Tolkien, lord of the Covid era?
Yes, he’s EXACTLY the writer we need for this post-pandemic world… suggests Nick Groom in his exhilarating new book
‘The Beatles wanted to make a film, with John Lennon keen to play Gandalf ’
KATHRYN HUGHES CULTURE Twenty-First Century Tolkien Nick Groom
Atlantic €25 ★★★★★
Anyone with a claim to be a Ring-head, a Middle-earthling or simply a Tolkienite will be on their toes (furry, like a Hobbit, obviously) with excitement at Amazon Prime’s new The Rings Of Power. At a cost of $1bn, it claims to be the most expensive small-screen series ever made and covers the ‘Second Age’, pre-dating the events of The Lord Of The Rings by several thousand years. The five TV seasons are already mapped out, using source material gleaned from Tolkien’s vast ‘legendarium’ of supplementary material. In effect, this is going to be a 50-hour movie prequel to the Peter Jackson films of 20 years ago.
But is it an adaptation too far? The question misses the point, says Professor Nick Groom, who explains in this fascinating book that Tolkien’s universe broke loose from its bookish moorings decades ago, and is now best thought of as ‘a multimedia mix of literature, art, music, radio, cinema, gaming, fandom and popular culture’.
From the moment The Lord Of The Rings trilogy began to be published after the Second World War, people were desperate to have their way with it. The Beatles wanted to make a film, with John Lennon keen to play Gandalf, while in 1967 Leonard Nimoy recorded The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins, neatly linking the pointy-eared world of Star Trek with that of Middle-earth.
Groom himself is a fan of the Peter Jackson
films which, he argues, widened and enriched Middle-earth at the turn of the millennium. Groom’s point is that we should learn to treat adaptations of Tolkien in the same way that we would the production of a Shakespeare play or a Dracula movie: ‘All of these adaptations are simply versions’.
This is a refreshingly unstuffy approach to those diehard Middle-earthers, who believe that Tolkien’s books – which he wrote over decades as light relief from his day job as an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon – are holy writ.
Groom is particularly optimistic that the new Amazon project will highlight themes that were important to Tolkien but have since been buried. Climate change is an obvious one. Groom points out that Tolkien was at heart a nature writer: ‘He writes of herbs, blossoming flowers, the passing seasons, and has a kinship with animals’. More of that crucial relationship, rather than the head-banging CGI battle spectaculars of the Peter Jackson era, is needed now.
And then there is race. Tolkien’s original Hobbits were a diverse crew, with the Harfoots having much darker skins than others, although you wouldn’t know it from earlier castings. The Amazon show features a much more diverse collection of actors.
Purists may scoff but Groom’s point in this wonderfully exhilarating book is that the universe JRR Tolkien created is so full of potential readings that it is perverse to insist on only one. Indeed, in a rousing finale, Groom suggests that Tolkien is exactly the writer we need at this particularly perilous moment, as we emerge, Hobbit-like, from our holes and try to imagine a new kind of life in this post-pandemic age.