The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

APPENDIX C

PETER JACKSON’S FILM VERSIONS ¹

Fifty years after the first publication of The Lord of the Rings, the ironies pointed to in the first paragraph of this volume have only become more obvious. Far from passing into the ‘merciful oblivion’ predicted by Philip Toynbee, far from being a work few adults will look at twice, as declared by Alfred Duggan, The Lord of the Rings has found a new and even larger audience in a new medium, the three films directed by Peter Jackson and released in successive years 2001–2003. These are arguably the most successful films ever made. As of January 2004 the three between them had taken some 1,279 million pounds at the box office, a figure certainly multiplied by VHS and DVD sales, especially of the extended versions which will give a final total running time of close on twelve hours.² It is impossible to estimate how many viewers this will represent, since one DVD can be seen by many people, and conversely the box office takings are inflated by repeat viewers, but it is safe to say that hundreds of millions of people have seen or will see the films. There will almost certainly be more viewers than readers (though of course they are often the same people).

Yet, amazingly, the Toynbee/Duggan reaction continued to be powerful, even during the making of the films. I have to confess that for what immediately follows (as for what was said above about Tolkien’s local reputation, see above and note) I can acknowledge no source other than gossip, though this time it is the gossip of Los Angeles, not Oxford. Perhaps one day the full story will be revealed. But it is said that while Peter Jackson was making the films, the moguls of Hollywood, alarmed at the ever-increasing scale and cost of the production, sent to New Zealand a ‘script doctor’, whose job it was to get the films back on track. The ‘script doctor’ immediately saw the faults in the Tolkien plot. Having heroes riding (or in this case walking) to the rescue of a threatened people was of course perfectly familiar and acceptable, as in The Magnificent Seven: but there was no need to have two threatened peoples, Rohan and Gondor. One of them could be cut out, which meant that the battle of Helm’s Deep could be amalgamated with the battle of the Pelennor Fields. A love-interest for Aragorn was also clearly vital, but once again there was no need for two of them: either Arwen or Éowyn should go, preferably Arwen, and Aragorn should then marry Éowyn instead of politely dissuading her. One could then make a further saving by eliminating the figure of Faramir. Meanwhile, though there was some doubt about the wisdom of having such small and unheroic figures as hobbits as heroes, they might be retained as a gimmick: but four of them were one too many. And it was absolutely vital that one of the hobbits should die. With changes like these, the Lord of the Rings could be converted into a perfectly acceptable, run-of-the-mill movie script – at the expense, of course, of cultural contrast, originality, emotional depth, and a few other inessentials.

The script doctor’s advice was ignored, and Jackson’s films perhaps convinced even the moguls in the end that there was something they did not know about popular appeal. Nevertheless, the changes proposed do say something about the individual and even eccentric nature of Tolkien’s work. So often it does not do what one might expect. The thought occurs, indeed, that many of the criticisms made of it by Edwin Muir, or Christine Brooke-Rose, or even Leonard Jackson (see above, here and here) would be much more accurate if levelled at the stripped-down, dumbed-down version Hollywood would have preferred. As often, the critics were criticising what they pretended to have read, not engaging with the work itself. But the success of the films does raise a more important issue. For many people, The Lord of the Rings now means the film version, not the books. In what ways are the two versions different, and would Tolkien himself have approved of the difference?

It should be remembered that Tolkien did live long enough to see a film script and to comment on it – the script indeed survives, with Tolkien’s marginal notations, in the archive at Marquette University, Milwaukee, while there are extensive selections from his letters of protest in Letters, pp. 260–61, 266–67, 270–77. That 1957 script was beyond all question an extraordinarily bad one, unambitious and careless, and Tolkien’s comments are appropriately blistering. Still, three points deserve to be extracted from them. First, Tolkien had no objection to a film version per se. Second, he realised straight away that for a film version his book would have to be cut; and he was sure that in such circumstances outright cutting would be preferable to compression. Better to take out entirely such semi-independent sections as the involvement with Tom Bombadil, or the Scouring of the Shire, or (he noted particularly, see Letters, p. 277) the return of Saruman, than to try to squeeze everything in at racing speed. What would happen if one chose that alternative would be, all too likely, that the Prime Action – Tolkien’s term for Frodo and Sam making their way into Mordor – would be downgraded in favour of the Subsidiary Action, the wars and the battles and the heroes.

