Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There was an interesting nugget in the comments under that article:

The crucial thing about this is that it is a pitch by the Tolkien estate rather than to them. Christopher Tolkien hated the Peter Jackson movies [...snip...]

I was an avid reader of Tolkien as a teenager and the movies were a disappointment to me as well. Too much spectacle and derring-do, whilst I always enjoyed the construction of the world and the inner lives & secrets of the characters. The omissions made were sometimes grotesque: the removal of Tom Bombadil alone made the mockery of the books. Skipping the entire homecoming chapter of the hero's journey ("the scouring of the shire") is a common complaint and a travesty of storytelling.

However, Christopher Tolkien is the ultimate Tolkien purist, after a lifetime of curating his father's work. In the few interviews he gives he's clearly dismayed by any deviation from the original intent. I suspect he'd likely be unhappy with any TV adaptation as well.

Like many other Tolkien fans I'd much rather see an adaptation of The Silmarillion, which if anything is the more epic book of tales.

Film(s) aren't books. It's rarely good storytelling to literally translate a book--especially a long complex one--into a film or even a series of films. It just doesn't work. Especially, a book like Return of the King that has real structural problems with multiple endings, at least one of which is buried in an Appendix.

Anyone who goes to a theater looking for a completely faithful and literal adaptation of a beloved book is almost certainly going to be disappointed.

I agree - although to be clear, my reading is this means that LOTR was simply a poor candidate for movie adaptation at all. I'm sure the financial backers disagree.

I never really understood the significance of the Bombadil interaction, except to underline how ancient a world this was, and how much more power everyone had compared to hobbits.

Would you help me understand why the scene was so important for you?

Bombadil connects the story to the future, not to the past. He is the only character whose fate remains enigmatic after the book concludes. He transcends the plot and is unaffected by the ring, unlike literally every other character, including gods. In cross-reference to his characteristics depicted in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and to the letters of Tolkien (which contain a specific denial of Bombadil being "Iluvatar", that is, Tolkien's fictional creator) I came to the conclusion years ago that Tom Bombadil is J.R.R. Tolkien inserting himself into the story. It's quite possible this is an unintentional self-insertion, and he's certainly not an author surrogate (which is a different and much more literal class of self-appearance, like William in The Naked Lunch), but nevertheless, the cap fits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com