Christopher Tolkien has died (opens in new tab)

I would assume not being paid for those movies had something to do with it?

In February 2008, the Tolkien Trust sued New Line Cinema, the studio behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for £75 million claiming they had not received "even one penny" from the films. A request for punitive damages was denied in September 2008. (In March 2008, New Line Cinema became a unit of Warner Bros. Entertainment.) The case was resolved out of court on 8 September 2009 with the terms not made public.

In a press release, Christopher Tolkien stated, "The Trustees regret that legal action was necessary, but are glad that this dispute has been settled on satisfactory terms that will allow the Tolkien Trust properly to pursue its charitable objectives. The Trustees acknowledge that New Line may now proceed with its proposed films of 'The Hobbit.'"

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578442/JRR-Tolki...

I have a love/hate relationship with the movies. While the trilogy brought to life Middle-Earth to a degree I never thought imaginable, there were some elements that just fell incredibly flat.

If I had to pin it on one thing, it was that Peter Jackson and team were extremely good at portraying evil in all of its ugliness but failed to portray "goodness" with equal skill (which admittedly is not an easy thing to do!). While the honest goodness of the Hobbits was wonderful, the portrayals of "good" characters such as Aragorn and Galadriel fell very flat. This is not to blame on the actors at all as I thought Viggo did an awesome job; but the screenplay needlessly muddled the character.

Also, where was the damn poetry?

One of the things that Game of Thrones got right is to realize that a novel corresponds to a dozen hours of screen time, not three. The Lord of the Rings trilogy misses a lot of the epic scope of the book, focusing a lot more heavily on battles and missing out on the sheer weight of time.

I don't know if any film could really capture that, especially to Christoper's satisfaction. But the movies are action-adventure blockbusters, and the books really aren't. It's notable that the Battle of the Hornburg was only about a page of text, but close to an hour of screen time. That kind of shift of focus recurs throughout the adaptation. Tolkien was creating an alien world; Jackson gave us a familiar Sort Of Middle Ages Or Something.

The films did manage to capture the age of the world better than anybody could possibly have imagined. Jackson hired the best artists, famed for producing images that were better than Tolkien's own, and capturing a lot of what Christopher would treasure in the book. As a series of still images, Christopher should have found a lot to admire in the films. But the dialogue doesn't achieve the same.

> Considering the astounding length and detail with which they were adapted, what more could he have possibly hoped for?

Not changing complex and interesting characters with boring Hollywood tropes (Denethor, Treebeard, Faramir)? Following Tolkein's carefully thought-out timeline of how and when and why things would have happened, rather than making every action scene a hollywood trope, where the bad guys can't hit anything and the good guys can't miss?

The best film adaptation of a book I've ever seen is the Sense and Sensibility adapted by Emma Thompson. You can't make a movie identical to a book; it doesn't work -- they're different art forms. Emma Thompson cut out big scenes, chopped out characters, and made a load of changes to make the situation more accessible to a modern audience -- but the heart of the story, and the character of the people in it, are true to the novel.

The movies jumped the shark for me when Faramir said he was going to "arrest" Frodo and bring him to Denethor. I watched the third film, but I'd emotionally checked out at that point.

IMO, to whatever extent the reverence exists, it is unjustified. The films are about as good as one can reasonably expect from big budget blockbusters, but to me they are somewhere between mediocre and merely decent cinema, with bombastic manipulative music, jarringly incongruent moments of lowbrow humor, lots of very fake-looking CGI, over-the-top almost comedically grotesque orcs, cheaply emptionally manipulative scenes like the Gondorian charge against Osgiliath, etc. They also have many good moments and many good filming decisions, but I wouldn't hold them up anywhere near the pinnacle of cinema. Don't get me wrong, I think that the books have many flaws too, although I like them a lot. I wouldn't say the books, good as they are, are at the pinnacle of literature either, although they may certainy be near the pinnacle of worldbuilding and are, I think, much much better than the films.

There's simply no way, no matter how technically wizardly the movies might be, that they could convey the "spirit" of the trilogy.

And, further, the movies fall far, far short of the images your own imagination can create from these classics.

And they even pollute your imagination with the limitations of the director's choices.

There are many, many examples of places where depth of character especially was lost in the translation. Some of this was obviously a matter of limited screentime, but other things were done badly that would have taken very little or no extra time to do right. One big example is Eowyn's showdown with the witch king, see this article:

https://www.themarysue.com/the-story-of-eowyn/

But even apart from that, when such huge chunks of screentime were devoted to these epic battle scenes, you do get the sense that the priorities at the top level were not quite aligned to what was in the book. Even compared to the 1981 BBC radio play (13 hours total), you feel like the movies missed a lot of good stuff.