The third point is more debatable. Tolkien (writing it should be remembered with a degree of ‘resentment’ about a confessedly poor script) protested that:

The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies. (Letters, p. 270)

Leaving aside for the moment the question of ‘the core of the original’, one could challenge Tolkien’s phrase ‘wholly different’. The ‘canons of narrative art’ may well not be wholly different, but in different media they could well be substantially different. But is this just a matter of a change of medium, or does it affect the nature of the entire work? In what follows I try to answer the question just put.

One very evident difference between writing a book and making a film is money. Someone like Tolkien, writing on his own in the spare time from his ‘day job’, had no one to consider but himself. All that he was investing was his spare time, and as Dáin says to the messenger of Mordor, ‘the time of my thought is my own to spend’ (LOTR, p. 235). Someone like Jackson, controlling a budget of many millions of dollars, had to think about producing a return on the investment, and so to consider popular appeal. Every now and then, accordingly, one can see him ‘playing to the gallery’. Legolas skateboards down a flight of steps on a shield at the battle of Helm’s Deep (JTT 51, ‘The Breach of the Deeping Wall’).^*

Gimli twice plays to a joke about ‘dwarf-tossing’, once in the scene with the Balrog, where Gimli refuses to be thrown across the chasm – ‘Nobody tosses a dwarf!’ (JFR 36, ‘The Bridge of Khazad-dûm’) – and once at Helm’s Deep again, where this time he accepts the indignity in the cause of duty – ‘Toss me … Don’t tell the Elf!’ (JTT 53, ‘The Retreat to the Hornburg’). Tolkien would have understood neither addition: they are there for a teenage audience. Something similar could be said about the extra role given to Arwen in the first film, where she replaces Glorfindel in the scenes after Frodo is stabbed on Weathertop. This makes her into a better example of the strong active female character now preferred, but the rewriting rings a little hollow. In Tolkien it is Frodo who turns to defy the Ringwraiths at the edge of the ford of the Loudwater, but his defiance is weary, lonely and unsuccessful. Jackson has Arwen turning and defying the Ringwraiths, ‘If you want him, come and claim him!’ (JFR 21, ‘The Flight to the Ford’). Of course they do want him, they have every intention of claiming him, and Arwen’s defiance actually makes no difference: not much is gained by introducing the stereotype of the ‘warrior princess’ – except that, as has been said, this is the kind of thing a modern audience expects, or may be thought to expect.

There are a number of insertions and alterations like this in the Jackson films, but their effect need not be exaggerated: they pass quickly. More serious is the question of ‘the canons of narrative art’, and here I cannot help thinking that there must have been several occasions where Jackson’s scriptwriters³ said, in effect, ‘but we can’t do that’ – occasions where Tolkien himself seems to forget, or ignore, some of the very basic axioms of narrative. One of these is ‘show, don’t tell’. Tolkien’s narrative is on occasion unusually talkative, ready to bypass major dramatic scenes, and quite ready to leave the reader, or viewer, ‘up in the air’ – as for instance with the Ring. The unquestioned ‘core of the original’, to use Tolkien’s term, is the Ring and what we are told about it: its effect is always corrupting, no one can be trusted with it, it cannot be hidden, it must be destroyed and it must be destroyed in the place of its forging. Without these data the story cannot proceed. But though much of this is told by Gandalf to Frodo in the early chapter ‘The Shadow of the Past’, full information and identification does not take place till twelve chapters later in ‘The Council of Elrond’, while there is a full six months between the two events (April 13th to October 25th) – and seventeen years between ‘The Shadow of the Past’ and Bilbo’s farewell party. This leisurely unrolling does not suit the narrative medium of film, and Jackson’s solution is clear, direct, and arresting: much of the history of the Ring as conveyed tortuously by Gandalf and other speakers in ‘The Council of Elrond’ is taken out and told at the start, with a cool, quiet voice-over accompanying scenes of extreme drama and violence on screen (JFR 1, ‘Prologue; One Ring to Rule them All’). Far fewer ‘talking heads’, and the viewer ‘put in the picture’ from the beginning. This change does indeed come with a price, as discussed further below, but it makes the action quicker and more visual.

