There is no doubt of Tolkien’s appeal to readers of a certain age. This might in part be about escapism. Neil Gaiman, the celebrated fantasy author, recalled that at fourteen all he wanted to do was write The Lord of the Rings. Not the equivalent high fantasy, but the actual book. Which was awkward, he admitted, as Tolkien had already done so.
But Jeffrey’s ‘non-existent’ feels underpowered. Tolkien is far from divorced from the real world.
Yes, the story does transport people. The wonderful, unquenchable invention that sheers off every page is intoxicating. ‘It is a really exceptional and remarkable creation, an entire cosmology in itself,’ enthused actor John Rhys-Davies, who had long considered the book beneath him. This has led to obsession, if not addiction. Jackson and Walsh were keenly aware that they needed to escape the closed feedback loop of Tolkien fixation. In this, their relative ambivalence toward the text to begin with was an advantage.
Nevertheless, re-reading The Lord of the Rings through a cinematic lens revealed a store of promise for the filmmakers.
In 1938, Tolkien gave a lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, in which he highlighted the necessary components of ‘the office of fantasy’. A fantasy world, he insisted, while ‘internally consistent’ must possess ‘strangeness and wonder’. It must have a freedom from observed fact. The laws of physics while largely upheld can be a tiresome constraint on mythical storytelling. Quite how Sauron has uploaded a crucial portion of his malign life force into a golden ring is not worth deliberating. Above all, he declared, the secondary world must be credible, ‘commanding belief’.
Tolkien was not shy about the fact he had fashioned Middle-earth from the forges of history. This wasn’t an alternative universe but our own. Richard Taylor fixates with great pleasure on the estimation that the story can be located to an interglacial lull in the Pleistocene. Are we to consider the mûmakil relations of mammoths? Are the fell beasts a species of Pterodactyl?
It is a perspective somewhat undone by the Edwardian trappings of Hobbiton, although Jackson describes it as ‘a fully developed society and environment the records have since forgotten.’
Within the fabric of the world and the weft of the storytelling came Tolkien’s firm instruction to Jackson — command belief.
And contrary to critical opinion, the book possesses a rich seam of theme and allusion. This was something the arrival of Boyens really brought home. She educated her partners in what lay behind the book that Jackson admits they ‘really hadn’t grappled with’. A depth, she felt, that would elevate their films above the gaudy clichés of the barbarian hordes.
Says Jackson, ‘We hadn’t understood that he cared passionately about the loss of the natural countryside, for example. He was very much this nineteenth century, pre-Industrial Revolution guy against the factories and the enslavement of the workers in factories. Which is what Saruman is all about.’
Tolkien’s experiences on the Somme pierce the book. It was something to which Jackson, the First World War scholar, really responded. The Dead Marshes, depicting an ancient battleground swallowed up by the earth, are a striking vision of bodies lurking beneath the characters’ feet like no man’s land. The book is transfixed by death. While in counterpoint it portrays loyalty and comradeship in extremis. The Fellowship isn’t only a mission; it is the philosophy that might save them. And in Frodo and Sam the idea of comradeship crosses boundaries of class much as Tolkien had witnessed in the Great War.
The critic Philip French found it telling that Tolkien ‘made the object of Frodo’s journey not a search for power but its abnegation’. Ironically, for all its Elves, Dwarves and hobbits, the book’s humanity makes it timeless — applicable to any age, any war. It remains relevant.
Tolkien’s writing can be archaic (he was creating a mythology; you can take or leave the songs) but he had an intuitive grasp of a set piece modern studios would die for: the Ringwraiths attacking Weathertop; Gandalf confronting the Balrog; the Ents demolishing Isengard; Shelob’s Lair. It was a menu of choice, cinematic dishes.
Jackson appreciated how Tolkien’s writing so vividly describes things: ‘You can imagine a movie: the camera angles and the cutting, you see it playing itself out.’
Ordesky admired how the story expands in a natural way. From the Shire, the world unfolds, getting larger and larger.
And at heart it was a relatively linear story. The unlikeliest of heroes, knee-high to a wizard, must sneak into the enemy’s camp and destroy their most powerful weapon right beneath their nose (or Eye). Keeping the focus on Frodo’s quest, aided and abetted by a disparate group of individuals, would give the films forward momentum. Through a very distorted lens, here was Bob Weinstein’s fucking Guns of Navarone.
So it didn’t take long to conclude that Tom Bombadil was surplus to requirements. Tolkien had started writing his sequel to The Hobbit without a clear sense of direction. The first few chapters charting the hobbits’ flight from The Shire don’t really cohere until they get to Bree and Strider. Preserving Bombadil, an ambiguous eco-bumpkin-cum-forest spirit immune to the Ring, would only waylay the drama and diminish the authenticity of the world at a critically early stage, no matter how many fans clamoured for Robin Williams to supply the babbling brook of his rustic banter.
‘He was never in the script at any point,’ asserts Jackson.
The question of Bombadil, so easily answered, signalled that key debate: how faithful they were going to be. Something they would begin to fathom with a treatment.2
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The Treatment: As their initial canary in the cage sent into the Mines of Moria, Botes’ scene-by-scene breakdown provided the basis for a ninety-two-page treatment for the two-film screenplay, clarifying Tolkien’s 1,000-page edifice into 266 sequences. A document that reveals how the backbone of the eventual trilogy was established very quickly, and where there was still considerable uncertainty.
While the detail is inevitably sketchy, the shape and tone of book are clearly intact. This was not the lightheaded remix embarked upon by John Boorman. The first film would end shortly after Helm’s Deep with the death of Saruman (eventually postponed all the way to the extended edition of The Return of the King), the second picking up immediately in the wake of battle. Many of the scenes are already determined, especially for what were eventually the first and third films. There are fewer major omissions than you might imagine: Lothlórien is the biggest absentee, while Edoras gets only a fleeting visit.
What impresses is how much of Jackson’s vision already emerges so quickly. The opening scene is a ‘breathtaking vista of battle’ with 150,000 Orcs, Men and Elves on screen. He is already inventing signature shots. With Radagast eliminated (until The Hobbit) the great eagle Gwaihir is sent to rescue Gandalf from Orthanc by the intercession of a moth. An idea which just ‘popped’ into Jackson’s head simultaneously with the image of the camera plummeting over the edge of the tower, down its vertiginous flank and into the quasi-industrial pits of Isengard.
Here is both the train of events and the visual language with which he would depict Middle-earth, giving the camera a panoptic viewpoint, swooping and plunging across the landscape indeed like an eagle. For instance, from the moment he re-read the book the siege of Minas Tirith clanged within his eager imagination: ‘Thousands of FLAMING TORCHES light the snarling, slathering ORCS. DRUMMERS are beating the DRUMS OF WAR …’
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The Two-film Version (with Miramax): For all his many gifts, Tolkien presented pitfalls for a future screenwriter. The sheer multitudinousness of his sub-creation would always have to be tamed — a landslide of material artfully removed while remaining tangibly Tolkien — but the story is also awkwardly episodic and repetitious. ‘You kind of don’t notice it when you