Transcript of a talk delivered at Swarthmore College on 2/16/2010

http://www.swarthmore.edu/news-events/tolkien-book-to-jackson-script-medium-and-message

[For more in this vein see Tom Shippey’s Roots and Branches – Selected Papers on Tolkien, “Another Road to Middle-earth: Jackson’s Movie Trilogy”, pp. 365-386]

Tolkien Book to Jackson Script: The Medium and the MessageBy Tom Shippey

Tom Shippey: Thanks very much, Greg, for the introduction. Well, there are some very obvious things to say about the Peter Jackson movies and I am going to say them pretty fast so as to get on to harder issues. And the harder issues which I would like to get on to – and I hope I will get on to them – well, first: is the overall effect of the movies different from the overall effect of the books? And next, how far is this an inevitable result of different media? And next, how much of it is a result of deliberate editorial or script writer decision? And you see that these are all pretty hypothetical questions. But my title is Tolkien Book to Jackson Script: The Medium and the Message andI am trying actually to get to the issues of how the medium affects the message. And as I say, whether this is inevitable ornot.

Tolkien in a way didn’t put his finger on this, but he did saysomething about a film script. In the late 50s the idea was floated that The Lord of the Rings should be filmed. And it was floated by a guy I used to know, a science fiction fan called Forry [Forest J.] Ackermann and he turned it over to a scriptwriter who was called Zimmerman. And I must say, despite all the things that people say about Zimmerman, that it was a very noble deed by Zimmerman to hand his script over to the Archives as Marquette University because Tolkien had written all over it with remarks of increasing anger. As he went on he was turning it over and writing, “And another thing…” on the back.

So actually it is an interesting historical document, but if I had been Mr. Zimmerman, I think I’d have gone rip, rip and said, “Let’s forget about that one!”

Anyway, Tolkien said – and I’d just like to say that this inthe context of reading what was an appallingly bad script – complaining about all this, “The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different”. And then he went on and he said, “The problem is not perceiving where the core of the original lies.” And I thought, well, that is very wise, Professor Tolkien, but actually when you say the canons of narrative art cannot be wholly different, I agree with you, but can’t they be very different, or slightly different, or rather different? What we’d like to know is, how different is it possible for them to be? And again, the problem is not perceiving where the core of the original lies, ok, where is the core of the original? Tell us that and then we’ll get a little bit further forward. So, these are questions, which, I say, are really quite difficult. And I am going to try to work round to them, but before I get there I want to say a few things that are really quite obvious.

First, there are always two reactions to the movies. And I think I became aware of them the first time I went to the previewof the first movie, which was in St. Louis. I went there and I sat there in the theatre and I watched the movie. And as the movie unrolled I could sort of feel the theater going quiet. Nobody stirred. You know it’s three hours, no intermission, nobody went to the rest room, nobody actually rustled their sweetie papers, nobody actually bothered about their popcorn. The whole place went dead quiet. And I thought, ok, that’s got through then, hasn’t it! And this was reinforced a bit later when I was… actually during a tv interview with one of the local channels, maybe six weeks after the movie came out. I said what I had to say about the movie, and at the end, when it was all over, the camera woman came out from behind the camera, and she came out to me and said, “I’ve seen that movie 51 times!” And I said, oh, that’s nice, you know… and I went off thinking, Fifty-one times! And I figured out – I’m sure I’ve got this right – she must have seen it every day and twice on Sundays ever since it was released! So the thing had been a kind of transcendental

experience for her. And this, I say, I’ve heard from other people too. Well, that’s one reaction: complete absorption.

The other though: again, at the end of the movie I hung around for a bit, because I wanted to see my name come up on the credits. And the credits were roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, and I was just getting up: “Ah, they let me down! They said they would have my name up…” I was stamping out and then, I think it was just after the man who emptied the portapotties, I got on thecredits. “Oh we almost forgot this guy.” So that meant I was hanging around for five minutes after the movie finished. And asI went out I could see a little knot of people over in the cornerand indignant voices were rising, and they were all complaining about things that had been changed in the movie. And I listened to this for a bit, and I realized that actually the rule in this case, if you were a purist – because these were the purists complaining about the movie – if you are a purist, it is a competition. And the person who wins is the one who makes the most fuss about the smallest detail. Because that shows you havereally absorbed everything. And just to show I can be a purist too: what really burned me up about the second movie, The Two Towers: Do you remember the scene in which Éowyn is trying sort of to get out of Aragorn how old he is? And she realizes he rodewith her grandfather and she’s obviously got her sights on him ina sort of romantic way and she is saying, “So how old are you?! 35? 40?” And eventually he says to her, 87. And she realizes heis one of the Dunedain. Well, actually, just to show I can nitpick as well as the next man, he is not 87! He’s 88! They looked it up in the Appendix, didn’t they! They saw the date of birth and the saw the date of the events and they deducted one from the other and they got 87. But, that conversation took place on March the 3rd and his birthday is on March the 1st! (Laughter and applause.) Spoiled the whole movie for me! (more laughter)

