Kate Nepveu has
a review up at tor.com of the FOTR movie coming out of her re-read project, which reminded me of my reactions to the movie when it first came out. So I've unearthed them from a posting on the Bujold list and updated them somewhat. This deals with only the first film: I found the second and third films unwatchable.
I had expected, before seeing the film, to react along the lines of Bentley's remark to Pope regarding his translation of the Iliad : "A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." This expectation proved unexpectedly close: a movie with a number of virtues, but not
The Lord of the Rings and definitely not Tolkienian. But this spurred a number of thoughts about the differences between modern fantasy and LOTR and the expectations which many (especially younger) readers seem to bring.
Some of the things the movie cut were clearly in the interest of time (however well or ill-judged that was). But many other adjustments were clearly not driven by the time factor, and many of the changes which involve additions seemed to me to be ill-conceived -- that is, they achieved some telescoping but in ways which were unnecessary and untrue to the thematic nature of the book.
1) History
Middle-Earth is historically
deep. The Fellowship starts out in the Shire (which has very little history) but as soon as one leaves the Shire, various reminders of a much deeper past come out, usually in a casual manner: Tom's references to the Dunedain of the North with regard to the swords from the barrow, Aragorn's linking of Weathertop with the Last Alliance, the narratorial introduction of Bree. And
the landscape bears the marks of civilization. The road from Bree to Rivendell goes back to Elendil and probably to at least the founding of Rivendell in the Second Age; the way through Hollin follows an old highway whose marks are still visible. Dimrill Dale has its pillar and its greensward.
There are references which have no clear referents. To those of us who read LOTR before
The Silmarillion came out, many of the references in the text were almost completely mysterious, having to stand on their own (especially those to the Valar and the First Age), illuminated only by their own light. All we knew of Gil-galad was a few lines dropped here and there -- by Gandalf, Aragorn and Sam. Gildor's description of his band as "Exiles" had little if any resonance because the nature and time of the exile wasn't laid out for us.
Not in the movie. There is no reference at all to the East Road and to Weathertop's location on it, no Last Bridge, no road through Hollin. Gil-galad, Elbereth, Earendil and Luthien are never mentioned. Where Tolkien's world is built on top of multiple layers of history, the movie's world consists of isolated and unrelated spots -- Bree,
Rivendell, Moria, Lorien -- with no connections between them. (Arwen is Galadriel's granddaughter; Arwen may have greater prominence, but the reference by Aragorn which (along with a number of other references) helps tie Rivendell and Lothlorien together just drops out of the picture.) There is no reference at all to the Kingdom of Arnor, since it looks like they've decided to grossly simplify the history of the heirs of Elendil by referring only to Gondor.
2) Meals
This may sound minor by comparison, but much of the action of the book centres around food as a social occasion of one form or another: the Party, the meal with Gildor in the Shire, the feast at Rivendell, the
al fresco meal on departing Lothlorien. Of these, only the Party remains (and even there, the characteristic hobbit-pleasing line "That is the signal for dinner." following the dragon vanishes as the result of changes to the plot there).
This is not as minor as it sounds: in Tolkien's world (as in many others) civilization is closely tied to eating and drinking on company as focal occasions. The
nature of the societies is shown up in their differing attitudes towards meals (contrast the pure Anglo-Saxon hospitality of Theoden with the disciplined tone of Denethor's
situation, for example.)
3) Age and character development
There were distortions in the ages of the characters which were tightly related to changes in character development. To take them one by one:
Merry is 39, and should look
older than Frodo, as a result of Frodo's possessing the Ring. (Pippin, by contrast, was about 12 years old at the time of the Party, and should look
just younger than Frodo -- Merry was about 20 at the same time.) He's a responsible character who deals with the "conspiracy", handles the gate at Bree, and spends his time in Rivendell researching maps. Instead, he and Pippin are showed as Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. Similarly, Sam is a practical and responsible, almost certainly overconscientious hobbit. I grant that the requirements to shorten the film required some simplification of the plot, but the changes which were made, including
insertions like the totally unnecessary fire scene at Weathertop, which make the hobbits (except Frodo) all look like a somewhat sillier version of Pippin are gratuitous and unnecessary. (Thirty seconds exposition regarding Weathertop's location near the Road would have provided enough of a background for the subsequent attack, and remained true to the characterization in the book.)