Perhaps it's natural to be very critical of the adaptation of something your are very emotionally attached to?.

I for one loved reading the books as a kid and I felt that some scenes (Legolas shield surfing and flying between elephants) were a bit too "cheap" and unnecessary. I enjoyed the films by telling myself that there was a lot of good that offset those bads but perhaps that's easier to do when you are young than when you are on your 70s

The original works were as much a careful exploration of a world not our own as they were an epic tale. Large sections of the text were devoted to describing that world.

The movies gloss over all of that to focus purely on the story.

The adaptation is always going to suffer in comparison to a book like that. It's not like you can just rotate the story through 360-degrees of the audio-video dimension and have it pop out at you.

Lots of more modern fiction, written by people who think of stories first in the cinematic sense even as they are writing them, you can almost derive the film from the book. Say, Jurassic Park, for example. The departures from the novel were incidental, and the film could've been made even more faithful to the text but for the desires of the producers.

I don't think he was at all surprised at how bad the films were, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't complain about them.

I think it's easy for many people who are used to a diet of truly terrible adaptations to mistake one which is merely bad for something excellent.

(I think pretty much everything about those films was very good, except for the script, which was poor on both a large and small scale.)

I think it's hard for many people who are emotionally and/or deeply connected to something, see it changed, modified, and reinterpreted by someone else.

Even in the world of software, how many of us have worked on a project for a long time only to hand it off to someone else, and find it hard not to have strong opinions about how they work with it, when it's no longer our responsibility?

Perhaps purists aren't so easily won over by lavish production values and jaw-dropping visuals.

The films are not bad for visuals and casting/acting, but changed the story and characters and motivations far too much for fans of the books. And left out the actual ending!

He probably felt a degree of ownership and protectiveness over the franchise that few of us could understand. It may have been impossible to match his expectations.

I wonder if Netflix or other streaming services would have produced something vastly different. Tolkien wrote so much it really could do with more exploration.

Also if you're selling it in a movie format, you have to be able to bring in the general masses. That means cutting down a lot of the intricacies.

I for one would have liked to see Frodo & Sam's journey to mordor in the second and third movies abbreviated a bit. It was incredibly drawn out. Otherwise I love the movies and see no room for improvement.

They took out bombadil.

It's so dry but so good. I read it on my vacation this summer (after Huckleberry Finn). What made it interesting for me was to understand the work itself and the context JRR was working in. There are references to Saxon and Finnish mythology in many of the stories. I recommend reading it alongside his collected letters; some of the explanations he made for things are enriched by his correspondences.

Here's a quick version: The Silmarillion in 1000 words. http://lotrspoofs.net/parodies-and-more/the-silmarillion-in-...

One of the gems of the early net.

I read it recently. The best advice I can give is to allow yourself to read it slowly. I spent a lot of time flipping to the back to get a clearer picture of who someone or something is. And it was worth it.

There's more world-building in some paragraphs of the Silmarillion than there is in whole novels of some modern scifi/fantasy fiction.

Skip the first 50 pages or so. The rest is golden.

It gets really really good in the middle and the end. But that beginning is quite a slog.

I loved LoTR, but Silmarillion is an higher level of epicness.

I understand that later in life Christopher Tolkien regretted having published it as he felt he had done too much editing, but I'm glad he did anyway.

I remember picking it up after LotR because I loved Blind Guardians concept album masterpiece “Nightfall in Middle-Earth” about it. I ended up enjoying the Silmarillion quite a bit more than the main trilogy (and am not alone in that). What was crucial for me was printing the family trees and maps and putting them somewhere closeby (e.g. a wall) for quick reference.

It only really starts kicking off at "the unchaining of Melkor". From then on the mayhem builds fairly steadily.

I also read The Hobbit to my 3 daughters when they were younger. Whenever I read to my daughters, regardless the book, I would make up different voices for each character. I will admit that making 13 different voices for the dwarves pushed my dad skills to the limit! When they later watched the films, they would respond, "That's not what they sound like." It did my heart good.

I'll second the overwhelming thankfulness to Christopher Tolkien for everything he did to keep Middle-Earth alive. May his journey into the West be swift for I have no doubt that he would be welcomed into Valinor with open arms.

It's great to see so many reading parents here. I read The Hobbit and LoTR to my daughter starting when she was around 9. It must've been almost a year per book because we finished last year when she was 13. I had to explain some of the subtler passages and backstories, but she got much of it. We watched the movies together this year and she picked up most of the differences (though even I didn't pick up on the deep changes in Eowyn's character, as linked in another comment here).

