“How do you know about Gandalf?” Sam Wilson asks Bucky Barnes in the second episode of the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, after Bucky mocks Sam for talking about fighting wizards. Bucky snaps back that he read The Hobbit when it was first published in 1937. It’s a fun character moment, one that sparked some debate on social media about whether or not a guy like Bucky Barnes would have read a kid’s book, but what’s interesting to me about the scene is the source of Sam’s confusion. Why would he assume Bucky, a contemporary of J.R.R. Tolkien, wouldn’t know about Gandalf? It’s because Sam thinks of The Lord of the Rings as a 21st-century cultural phenomenon, one that a man out of time like Bucky would need to catch up on.
And the thing is, Sam’s not wrong…
Tolkien’s works and world have cast an outsized shadow over fantasy for decades, spawning countless imitations and making halflings, orcs, dwarves, and elves mainstays of fantasy literature and games like Dungeons and Dragons. Other popular fantasies, like the Harry Potter series and A Song of Ice and Fire, proudly tout their Tolkien influences. The books enjoyed a countercultural cool starting in the 1970s, one amplified by allusions threaded through Led Zeppelin songs and Ralph Bakshi’s trippy 1978 animated movie. But for all its widespread popularity and influence, Middle-earth never quite achieved the mainstream status that other genre stories like Star Wars did—until 2001.
Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, starting with 2001’s The Fellowship of the Ring, changed the cinematic landscape forever. In my rewatch of Rankin/Bass’s The Hobbit TV movie, I imagined a little girl (let’s call her Elanor, after Samwise’s daughter) in 1977 witnessing mass nerd culture start to take shape with the appearance of The Hobbit movie and Star Wars in the same year. Fast forward to 2001, and the adult Elanor now takes her own young children to see Fellowship of the Ring (and the first Harry Potter movie). She now stands excitedly, but unknowingly, at the dawn of the Golden Age of the Geek.
Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies ushered in a craze for genre movies and shows that hasn’t abated after two decades. Game of Thrones certainly wouldn’t have become a show, let alone a worldwide hit, without Jackson’s movies. And while the superhero movie boom began with 2000’s X-Men, the massive success of the interlocking, lore-heavy movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe seems unlikely without Jackson’s movies giving audiences a taste for genre films grounded in layer upon layer of deep backstory (…then again, maybe it’s really all down to the endless charm of Ian McKellen).
Even today, two decades after the films came out, they still pack a powerful pop culture punch. On Better Call Saul, the rich, preppy lawyer Howard Hamlin hisses that talking to Jimmy McGill (the future Saul Goodman) is “Like talking to Gollum.” Netflix’s Stranger Things alludes to Mirkwood. And well before Sam and Bucky bickered over the difference between wizards and sorcerers, Tony Stark jokingly called Hawkeye “Legolas” in The Avengers. All of these shows and movies are made by genre nerds, of course, but what’s telling is that they expect mass audiences, like Steve Rogers with The Wizard of Oz, to understand and appreciate the references. Gandalf, Gollum, and Legolas have become household names.
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The Witness for the Dead
Like any hit, Jackson’s movies benefited from a certain amount of luck in coming out at the right time in the pop culture cycle. They hit a sweet spot. But they’re also just really damn good. I began reading The Hobbit to my 6-year-old son Liam recently, and we decided to rewatch all the movies in tandem. Two decades after they came out, I’m struck by how incredible the movies still look, even their CGI, and how well they translate Tolkien’s epic onto the big screen. The Fellowship of the Ring, in particular, is a masterful adaptation of the source material, streamlining Tolkien’s story into a fleet, exciting adventure, while losing little of the depth and charm of the books.
Jackson and the team at the Weta Workshop brilliantly translate so much of the rich history and culture of Middle-earth into the sets, costumes, and creature designs. Instead of long expositions about the fraught history of the Elves and Dwarves, we have the image of Legolas with his earth tones and fluid, graceful bows and knives next to Gimli’s sharp, blocky armor and axes. It’s all in the details. Take one example: in the Council of Elrond/Rivendell scene, Gimli tries to destroy the One Ring with his axe. Instead, his axe shatters and sends him sprawling to the ground. The camera then pans up to the Ring, disturbingly untouched, surrounded by shards of the axe. On one of the shards you can see Dwarvish runes. It’s only on screen for a split second, and you wouldn’t fault any filmmaker for simply tossing a few random chunks of metal on the table and calling it a day. But not Jackson and his crew. Even the smallest props are given attention and care. Add the gorgeous natural scenery of Jackson’s native New Zealand, Howard Shore’s stirring score (I still listen to it frequently), and you have a Middle-earth that truly feels like you can step inside it. It feels real.