Even more challenging for the scriptwriters, I would imagine, was Tolkien’s handling of the destruction of Orthanc by the Ents. In his narrative we have a markedly slow build-up to the Ents’ decision to march, broken by ‘a great ringing shout’ (LOTR p. 473) and rapid movement to the end of the chapter ‘Treebeard’, which closes with the Ents and the hobbits looking down into Nan Curunír, the Valley of Saruman. Attention then moves elsewhere for almost four full chapters, nearly seventy pages, and the next time Orthanc appears it is a ruin. What has happened in between? This is not explained for another ten pages, and then it is told in flashback by Merry and Pippin between them. Jackson’s scriptwriters clearly could not repeat this. They had a choice between a scene with people talking ruminatively about something that had happened already, or a major action scene in chronological order (JTT 59, ‘The Flooding of Isengard’). In a visual medium such a choice can only go one way. The same is true of Aragorn’s journey from the Paths of the Dead to Pelargir, his rout of the Corsairs, and his arrival in the nick of time at the Pelennor Fields. In the book the Grey Company disappears from sight on p. 773, and reappears almost sixty pages later, in a way which further remains unexplained until this time Legolas and Gimli tell the story, again in flashback, a further thirty pages later. Once more it is a choice between ‘talking heads’ and major action scenes with every opportunity for special effects, and the choice for a film-maker is just as inevitable, as one sees from the scenes in the film of The Return of the King. It is hard to protest about any of these changes. In such cases the ‘canons of narrative art’ are different as between visual and verbal media, and Jackson surely had to do what he did.

Does it lead, however, to Tolkien’s feared subordination of Prime Action to Subsidiary Action, taking one’s attention off the Ring and on to the special effects? I would suggest that in fact Jackson restores any balance lost, several times, with rather deft transpositions which foreground or bring back quiet but important scenes which might otherwise have been suppressed. ‘The Council of Elrond’ is a case in point. In the film, much of its material has already been used, while it is quite clear that no film-maker could afford to spend a significant proportion of his running time on what is in effect a committee meeting, and one which ends moreover in exhaustion and prolonged silence: ‘All the Council sat with downcast eyes, as if in deep thought’ (LOTR p. 263). In Jackson, by contrast, the much shorter meeting ends with all parties shouting and haranguing each other. Yet the vital words at the end are almost exactly the same in both versions, Frodo saying ‘I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way’ (LOTR p. 264). In Tolkien these are dropped into a silence, in Jackson they have to penetrate a hubbub of voices. What happens in the film is that Frodo says ‘I will take the Ring’, and is ignored. As he walks forward to say it a second time, Gandalf turns to listen. And as the others notice Gandalf listening and fall silent, he says it a third time⁴ this time completing it almost as in Tolkien: ‘I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though I do not know the way’. The scene in the film makes a point vital to the story, and to the Prime Action, which is that it is the small and physically insignificant characters, the hobbits, who dominate the plot, though this is completely unexpected by anyone except Gandalf, the only one among the wise who ever pays any attention to them. Jackson’s straightening and lightening of the plot finds a justification in just this moment.

Another transposition to which I would call attention comes from ‘The Shadow of the Past’. In this chapter, in Tolkien, there is an especially resonant exchange between Frodo and Gandalf. Slowly realising what Gandalf is telling him, Frodo says reluctantly, ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time’, and Gandalf answers:

‘So do I … and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’ (LOTR, p. 50)

For English people of Tolkien’s generation, the words ‘in my time’ carry a powerful echo. In 1938, returning from the Munich conference where he gave way to Hitler, Neville Chamberlain notoriously and quite wrongly announced that he brought back ‘peace in our time’, and the words (themselves taken from the Anglican liturgy) have become irrevocably tainted with appeasement, avoidance of duty, and failure. When Gandalf says ‘all who live to see such times’, then, he could be taken as meaning, in unconscious prophecy, Tolkien’s contemporaries and countrymen; and when he says ‘them’, the pronoun includes Frodo and the Shire-hobbits with everyone in Middle-earth and indeed everyone at any time faced with the need for painful decision. Gandalf then softens the implied criticism slightly by changing his pronoun, including himself, and narrowing the focus: ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us’ (my emphasis). The echo of Chamberlain, however, might well slip past a twenty-first century audience almost a lifetime removed from 1938 and Munich. But Jackson gives the words a renewed emphasis by moving them to a different place and moment. In the first of his films, the words are still said by Gandalf to Frodo, but they are said in another notably quiet scene, in the dark, as the two characters talk in the Mines of Moria (JFR 34, ‘A Journey in the Dark’). Their force is furthermore established by repetition. Almost at the very end of the movie, as Frodo prepares to leave the Fellowship and set out as he intends for Mordor on his own (JFR 46, ‘The Road Goes Ever On’), he seems to hear Gandalf’s words repeated, with the face of Gandalf (whom he and the viewers think at that moment to be dead) filling the screen. Only the words have once more had their pronouns changed. This time what Frodo hears is, ‘All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given you.’ The statement has accordingly become entirely personal, directed precisely at Frodo’s own single moment of decision.