The hobbits in general suffered from a decision to make Frodo more prominent and the others less so (e.g. Frodo replacing Merry as the one who has the right idea about the doors of Moria). Oh, and eliminating the master and servant relationship between Frodo and Sam causes a whole chunk of motivation just to fall out, even for the actions which remain.
Aragorn turns 88 during the War of the Ring.
He's not in the process of growing up. (For that matter, Arwen is 2,778, but that's less relevant here.) He knows what he is destined to do (or at least attempt), and this goes back to his mother's naming of him as "Estel". He's a representative -- the pre-eminent representative -- of classical heroism at its highest form -- warrior, healer, loremaster -- which gets contrasted both with the more modern, "Christian" heroism of Frodo and Sam as humility, and with less high, rougher heroism of the men of the Mark (and Boromir, who is more like them than the older Men of the West).
4) Elves and Elegiac
The Tolkienian elves are gradually becoming less important in the world. The elder days are passing. They have a long history of exile and struggle behind them; they are returning to Aman gradually; they are always looking westward. Such power as they still have is principally in preservation, and in their affinities for the natural world (strictly speaking, they are natural, bound to the world, and humans are supernatural, seeking beyond the world), and for language in poetry and song (they are "quendi", the speakers).
The elves who have been in Aman -- and we meet only a few of these, since most are gone: Glorfindel, Gildor, possibly some other Rivendell elves, Galadriel, possibly (in some versions of the backstory) Celeborn -- have additional abilities which do come into play from time to time. (The only elves to show a real "aura" of power in the book are Glorfindel, at the Ford, and Galadriel, at the Mirror.) But most "elven-magic" is very close to "blessing" objects: imbuing them with enhanced virtues according to their nature (Lembas, the elven-cloaks,
miruvor) or capturing light and its associated virtues (the Silmarils, the Elessar, the Phial of Galadriel). In some cases the power associated with the object is different in type, as with the Rings of Power and the Palantiri.
But as Children of Eru they are, overall, very much like men otherwise: biologically "the same species" (or else they could not interbreed in a fertile manner), with the differences being in the soul infused into the body (hroar and frear, in the Elvish terminology).
There is always, by the time of the War of the Ring, an elegiac mode associated with the elves in Tolkien's presentation: they know that they will have to depart, and that the power of the Three will fade, or be overwhelmed, regardless of the outcome of the war.
None of this is there, per se, in the movie. (Elrond makes a reference to the elves as departing, but free of all context). There is no song shown in either Rivendell or Lothlorien, and little exceptional fairness about their voices or features. Lothlorien suffers the most, but the essential character of both places as the book presents them -- Rivendell preserving the memory of the Elder Days, and Lothlorien its essence -- is just not there. The substitution of Arwen for Glorfindel, and the reduction of the role before the Ford of "I'm the faster rider" blurs to the point of obliterating the distinction between Calaquendi and Moriquendi, and Arwen's invocation of the flood rather than Elrond's (which would have made use of the power of Vilya) equally obscures the nature of "elven-magic". The whole elegiac theme regarding the whole passing of the world, in the way in which the world is changing from one kind of place to a very different kind of place with the coming of the Fourth Age, has not been prepared (Part of this lies with point 1, above, and the absence of the history of which this state of affairs is a remnant.)
5) Pacing
The book starts out slow-paced, but even when the pace speeds up (after the departure from Rivendell) the effect of the narrative is one of relatively long periods of experiencing the surroundings between crises: the Shire, Arnor, Eregion, Moria (most of which is simply empty, an echo of its former greatness, rather than threatening -- others have declined as well as the elves), Lorien, Anduin. There are usually threats, but they're over the horizon and not immediate for most of the book.
The movie moves from crisis to crisis -- and this is not merely a matter of having to edit for length: it
creates crises, or heightens the threats in other situations. The Prancing Pony is a homey pub with warmth and light rather than the dive it is presented as; the confrontation with the Watcher in the water is grossly expanded; the transferral of the gap-leaping episode from the earlier part of the trip through the mines (where it merely heightens the sense of decay and abandonment) to the invented issue on the staircase, gives it a totally different sense of urgency; the heightening of the conflict in the chamber of Mazarbul and the later confrontation in the hall play up the aspects of continuing physical threat. The initial meeting with the Elves of Lorien changes from one of startlement only -- Legolas' surprise when he leaps into the tree -- to direct threat, especially as it has not been prepared for by Aragorn's previous talk about the Golden Wood.