Twenty years into the Golden Age of the Geek, it’s hard to imagine what a daunting task Jackson faced introducing his vision of Middle-earth to the world. The Lord of the Rings isn’t just a dense fantasy book with vast appendices of backstory, after all—it’s also a sequel. Jackson needed to give viewers a crash course in Middle-earth history and the events of The Hobbit before even getting to that long-expected party that opens the story. We get this with an extended prologue explaining the history of the Rings of Power, including sweeping aerial shots of a huge CGI battle. That sort of shot wasn’t new, and would become common in the decades after the movie (see the final battle in Avengers: Endgame), but it still thrills. Right from the start, Jackson’s showing us the size and sweep of the story before us. It’s the fantasy equivalent of the titanic underside of the Star Destroyer that opens Star Wars.
The final battle in the War of the Last Alliance conveys so much with a few smart shots. Hideous orcs snarl, elves swing their swords in a golden wave, arrows whistle past Elrond’s ear, ruffling his hair but not his concentration. All the while we have Cate Blanchett’s ethereal Galadriel guiding us through a few millennia of history as we track the Ring from Mordor to the bottom of the Anduin, then to Gollum’s cave, and finally into the pocket of “Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit of the Shire.”
The extended edition of the movie then switches to Ian Holm’s Bilbo giving us a second prologue about hobbits. Holm is only in the movie for a few scenes, but he’s so assured as the older Bilbo that every time I watch it, I feel as if I have already seen an actual Hobbit movie starring him. Holm’s “Concerning Hobbits” prologue is delightful, but it’s easy to see why it was cut. There are only so many fantasy prologues you could subject your audience to in 2001 and expect them to stay put. These days our bottoms are far more patient.
One lingering complaint I’ve seen about the film is that it dawdles too long in the Shire, but god, who wouldn’t want to dawdle there? Jackson’s Shire and Bag-End are sumptuously realized, and he understands—better even than Rankin/Bass or Bakshi—how important the Shire is to the story. It’s a place the audience must miss, and feel the need to save and return to, as much as Frodo does, even though its inhabitants are often ridiculous. In other words, it’s home. But the Shire exists in Tolkien’s stories to be left behind, not stayed in, so eventually we must bid our wistful farewell.
After Bilbo’s extravagant and awkward 111th birthday party, and Gandalf’s increasing misgivings about the old fellow’s magic ring, Frodo is forced to flee with his gardener Samwise. Who better to play the two central hobbits than Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, two former child actors taking on their first major adult roles? Wood brings soulful intensity to Frodo with his enormous eyeballs, and Astin’s well-honed everyman routine fits perfectly with Sam’s cheerful but dogged determination. Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd’s more comic takes on Merry and Pippin were controversial, but I think they add a welcome touch of humor and mischief to the otherwise fast and frightening journey out of the Shire.
Hot on the hobbits’ trail are the Black Riders, and Jackson’s Ringwraiths are truly terrifying with their empty, tattered black robes and blood-curdling shrieks. Jackson was famously a low-budget horror director before he became Lord of Middle-earth, and it shows. There’s that terrific shot where Frodo looks down the road and it seems to close in on him as he senses the Black Rider approaching. It’s a beautiful visualization of unseen, creeping dread and fear, and also fits Tolkien’s own vision of evil as a force that warps and curls the world around it.
Like Bakshi, Jackson smartly skips straight to Bree, a rainy, mud-clogged town where the hobbits make their first steps into the outside world. It’s a weird, unsettling place and Jackson emphasizes the hobbits’ smallness compared to the men, including Strider, around them. And that establishing shot of Strider! The pipe glow illuminating his eyes in the dark as the score swells ominously! Viggo Mortensen’s handsome Aragorn never quite “looks foul and feels fair” like book Strider, but he brings an earthy charisma and nobility to the role that makes him seem equally at home in the wild and the courts of Minas Tirith. Here’s a man who you would follow into the forest, and make a king of Men. Here’s a man you’d give up immortality for.
