I have been a long time fan of the trilogy since the early 70’s. I can honestly say I have always felt the scouring was anticlimactic. I can understand why Jackson left it out of the movie version. Much of the history and sideline details would have been too much for a viewing audience of Ring Newbies. The movie already had several false endings to the uninitiated viewers. The scouring would have sent many people out early in frustration, causing them to miss the beautiful ending.
What did bother me was:
The quickened pace. The trip from the Shire to Rivendell was a merry little hop, skip and a jump compared to the long and grueling journey written by Tolkien. I would like to have seen more travel time in the beginning accented by more road songs and such. They started out naive and simplistic on a mysterious journey, not knowing how dire their circumstances really were.
The time spent at Rivendell seemed like an overnight stopover in the movie. I wanted to see more of this place. Where were the tales by the fire? The songs? The pipeweed smoking? I want more elf time!
The beauty and wonder of Galadriel and her people was replaced by scary and disturbing. No gift giving…no explanation of the magical cloaks. Yeah, I knew all this stuff, but the Ring newbies didn’t. Again, not enough elf time.
Merry & Pippin were reduced to mere, comic-relief sidekicks. Pippin was never purported to have grown in stature as a result of consuming great amounts of entwash.
Frodo was portrayed as a bit of a whiney-baby in the film version, whereas in the book, I was moved by his strength and stamina despite his burden. The movie version left me feeling like Sam got the shaft when they were giving out hero status.
But overall, I thought the movie was great. I was amazed at how Jackson managed to enter my own brain to get the visuals for the scenes.
It’s been awhile since I read the books, so I’ll just stick with the fims.
I disagree with all this Merry and Pippen talk. While they do start off as comic buffoons, by the end of the third film they HAVE shown growth. Merry rides with into battle the Rohan and Pippen finds himself aiding in the defense of Minas Tirith as an (albiet reluctant) Guard of the Citidel (correct me if I mixed them up). Respect.
Few of the changes in the movie are similar in kind to the many he complains about in the letter. However, considering their detail, I think the presumption of “smiling” is too strong. Probably more like a grudging “Well, it’s better than the cartoons.”
On the contrary, he’d be pleasantly amazed that anyone had the talent and imagination to bring his vision to the big screen as faithfully as Jackson did…and bring in a shitload of money in the process.
I don’t know. I’d like to believe that. I really enjoyed the films, and it would be nice to think that Tolkien would have been pleased. But that’s just not the sort of guy who comes through in the letters. Reading them gave me the strong impression that he would have been as intolerant of any deviation as the most vitriolic fan boy. The “re-imagining” of some of the characters, like Faramir and Denethor, would have been the most intolerable to him. He probably could have accepted abbreviating the plot to fit a film format, but my sense from his letters is that he would have been deeply aggravated by any alteration of the meaning or significance of anything in his world. I think he was deeply attached to these details. Seeing his creations altered by the hand of another and then broadcast to the world would have driven him nuts.
On the one hand, he wanted to create a new mythology for the British people. On the other, like many artists, he wanted to maintain absolute control of his creation. But nothing can serve as a cultural myth when it is the exclusive property of one person. It has to be re-created by every listener to be kept alive.
I would have gladly watched a fourth movie. Were there three movies because there were three books (or three sections to one book)? I wonder if Jackson ever considered four, so he wouldn’t have to leave so much out.
I suppose if the third movie had to end with Sauron’s defeat and Aragorn’s ascendance, viewers who hadn’t read the book might have thought the best part of the story was over and stayed home from a fourth movie.
I didn’t read the book until after I saw the movies, and so I thought the Shire was kept out of the conflict. It didn’t seem quite fair, that all the other Middle Earthers suffered so mightily while the Hobbits were able to go about their business.
The reason is because it was complex. It defied the idea that all the evil comes from Sauron, and was cured when the ring melted. This is the same reason that they blamed the snow directly on Sauron in the movie. It is not tidy, so it was cut.
Then do! No way to prove one way or the other. I think he’d have been a bit miffed about Denethor, but I think the movie treatment of Faramir made him more human and admirable. It’s easier to admire someone for resisting temptation if you see how close they came to giving into it and how irresistible its pull was.
That’s the main reason I find it justified to hate the absence of the Scouring. (I dislike the absence because it’s a cool part of the book, but it actually has some symbolic importance.)
It almost completely changes the meaning of the entire trilogy. It turns it into another neat cinematic struggle between good and evil where everyone’s happy at the end (even the Elves: who wouldn’t want to go to Heaven on Arda?)
