If J.R.R. Tolkien were still in his grave, it is likely that he would be turning in it. The cause of his consternation would be the gollumizing of Middle-earth by the forthcoming TV series bearing the name of The Lord of the Rings. This new “adaptation”, produced by one of the Tech Tyrants which are the dark lords of our globalized world, will reflect our own disfigured and gollumized zeitgeist, mirroring the death-culture and the dictatorship of relativism and proving Tolkien correct in his assertion that fairy-stories hold up a mirror to man. This new version will be a perversion and an inversion of the moral vision of Tolkien’s epic but will be a faithful reflection of the ugliness of the perversion itself and of those who have carried out the textual abuse.
Were we to seek an inkling of what Tolkien might have thought of this perverting of his work, we can find it in his response to three American businessmen, Forrest J. Ackerman, Morton Grady Zimmerman and Al Brodax, who showed him drawings for a proposed animated motion picture of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was impressed by the “really astonishingly good pictures”, which he was relieved to discover were “Rackham rather than Disney”, but he was appalled with the storyline. “People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation,” he complained to his publisher, “Lorien becomes a fairy-castle with ‘delicate minarets’, and all that sort of thing.” Worst of all was the description of lembas, the elvish waybread which has been associated allegorically with the Eucharist, as a “food concentrate”. Needless to say, Tolkien discontinued negotiations with the film moguls, seeking to preserve and protect his epic creation from the assault of such banality and crassness.
There is no way of knowing what Tolkien would have thought of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings but there’s no doubt that Jackson went to great pains to evoke the epic sweep of the original work and to avoid provoking the ire of the Tolkien fanbase worldwide. In fact, part of the marketing strategy for the film was to win the hearts of Tolkien fandom with assurances that the aim was to be faithful to the books. Those who had been expecting the worst, the present author included, were pleasantly surprised, for the most part, by the fidelity of the films to Tolkien’s text, obvious and sometimes egregious exceptions notwithstanding.
The same could not be said of Jackson’s woefully bad adaptation of The Hobbit. Clearly hoping to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings movies and suffering from the avaricious dragon-sickness, which is the very root of all evil in The Hobbit, Jackson took outrageous liberties, transforming Tolkien’s succinctly sublime children’s story into a techno-addicted and computer-generated travesty and farce.
Let’s conclude by considering a little more deeply the spirit which is likely to pervade the new Tech Tyrant production of The Lord of the Rings. There has been talk of adding a little libidinous spice to the stories with the introduction of sex scenes and we have been promised that the Shire will conform to the dictatorship of relativism’s insistence on what it calls “multiculturalism”. The former will remove the veil of chastity which clothes Tolkien’s work, stripping away the self-sacrificial love which animates Tolkien’s Middle-earth with the animus of self-absorbed and self-indulgent lust. It will transform the viewer into a voyeur, disfiguring him with the power of the Ring that binds all in darkness instead of transfiguring him with the power which rides above all shadows.
As for making the Shire “multiculturally” acceptable, the Tech Tyrant production of The Lord of the Rings will merely impose upon the authentic culture of the Shire the globalist monoculture which the cultural imperialism of the Tech Tyranny is seeking to impose upon the world. The Middle-earth which Tolkien conceived is authentically multi-cultural. The culture of the hobbits is their own; it is the grassroots culture, rooted in the people themselves, passed down from generation to generation. Similarly, the culture of Rivendell and Lothlorien is authentically elvish, passed down through immemorial millennia. The culture of Rohan and Gondor, the culture of men, is itself authentic and distinct from the cultures of hobbits and elves, as they are distinct from each other. And then there is the enemy of this healthy cultural diversity, Mordor’s culture of death, which despises the cultural diversity of the peoples of Middle-earth, seeking to impose its own global brand or orcish ignobility, marked with the Eye of Sauron, on all people.