Meanwhile, Gandalf runs around Middle-earth trying to suss out the truth about the Ring. We get a brief, sunset shot of the towers of Minas Tirith and Gandalf spelunking in its dusty archives, and later he arrives at Isengard, the domain of the white wizard Saruman. The film’s Isengard comes straight from the canvas of renowned illustrator Alan Lee and it’s a wonder to behold (Lee and fellow Tolkien artist John Howe served as creative consultants on the films). I first encountered Lee’s painting of the tower of Orthanc on the cover of The Two Towers at my college bookstore, and I was so intrigued by it, I bought the entire trilogy. Seeing the painting come to life on the big screen gave me chills.
Equally mesmerizing is watching McKellen and Christopher Lee together in the tense final moments before their old and powerful friendship goes sour. McKellen radiates ancient wisdom and concern while Christopher Lee is perfect as the cold, imperious Saruman. The fanatical light in his eyes when he bids Gandalf to join him on the dark side is as terrifying to behold as the Black Riders. No one will ever play this role better. The knock-down, drag-out fight between the two wizards is the weakest point of the film, but it’s capped by the wonderful shot of Gandalf flying into the air as Lee growls, “You have elected the way of pain.” Every line reading from Lee is a beautiful obsidian shard.
After Frodo and the hobbits escape Bree with Strider, they wind up surrounded by the Ringwraiths on Weathertop. The set feels too much like the sound stage it is, but the ghostly images of the wraiths’ true forms when Frodo puts on the Ring are suitably horrifying. They gave my son nightmares. They gave me nightmares. It also provides Wood with the first of many scenes where he’s stabbed and then gets an overlong close-up of his anguished, just-been-stabbed-face. No one has ever been stabbed more often, and more artfully, than Elijah Wood. Fortunately, Arwen arrives and rides hard with Frodo to her home in Rivendell. Liv Tyler had a difficult job in portraying a character who is both a hardened warrior-elf and the world’s most luminous person, but she pulls it off.
It’s interesting to contrast the three different elves who show up to save Frodo, Strider, and the others from the Ringwraiths, and what the choice of elf tells us about this version of The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien’s book, it’s Glorfindel, a High Elf who otherwise plays no role in the story, but whose presence expands the world and ties it to Tolkien’s First Age stories in The Silmarillion. Bakshi opts for Legolas, a canny narrative choice given his presence in the Fellowship. Jackson picks Arwen, which allows him to give greater focus to her love story with Aragorn, and also feels like an appropriate echo of Tolkien’s lore. Arwen is something of a Lúthien reborn, and just as Lúthien stared down Sauron at the Isle of Werewolves and cast Morgoth from his dark throne in The Silmarillion, here Arwen outraces the Nazgûl and drowns them with a horse-fringed flood.
Arwen at the ford encompasses most of Jackson’s adaptation choices, for good and for ill. He and fellow screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens often approach adaptation as a shuffling around, switching out characters and even dialogue in scenes (Wormtongue’s words to Éowyn in the second movie originally belonged to Gandalf; similarly, Galadriel’s opening narration before the title screen is Treebeard’s in the book). They streamline and add character conflict where Tolkien favors contemplation and mood. This approach works wonders for Fellowship, by far Tolkien’s shaggiest hobbit book, but it has diminishing returns over the course of the subsequent Middle-earth movies.
Still, all that is ahead, as is the rest of Frodo’s journey, and the impact it would have on worldwide pop culture. Few people watching the movie in 2001, like our imaginary Elanor, would have predicted it. But that’s where adventures lead us, after all, into the unknown. As Holm’s Bilbo says, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Next time, we’ll cover the back half of Fellowship of the Ring, and the birth of Middle-earth memes.
Austin Gilkeson has written for Tin House, McSweeney’s, Vulture, Foreign Policy, The Toast, and other publications. He lives just outside Chicago with his wife and son.
Looking back on my high school years, the period 20 years previous was 1959 to 1963. No one movie had that sort of influence 20 years later, but styles of movie certainly did. Everyone knew John Wayne Westerns, and World War 2 movies of course. Some of the early Paul Newman films. I suspect that early TV had more of a cultural influence, especially since it was TV that kept the rest relevant. All those 20+ year old movies (and TV shows!) were on TV, especially in the summer.
In the early Eighties while shopping for my first computer, I made an orc joke for God knows what reason, and the nerd sales guy almost fainted with surprise. A woman who knew Tolkien! If my brother hadn’t been with me, I think he would have proposed on the spot. Tolkien wasn’t even remotely mainstream back then even among my fellow nerds.
regarding that Bucky/Hobbit meme — I’m guessing the writers watched Archer, since there was a 2018 episode of Archer: Danger Island set in 1938 where the characters make Tolkien references and they explicitly justify it to each other as having all read The Hobbit that came out in 1937.