Not all good cinema is related to action and high pacing: it's perfectly possible to enchant audiences with the opposite as many of the recent crop of films of earlier English novels do (or consider
Babbette's feast or
My Dinner With Andre). The movie provides no major breaks; such breaks as it does provide (at Rivendell and Lorien) are made more menacing and the sense of their length is much telescoped.
As I have noted before, these differences -- which are more thematic than purely technical -- seem to me to reflect the sorts of differences between the Lord of the Rings and the modern fantasy novel in general. (When I first posted this, I got a lot of reactions along the lines of "the media are different, you idiot!", especially from people in the film community. So let mje make it clear:
I do not think that any of the changes I am highlighting are intrinsically related to the difference between the media. I think that they could have been avoided and still produced a film as good or better than the existing film.) LOTR has novelistic elements, but it is also grounded in a whole set of different narrative conventions of epic, edda, and mediaeval romance, in which characters develop only in the technical sense of "being revealed" and in which heroic nature is accepted as a postulate. In addition, landscape plays a significant role, thematically, in the structure and thematic unity of the book. Its theme is elegiac, tinged with regret for a world which is passing away. These are
not aspects of the novel which have been taken up by its more recent successors.
1) Pure Novelization
Most more recent fantasies are very much novels rather than romances (in the old sense of romance) or epics. A surprisingly large number of them are
bildungsroman specimens:
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn,
The Belgariad,
The Wheel of Time, and most obviously Harry Potter: they start with a young, unformed character and follow him through his development in the fantasy world. And whereas a mediaeval author who wanted to tell an Arthurian story would (usually) tell one with Arthur and his court as a fixed background and (frequently) a known figure with fixed character as the central agent, many if not most modern Arthurian stories are about character development (usually Arthur or Merlin).
Those which aren't are still, usually, very much novels.
The Curse of Chalion is a good example here: the central character, Cazaril, is already mature, but the narrative gains a great deal of its interest from the developing character-related conflicts and affinities between the characters.
There is character development in the Lord of the Rings -- Frodo, Eowyn, Merry and Pippin come to mind -- but it's not central to the story in the way that it is in a "pure" novel. The film's changes -- highlighting Frodo at various points with relation to the other hobbits, and making all
sorts of changes to Aragorn -- moves the conventions of the film more closely towards those of the novel and further away from the romance/epic. And the entrelacement used as a technique in the book works against too much focus on any one character or plot line as being "the" plot of the book.
The use of verse in the book pushes it away from the novel as well, although it doesn't have the strict structural role that is true of many classical and mediaeval works (e.g. Boethius). Few later fantasy novels have followed this, just as the use of many linguistic styles which is important in Tolkien has been dropped by most recent authors, since one needs a great deal of skill to do this properly, and even the older standard use of high, middle and low styles (which Tolkien follows and uses) has fallen out of favour. (Many of the film's composed scenes violate these principles, with the most egregious violation being on the staircase in Moria, but equally in just about all the made-up dialogue for Elrond and the entire Council.
2) Action
Tolkien holds together two different styles of narrative. At times -- in dealing with the battle scenes in the second and third volumes, especially -- he provides a great deal of combat and "action scenes". It is this aspect of the books which has frequently led to them being grouped with "Sword and Sorcery" novels (by those who make no distinction between this and "high fantasy". He also uses heavily descriptive prose which is not dominated by action at all, but rather by observation and conveys no very great sense of urgency at all (although things may happen, they aren't matters involving physical conflict).
Modern fantasy tends to have diverged into two streams. On one hand, much of the modern EFP is very much action-oriented: it is organized along the lines of a narrative linking combat crises together. On the other, writers like Guy Kay and Bujold in her Chalionverse may have some very isolated incidents of martial or magical conflict but these are isolated within their narratives, where the focus is almost entirely elsewhere.
3) Other races.
Lots of post-Tolkien novels have Elves, Dwarves and/or trolls/goblins of one sort or another: consider
The Deed of Paksennarion,
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn,
Oath of Swords, and the Riftwar books, for example. In many cases the elves and dwarves are directly or indirectly derivative of Tolkien; in virtually all of them, though, the
history of the other races is quite different (if any is given at all), and in most if not all of them the elves are
more alien as regards men than Tolkien's elves are (and frequently the Dwarves are more like men, but that is a more minor point). In many (although not all) of them the story ends with the same status quo as regards relations between the races as held at the outset.