This kind of switching between universal truth and individual application is entirely Tolkienian, exemplified several times in the hobbit-poetry which Jackson has cut out. Yet what is cut out in one place has a tendency to reappear in another. Bombadil has vanished entirely from Jackson’s films, but some of his words are reallocated to Treebeard, and there is one moment where the third of the films shows a very careful reading of the original. At the start of the chapter ‘Fog on the Barrow-Downs’, Frodo has a dream – except that we are told explicitly that it may not be a dream. In this dream, or vision, or moment of insight, Frodo sees ‘a far green country open [ing] before him under a swift sunrise’ (LOTR, p. 132). No more is said and nothing is made of this dream, or vision, but it returns almost nine hundred pages later. On the penultimate page Frodo, setting out from the Grey Havens, once again ‘beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise’ (LOTR, p. 1007). What is it that he sees? Is it Aman, the Undying Lands? Or is it something even beyond them, something which is not reserved for him alone? In one of the most violent sequences of the three films, as the trolls are battering their way into Minas Tirith, Jackson surprisingly takes up the question. He shows Pippin sitting, frightened, a little way behind the front line, when Gandalf comes over to him and talks to him about death. Death is not the end, he says, smiling. When it comes we will find ourselves walking into the ‘far green country’. Pippin is reassured, but the scene has a point well beyond the momentary reassurance. One feels that here the wise men, Tolkien or Gandalf or Jackson, are talking to everyone, and talking to them about death, a subject well beyond the range of most Hollywood rhetoric. It is a good example of Jackson’s readiness to hold the action and say something quietly, and it shows also at the very least a careful and thrifty reading of the original.

Less easy to explain are scenes which add complexity to a plot which (as the script doctor no doubt said) has quite enough movement in it already. The first substantial one of these occurs near the middle of the film of The Two Towers. Aragorn and Théoden are withdrawing towards Helm’s Deep, when their column is attached by Orc Warg-riders. This is itself an addition to the original text, but one has to admit that for Tolkien to mention Warg-riders and then never foreground them was an intolerable provocation to any movie-maker. But as the attack is beaten off, Aragorn falls over a cliff and into a river, where he lies as if dead. He is then called back from death, seemingly, by a vision of Arwen and by the attentions of his horse, Brego (see JTT 34, ‘The Wolves of Isengard’, and 37, ‘The Grace of the Valar’), after which he returns to Helm’s Deep and the action continues as before. Why build in what seems to be a narrative digression, a zig-zag? One motive must be to find, once more, a role for Arwen. Just as he is brought back to life by love of her, so she turns back to share his fate and that of Middle-earth – and that means, to die – for love of him (JTT 38, ‘Arwen’s Fate’). Her decision furthermore is echoed by the decision of her father Elrond to abandon his fainéant role and dispatch a surprisingly well-drilled Elvish army to the rescue of Helm’s Deep, another addition to the original. I would suggest that a second motivation for this set of changes lies in the different politico-military expectations of a 21st century audience. Tolkien’s English contemporaries could accept without trouble the idea that the forces of evil might just be stronger than those of good: it was part of their real-world experience. After sixty years of almost unchallenged military superiority, 21st century American viewers need another and less matter-of-fact explanation for failure, and it is given as disunity and despair. Jackson presents Théoden, not making a tactical withdrawal, but refusing to fight out of a kind of disillusionment. ‘The old alliances are dead’, he says, ‘we are alone’ (JTT 43, ‘Aragorn’s Return’). No help will come from Gondor (Tolkien’s Théoden had not expected any), no help from the Elves (in Tolkien, the Riders do not even know quite what Elves are). There is indeed a slightly Churchillian suggestion in all this, with Théoden saying in the same scene, ‘If there is to be an end, I would have them make such an end as is worthy of remembrance’, much like Churchill’s famous ‘finest hour’ speech of 1940. But the sense of having been abandoned is set up, of course, only to be reversed, as the Elvish army turns up to honour the Old Alliance and man the walls of the Hornburg. Jackson’s version insists that the source of weakness is disunity, and Aragorn and Arwen are given an expanded role as the focus of union, reinforcing Elrond’s words much earlier, ‘You will unite, or you will fall’ (JFR 27, ‘The Council of Elrond’). This, perhaps, is the main justification for the whole Aragorn-revival digression. It is there to show that ‘there is always hope’ (Aragorn to the boy Haleth son of Háma, JTT 48, ‘The Host of the Eldar’), that Théoden is wrong to think he has been abandoned⁵. The movie has been affected, one might say, by close on sixty years of NATO.