A well written article that captures my feelings for this trilogy of films perfectly. I came across JRRT early in my life as well thanks to a voracious appetite for books and an ability to often read far above the “normal” reading comprehension level for my age. In the early 90s I went to a small Catholic grade school with a very small and very, um, antiquated? library. Let’s just say our selection of books contained mostly things that would have been newer when my mom would have gone to school there. You only got to go to library with your class once a week and could only check out 3 books. It was always a mad scramble by most of my classmates to snatch the few copies of newer books and those who weren’t quick enough were left to go spelunking through the old and assumed to be boring books. It was there I came across a book with the odd name of The Hobbit with an interesting cover of a bunch of people in a giant eagle’s nest and I decided to give it a whirl. I never looked back.
Fast forward to the year 2000 when I was a sophomore in high school and the internet as we know it was in its infancy I got wind of a rumor that the Lord of the Rings was being made into movies. I think I nearly died of excitement. I still recall dragging three of my friends to see 13 Days (great film if you are so inclined) just so that I could see the trailer that was supposed to be released for the Lord of the Rings. I went in with no small amount of trepidation. As the article points out, well done, big budget fantasy films were a rarity at that point and films done well with the trove of lore to be mined from JRRT were totally unheard of. I was fully prepared for what I saw to be a shallow disappointment that paid only lip service to the source material. What I witnessed instead was a trailer that exceeded any of my hopes. It breathtaking, beautiful, exciting, and everything I could have hoped for. The worst par was knowing it was still nearly a year away form being in theaters.
I saw every one of those movies in theater multiple times. Given that this was at a point in my life where my disposable income was somewhere between none and “can I borrow 5 bucks?” multiple showings was a BIG DEAL. I still set aside a weekend every year to screen all three trilogy extended cuts (and The Hobbit films) back to back. I know there are quibbles that can be made about narrative choices in the movies (especially The Hobbit films) but I couldn’t care less. The child in me who found those books tucked away in a dark corner of a small library has nothing but love and appreciation for the movies bringing to life a world I thought I would only get to imagine. The fact that they have ushered in so many more worlds and stories is only icing on the cake.
Wow! Really looking forward to the rest of this series. I cannot recapture my original experience with the books OR the PJ movies, but this post comes close!
Great article! I kind of discovered Tolkien thanks to seeing the trailer for tFotR (and then remembering seeing a notice a little while ago that there was a new print of a book of the same name that seemed like I might really enjoy it). I still remember how the trailer almost took my breath away (well, it did have that scene of Legolas coming over the mountain in it, and I was a teenager). By the time tFotR finally reached the local cinema, I had read the whole trilogy and was a devouted fan.
I am very, very fond of Jackson’s the Hobbit trilogy, but I think there is no doubt that LotR is the superior one. I was very impressed with the love and care they put into every detail (especially after having seen all the extra material on the discs that came with my collector’s edition), and I continue to be so.
I will be looking forward for the next articles. Also, I think it is time for a rewatch.
I hope there are lots more articles coming about this!
I was gifted The Hobbit and Fellowship when I was in the sixth grade, in the mid 90s. I then went on to read the rest of the trilogy and I was hooked; for awhile I would just pick up the Hobbit as soon as I finished Return of the King and start over. Even before I becamse known as being the weird Star Wars fanatic, LOTR was my first real nerd obsession. At the time this was not a common interest; I had one other geeky friend I would do Tolkien trivia with, and then another guy in my class said I should go look up the Silmarillion. I think I was in 8th grade then? I had never heard of it! If I recall, even the librarian wasn’t totally familiar with it.
Fast forward however many years, and I’m watching James Franco on the Colbert show trying to curry favor by bragging about reading it. And I just laughed; never would I have magined that the word “Silmarillion” would be said by a celebrity on prime time, mainstream TV like it was a totally cool thing.
When those movies came out I was just graduating high school/starting college and moving into the very geeky honors wing of the residential science program at my large State school and finding ‘my people’. It really was a golden time; Star Wars prequels, the Harry Potter books/movies, and Lord of the Rings movies (plus Wheel of Time books coming out). My boyfriend at the time was into comics and so he started introducing me to the comic book movies that were starting to gain popularity (Spider-Man and X-Men are the ones I remember). I really thought this was the apex, and yet…here we are. While I haven’t been happy with every single element of it, we’ve got more Star Wars, more Marvel, more shows, books, etc than I can consume which fills me with some existential angst at times, hehe.