Well, we have then, as I say: the two reactions: complete absorption and the kind of nitpicking complaint. Perhaps I should say also that I think much of the Tolkien fan criticism has been very negative about the movies and in one of them – I have a little store of insults I have received which I treasure –and one of them, a guy I know from California, he said, because I

said I quite like the movies really, something as mild as that, he said, “This is disgraceful. Someone who has looked at Tolkienas much as this!” He said, “This is an example of Sarumanian accomodationism!!” (laughter) Yes, I’ve arrived! I thought I was a rear rank orc, but I’ve been promoted. So there are these two reactions to [Jackson’s] Tolkien and I can’t help feeling that mine is somewhere in between the two.

However, if I were going to have an argument with a purist, well, I’d say, let’s be realistic about this. Consider the circumstances of composition. Let’s think about something very basic. In this case, it’s money! How much did it cost Tolkien to write Lord of the Rings? Well, he used to scrounge paper from oldexaminations scripts. So I don’t think that cost him very much. He used to write in fountain pen; and it’s my belief that he filled it up at the college inkwell! So the ink didn’t cost him anything. So what were his expenses? Well, the only thing he invested in it was his spare time and what is a professor’s sparetime worth? Well, we are in a position to tell you that: it is worth absolutely nothing! So considering the enormous returns onTolkien’s investment, I reckon it comes to considering returns against capital, the case of The Lord of the Rings must be the most remarkable example of positive returns in world history. So it cost Tolkien nothing to write The Lord of the Rings, which meant that he could do what he liked.

But Jackson with the bill rising all the time and pressure on his back actually from the money men there back in Los Angeles, he had got to think about making a return on the investment. And as a result there was on him a strong sense of what I call reverse audience pressure. He had got to figure out how he was going to sell this movie, and he had got to start doing things which would appeal to the target audience. And the target audience was teenagers. Well, as a result it is quite clear that much of the movie has been teenagered. Merry and Pippin are much brattier than they are in the original. There aresome things where you have to hide your eyes and pretend you weren’t there. There’s Legolas skateboarding down the steps. There are unfortunate jokes about dwarf tossing and things like that. And you could go on: Gimli – I slightly regret this – hasbeen turned into a grumpy old dad image for people to laugh at.

He’s been made more a figure of fun. And we have got other things like Glorfindel being written out and Arwen being written back in because somebody at some point said, “We’ve got to build that character up.” Ok! Ok! There’s half a dozen things like that and I say you just have to let them go by. One other thing is that, I think it’s pretty clear that the model they had in mind was Star Wars. They wanted to outdo Star Wars in terms of the special effects. And that was something they were dead set on doing. They also realized I think early on that because of the teenage market and having looked at Star Wars they didn’t need to spend a lot of money on well-known actors. Because their target audience was not going to be particularly impressed by well-knownactors. So they could save a good bit of budget there. So the money thing meant that there was a different attitude towards theaudience and Jackson did not have the free hand, the entirely free hand that Tolkien did.

Well, then that’s the first thing then: that there are two reactions. The second: you’ve got to remember that Jackson was not in the same position as Tolkien. The third thing I’d say is this: Tolkien talks about the canons of narrative art. But in some ways he himself, not being a professional author, not being a professional author at all, paid no attention whatever to well-known canons of narrative art! And Jackson picked up on this very quickly. One of the things he said was, talking about the first movie, “The first movie was actually in a way quite easy todo.” He said, “It’s a road movie. You’ve just got to move people along. It’s nice and linear.” “But,” he said, “when we looked at the book, what was the problem? The problem was the Council of Elrond.”

There it is, Chapter 2 of Book 2 about rather more than halfway through the volume, and it’s a record of a committee meeting.And it’s about… oh,… 20,000 words long! I tried to count up how many speakers there are, and I always get a different answer because it is so many. And many of them are actually introduced for the first time. I make it that there are over 20 speakers there if you include people who are introduced inside Gandalf’s own narrative! You’ve got lots of speakers, some of them quite new, some of them quite unimportant. There are figures there whospeak and take part in the discussion and do nothing else at all

in the whole of the sequence! One other thing that I have to say: I’ve been to many committee meetings, many, many committee meetings, and I reckon I know who is a good chair and who is not.And Elrond is a terrible chair; he lets the meeting get completely out of hand. If I had been Elrond I’d have said, “Look, this meeting has three points to decide: one, is the hobbit’s ring the One Ring? If it is, what are we going to do about it? And once we decide what to do about it, we’ve got to decide who is going to do it. Right. Item one on the agenda: Gandalf let us have your report…”