But the stream of novels, once again, has bifurcated. Most novels which do have multiple types of rational beings presuppose at least some points of relatively full interaction between them and tend to locate the story in a thorough mix of races. (The extreme would be the Vlad Taltos books, which have a human focal point in the middle of a society of "elves".) And most novels which are about human interaction are about humans only, usually set in worlds where humanity is the only type of rational being (other, perhaps, than the Gods). It was Tolkien's focus on the elegiac aspect -- "an end was come of the Elder Days in story and song" -- which allows him to have the elves as important but nevertheless marginal
at once. (Note that this is specifically true of LOTR. In
The Silmarillion the focus is entirely on elves, with a few men at the edges and at pivotal points -- Beren, Turin, Tuor -- and in the
Akallabeth it is almost entirely on men until after the Fall of Numenor).
On the Evolution of SF and Fantasy
In the beginning of "modern fantasy", aside from the Sword and Sorcery writers and the writers of
Unknown, there were various other clear influences on the field, of which Tolkien is the most obvious, who embodied rather different skills and virtues: Tolkien, with his knowledge of language and the northern theory of courage; Cabell, with his ironic attitude, his complex references to classical culture and his generational themes which also tended towards writing about writing; Eddison, with his heavily archaic style and mystical interests.
Science fiction, whatever may be said about remote forerunners such as Swift, Voltaire and even Verne, or outliers such as Lewis, Huxley and Orwell, really begins as fiction by engineers and scientists for engineers and scientists: Smith, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, et al. It basically stays at that level (high idea content, typically weak characterisations, usually optimistic in general outlook) until the New Wave in the 1960's and then the gradual development of a set of writers whose concerns with purely
writerly craft has raised the overall average standard of the SF novel very considerably: think of Willis, Stephenson, Bujold.
It's probably fair to say that there was no single fantasy genre until about the 1970's. (When LOTR was published, there were no obvious slots into which to put it. Many of the slots into which reviewers put it for comparison purposes -- Wagner, Ariosto, etc. -- were types of literature which Tolkien actively disliked.) And it has become a "genre" by shedding all sorts of outlying territories which are now seldom visited until it met science fiction. From some point in the late 70's or early 80's the two have grown together: SF by attaching (as it were) new writing territories to address, and Fantasy reflecting these accessions.
But fantasy has now become weighted down by several factors:
1) Much more almost purely formulaic work which floods the market. Much of this may be put down to role-playing games, which haven't had nearly the same scale of effect on science fiction.
2) A few very out-of-the-usual blockbuster sellers in Eddings and Jordan, who were definitely
not the best writers in the field but who managed to become heavily popular and have distorted the economic model of publishing fantasy. (By contrast, even SF's bestsellers by and large are an order of magnitude smaller in their difference from the rest of the field.)
3) Where science fiction tends to get new ideas flowing in from the pace of technological change, fantasy has to be driven by its own internal mechanisms. Thus the most promising fantasy novels tend to show cross-pollination with genres outside fantasy: many with techniques and concerns drawn from the mainstream novel (note that a number of "mainstream" novels also draw on fantasy elements: true dreams, ghosts, etc.).
And the things which are the most "characteristic" of Tolkien have dropped out of modern fantasy almost entirely. I see this not only in the film (which manages to preserve the outline and order of events while driving them with most un-Tolkienian themes, timing, and motivations) but in the reactions of many (e.g. in the rec.arts.books.tolkien newsgroup) to the films, which is overall remarkably positive given the great liberties taken with the books
which are not simply a matter of screen adaptation.
In Dorothy Heydt's
A Point of Honor there is a fantasy novel (
The Golden Road) inside the story which provides some important content (as well as one direct quote of about a page). It sounds fascinating and very Tolkienian (down to its inspiration in a story which is buried in the few remnants of germanic poetry of the late classical period, that of the captivity of Theodoric). But I suspect, more and more, that
Golden Roads are less and less likely to turn up. The trend of the genre is away from the epic and towards the novel, or towards the gross simplification of the epic which is sword and sorcery. The new good fantasies are, more and more, the books which dispense with the inherited trappings which drove Tolkien and which make use of narrative techniques of the novel and conceptual ideas whose virtue lies in being "new" (at least to the genre) rather than "old".