But I still like to revisit Middle Earth from time to time :)
Very nice article!
I’ll never forget the pure excitement I felt when I first saw the original trailer in front of a movie. Having no idea it was even in the works at the time. I was awestruck.
One thing that youtube has ruined, never being surprised by a trailer again.
OK, if nobody else will do it, I will be the elderly curmudgeon: The Lord of the Rings was well-established in pop culture long before the Jackson films. We talked about it in my English lit classes in high school in the 80s. I remember watching the Rankin/Bass Return of the King on network TV. My neighbours named one of their dogs “Frodo”. I used modems made by Gandalf Technologies.
The Lord of the Rings wasn’t at the level of Star Wars popularity–nothing else was–but it was mainstream. The Jackson films were certainly influential, and there are probably people who came to them without knowledge of the source material, but they didn’t bring Tolkien into pop culture. He was already there.
You could argue that the Peter Jackson movies kept LotR relevant. I remember in the ’80s, it seemed like the sf section of every chain bookstore had a whole shelf of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings — paperbacks, hardcovers, slipcase sets, deluxe leather-bound collector’s editions. Tolkien’s books may have been read exclusively by nerds, but almost every nerd read them. Then in the late ’90s, this extravaganza stopped. Until the PJ movies came out. Then everybody knew about Tolkien and I was telling everybody that I had read the books — before they were cool.
The first book I ever bought on my own was a copy of The Hobbit at a school book fair, back when school book fairs were a thing. I literally grew up reading those books. I still own my first HC edition of The Silmarillion, tattered dust cover and all, and eagerly awaited the new editions of the tales from that volume that have come out in the past few years.
I remember when Bakshi’s adaptation of approximately the first half of the trilogy came to the theaters; I was one of those standing on line for the first showings. I was sorely disappointed when the attempt to produce the rest fell through.
I don’t recall standing on lines for my ticket to see The Fellowship of the Ring, (an abortive attempt to get Grateful Dead tickets a few years before by being on an overnight line cured me of such folly) but I was certainly at an early showing. The prologue … oh my lord. And the opening shots of the Shire, the colors, the scenery … I remember thinking, goddamit, they got this perfect. This is the Shire of my dreams, of my imagination, rendered beautifully.
I still tear up thinking about it.
@9 I’m with Keith, the Lord of the Rings was already well established in popular culture long before Peter Jackson got ahold of it. But I do agree, it aided quite a bit in the shift in nerd culture to the mainstream.
That said, they are magnificent. My friends and I saw Fellowship on opening night and the scene where Gandalf rides into Hobbiton is brilliant. It transported me back to a summer reading my dad’s leather-bound Lord of the Rings in the car on a family vacation. It made me feel like a kid walking into Disney World. That little bit of movie is cinema perfection. I literally had tears in my eyes that first time.
Even now, after seeing it so many times, I am still brought back to that moment in the theater every time I see it. The only thing that comes close is Grant and Ellie seeing the dinosaurs for the first time in Jurassic Park.
Tolkien was in pop culture in the 60s/70s. This was made at the time:
https://youtu.be/V3fZhJN4Tdc
But the article is right in the sense that people are being bullied less for knowing about Tolkien’s books than in the 90s due to how popular the movies were, and in part because being a nerd became cool, or at least nerd culture became cool.
It’s like knowing who Conan was before 1980. Only nerds knew. Now it’s mainstream.
Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy is, well, more than I expected, and in fact more than the world deserved, IMO. I loved The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings all my life (my dad read them to us aloud, a chapter a night); I struggled to like the Rankin-Bass cartoon; I half-liked, half-hated Bakshi’s LOTR film. I guffawed at Rankin-Bass’s drunken stagger of a ROTK cartoon. (When There’s a Whip — There’s a Way! Lol!)
But it never even occurred to me that any director would ever be able to adapt those books well. I was intrigued when I heard of Jackson’s project; are they really going to shoot for the moon, and do three films?
And I was impressed with the cast. And I don’t mean Elijah Wood or Ian McKellen; they were, well, too obvious; casting them was like passing a minimum-competency exam. I was much more impressed when Jackson tapped Hugo Weaving – Agent Smith! – for his Elrond.