The death-culture of Mordor, like the death-culture of the Tech Tyranny, seeks to wipe out genuine cultural diversity, the multifarious fruits of the folk cultures of the free peoples of the world, each in their own hobbit-sized shires, in order to replace it with a one-size-fits-all “multicultural” monoculture in which nobody sings their own songs but everyone listens to globally marketed “world” music. This “multiculturalism” which the Tech Tyrant is imposing upon the Shire in Middle-earth and the shires of the world is nothing but the cultural imperialism of the globalist plutocracy. It ploughs down all the beautiful and multifarious flowers of authentic local and national culture, replacing it with one brand of bland monochromatic monoculture. It is the replacement of the spectrum of colours with fifty shades of grey.
It should go without saying that those with a modicum of freedom-loving sanity and wisdom will steer clear of this new “adaptation” of The Lord of the Rings, which might be likened to one of the palantír stones, the so-called seeing stones which allow the Dark Lord to feed his propaganda to anyone stupid enough to peer into them. Denethor spent so much time staring into one of these stones that he believed the Dark Lord’s victory to be inevitable, committing suicide in an act of abject despair. It is no coincidence that the word palantír means “far-seeing” and can be translated as television, which was surely Tolkien’s intention. Choosing to watch the Tech Tyrant’s palantír version of The Lord of the Rings is playing with fire. It is taking the Denethor option. It would be much better to make a silent protest against this latest desecration of Middle-earth by picking up a copy of Tolkien’s classic and reading or re-reading it. Doing so will not only shame the devil and his globalist servants, it will lead us closer to the God to whom Tolkien points in what he described as his “fundamentally religious and Catholic work”.
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Thank you, Mr. Pearce, for voicing our trepidations about the forthcoming “Rings of Power.” It certainly looks to be dreadful. Jackson’s Lord of the Rings has aged poorly, and I imagine that even those who first praised it now realize that Jackson’s exaggerated style and emphasis on special effects detracted from the story and characters and the overall serious tone of the work. And his Hobbit was an overblown, tedious mess. So expectations are low as we look to see how badly Amazon will botch things. Wouldn’t it be nice if Middle-earth was explored as opposed to being exploited?
One ring to rule them all
One ring to find them
One ring to bring them in
and in the darkness bind them
I have read that they have promised there will be no sex as to make it a suitable show for families. Let’s see if that holds true. As for the multiracial casting I’m not entirely sure what to think. If it was a series based on real history it would of course be ridiculous and woke for the cast to be multiracial unless that was historically accurate. As an expert on Tolkien’s universe I am curious whether you think individuals of different skin tones amongst the various races could be feasible given the movement of peoples through the history of middle earth. As Catholics we believe all races descend from Adam and Eve. If I recall each of the at least Elves, Dwarves, and humans(and therefore hobbits as an offshoot of men), descend from multiple first parents. Could that not make the existence of different skin tones even more likely in this setting especially if some of the first parents started with the different skin tones, unless something in the Tolkien’s text prohibits such an idea. I guess what I’m getting at is that I would not want actors of quality talent excluded from the production merely based on skin color unless something in Tolkien’s text and story explicitly made that impossible.
James, it seems a though Hobbits, Elves, Men, etc., are all different [i]species[/i] in Tolkien’s world, and that of course some are compatible for procreation(Elves and Men, for instance).
We know that in the Silmarillion, there is the Elves’ creation story l, the Dwarves’ one, and then there’s the mysterious “awakening of Men”. They came into the world separately and are most likely fully-separate species, unlike in our world(we are all the se species and thus fully physically compatible).
Clearly the multiracial Shire folk were cast thusly to appease the whims of today’s “woke” attitude pervading the entertainment industry, and not for the sale of being faithful to the books
Neither would I, James. Well said.
Well said. Thank you.
I agree with you for the most part Mr. Pearce but….I actually really like The Hobbit movies but I get if you hate it. Personally The Hobbit is my least favorite of Tolkien’s work (not saying it is bad or overrated in any way in fact it is good) and I can only really appreciate it in the context of the grander lore but that is just me. Most of the changes and additions for the Hobbit films didn’t bother me. I was actually more bothered by some of the ones in The Lord of the Rings to be honest. You can tell me till you are blue in the face that I don’t understand or appreciate what the Hobbit book what trying do or what the circumstances were in its making and such (and plenty have)…I get it but it doesn’t change my mind. The two Peter Jackson trilogies are not perfect by any means (in fact I really get annoyed when some call The Lord of the Rings movies objectively perfect…come on….) and they really are more entertainment representations of Tolkien’s world than an actual representation (if that makes sense) and as I see it the Jackson’s films are in a way a separate continuity (as that is how I see nearly all adaptations) but I still love the films anyway. The only real way to experience Tolkien is to read the books.