An even more marked plot-shift centres on Faramir. As everyone who has read Tolkien will remember, Faramir has every opportunity to strip Frodo of the Ring, about which he knows a great deal even before Sam’s blundering admission, but rejects the temptation. Jackson has him succumb to it, declare ‘the Ring will go to Gondor’, and march Frodo, Sam and Gollum off to Gondor as prisoners. In Jackson’s version, Faramir intends to hand the Ring over to his father as ‘a mighty gift’ (JTT 57, ‘The Nazgûl Attack’) – and the phrase is indeed Tolkien’s, but in Tolkien it is said not by Faramir deciding to seize the Ring but by Denethor, rebuking him for letting it go (LOTR, p. 795). This digression too makes no real difference in the end, as Faramir is persuaded, seemingly by Sam, into letting the Ring and the hobbits go back into Mordor (and indeed anything else would have altered the plot terminally). So why introduce this second apparently unnecessary complication? One reason may well be to form a connection with the refashioning of Denethor in the third movie, which turns him into a thoroughly unpleasant character. It is true that even in Tolkien Denethor is cold, proud, ambitious, and misguided. It is his decision to defend the Rammas Echor, the wall which Gandalf thinks to be wasted labour, and this decision all but costs Faramir his life. It was his decision also to send Boromir to Rivendell rather than his brother, although the prophetic dream was clearly meant for the latter. It was this decision which meant that Faramir was the one to encounter the hobbits in Ithilien, as Faramir angrily reminds his father, but Denethor refuses to take responsibility. Nevertheless, and in spite of his other disastrous errors, it is possible to feel a certain sympathy for Tolkien’s Denethor: he makes his mistakes for Gondor. One cannot say the same of Jackson’s Denethor. One of the more blatant uses of cinematic suggestion is the scene in the third movie in which Denethor, having sent his son out to fight, sits in his hall and gobbles a meal, tearing meat apart with his hands and munching till juice runs down his chin. He is made to look greedy, self-indulgent, the epitome of the ‘château general’ who sends men to their deaths while living himself in style and comfort. And in a repeat of the ‘disunion’ motif, he refuses to light the beacons to summon Rohan, till Pippin does so at Gandalf’s direction – Tolkien’s Denethor had lit the beacons and sent out the errand-riders before ever they arrived, see LOTR, p. 748.

What the revised Faramir and Denethor interplay does is generate a theme particularly popular in recent (American) film, that of the son trying desperately to gain the love of his father, and of the father rejecting (till too late) the love of his son. It also appeals to American taste by making Denethor stand for old-world arrogance and hierarchy, while Faramir is converted from his obedience to his father by the intervention of the lower-class figure of Sam. What happens is that Sam, having dragged Frodo back from the winged Nazgûl, is given a long speech, transposed from its original place on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, on ‘the great stories’ and the heroes of old. ‘They kept going because they were holding on to something’, he tells Frodo, because ‘there’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for’ (JTT 60, ‘The Tales that Really Mattered’). His words are given total authority by being presented as a voice-over to images of victory at Helm’s Deep and at Isengard, of which Sam at that moment knows nothing. For all his rustic accent, he has become a prophet, a spokesman for the movie’s philosophic core, and Faramir, having overheard Sam talking to Frodo, is made to recognise this by giving way and changing his mind about the Ring.

The sequence indeed shows two general tendencies in the Jackson films, which I would label rather clumsily as ‘democratisation’ and ‘emotionalisation’. One sees the former in the liking for enlarging the roles of relatively minor characters: just as Sam’s stout heart converts Faramir, so Pippin’s cunning diversion of Treebeard through the wasted groves near Orthanc converts Treebeard, in Jackson’s version only, from neutrality to decision (JTT 54, ‘Master Peregrin’s Plan’ and 56, ‘The Last March of the Ents’). Meanwhile, the best example of the latter must be the way in which Jackson turns the journey of Gollum, Frodo, and Sam into a ‘triangle’ situation, in which Gollum (or rather Sméagol) competes with Sam for Frodo’s love – a sequence which includes Gollum’s trickery over the lembas and leads to Frodo actually dismissing Sam on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol. The Jackson handling of Gollum/Sméagol is masterful all through, with an especially good and original scene in which Sméagol argues with and exorcises his alter ego Gollum (JTT 29, ‘Gollum and Sméagol', only for Gollum to come back after the seeming betrayal at Henneth Annûn (JTT 42, ‘The Forbidden Pool'). Jackson has a countervailing tendency, one might note, to iron out merely tactical complications, like the conflicting motives of the three groups of Orcs who capture Merry and Pippin, Uglúk’s Isengarders, Gríshnakh’s Mordor-orcs, and the ‘mountain-maggots’ from Moria. He makes motivation more understandable (for a 21st-century audience) in terms of love given and love refused, faint-heartedness and mistaken loyalty.