Was it really possible that Peter Jackson “got” Tolkien’s Elves? That the director of – gulp – Meet the Feebles – and mind you, I’m not dismissing Meet the Feebles – did this fat Hobbit actually understand that Elrond wasn’t a willowy Elf librarian? That he needed an actor who could bring it – who could portray a half-human, half-Elven, all-badass warrior, someone who had personally witnessed Eonwë’s host come ashore and march off to kick Morgoth’s shadowy ass; who’d lost his twin brother to Manhood and mortality, watching Elros sail off to become the first King of Númenor – the island that later got Atlantised for the crime of trying to conquer Heaven itself; who’d been Chief of Staff to the Elves’ greatest King in the Last Alliance; and who, over millennia of amazing deeds, had seen s**t that made Shelob look like Shadowfax?
I still remember marveling at Cate Blanchett getting her Galadriel on in that remarkable Fellowship prologue – clearly inspired by Susan Tyrrell’s opening narration in Bakshi’s Wizards, but with the gravitas of Tolkien’s legendarium behind it. “But they were all of them — deceived,” purred the Lady of the Golden Wood; and suddenly I realized: this was happening.
Thanks, P.J.
As I read this article and the following comments I heard comming from my kitchen, where my mum has Classic FM on the radio, the sweet sounds of Shore’s LotR score… Really underlined the point made.
Regarding the Shire as “a place the audience must miss”: A friend of mine was in England when “Fellowship of the Ring” opened there. She told me that during the opening Shire scenes, people in the audience gasped. Apparently it was such an evocation of an idealized rural English life now largely vanished, that she could hear people sobbing around her.
I agree with many other here that Tolkien was fairly mainstream by the 70’s and 80’s. People named their pets “Gandalf” even if they had never read the Hobbit. Jackson’s trilogy made them immensely more popular of course. What the movies did change was the fantasy film genre. There were numerous attempts in the 80’s to make good fantasy films and most of them are fairly terrible, or at minimum the special effects were. Budgets were low for these films, chain mail bikinis were prevalent, and when they weren’t the stories were mediocre (hello Willow!). Jackson’s trilogy changed the budget for fantasy films and set the bar for fantasy films, even if mediocre stories still occasionally plague us.
I went into the Fellowship excited as any, but fearing that the first book would be near impossible for anyone to bring to film well. Happily all my fears were unfounded. Unfortunately if Fellowship was a 10 out of 10, all subsequent films were each a little worse, Towers was a solid 9, and Return rates an 8 (no scouring–grrr). The first Hobbit might scratch a 7, the second one a 5, and the last a 3.
@17 – “Return rates an 8 (no scouring–grrr)”
What, that movie didn’t have enough endings for you? I felt like I was doing squats in my seat, as many times I got up thinking the movie was over!
@18 – Can I trade the bed romp ending for a scoured shire?
@17 – The first Hobbit might scratch a 7, the second one a 5, and the last a 3.
Three movies for a single novel. Like butter scraped over too much bread. It still makes me sad to think of what could have been.
Those who did not experience the 60’s simply aren’t aware of how widespread the influence of these works reached. Mid 60’s is when the authorized paperback versions were published in the USA which made them accessible to everyone. I had already read all three by then but only because they were in both the city and school libraries. As soon as the paperbacks were released I bought them all, as did most of my friends.
Frodo Lives! buttons were everywhere, worn proudly next to our peace signs. With those and Ramble On in 1969, Tolkien was a major part of the culture.
Good article; I hadn’t really noticed references becoming more common because I’ve long spent most of my social time with genre readers, but I can see the movies making an impact. One cavil:
The books enjoyed a countercultural cool starting in the 1970s
60s, as @13 noted; I was there, and remember (e.g., widespread “Frodo Lives!” graffiti). They might have been less cool because they got so much attention in mainstream press, but the press was following the Potter-like explosion of interest.
@13: I had hoped that horrible song was safely buried, but I guess almost nothing can really have died now that we have the net. (Almost, because so much early Dr. Who is known to have been erased…)
@14: I was much more impressed when Jackson tapped Hugo Weaving – Agent Smith! – for his Elrond.
I remember seeing that and my mind’s ear (undisciplined thing!) hearing him say “Misssssster Aragorn” when he shows up with the reforged sword. (Goes along with the imaginary clip of Margaret Hamilton as Darth Mater, I suppose.)