But, you know, instead we get Gloin telling us the history of the Mines of Moria. (Gimli doesn’t speak. Again, slightly oddsince he is going to be a character later on.) And Boromir tellsus about Gondor and Gandalf says what he did on his holidays, andthe whole thing fumbles along and Legolas says, Oh we lost Gollum, and… anyway, as Jackson rightly said, “That would just stop the movie dead! So we can’t do that!” And you know what hedid, which I think is a good decision. He took – because although it is a committee meeting and all that, a lot of information is being passed on, and that is vital information forthe plot – he took the information out – a lot of it – and put itat the front, where you have a voice over, somebody talking, coolly and calmly, over scenes of extremely violent action. So you’ve got the audience watching and you’ve also got them being given vital information and then you can start the movie and then you can make the Council of Elrond a very different and much shorter incident when it comes up.

So that’s been very much altered and you might notice that the climax of it is quite different. In the book, basically, as often happens in committee meetings, everybody has talked themselves out. And the meeting sort of runs down until Frodo intervenes. But in the movie, much more dramatically, you might say, everybody starts shouting at each other and Frodo has to tryto break into the scene of shouting and confusion. And that is actually done very well, I think. Because Frodo gets up and says, “I will take the Ring.” And nobody takes any notice of him. Except Gandalf who turns round to listen to him because Gandalf is the only person there who takes any notice of hobbits.And because Gandalf has turned round the rest start to shut up a

bit and Frodo says again, “I will take the Ring.” And then they all fall silent and then he says for the third time, “I will takethe Ring, but I do not know the way.” So that is done quite well, and the point I’d make is that Jackson is pretty good at doing quiet scenes. He has a lot of noisy scenes, a lot of action scenes and all that, but he can do the quiet scenes as well.

Still, that was the problem in the first book. In the second and third books, or movies, again you have Tolkien posing problems for the script-writers, who I imagine kind of tearing their hair and saying to each other, “You can’t do that! You just can’t do that!” “Canons of narrative art”? One of the things anybody will tell you, is show not tell. But actually Tolkien doesn’t do that. In the second book a classic thing, I think, is this. The Ents are stirred up. They are marching on Isengard. They get to Wizard’s Vale, Nan Curunir, and they look down into it and it says, “Night lay over Isengard.” Finish. And then we move off to another strand of plot and when we get back to Isengard, it is a ruin. In between Isengard has actuallybeen destroyed. So we move from “night lay over Isengard” to twosmall figures sitting and smoking amid the wreckage and then the two small figures sit and tell Legolas and Gimli what happened asa kind of flashback. Only it’s not a flashback. Flashback implies it’s quick; it’s actually rather slow. Well, in other words, a big action scene has been totally removed from the story. And I am quite sure, I know the scriptwriters said, “Hey,you know if we try and do that the special effects guys will murder us. We have got to put that in the right places and we have got to make it a big action scene.”

Just saying it quickly, the same thing happens in volume three where at the end of Chapter Three Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are going into the Paths of the Dead and the chapter ends with the words, “The dead followed them.” And we don’t see them again until they reappear in Chapter Seven and we don’t actually know what happened, until once again, Legolas and Gimli, sort of reversing what happened with Merry and Pippin, tell the story in flashback in Chapter Nine. So on two occasions you have major action scenes just taken out and reported later on. Well, a goodquestion – and this is now getting on to being hard questions –

is not, why did Jackson do what he did, which is obvious, but whydid Tolkien do what he did!? Why did he tell the story that way round?! Because it is not a natural way to do it. And also what is the result of this?

Well, I will just let that lie for a moment. But surely onething is this: that if you are reading the book for the first time, much of the time you do not know what is going on! You don’t know what happened. That applies particularly to the firstbook, where you have no idea of the back story until you get to the Council of Elrond. But in the movie you have the backstory right at the start. And so, putting it quite literally, in the movies you are in the picture from the start and you stay in the picture all the way through. So that sense of not knowing what is going on, that’s there in the book, but much of it has been removed from the movies. Well, all the same I can see entirely why Jackson and his team did what they did there. What puzzles me is why Tolkien did what he did and I’ll come back to that later on.

