I don’t care what they say – I’m excited!
Having consumed (a number of times) the several books worth of J. R. R. Tolkien material scraped together from his papers by his son Christopher Tolkien (they sit here on my shelves…. The Book of Lost Tales (I and II), the Lays of Beleriand, Sauron Defeated, Morgoth’s Ring, and so forth…), and thirsted for more, this is just excellent news:
From Reuters, in an article by Mike Collett-White, I read:
More than 30 years after his death, a “new” book by J.R.R. Tolkien goes on sale on Tuesday which may well be the author’s last complete work to be published posthumously.
Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher, now in his eighties, constructed “The Children of Hurin” from his father’s manuscripts, and said he tried to do so “without any editorial invention.”
Already told in fragmentary form in “The Silmarillion,” which appeared in 1977, the new book is darker than “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” for which Tolkien is best known.
The story is set long before “The Lord of the Rings” in a part of Middle-earth that was drowned before Hobbits ever appeared, and tells the tragic tale of Turin and his sister Nienor who are cursed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord.
And it will have some illustrations by the brilliant Alan Lee! (See cover above left.) Read more here.
The Silmarillion is of course a wonderful masterpiece and not widely appreciated enough, in my opinion, so I hope that this extended tale gets people curious and brings it more readership.
Now, before I go I’d like to repeat something I’ve been saying since I was about 12 or 13. Only I am allowed to make the film(s) of the Silmarillion, ok? I just need the funding, a team, and a bit of training in film-making and I’ll deliver the appropriate masterpiece(s).
(Previously I said this about both the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, but nobody listened to me, strangely enough, and they let that Peter Jackson guy do three brief films… leaving out so much (such as all the songs! the songs!) although I’ll grudgingly admit he did more than a half-decent job. But…!!!)
-cvj
Hi,
I deleted the email you put. Sorry. Maybe you will come back and check. In which case, have a look here, among numerous other places on the web.
-cvj
can any 1 remail me in which order the lord of the rings books go:
is it morgoths ring, then simarillion, the the hobbit, the children of hurin the the lord of the rings? and any others i missed out, please tell me my email is […cut by cvj…]
Ha HA HA!
-cvj
Ok, the Numenorean bits can have Elvish dialect subtitles.
–IP
Oh and yes, they’re gonna make the Hobbit, but Peter Jackson’s probably not doing it as he had a fallout with them. So you’ve still got a chance to direct that one.
I will let you make the movie, but only on the condition that I get to be the person who runs around New Zealand finding the perfect places to shoot it. I just got back from my travels which included the South Island, and I was already planning then just when I’d be able to go back down there…
Pictures forthcoming, once I figure out which of the several hundred I took are worth uploading. 😉
That would make it a bit hard for all the (for example) Numenorean -speaking characters, won’t it? 😉
I think it might be too late for the Hobbit film – did they not announce the other day that it was going to be made soon?
-cvj
The Silmarilion film? Ok, you’re allowed to make it but *only* if they are entirely in Elvish dialects. For the hardcore Tolkein fans only.
And can you make a Hobbit film too, pretty please?
–IP
Ha Ha! That’s a very good observation indeed. You’re right.
Ah yes, the Ents…. I did have some issues there too… starting with why they needed to use the same voice for treebeard as for Gimli. Could they not afford a separate actor?
-cvj
Hasty Ents was the worst, IMO.
For some reason, fantasy/sci-fi movie makers cannot seem to resist the temptation to have deliberative superbeings be subject to whims of cheap emotion.
No argument here! I actually liked her better when she was speaking Elvish than when she was speaking English. 🙂
Oh, I have my criticisms of some performances and characterizations! I’ll happily say for the record that Liv Tyler sitting around blubbing for most of the three movies was a bit annoying… 😉
-cvj
Yes, you make a good point about interpretation, and it’s something I thought a lot about while keeping track of the movies’ development. How does one even begin to translate the complexity of Tolkien’s world to the movie screen? Certainly some things have to be removed (which is why I wasn’t overly bothered by Bombadil’s absence), edited (ditto for the conflation of several characters, e.g. Arwen taking Glorfindel’s place), and emphasized or de-emphasized. And I think you’re right: if we keep in mind that this is one person’s (or one group of people’s) interpretation of LOTR, then many of these disagreements based on personal preference or individual resonance lose their urgency. But it can be very difficult to separate legitimate critique of the movies that were made from comparison with one’s own ideal movie versions. Especially in the case, as you say, of books we love.
Just for the record, I didn’t intend any criticism of John Noble, who’s clearly a terrific actor. In fact, I thought most of the acting was excellent, and quibbles aside (of course there are several more on which I could expound ad nauseam), I thought the movies were wonderful overall. What a great time to be a Tolkien geek!