I first met Tolkien’s works just before the movies were announced. I was in fifth grade in 1997, and we were doing an art project that involved papier mache masks of the characters from the Hobbit (I got Balin!), with our teacher reading it to us as we worked. When we finished the project, the book was barely half finished, and I was so incensed it was just going to be left there that I grabbed it from the library and finished it by the weekend. That summer (1997-8, Australian summer), shortly after I turned eleven, I tackled our old copy of Lord of the Rings. Took me a month, but I got there!
Learned about Jackson’s trilogy soon after, and obsessively followed production, speculating on forums (I was pretty glued to Entmoot and TheOneRing.net). Watched the Bakshi film. Watched the Bakshi film… a lot, half cringing, half genuinely enjoying parts of it, but still snickering over the snarky recap on the Tolkien Sarcasm Page. Fellowship of the Ring came out in December 2001, shortly after my fifteenth birthday and almost four years after I first read the book and the fandom exploded, with the movies being such an integral part of my love for Lord of the Rings that I can’t imagine a world without them.
Thank you, Peter Jackson, they’re magnificent!
Tolkien’s works were wildly popular for decades before the movies, and references to them appear in so many different contexts, not to mention them being literally the basis of the modern fantasy genre, that it seems more than a bit anachronistic to say that the movies launched them into the pop culture spotlight.
What has always puzzled me about the movies are the things that Jackson, et al, changed for apparently no story-driven reason. I can fully understand eliminating TOm Bombadil, even if I was looking forward to that segment coming to life on the big screen, but there were other changes made that don’t seem to have been made for any logical purpose.
I think that, as a previous commenter noted, what makes these movies culturally significant is not that they were made, but that they were made so *well*. They are arguably the first high quality productions made of any fantasy franchise, and they not only set a benchmark for cinematic quality, they went so far beyond what had ever been done before that it’s likely such a production will never happen again—if for no other reason than that improvements in 3D animation have got to the point where the intricate level of detail that Weta Workshop put into the physical props will in the future be done entirely on silicon.
To be perfectly honest, I enjoy watching the Extended Edition “behind the scenes” discs more than watching the actual movies, though I have not gone back and rewatched any of them in years. Now that I have a 4K UHD television, I no longer have a surround sound system to fully enjoy the experience.
I first read LotR back in ’71 when a friend and I had a bet on what was the best trilogy, LotR and Foundation. I lost…
My sister had all the paperbacks, which I promptly stole. I still have Fellowship and Return, but lost Towers decades ago. I think she stole it back! I was reading that copy of Return at work, when my boss walked by. He stopped, came in to my cube, picked it up and was ASTOUNDED that I WAS READING THIS!!!! It was a FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION of return, and he felt it should be in a safe somewhere!
When the first movie came out, my office went as a group. We ALL knew LotR, and it was amazing to watch the movie in a group of close friends that all ‘got it!’
@@@@@ 14: I agree the cast of Jackson’s LOTR is a dream come true. Just think of Christopher Lee as Saruman! I understand he wanted to play Gandalf, and he would have been a wonderful Gandalf, no doubt, but he was BORN to play Saruman, as Ian McKellen was for Gandalf. (Though perhaps Richard Harris could have been Gandalf, had he not passed away too soon.)
To this day, though, I object to Elijah Wood’s casting. For no fault of his own, I should add: he is a super talented, smart actor whose choice of movies have always delighted me. (Come to Daddy was for me one of the few highlights of 2020.) But he was simply too young (and WAY too pretty) for Frodo. Frodo needs some gravitas, IMHO, and that was something Wood could not bring to the plate.
But of course that’s MY Frodo. I’m pretty sure many people won’t agree with me.
@26: Martin Freeman would have been a phenomenal Frodo. Perhaps age up Merry a bit too in order to appear closer in age to Frodo and to more nearly portray the thoughtful hobbit he was in the text.
First learned of the existence of LOTR when a friend of mine at prep school in 1962 was reading his father’s Folio Society (I think) edition. Read it myself on the way back from an interview at Sheffield University in 1968 when I was 17 (The old Thames Clyde express with snow outside and the lights dimming as the batteries ran down – no wolves but….). Heard the BBC Radio adaptation (still the best signature tune) and remember thinking then that they would never be able to film it. Then came the first Star Wars film’s opening sequence and suddenly the possibilities opened up. Jackson nailed it for me.
@@@@@ 26: YES! Martin Freeman would have been an ideal Frodo. As it is, he was a near ideal Bilbo. The Hobbit movies are nowhere near as good as LOTR, but that’s hardly his fault.