But there are other things that perhaps are more puzzling. In public discussion I have usually turned at this point to some things that Jackson added. And I always say, this is rather strange. Because you can see that he is trying very hard to lighten ship. He’s actually got 62 chapters to deal with and he wants to get rid of some of these, because he knows he can’t possibly squeeze them all in, even to an 11 hour special ExtendedVersion. So Bombadil, out! Scouring of the Shire, out! Ok, youare making drastic changes like that, taking out three chapters at a time to cut the whole thing. So why add things? There areseveral things he added. One is what I call the Aragorn Intermezzo. Aragorn is heading for Helm’s Deep; the Wargs attack. Ok, I know why that’s been added on, because the specialeffects guys said, “We’ve got to do Wargs! We’ve got to do Wargs! We’ve got really good ideas about Wargs. Please let us do the Wargs!” So he has to put the Wargs in. Ok, ok, but why does Aragorn have to fall off the cliff and be rescued by his horse!? After which he gets back on the horse and goes to Helm’sDeep which is where he was going anyway! What we’ve got here is a zig-zag… well, I’m not sure it is a zig-zag; it’s a loop. It’s

a narrative loop which takes him back to where he was and then continues. So what has that loop been built in for?

In very much the same way, you have what I call the Faramir Inversion. Instead of Faramir meeting Sam and Frodo in Ithilien,and finding out what they are doing and sending them on their way, he decides to take them to Minas Tirith. And he takes them across the river to Osgiliath and then they have to go back across the river. So you have another narrative loop in which they are going in this direction, they are taken round in anotherdirection, and then off they go again where they were before. Well, there are two of those cases, and the third thing I did wonder about was the kind of demonization of Denethor who is madea much less sympathetic character in the movie than he is in the book. Now, what are the explanations for these?

One thing I have had to do in recent months is look very hard especially at the second movie. And also to play through the Director’s Commentary and the Scriptwriters’ Commentary, and the Cast Commentary, the Design Team Commentary and the Production Team Commentary and actually they are pretty open about it.

The Aragorn Intermezzo is because they really had to keep Arwen present in the movie. And as you know, remember, in The Two Towers as written Arwen doesn’t appear at all. She is not there, not mentioned under any heading. But they felt you can’t just drop someone completely out of the second movie, because when you bring her back in the third movie, it’s a two year gap and everybody’s forgotten about her. They felt they had to have some kind of continuity and Arwen had to be built up as a character.

The Faramir Inversion, well…, one of the things it did, and they are quite keen on this, was to build up the role of minor characters and in this case they made Sam a turning point character. He actually is the one who is actually responsible for Faramir changing his mind. It also built up Faramir as a character. Because one of the things they kept on saying, the director and script writers, was that they felt every character had to have a journey. “Journey” was the word they used. So Faramir had to be given a journey of development and change. He had to think one thing one time and then change his mind and come

to a better realization. And it was Sam who made him do it. They did the same thing, just to mention it, with Pippin. Pippinis actually given responsibility for changing Treebeard’s mind. So actually they like to build in scenes in which people change their minds, because that made them have a journey. And they liked to build in scenes in which apparently minor characters were responsible for major plot changes. So they are kind of equalizing the roles of the characters, you might say.

The Denethor stuff puzzles me a bit. And I think there was a somewhat clichéd element in it. And I would say that perhaps it’s the case that nowadays as a result of 50 years of relativelypeaceful history it is hard for people to grasp the idea of conflict of interests. That you can have people who are allied to each other and certainly on the same side but who do not see things the same way. And Denethor is a person who interests are only with Gondor. Well, ok, and that’s true in both the book andthe movie. But in the book this is accepted as unfortunate but perfectly reasonable. In the movie this has to be demonized, because everybody is felt to have to perceive their interests thesame way.

However, having said all that, I am slowly grinding on towards issues of increasing difficulty where I cannot see quite what is happening. And I thought actually it might be better at this point to consider some of the things that were said by Jackson, by Philippa Boyens the scriptwriter and by the actors and the production teams. It’s obvious especially with the second movie what the advertising drive was. I don’t know if youremember, no reason why you should, the way that they did the trailers and the posters for the second movie. But the trailers and the posters were very heavy on Éowyn and Arwen. There was for instance one poster that I remember particularly which has Viggo Mortensen at the front holding up his sword like this and on one side there is Éowyn and on the other side is Arwen; and you realize, hey, I know what we have here: we have a triangle story. And they triangulated it. In order to do this, of course, they had to make pretty drastic changes, in fact very drastic changes, for both Arwen and Éowyn. How many words does Éowyn say in the book version of The Two Towers? Don’t worry I have counted them for you. She says 42! Only 5 of which are

addressed to Aragorn and most of them consist of saying things like, “Hail to you, Théoden king of Rohan!” So, frankly, what she is doing there is waiting at table. And there is a faint hint that she is feeling a bit out of it, and there is just a faint hint that she is paying attention to Aragorn, but that’s allthere is.