But in Tolkein’s original tale, while it still is an impressive, nearly black and white struggle between good and evil, the Scouring drives home the point that while Sauron was defeated, we must be ever-vigilant against the rise of evil and that no one was left untouched in the struggle in Middle Earth.
> Are you saying that the Scouring could have been integrated into the movie,
> but Jackson just didn’t know how to do it effectively? If so, I’d be interested to
> hear your ideas. (I’m not interested in hearing a blanket “the movies suck
> because they don’t follow the book verbatim.”)
I didn’t say anything about whether it could have been integrated into the movie. I said that Jackson didn’t care whether it could have been done effectively. Jackson had his own version of the plot arranged in his mind before he (and his co-writers) wrote the script, based on his vague memories of his two readings of the book.
glee writes:
> Wendell, what are you basing your allegation on? - Jackson is a huge Tolkien fan
Jackson was not a huge Tolkien fan. He had read the book twice, once at 18 and once in his thirties. Jackson is not even much of a reader. He was someone who grew up making his own films on a camera his parents gave him. Jackson’s strengths are visual. He doesn’t write good dialogue and isn’t good at directing actors in scenes with important dialogue:
> I have listened to Jackson’s commentary on the Extended Edition.
Jackson’s commentaries (and his comments in interviews) are hype. He changes his story about his view of the relationship of the book and the film whenever he wants to. At times he insisted that faithfulness to the book was important to him. At other times he said that it wasn’t important at all.
Time to bring down Godwin’s Law (sorry!): if you look at it in the context of Tolkien’s experiences as a communications officer during World War I and his views on World War II (and war in general)–it’s like saying “yay, the Nazis are defeated, time to go home” and packing up and leaving. You can’t ignore what happened there and pretend everything’s hunky dory again.
Tolkien lost a lot of his friends in the trenches in World War I and bitterly railed against the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a staunch believer in real life that war isn’t a tidy, neat struggle between good and evil–bad things happen and lives are changed forever, and the Scouring of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings reflected that.
I agree with most everyone, though: great in the book, wouldn’t have worked in a cinematic adaptation. Wendell Wagner, how would you have done it effectively?
Can I interject and say that I’m glad there was no Scouring of the Shire in the movies? Not because I don’t like the scene in the book — I do. Not because I don’t think Jackson would have made it awesome — I do.
But because RoTK (the movie) would not freaking end. I am a super-huge Tolkien fan - read the books over every year - and I was squirming my ass off by the end of RoTK and thinking to myself “End! End Goddammit! By Smeagol’s Hairless Bum, end the movie!”
Well, I read the book (between TTT and RotK), and Frodo came off as something of a whiny baby there too, but he was a whiny baby who was still dragging his ass halfway accross Mordor (With Samwise dragging him the other half). I think the fact that Sam doesn’t get any renown for his many acts of bravery and perseverence is sort of the point, he’s not the celebrated hero, he’s the unsung hero, the anonymous peasant boy who carries the wounded knight to safety on the battlefield. He doesn’t get any real renown until he helps rebuild the shire, doing the hard work to rebuild that which was destroyed while the Heros fought the Villians centerstage.
As for the Scouring of the Shire not being there, Jackson’s version of the story generally presents a higher opinion of humanity than Tolkiens’ does. Tolkien had a recurring theme of humans giving in to their inner demons, or in to outer corruption, being too short sighted to act in the name of the greater good, while Jackson generally presents many of the humans as good folks who realize their mistakes and try to atone for them, and villians promptly get what’s coming to them.
In the book, Gandalf lets Saruman go, making him promise to behave, and no sooner have our heros stepped out of the room than does Saruman go about working over the Shire (indeed, it’s implied heavily as early as The Two Towers that he had been doing that even before the Ents attacked Isengard, with Pippen and Merry finding the cache of Shire pipeweed.)
So in short, it wasn’t in the movie not only because it would have ruined the pacing, but it just didn’t fit the somewhat happier fuzzier version of Middle Earth that Jackson was presenting. To be honest, I’m OK with that.
If memory serves, he originally intended to make only two movies (covering all three books (not that there really are three books, there are six, or rather one, but never mind)) and was amazed when the boys with the money said “let’s do three”. It probably never crossed his mind to try for four.
No way to prove one way or the other. I think he’d have been a bit miffed about Denethor, but I think the movie treatment of Faramir made him more human and admirable. It’s easier to admire someone for resisting temptation if you see how close they came to giving into it and how irresistible its pull was.