(And they’re not bad movies; I even admire the effort they put in incorporating some of Tolkien’s unpublished material. They’re just… not The Hobbit.)
Avaia @@@@@ 24: which specific changes did you have a problem with? I remember macho types complaining when the first movie came out about Arwen being active early rather than just a prize at the end — but it was pointed out that the appendices (about a third of the last book) say she’s been around with Aragorn for a long time. I regret the loss of the Scouring — I love big succesful endings — but I can see arguments that it wouldn’t have fit the mood (not to mention making the movie too long).
When you talk about the attention to detail in the movies, I remember clearly going to the traveling exhibit from the movies at my Museum of Science. While some of it focused on the “how tos” of the production (I still love the picture of my mother and I in Gandalf’s cart with a giant me looming over my tiny “hobbit” mother), much of it was displays of the costumes and props. We spent hours in that exhibit pouring over those stunning dresses, weapons, etc. And we both came away feeling like we’d been privileged to see a spectacular exhibit of some ancient, and very real, culture.
Regarding the importance of the Shire and the attention to detail, we were lucky enough to go to New Zealand a few years ago, and we went to the Hobbiton set. After riding through the countryside on the bus, and getting the little intro spiel in an outdoor gathering area, you enter though a little path between some hills, and then once you clear that you get a wide view of the landscape I won’t like, I teared up a little, and there’s a split second where you can truly believe you just got transported there.
I remember the shock I felt when my teenaged cousins asked, “Who is Tom Bombadil?”
Yes, Peter Jackson took him out of the movies, and made other changes I hated.
I first read LoTR in the 1960s. Knew Jack Gaughan and Don Wollheim, and later Ian Ballantine.
The film ended hundreds of pages before the actual book did—and literally hundreds of years before the Indexes did.
Will never watch it again.
Adding to some of the comments here… I am Dutch. The first translation ever of LotR into any language, was into Dutch (1956-1957). That’s why, in 1972, the principal of my Amsterdam primary school could tell us about Tolkien and LotR… Intrigued, I read the book in 1973, aged 12. It led to a lifelong love of fantasy. So I can confirm that Tolkien was a cultural phenomenon as early as the 1960s, and not only in the English-speaking world.
That Bakshi cartoon soured me on all tv and movie adaptations of books I loved for a really long time. When news came out of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, I was not at all in favor. By this time I knew that movie makers’ visions never matched mine. Until the day I saw a commercial on TV for Fellowship that included a shot of Orcs — with pointy ears. That’s when I realized that someone on this movie must have read the Silmarillion and understood where Orcs came from. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to see this movie! PJ did not disappoint. (with LOTR at least; The Hobbit is a whole nother story)
@32 I’m not a macho type, but a purist. If it was good enough to include in the books, it was good enough to include in the movies.
I first read The Hobbit and LOTR back in the early 1970s. My older sister was reading them for high school so I grabbed each book as soon as she finished it. At one time I estimated that I’d read the trilogy at least 30 times, so I’m fairly familiar with the story. I liked Bombadil, Old Man Willow, and the Barrow Wights, but understand why that section is consistently edited out of video versions…though removing the wights does change the origin of the hobbits’ swords and breaks the connection to the past. But changing Glorfindel to Arwen feels like pandering (she was not a high elf Lord and wouldn’t have been able to save Frodo in that manner), and removing the part about Narsil being reforged before the fellowship departed from Rivendell only served to give Elrond a little screen time, presenting Aragorn with Anduril outside Minas Tirith. 🙄
I watched the movie trilogy, enjoyed it for what it was, but have never felt the desire to watch any of them again. I’ll reread LOTR instead.
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So many memories. I first heard of LotR and the Hobbit from my older sister, and my parents. Saw the Rankin-Bass Hobbit on television, and was encouraged by my sister to read the books (“Didn’t we tell you?”). Got the Ballantine boxed set (which I still have, though my mother read them too, and she was hard on books; they’re in rough shape).
Mother taught some bits of LotR in her college-level English classes some years later, after the Bakshi film came out, and she realized that some of her students were failing to read the sections she assigned in favor of watching the animated film. So she asked questions on the quizzes about Tom Bombadil (who has been omitted, as far as I can tell, from all versions except the original books). This, as you can imagine, caused quite a lot of distress.
We still have a first-US-edition hardback of the Silmarillion, though the jacket is nearly destroyed.
@41 ahahaha your mom is awesomel :)