Well, 42 words… In the Extended Edition version, the dvd of the movie, there are 62 scenes and Éowyn appears in actually 14 of them. So she is there, she is on screen in a quarter of the scenes and of course she has many more things to say. Well, Éowyn goes from 42 words to 14 scenes – big shift. Arwen goes from absolutely zero, nothing there at all, to figuring prominently in 3 scenes. So both of them are pretty strong buildups. However, it is pretty clear that the production team especially really liked doing the Arwen stuff. One thing they did, you may notice, was that they invented the idea of the Evenstar. The object, the Evenstar. There is no Evenstar objectin the book. They made that up. And actually it comes in from the first movie, all the way through, and is quite often focused on prominently, because it is a kind of symbolic object that keeps reminding you, even if she is not there, of the importance of Arwen. The other thing that I noticed is that, as I say, the production team really liked the Arwen stuff. You remember what they did in the second movie was bring in a lot of Appendix A5 a part of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen which is about Arwen choosing mortality, staying in Middle-earth and having to endure the death of Aragorn. Well, they really liked that and the production team guy said, “That scene with Aragorn’s tomb,” he said, “that was the best shot in the whole movie!” So they really liked doing that. But what they did was, as I say, to swap in a lot of material from Appendix A5.

With Éowyn in some ways they were even more daring I thought, because after all Appendix A5 was about Arwen. But withÉowyn what they did was to bring in stuff from the third volume and much of the time they actually switched the speaker! So there is one scene, which perhaps you remember from the movie, where Grima is talking to Éowyn and he is saying to her, how you must feel trammeled as if you are a wild thing that has been trapped in a hutch, and he is pointing out to her how lonely and

how isolated and how imprisoned she is. And that is Grima talking, but actually all those words are Gandalf’s [in the book]. They switched Gandalf to Grima. They did that quite often actually. Bits said by one character [in the book]would appear spoken by another [in the movie] and sometimes you feel they are quite appropriate. Bombadil having been kicked out [of the movie] actually reappears because Treebeard gets some of his things to say [in the movies]. Philippa Boyens said that Bombadilwouldn’t mind his words being given to Treebeard. And I thought,Yes, I guess that is fair enough. But I think that their switching Gandalf to Grima, that’s really rather a bolder decision. They kept doing this kind of thing and I asked myself again, Why?

Well, the why I have already given is continuity. You are bringing out a movie at one year intervals and you cannot afford to lose people for over the two year period. So Éowyn and Arwen were not only built up because they were going to be important, they also had to be kept in focus. Arwen had been in Number One and she is going to be in Number Three, so she had to be in Number Two. And Éowyn is going to have a big role in Number Three so she had to be introduced in Number Two and her position stated, but they also of course brought back Elrond who disappeared in the book and had to be given a role in the movie. And Galadriel. And they also introduced Denethor early. There was a strong wish for getting continuity for characters. And oneof the cast actually said that he thought if he didn’t do that the character would lose “emotional resonance”. You could not expect the emotional resonance to be kept up if you just dropped characters and didn’t bring them back again. And actually when you think about that, it is such a good point that you wonder howTolkien got away with ignoring it. He was quite ready to drop characters and bring them back as appropriate or indeed, with Arwen, to have her an apparently important figure but not have her do very much at all in the book.

So: they were concerned with continuity. They were concerned that everyone has to have a “journey”. That’s why we have Pippin and Treebeard and we have Sam and Faramir and we haveElrond, another character who is forced by Galadriel to change his mind completely about his policy of isolationism.

And a third thing which I have noticed before in Hollywood movies, they do like triangles. I already said, Éowyn and Arwen and Aragorn. Ok, but there is also Denethor and Boromir and Faramir. You might say that triangle was there in the book but it’s much more heavily developed in the movie. And another one much more heavily developed in the movie is, of course, Frodo andSam and Gollum. Where we have a kind of love relationship among the three and a kind of desertion scene built in as well.

Well, underlying all this I feel, is a different attitude topeople. And I would say, Jackson’s attitude – which is also the one of our time – is really a more sentimental one than Tolkien’s. Tolkien in some ways was a rather harder person emotionally, I would say, than Jackson is. And also that is whatpeople were more used to in the 1950s. One thing I just mention,en passant, is that never forget, never forget, that the Inklingswere effectively a veterans’ organization. You know, after WorldWar 2 when Britain was still on rations some of Lewis’s admirers would send him things like a ham from America and then they wouldcook the ham and have a dinner for the Inklings, and then they would write a little letter of thanks. And they usually wrote iton the back of the menu. One of these menus survives and they all write down their names and their jobs and their regiments. So they put down Lancashire Fusiliers, Somerset Light Infantry, Christopher Tolkien put down Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. Everybody put down what they could and if they couldn’t do anything else they say, Oh, I was an air raid warden. But just the same everybody did their best to indicate some kind of military connection. And that perhaps has something to do with their different beliefs about people.

However, and now I come to a hard topic. I think there is also a different belief about events. About the nature of events. And this is where I wonder if this is an accident of thechange of medium or a deliberate decision. And I’ll tell you what I think about it. But I have to say this rather summarily because if I try to say it fully, I think the point will get lost. So I am actually trying to summarize this as briefly as I can.