One might say that there are no neutrals in Jackson’s vision, or that those who wish to remain neutral, like Théoden, or the Ents, or the Elves turning their backs on Middle-earth, are made to see the error of their ways. Jackson is also quicker than Tolkien to identify evil without qualification, and as a purely outside force (a failing of which Tolkien has often, but wrongly, been accused). In the opening voice-over we are told that after the battle of Dagorlad, Isildur had ‘this one chance to destroy evil for ever’ (JFR 1, ‘Prologue: One Ring to Rule Them All’). For ever? When Tolkien uses the phrase, it is marked immediately as mistaken. Elrond says he remembers the day ‘when Thangorodrim was broken, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so’ (LOTR, p. 237, my emphasis), but there is no such qualification from Jackson. Jackson also has Elrond say to Gandalf that because of Isildur’s error ‘evil was allowed to endure’ (JFR 24, ‘The Fate of the Ring'), but Tolkien’s wise ones, I am sure, would be conscious that evil is always latent, and will exist whether humans and Elves allow it to or not. There is the kernel here of a serious challenge to Tolkien’s view of the world, with its insistence on the fallen nature even of the best, and its conviction that while victories are always worthwhile, they are also always temporary. And this could, at last, be a problem not created by any failure to perceive ‘the core of the original', but a grave and genuine difference between two different media, and their respective ‘canons of narrative art'.

I come now to a matter which I have tried to elucidate before, in the section on ‘The ethics of interlace’, and again in my later book Author of the Century, pp. 172–73. Tolkien, however, is an author one can never quite get to the bottom of, and viewing the Jackson films has once again generated a thought that had previously escaped me. This is that just as the complex structure of the middle sections of The Lord of the Rings is there to demonstrate the characters’ natural feelings of ‘bewilderment', in two senses, the old, literal, and perfectly true sense of being ‘lost in the Wild', and the modern, metaphorical, and avoidable sense of being ‘mentally confused', so there is also a demonstration in them of another danger, which can also be summed up by one ambiguous word. The word is ‘speculation', and this is something to be avoided at all costs. ‘Speculation’ furthermore has two meanings, just as one might expect from Tolkien. Its modern and metaphorical sense is something like ‘allowing one’s actions to be guided by hypotheses about what will happen, or what is happening, or what other people are likely to do’. Its ancient and literal sense is, however, the practice of looking in a speculum – a mirror, a glass, a crystal ball. Frodo and Sam ‘speculate’ when they look in the Mirror of Galadriel, and it is a temptation to them. It tempts Sam to abandon his duty to Frodo and go home to rescue the Gaffer: this would be disastrous for the whole of Middle-earth. Fortunately Galadriel is there to counsel him and to point out ‘the Mirror is dangerous as a guide of deeds’ (LOTR, p. 354). It is that kind of reasoning from the mirror the witches show him that destroys Macbeth.⁶ But the major source of dangerous ‘speculation’ in The Lord of the Rings is the palantíri, the Seeing Stones.

These are used four times in Tolkien’s work, with a very consistent pattern. The first occasion is when Pippin picks up the palantír thrown from Orthanc by Gríma, and later sneaks a look at it when Gandalf is asleep. In the Stone, he sees Sauron, and Sauron sees him. But though Sauron sees Pippin, he draws from this a wrong conclusion, namely that Pippin is the Ring-bearer, and has been captured by Saruman, who now has the Ring (LOTR, pp. 578–9). The next day Aragorn, who has been given the Stone by Gandalf, deliberately shows himself in it to Sauron, and once again Sauron draws the wrong conclusion: namely, that Aragorn has overpowered Saruman and that he is now the owner of the Ring. It is fear of this new power arising which makes Sauron launch his premature attack, and Gandalf indeed realises that this was all along Aragorn’s intention (LOTR, p. 797). Gandalf further surmises that it was the palantír which was Saruman’s downfall. As he looked in it, he saw only what Sauron allowed him to see, and once more drew the wrong conclusion, losing heart and deciding that resistance would be futile (LOTR, p. 584). Both Sauron and Saruman have allowed what they see in the Stones to guide their decisions, and what they have seen is true; but they have seen only fractions of the truth.