“Choosing to watch the Tech Tyrant’s palantír version of The Lord of the Rings is playing with fire. It is taking the Denethor option. It would be much better to make a silent protest against this latest desecration of Middle-earth by picking up a copy of Tolkien’s classic and reading or re-reading it.”
This is an excellent observation. I would also humbly suggest that beyond re-reading one could also explore the writings of the other Inklings from Owen Barfield to W. H. Lewis, delve deep into the literature and history of the Middle Ages–everything from Beowulf to the folk epics of the Heros of Kiev, and (most especially) the Old Icelandic sagas which Tolkien knew so profoundly. Finally, there is a world of engaging fantastic writing to be found in many of Tolkien’s contemporaries. The literary road leading from Bilbo’s door does go ever on and there are many forking paths. I must needs refrain myself here to avoid running on endlessly.
“Tolkien’s succinctly sublime children’s story.”. Succinct and sublime yes, but am I the only one to think that The Hobbit is so much more !than a children’s story? Am I the only one, for that matter, to prefer The Hobbit over the Lord of the Rings?
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Lord of the Rings and all things Tolkien. I also love the Iliad and the Odyssey and the grand themes and overarching values which they portray. I just find it a little hard to relate to Achilles and Odysseus and Aragorn or even the tortured Frodo and his heroic fellowship. Now Bilbo, and his somewhat bumbling fellowship of dwarves, that I can relate to. And the displays of courage and wisdom and loyalty in the Hobbit are not merely the stuff of children’s tales but in many ways the equal and as touching as those in the trilogy. And again, more relatable. To say the Hobbit is a children’s story is like saying the Greek fables are children’s tales.
And I challenge anyone to find words of wisdom in The Lord of the Rings equal to Gandalf’s parting remarks to Bilbo, ” You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck: just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins; and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.”
Amazon has been extremely secretive all along about what they’re doing. At intervals they released tidbits of data, nearly all of which were inconsequential. Now they’ve started on a marketing campaign to drum-up interest (presumably), and what do they do? They could have revealed anything: publicity stills of Sauron, anything. But what did they do? They showcased certain characters, among which are one black actress and one black actor. That’s quite a change to the milieu of the story. It suggests that their first priority is not faithfulness to the story, as written. They have another agenda, or set of agendas, that rank higher. They’re not saying anything about what their other agendas are, of course.
Maybe it’s a small matter, maybe it’s just color-blind casting. But if they’re unfaithful in small matters they might be unfaithful in larger matters as well. It doesn’t look good at first glance. And they also are compressing the timeline, ostensibly to avoid having mortal characters come and go. That’s more unfaithfulness.
Another potential problem is that this Silmarillion material contains relatively more characters at a high level of maturity and nobility (some of them being angelic) than The Lord of the Rings did, and those characters were the ones who suffered the most in their transition from book to movie. And the tone is loftier than in LOTR. The LOTR movies had a much lower mental center of gravity than the book, and one should expect a similar situation with this new series; only the difference will likely be more noticeable.
But we’ll see.
I have only bad expectations of what will happen to Tolkien’s world view . Only to be expected. But I think our wrath should be for the Tolkien family who sold out their father?, grandfather? …..who ever allowed this travesty to happen!! Imagine the sorrow he must feel that they turned their back on truth & beauty for 30 pieces of brass…..
Currently on my 6th reading of LOTR. Each reading reveals new treasures—-the sign of good literature. I will follow this with another reading of the Silmarilion. I love both equally. I don’t do any business with Amazon since they started banning books—so luckily, I will give their predictable mutilation of LOTR a pass.