And I would say this: First, a major feature of Tolkien’s books is a sense of bewilderment. The characters are often

bewildered and they are bewildered in two senses. They are bewildered because they are lost in Wilderland. They don’t know where they are. Sometimes they discuss where they are. Merry and Pippin are particularly lost because they are too idle to ever look at a map! But even Aragorn, who has a good idea where he is, he is often lost in the sense of not being sure what to do. So they are lost in being bewildered in Wilderland, but theyare also bewildered in that they don’t know what to do. Aragorn in particular feels this strongly, I think, at the start of Book Two because he has to make a string of decisions. Ok, Merry and Pippin are being carried off, Frodo and Sam have gone off in the other direction, who is he going to follow? Merry and Pippin. They have been taken by orcs and there is an S rune there. Does that stand for Sauron or for Saruman? Saruman. So we are going to follow them in the direction of Saruman’s country. Are we going to pursue them through the night with the risk of losing the track? Or are we going to stop at night with the risk of them getting further away from us? We’ll stop at night. Ok, so he makes all these decisions and at the end of that sequence he thinks he has done it all completely wrong. And it is actually Gandalf who has to tell him not to take it too hard. Maybe, in fact, this is going to come out well.

One point I would add is, that every time he makes a decision, Gimli says, That’s a bad idea. And Gimli, well …It’s afamiliar situation to me. It’s a military situation: the officerwho is Gandalf, is dead, the sergeant who is Aragorn, has to takeover, Legolas who is the corporal, loyally backs [him] up, Gimli who is the long service private does what we used to call in the army, burging. Burging is muttering in a kind of dissatisfied way without quite reaching the level of open insubordination. And in the first edition of Lord of the Rings Aragorn eventually cracked and turned on him and said very angrily to Gimli, who’d said, You shouldn’t have been looking in the Palantír, and Aragorn says, Why, what did you think I was going to tell him? Did you think I was going to tell him I have a rascal of a rebellious dwarf here whom I would gladly swap for a serviceable orc!? Tolkien cut that out in the second edition, but actually Ihad a feeling that Gimli was asking for that by that stage! He

really had grumbled all the way through and he wasn’t making Aragorn’s life any easier.

Ok, the bewilderment is there because the characters don’t know what to do. And they also, note, don’t know what is going on. They don’t know what has been happening. And they try to deal with this by speculation. “Speculation” is another word with two meanings. You know what speculation means in normal use. It’s what they do at the stock market or the casino as we call it. But speculation also comes from “speculum” which is theLatin word for “mirror”. And it’s really “looking in the glass”. Yeah, right, looking in the mirror of Galadriel, that’s “speculation”. It’s not a good idea. You see things, all right. But you don’t know whether they are true or not. And you don’t know what to do if they are true. And there is also speculation which is looking in the Palantír. And that’s a bad idea as well.I would say, that always goes wrong.

Now: the bewilderment I have mentioned: a lot of it is an effect of the complex separations which take place. Like I say, first movie – road movie. Second movie, second book, characters are going off in all directions. Frodo and Sam, Merry and Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, Gandalf comes in, they swap over, then Pippin goes off with Gandalf, Merry goes off with the Riders or goes off with Éowyn. The characters are zipping backwards and forwards all the time, Gandalf sort of criss-crossing. And of course none of them know what is happening withFrodo and Sam. I once tried to draw a diagram of this, and it was printed in my book Author of the Century and the printers made a botch of it! But I am not surprised: I drew that diagram about five times with different coloured ballpoints trying to get it towork and I could never get it to work. It was too complicated for me. Still, I gather the diagram did make a point; it made the point it’s all damn complicated. And that was all you reallyneeded to know. But you wondered again, “canons of narrative art”! Who told Tolkien to do that?! What was his point? It was all very, very difficult. Well, the point is, Tolkien would say,I did that to show people who were bewildered, because that’s theway things are in reality! We never know entirely what is going on. Our fates are affected by other people’s decisions. But we don’t know about the decisions and maybe we will never find out.

In Lord of the Rings as Tolkien wrote it, however, there are some simple answers. Who killed Théoden? Denethor. Gandalf says so.What nearly kills Faramir? It’s defending the walls of Pelennor which is really an echo of the old Maginot Line idea. What savesSam and Frodo? And this is in the movie, the decision of Aragornto distract Sauron. But very clearly in the books, less clearly in the movies, you the reader may find out, but the characters never know.

