12/26/2023 0 Comments Lord of the rings cplotI first took on “The Lord of the Rings” at the age of eleven or twelve to be precise, I began it at the age of eleven and finished at the age of twelve. Been there, done that, read the book, gone mad. Towering or stumpy, brazen or subtle, smooth or hirsute, gabbling or speechless, yellow-bellied or stout of heart, reassuringly human or halfway to the swamp: there’s no two ways about it, Tolkien fans are a funny bunch. For the next two years, we will be assailed by unorthodox creatures, the like of which many of us will have read about but few will have witnessed in the flesh. By the end of 1968, total readership of the trilogy was thought to stand at around fifty million.Īnd so, once again, we will enter the outlandish plenitude of Middle-earth. In the event, this estimate proved a little cautious. When “The Fellowship of the Ring” came out, in 1954, Tolkien’s publisher, Allen & Unwin, gambled on selling as many as thirty-five hundred copies, falling to thirty-two hundred and fifty for “The Two Towers,” and so down to three thousand for “The Return of the King,” the following year. All that Jackson can do is look back at the example of Tolkien himself. Finally, at the end of 2003, we will don our chain mail and stand to greet “The Return of the King.” No one can say whether audiences will stick with the story, or whether, in two years’ time, they will have dwindled to a small band of hobbit wanna-bes, lining up glumly in the rain. After “The Fellowship of the Ring,” we will be forced to wait twelve months for “The Two Towers”-a period of reflection that, given the title, is probably a good thing. Tolkien’s original novel, will appear in three parts. Jackson isn’t buying himself a country he’s building us a world. People who complain that for three hundred million you could purchase a small nation are absolutely right, but that only proves what a bargain this movie may turn out to be. The bulk of it seems to have been spent on re-creating Middle-earth, the place where the story unfurls. That, give or take a few million, was what the director Peter Jackson was given to play with: a gratifying deal, considering that, unlike Bilbo Baggins-uncle of Frodo and hero of “The Hobbit,” the predecessor to “The Lord of the Rings”-he didn’t have to sneak past a dragon in order to lay his hands on the loot. Now we know what the element is: three hundred million dollars. Everything about the book seems so earthy and rooted, so densely planted with discernible characters and landscapes, that you would expect movie directors to leap upon it with glee, and yet something-some mysterious element of wit or magic-has been missing. The plot tells of a journey taken by Frodo Baggins and his hobbit companions from the Shire, where they have long conducted blameless lives, to the land of Mordor, far away to the east, where Frodo must hurl a ring of inexpressible power into the crater of Mount Doom. “The Lord of the Rings” is about hobbits-small, peaceable souls, the tops of whose heads lie level with the average human crotch. An animated, severely truncated version arrived on our screens in 1978, but this fortress of a story has a habit of repelling invaders. Ele! Eglerio! Laite! And a box of Raisinets! For, on that day, men in the bright havens of the West, and along the storm-tongued seaboard of the East, and at your nearest multiplex pretty well everywhere in between, will release the first installment of “The Lord of the Rings,” rated PG-13. What it means, of course, is “Thou canst speak the language of the Elves?,” and, if for some unpardonable reason your Elvish is on the rusty side, you have until December 19th to make it shine anew, even as the tumbling waters of Nimrodel refresh the weary traveller who ventures unto Lothlórien, below the eaves of the Golden Wood. Quenuvalye i lamber Eldareva? A boring question, I know, and I’m sure that people ask you the same thing all the time. At school, he not only debated in Latin and Greek but “broke into fluent Gothic.” Illustration by Istvan Banyai
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