The most disastrous use of a palantír is however made by Denethor. The sequence of events is here made especially clear by Tolkien, though it is disguised by his own ‘leapfrogging’ style of narrative, see above. Aragorn shows himself to Sauron in the Orthanc Stone on 6th March. On the 7th and 8th Frodo and Sam are with Faramir in Ithilien. On the 9th Gandalf and Pippin reach Minas Tirith. On the 10th Faramir returns to Minas Tirith and reports to his father that he has met, and released, two hobbits, whom both he and his father know were carrying the Ring. The next day Denethor sends Faramir to defend Osgiliath, clearly a tactical error. On the 13th Faramir is brought back badly wounded, and Denethor retires to his secret chamber, from which people see ‘a pale light that gleamed and flickered … and then flashed and went out’. When he comes down, ‘the face of the Lord was grey, more deathlike than his son’s’ (LOTR, p. 803). Clearly Denethor has been using his palantír, but what has he seen in it? Much later on, close to suicide, he will tell Gandalf that he has seen the Black Fleet approaching (as it is), though he does not know (though at that moment the reader does) that the Fleet now bears Aragorn and rescue, not a new army of enemies (LOTR, p. 835). However, this does not seem quite enough to trigger Denethor’s total despair. Surely we are meant to realise that what he has seen in the palantír is Frodo, whom he knows to be the Ring-bearer, in the hands of Sauron. Both Frodo’s capture and Faramir’s wounding take place on March 13th; and one may recall that Sauron plays a similar trick by showing Gandalf and the leaders of the West Frodo’s mithril-coat and Sam’s sword in the parley outside the Black Gate. The matter is put beyond doubt, however, by what Denethor says to Pippin as he prepares for suicide. ‘Comfort me not with wizards! … The fool’s hope has failed. The Enemy has found it, and now his power waxes’ (LOTR, p. 805). ‘The fool’s hope’ is Gandalf’s plan to destroy the Ring (see LOTR, p. 795), and ‘it’ must be the Ring. Once again, then, Denethor has seen something true in a palantír, and has drawn from it a wrong conclusion.

What all these scenes do collectively is to indicate the dangers of ‘speculating’. Speculating in the old sense (looking into crystal balls) is invariably disastrous in Tolkien’s fictional world. Warning against the dangers of speculation in the modern sense, the way in which too much looking into the future can erode the will to action in the present, is however very much part of Tolkien’s analysis of the real world.⁷ The answer to speculation lies in the repeated scenes when we are made to realise that the fate of one character or group of characters depends on assistance coming from a direction of which they are quite unaware. Sam and Frodo cross Gorgoroth unseen because Sauron is distracted, quite deliberately, by Aragorn. Théoden King is saved at Helm’s Deep by the Huorns brought by Gandalf, but also by Merry and Pippin alerting Treebeard. Saruman is destroyed in a way by his own actions. For all Aragorn’s doubts about his own decisions, Gandalf reminds him, ‘between them our enemies have contrived only to bring Merry and Pippin with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all’ (LOTR, p. 486). The palantíri mislead careless users by filling them with unjustified fear, but the whole structure of The Lord of the Rings indicates that decision and perseverance – not speculating on what is happening elsewhere, but doing your job and getting on with it, ‘looking to your front’ like a Lancashire Fusilier – this mental attitude may be rewarded beyond hope. This, I would suggest, is Tolkien’s philosophic core. He believes in the workings of Providence – the Providence which ‘sent’ Gandalf back, and which ‘meant’ Frodo to have the Ring (LOTR, pp. 491, 55). But that Providence does not overrule free will, because it works only through the actions and decisions of the characters. In Tolkien there is no chance, no coincidence. What his ‘bewildered’ characters perceive as chance or coincidence is a result only of their inability to see how actions connect.