So the temptation if you as a character are bewildered is tospeculate. Looking in the Palantír, how often does that happen? Ok, the first time, Pippin looks in the Palantír and Sauron sees him. And Sauron draws a conclusion from that – he sees a hobbit in the Palantír, he knows the Palantír belongs to Saruman, he concludes that the hobbit is the Ring-bearer and that Saruman hasthe Ring. What he sees is true, but the conclusion he draws fromit is wrong. The next thing is that Sauron sees Aragorn in the Orthanc Stone, and he concludes from it that Saruman had the Orthanc Stone and the hobbit and the Ring, now Aragorn has the Orthanc Stone so he must have the hobbit and the Ring. And that is why Sauron strikes early. He makes a preemptive strike. Onceagain what he sees is true but he draws from it the wrong conclusion. Every time any one looks in the Palantír what they see is true, but from it they draw the wrong conclusion. Why didSaruman give up and decide to ally himself with Sauron? Because he saw in the Palantír the preparations that Sauron was making and he concluded wrongly that there was no possibility of resistance.

But the most decisive example, I think, of looking in the Palantír and getting the wrong answer is surely Denethor. The dates on this… I’ve got to get them right… Pippin looks in the Stone on the 5th of March, Aragorn looks in the Stone on the 6th of March, Faramir meets Sam and Frodo on the 7th and 8th of March,on the 9th of March Pippin and Gandalf reach Minas Tirith, on the10th of March Faramir reaches Minas Tirith and reports that he has had a meeting with Frodo and Sam, he is sent off to retake the Pelennor Walls and he is brought back on the 13th of March, and when he is brought back, Denethor sees him brought back and goes off to his tower and people see from that tower a light flashing and flickering. But he is not watching the television,

he is looking in the Palantír and when he comes out what he says is, The fool’s hope has failed, the Enemy has found it. And the fool’s hop, as he knew from Faramir, was Gandalf’s idea of sending Sam and Frodo into Mordor to destroy the Ring. The fool’s hope has failed, the Enemy has found it. What has he seen? He has seen Frodo in the hands apparently of Sauron. Onceagain, then, Denethor has looked in the Palantír, has seen something which actually is happening on that particular day but hehas drawn from it the wrong conclusion. And he then gives way to despair and suicide.

The moral of all this is quite clear, I think. If you speculate you will draw the wrong conclusion. Why does Tolkien do this? And why does he have this complex net of criss-crossings, bewilderments and speculations? Well, I’d say the answer to that is fairly clear. What he is saying is, and I can sum it up in four words, which is the old motto of the British Redcoat, “Look to your front”. Don’t look to the sides, don’t look to see what your mates are doing, you don’t need to know that, because if you are looking to see what they are doing, theywill be looking to see what you are doing, and you will all frighten each other in no time! Certainly don’t look behind you.Look to your front.

Or another way that it is put and this time it is Gandalf’s words. Gandalf talking to Frodo early on in the book and repeated twice actually by Jackson. He says, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” All we have to do is decide what we’re going to do. Do not think about other people! Once you start making your decisions on the basis of what you think other people’s decisions will be, you are speculating. And when you start speculating, you will inevitablyget it wrong! And you will actually frighten yourself and drive yourself to wrong conclusions like Denethor, and indeed, like Sauron.

Well, I think, actually in the book all that is quite clear.It’s a statement about the way events are in the real world. Andit is telling you what is the right procedure in the real world. But in the movies it is quite different. The Palantírs there arenot deceptive; they are in fact providers of information. When Pippin looks in the Palantír he actually sees something, which is

Sauron’s plan to attack Minas Tirith. So he gets true information from it and that actually comes out quite useful. And there are other scenes in which Aragorn looks in the Palantírand all these are deliberate. And when Saruman is looking in the Palantír, it’s like using Skype. You’ve got the webcam in front of you having a video conversation, perfectly normal. Not makinga point at all, as far as I can see. So the Palantírs are reallyquite different and that I think suggests that there is a different attitude to events there. And the cross-cutting is gone.

Yes, well, last point, really. Was that inevitable? The book has 62 chapters; 6 of them got junked. Ok, it’s got 56 chapters. The Extended dvd has 168 scenes. And if you divide 56into 168 you get 3 exactly. You get 3 scenes to every chapter. But actually Tolkien will follow one thread, one line – like Frodo and Sam – for a long period and then switch back to anotherthread, though the other threads are usually much shorter. As I say, zigzag a lot. Just the same, he will follow that for relatively long periods. And furthermore, a point I was trying to make with that wretched diagram, they leap frog all the time. You follow characters up to a certain date, then go back and you follow another group of characters to a bit past that date and then you go back. And they keep zigzagging past each other. So that actually the characters never quite know what is going on elsewhere and you get these strange scenes of flashback. So whatI’d say is that in the movie that is all gone. You get a sense much more of things happening simultaneously, at the same time, and you are switching from one scene to another which is thought to be taking place effectively simultaneously. In other words, what has been a complex zigzag has actually turned into two straight lines which are nevertheless broken up. But not ever broken up for very long.

