- As anyone who’s read the appendices to The Lord of the Rings knows, both it and The Hobbit are Tolkien’s translations from the so-called “Red Book of Westmarch,” an ancient manuscript written in Late Vulgar Adûni. How Tolkien came to possess the Red Book is a mystery, and the Tolkien Estate has never allowed other scholars access to it.
Tolkien’s original translation is justly famous and beloved. He treeherds an unwieldy ancient text into lyrical modern English and captures the vast scope and romance of the epic.
It is also deeply flawed.
Paging flagamuffin... In fact, the famously conservative and Catholic Tolkien left out almost all of the Red Book’s ribald humor and attention to the body. Gone are the dwarves’ dirty songs, gone is Gandalf repeatedly referring to Pippin’s brain as “blunter than an orc’s dick,” gone is the Fellowship’s graphic struggle with dysentery in the Mines of Moria.
Yeah, saw this, it was hilarious. Honestly, speaking as someone who instigated what may be the most controversial thread in r/tolkienfans' history by criticizing the tight-assed way C Tolkien has protected his father's legacy, this was the line that made me laugh the hardest: It really works after 16 bawdy translation jokes in a row.The Lord of the Rings: A New English Translation was published on September 22, 2007. The Tolkien Estate immediately filed suit against me for copyright infringement.
It started as a defense of Peter Jackson and devolved. I regret the defense now, because the Hobbit movies kinda suck. But whatever. https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/1ae9s0/a_brief_response_to_the_thread_about_christopher/ Gotta love that r/tolkienfans' version of controversy is like a bunch of Oxford dons sitting around drinking tea at each other. But we've reached 100+ comments there maybe five times ever. And it's always when someone brings up the movies.
"Drinking tea at each other" is graduate-level wordsmithing. Realize two things: 1) The hobbit movies were going to suck. Now that we've made the decision that every.fucking.book gets to be three-plus movies, stretching something shorter than To Kill A Mockingbird into nine hours of cinema is going to involve ridiculous amounts of improvisation. That improvisation will be designed to sell Burger King commemorative cups. If The Fault In Our Stars received similar treatment, it would be three two-and-a-half hour movies. 2) You're getting closer and closer to convincing me to read the fucking things.
Yes, they were going to suck, but not in my opinion because of the length disparity (didn't help though) -- rather Jackson's philosophy, which fit LotR okay, whiffs hard on the Hobbit. They're completely different types of book. The short version is that the Hobbit is actually a kid story. Whimsical. LotR ain't (even if it actually has a happier ending, sort of). So Jackson rightly made LotR with this grim fantasy-realism feeling heavily in mind. Great. But I knew in advance he was going to try that shit on the Hobbit -- ruined the moral, the plot, the tone, the characters even. Takes two days to read 'em. The prose is gorgeous, the plot fulfilling. The descriptions evocative. If you don't come out of the experience wanting to up and move to anywhere in Middle-earth, whack yourself on the head and try again.
I dunno, man. I don't think it had to be that way based on the way he did LotR. After all, Peter Jackson also did Bad Taste and The Frighteners. I suspect that the general consensus around the money was "do that thing where we made a shit-ton of money. Yeah. Like, don't change a thing. Except make it longer."The short version is that the Hobbit is actually a kid story. Whimsical. LotR ain't (even if it actually has a happier ending, sort of). So Jackson rightly made LotR with this grim fantasy-realism feeling heavily in mind. Great. But I knew in advance he was going to try that shit on the Hobbit -- ruined the moral, the plot, the tone, the characters even.
Well it didn't have to -- but what he ended up doing was a ridiculous mishmash of both styles (you've got that awful rabbit chase thing, and then cut suddenly some giant black shadow is murdering Gandalf while trumpets roll). Shoulda stuck to lighthearted etc etc, lots of jollity, like the animated one from way back. But then they made it longer, added grim backstory that in the book Hobbit is never mentioned because it's too depressing for children and it was all over.
We watched the first one on Amazon. My wife kept glowering and we'd have to pause it so she could fill me in on stuff from the Similrilowhatever. We didn't do the other two. We might at some point. Worth noting: She had three pound puppies named Frodo, Bilbo and Radegast, as well as a Cabbage Patch Doll named Galadriel. You two would probably get along.