The structure of The Lord of the Rings, then, does very much what John Milton said he was going to in Paradise Lost (Book I, 25–26): both authors, the arch-Protestant and the committed Catholic, mean to ‘assert eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men’. But to follow that structure one needs a very sure grasp both of the chronology of events, and the way in which events in one plot-strand (like the capture of Frodo) affect those in another (like the suicide of Denethor). It seems to me that the medium of film does not lend itself to this kind of intellectual connection. As noted above, Jackson diminishes the theme of ‘bewilderment’ from the start by explaining the history of the Ring start to finish, and by eliminating flashbacks: ‘putting the viewer in the picture’ is achieved at the cost of reducing the characters’ (and the reader/viewer’s) sense of uncertainty. Jackson furthermore does not use the palantíri much. In the first film we do indeed see Saruman looking into one (JFR 18, ‘The Spoiling of Isengard'), but he uses it only to report and receive orders: there is no hint that he is being misled. Pippin later picks it up in the flotsam of Isengard (the explanation of how it comes there is rather different, a result of the early elimination of Saruman in Jackson’s version) and as in Tolkien sneaks a look at it. But the important thing in Jackson’s third film is not Sauron seeing Pippin, and drawing the wrong conclusion, but Pippin seeing Sauron, and being able, quite correctly, to guess some part of his plan – to assault Minas Tirith. Aragorn uses the Stone later on in the film, but not as indicated by Tolkien. The theme of mistaken ‘speculation’ has been all but entirely removed.

Meanwhile the related theme of mis-diagnosed coincidence is indeed present, but relatively vestigially. In the shortened presentation of Sam and Frodo’s approach to Mount Doom, the two look out across the plain of Gorgoroth, and see the camp-fires of the Orcs going out as Sauron’s armies move away to the Black Gate. Sam thinks and says that this is a stroke of luck, but he is wrong, because Aragorn and Gandalf have led their remaining forces to the Black Gate precisely in order to draw Sauron’s attention. But other ‘coincidences’ have been removed. In Tolkien, it was a fortunate coincidence that the sword with which Merry stabs the chief Nazgûl had been made long ago for use against ‘the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king’ (LOTR, p. 826), who is now the Nazgûl; but the film, having eliminated the barrow-wight sequence, makes nothing of this. Similarly, there is no doubt in Tolkien that Denethor’s attempted murder of Faramir is what dooms Théoden, for as Pippin draws Gandalf away, Gandalf says, ‘if I do [save Faramir], then others will die’ (LOTR, p. 832). But this demonstration that there is always a price to pay for weakness is also no longer visible. In general, Tolkien’s painstaking double analysis both of the dangers of speculation and of the nature of chance, which between them express a highly traditional but at the same time markedly original view of the workings of Providence, is not reflected in Jackson’s sequence of movies. In that sense, much of the philosophical ‘core of the original’ has indeed been lost in the movie version.

However, and here I query Tolkien’s statement cited at the start of this essay, this may be because the ‘canons of narrative art', while certainly not ‘wholly different’ in a different medium, are identifiably different. For one thing, the film medium has more trouble dealing with distorted time sequences than does prose fiction. Film makers can easily cut from one scene to another, and Jackson often does so with strikingly contrastive effects.⁸ The implication, though, is always that the different scenes (more of them, shorter, much more broken up)⁹ are happening at more or less the same time. Simply by having chapter and book divisions, with all the familiar devices of chapter-tides and fresh-page starts, a novelist like Tolkien can in effect say to his reader, ‘I am now taking you back to where I left off with this group of characters’. One result is that the reader is much more aware of what he or she knows, from another plot-strand, that the characters in the plot-strand being narrated do not know, with obvious resultant effects of irony or reassurance. This is a major difference between the two versions we now have of The Lord of the Rings.

Does it matter? Jackson may not have been able to cope with all the ramifications of Tolkien on Providence, but then few if any readers do. It is very difficult to say whether some part of Tolkien’s intention gets through even to careless or less-comprehending readers: he would have hoped so, but there is no guarantee that he was correct. And meanwhile Jackson has certainly succeeded in conveying much of the more obvious parts of Tolkien’s narrative core, many of them quite strikingly alien to Hollywood normality – the difference between Prime and Subsidiary Action, the differing styles of heroism, the need for pity as well as courage, the vulnerability of the good, the true cost of evil. It was brave of him to stay with the sad, muted, ambiguous ending of the original, with all that it leaves unsaid. Perhaps the only person who could answer the question posed above – do the changes affect the nature of the entire work? – would be a person with an experience quite opposite to my own: someone who had seen the films, preferably several times over, and only then had read Tolkien’s original. It would be interesting to gather from such a person a list of ‘things I hadn’t realised before’, as also ‘things Tolkien left out'. Perhaps the most heartening thing one can say is that there will certainly now be many millions of people in exactly that position, new readers facing a new experience, and finding once again Tolkien’s road to Middle-earth.

^* References to the first two Jackson films are by scenes as numbered in the extended DVD versions put out by New Line Cinemas in 2002 (The Fellowship of the Ring, here JTT) and 2003 (The Two Towers, here JTT). At the time of writing the extended version of the third film has not yet been released, though I have been fortunate enough to see it, and scene references cannot be given.