not everybody warmed to
Wood, Weaving or Mortensen; not everyone felt that the Elves and their domains were
beautiful or mysterious enough; and there were other niggles. Some, for
example, were hurt by the exclusion of Tom Bombadil, although how anyone thought
that having Billy Connolly or Russell Brand or similar spouting knowing
doggerel in funny clothes would have sustained the development of dramatic
tension, Galadriel only knows! In short, though, legions of viewers were given
hope.
With the second instalment, The Two Towers, the hopes of
many were dashed. It was, of course, a critical and commercial success – but strictly
as a movie on its own terms. As a translation of the novel to the screen, it
was heavily compromised. In part this was due to the underlying book. The most
demanding and least rewarding of the three novels, structurally as well as
narratively, it serves the purpose of recitative
in an opera – functionally pushing the story-line forward and setting the
scene for the great arias of the final act. It was always going to be a tough
one to turn into a movie that would stand on its own feet, separated from the
first and third instalments by a year in each case.
And in the process of manipulating the story-line to accommodate
the main incidents from the book, while providing all that infilling plot and character
development, and while offering a decently spaced succession of cinematic
high-points and dramatic moments for the lead actors, the spirit of the
original is heavily traduced – especially in the motivations and actions of
some beloved characters. We are left with a weak and whinging Frodo; an Aragorn
who doesn’t really want to be king; a proud and cold Théoden; a remarkably
unloveable Éomer; a Gimli who provides little more than comic relief; a Faramir
who is really no more than a weaker but more disciplined version of Boromir; a
rather sparse bunch of Ents who have to be tricked by a sly Hobbit into
declaring war on Saruman; a squad of regimented Elf-solders who turn up out of the blue and are able to be felled by nothing more fell than Orc-arrows; some pretty
unthreatening Nazgûl who do little more than flap around in the sky squawking
like wounded parrots from time to time. I came away wondering whether I would
bother to watch the final episode.
Fortunately, much improves in the final movie, ‘The Return
of the King’. Apart from Frodo, whose characterisation never seems to regain
the stature it lost in ‘The Two Towers’, most characters acquire greater gravitas, or purpose,
or strength or warmth or menace as appropriate. Once again a massive attempt is
being made to honour the original novel, and there are moments of great power
and pathos to trancend both earlier episodes. The most serious omission is the
Scouring of the Shire, but as with Tom Bombadil in the FotR, even there one can
see justification in keeping to a manageable overall length and preserving the
dramatic shape of the whole. At least, the final ‘dying fall’ at the Grey
Havens is handled with poignancy and dignity.
The tragedy of the movies, I feel, is that a generation is
growing up that will never retain personal mental pictures of Middle Earth that
are free of Peter Jackson’s supervening imagery. I would say to anyone who still has the
opportunity: read the books first, form your own mental pictures, then let
those be the criteria by which you judge the movies. And for those denied the
opportunity to do that, do read the books in any case; there is much to enrich
your heart and mind, even if you can never read the dialogue without hearing Sean
Astin’s Californian hippy take on a rustic English drawl echoing inside your head.