I had read the books as a teenager in the 80's, 20 years before the movies existed, the same paperback books from my father that we re-read together. I was happy to re-read them, because I had missed much of the poetry (as noted in other comments here) and forgotten some of the story. I had seen the movies in between, but I'm referring to the deeper stories and in-book legendaria that the movies didn't cover. Despite the changes and omissions (and Hollywood effects), I still think the movies did a good job, as good as could be expected.

BTW, we started reading Little House on the Prairie when my daughter was 4, and also read all of Narnia and a few others before Tolkein. Reading with your kids is a great way to re-discover the books of your childhood (or discover, because I'd never read LHotP).

I started reading "The Hobbit" to my oldest son when he was about 4. He loved it. What astounded me, though, was that his little brother, who was only two at the time sat and listened with great intent. I didn't do the voices, but in retrospect, I should have. I realized later how much fun it was.

Of course, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. When we bought my second son the hard-bound original stories of Thomas the Tank Engine, which was filled with wonderful art, he literally sat and paged through it for like 45 minutes straight. And he wasn't even 2 yet at the time.

I also read my kids "The Wizard of Oz", all the original "Winnie the Pooh" books, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and many others, including the usual short-form kids books like Dr. Seuss and P.D. Eastman when they were really little. I miss reading to my kids, but eventually we couldn't all fit in the bed together... (Plus, they're all adults now.)

What ages did you do? Were they able to keep up with the story OK at those ages?

I've been thinking that I'm due for a re-read of The Lord of the Rings for a while now. This seems like a good signal to start tonight.

These lines from The Silmarillion really hit me the other day. It relates pretty well to death and impermanence in general.

"But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said, before it ends: as works fair and wonderful, while still they endure for eyes to see, are their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken forever do they pass into song."

> RIP Christopher Tolkien. His labors have given the world a great gift.

Well said. Also, he was a rare example of someone who inherited a trove of intellectual property and actually did something with it other than sit back and ride the gravy train. For that alone I have a great deal of respect for him. He will be missed.

Wow! these lines encourage me to read the LotR books. Thanks for sharing.

Indeed: while practically everything in The Silmarillion was his father's words, it did not appear until after JRR Tolkien's death. Only his father's name appears on it, but Christopher's editing was absolutely essential. It represents neither Tolkien's last thoughts nor his best writing, but the ones that Christopher felt were most consistent with the published Lord of the Rings.

Christopher doesn't get enough credit for the monumental task of piecing something vaguely coherent from Tolkien's numerous drafts. He basically devoted his life to understanding his father's work. And that is effort should be appreciated: Tolkien was one of the most creative literary thinkers of the past century, and having so much insight into his process is almost unique among authors.

And also drawing the final maps that appeared within The Lord of the Rings, if you've ever pored over them while reading. For me, they were an integral part of the book too, and something that also defined the fantasy genre experience and helped cement the world building of it.

I was literally just looking at this for the same reason. I'm sure it's a bit silly and sentimental, but the notion of there still being a living connection to them in the world makes me feel they're not entirely gone.

Same. Like with Nikola Tesla or H. P. Lovecraft, who died more or less impoverished and were nowhere as cherished in their lifetime as they are now, and many others like them who only received posthumous appreciated, it's like they were cheated by fate. It makes me angry at how the world treated people like them.

But what about Nicholas and Anna Tolkien?!

You know he didn't write Lord of the Rings, right? You're either really reaching for a way to be contrarian or your whole knowledge of the series is just borrowed opinions from critics.

Sam.

It's a fascinating read the complete Le Monde article [0], but there's an extended quote in the second to last paragraph. Google translate gives me:

"The gap that has widened between the beauty, the seriousness of the work, and what it has become, all of this is beyond me. Such a degree of commercialization reduces to nothing the aesthetic and philosophical scope of this creation. I only have one solution left: turn my head. "

[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2012/07/05/tolkien-l-...

And now Amazon or somebody is going to make some sort of LoTR prequel TV series!? Travesty, I say! Sheer, naked greed.

I don't see a person dying after 95 years of a well-lived productive life as terrible. That's a pretty pathological view.

Celebrate his life. And maybe read some other things about the many much more healthy perspectives cultures around the world have developed around death.

Sadness is fine, that's part of processing a loss. But neither this loss nor the appropriate sadness are terrible things.

That's an awesome first-hand story, and made me read up on 2675 just now.

The verses are so vivid, so poignant. They talk of great deeds, vows (e.g sons of Feanor),the powers people had, the nobility they showed when faced with terrible evil.

It makes one really sad for a lost world.