Well, first question: was that inevitable? I don’t know. I’ve never had to make a film. I think it probably was actually.It is a question of attention span. You can’t actually expect the movie audience to stay fixed on one thing and wondering everynow and then what is going on elsewhere without assuaging that desire to know. So I think it probably was inevitable. And having said that, yes, if it was inevitable as I think it was

because the medium is different, does it create a quite differentmessage? Well, I think so. But I am not too sure about that. AsI was saying to Dawn in the audience just before we started, the person who would give a good answer to that is the opposite of me. I know the books very well, then I saw the movies. We really need somebody who knows the movies really, really well – like that lady who saw them 51 times through – and then goes and reads the book. Because someone like that could tell us whether it feels different. And as I say, I think it does, but I don’t trust my own judgment on that point. So I ask, were these changes inevitable – I think so. Did they actually create a different result – yes, I think so, but I am not so sure about that particular bit.

But my general conclusion is that it seems to me – and I hope the film fans will not turn on me here – that movies are a less subtle mode of communication than books and I also think that Tolkien’s book anyway is harsher and more pessimistic than the movie. It has a much stronger sense of loss. However, I am not too concerned about that, I just think it is a case of thingsbeing different.

And one last point I’d make. I really did appreciate some of the things that Jackson did. And one of the bravest things I think was to keep the ending. To just leave the ending the way it was. When Sam comes back from the Grey Havens and sits down by his own fireside with a baby on his knee and he says, “Well, I’m back.” Michael Swanwick, the greatest active writer of fantasy in the world today, he said that’s the most heart breaking line in modern literature. Why? Well, it’s a very Anglo-Saxon line. Sam comes back and he says, “Well, I’m back.” Well, of course, he’s back! If he weren’t back he wouldn’t be there to say, “Well, I’m back.” That’s really Anglo-Saxon, to say something which is completely pointless!

Yes, but it isn’t, is it?! Because it means a lot. What itmeans is, I gave up immortality. I’ve come back. I gave up eternal life; I’ve come back to be with you. I’ve come back to death. Of course, they are not going to say that, and nor would I! Because I am an Anglo-Saxon and we don’t go in for soppy stuff like that. But also it means, I’ve come back to death, butI have come back to life as well. Because I have a long life to

go, and I’m going to be mayor of Michel Delving. Can’t say fairer than that. And I have got my children and my grandchildren to come, another way of coming back to life as well. So I have made a choice, and it is a difficult choice, andit’s a choice between two very different things. But I’ve done it, I’ve done it, and I am not going to make a fuss about it. I’m back, and that’s all. Yeah, good ending.

And perhaps the last thing I will say is this: Jack Nicholson came out of the third movie, having seen it at the preview and he turned to, I think it was Elijah Wood, and he said, “Too many endings.” And I will end with that. Thanks verymuch. (Applause)

Comments from TORn:

http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2014/07/13/91041-tolkien-book-to-jackson-script-the-medium-and-the-message/

July 13, 2014 by Demosthenes:In this 50-minute lecture at at Swarthmore College, Professor Tom Shippey, theauthor of J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, charts the creative reshaping of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings into Peter Jackson’s award-winning trilogy of films.Or, as he puts it:

Is the overall effect of the movies different from the overall effect of the books? And, next: how far is this an inevitable result of different media? andnext, how much of it is a result of deliberate editorial or scriptwriter decision?

Interesting questions to ponder.

Professor Shippey’s talk — which is, I think, quite excellent — charts the creative reshaping of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings into Peter Jackson’s award-winning trilogy of films, and whether (and how) the medium affects the

message. You’ll probably recall that Shippey was the literary consultant to Jackson and the actors as they worked on the films.

AK 195Interesting lecture. I was especially enthralled with the part about the Palantirs having a less "sinister" role in the movies; this was something I completely overlooked, and never once thought about until Mr. Shippey brought it up.One thing at the end confounded me a bit though, and that is Shippey's assertion that Sam was giving up immortality by going back to his family in the Shire. Maybe someone can correct me on this, but I never thought that Sam had a choice in the matter, at least not at that point anyway. It is implied that Sam did eventually take ship to Valinor, although this was many years afterFrodo and Bilbo left the Grey Havens. Not to mention that neither Frodo nor Bilbo were afforded immortality, but the chance to live out their remaining days free of the burden and pain caused by their possession of the Ring.

Demosthenes Valar  My interpretation (and I could be wrong) is that he's not being literal there. It's more a metaphor about knocking backthe opportunity to live in legend/myth. Instead Sam chooses to return to the Real World(tm) and resume his ordinary life.So, I guess, that's a death of sorts and a refutation of a kind of immortality.

I'm sure Shippey is well-aware that simply travelling to Valinor does not in itself convey life eternal.