Hi,
While I quite sympathize with your disappointment, I was not as put out as you were by the reading they took of Denethor… I think they took an aspect of the character and used that as a point of departure and executed it rather well. I’m very happy with someone making a film which is not exactly like a book I love, (film and book are different things, and one has to so develop characters rather differently given the time constraints, etc.) I guess I’m not bothered too much that he is not exactly the Denethor I might have written myself. It was enough for me that they found some part of him that was there and then developed it well, which I think they did (writers and actor, John Noble, together).
I agree that Sean Bean was awesome as Boromir, and I would say the same for David Wenham’s reading of Faramir. John Noble did a great job as Denethor, and Billy Boyd was also brilliant in those scenes.
Cheers!
-cvj
Well… I was less than pleased by the flattening of Denethor’s character from an intelligent, melancholy, and despairing tragic figure into a carnal, irritable, priggish, mean caricature. The part where Gandalf smacks him upside the head is ridiculous, and his death scene completely overblown in a very self-indulgent Peter Jackson way. Sean Bean was awesome as Boromir, and Billy Boyd and David Wenham were very good as Pippin and Faramir, so I had high hopes for the denouement of that storyline, but I was ultimately pretty disappointed.
I did like the singing scene, though, so on that we agree.
adam…. Without the tale of Beren and Luthien (so crucial to the significance of the (less than well-handled in the film) Aragorn/Arwen tale too), there purpose of my epic would be severely diminished! In fact, I’d be considering making an entire movie out of just that chapter….!!
Indeed, the whole Faramir/Boromir/Denothor/Pippin matter was masterfully handled – the best work of the entire film by head and shoulders, and neither a sword nor arrow was needed to drive the emotional impact so powerfully.
Cheers,
-cvj
Another Tolkien novel…exciting news! Of course C. Tolkien did a fine job with the Histories of Middle-Earth, so any skepticism about the CoH is unmerited, in my opinion.
….and if you film ‘the Silmarillion’, make sure to include the tale of Beren and Luthien, one of my favorites!
And I agree with your thoughts about the singing…PJ could have made several scenes more emotionally powerful by including other song-scenes. Pepin singing for Denethor is among my favorite scenes in all film.
LOTR the Musical is about to open in London, and an actor friend is playing ‘Gimli’. I’m not sure how (or if) the music relates to the songs in the book. Should be interesting!
Supernova:- I agree with you on most of the choices made by PJ on the songs in terms of broader appeal (oh, another major appearance of singing is at Theoden’s in Rohan… Merry and Pippin do a bit of table dancing and singing….), as I said in my earlier remark…. but consider the power of the scenes in which Pippin sings for Denethor while Faramir’s pointless assault goes on, I can’t help but wonder how much more powerful and long lasting the films would have been had more scenes of that type had been done – very much in the spirit of what JRRT intended.
Cheers,
-cvj
To PJ’s credit, he did include several of Tolkien’s songs in various ways: Bilbo sings “The Road Goes Ever On” right as he’s leaving Bag End in FOTR, Theoden murmurs some lines from one of the Rohirrim anthems in TT, Pippin sings for Denethor in ROTK (although, bizarrely, what he sings is a hobbit walking-song slowed down and set in a minor key)… and there are a few other instances, some that got relegated to the extended-cut versions. Then there were a couple of places where he included songs, but they aren’t original Tolkien songs (the early FOTR scene in the Green Dragon comes to mind), and this has always puzzled me — surely there’s more than enough song material in the books to draw from?! Given that the movies are extremely long as is, I’m inclined to cut PJ some slack on this one; my personal preference would have been for more singing and fewer extended meaningless action scenes, but since he was trying to appeal to a modern audience including many non-Tolkien readers, I think he probably made good decisions in general.
Regarding Stephen’s comment, there is at least one song for which the melody is known. Christopher Tolkien’s The History of the Lord of the Rings is a long but very fun read about the writing of the epic, and in the first volume he mentions that his father sang the Troll Song from FOTR to the tune of the folk song “The fox went out on a chilly night”. I was delighted to read this, because now I can sing the Troll Song with impunity. 🙂 There may be other instances in the History of tunes being identified, but this is the only one I remember clearly, no doubt because I know the tune.
I will probably have to pick up this new book, if only for geek-completeness. Clifford, you should post a review when you’ve finished reading it!
good to hear. I need some more weeks to get the write-up done, and I am about to set up a website. I have a pretty clear idea in mind, but the details are missing, I’ll let you know if I managed to bring it in a useful format. Thanks 🙂
Bee… deadly serious. Call me.
-cvj
wow, thanks for letting us know! My younger brother will love it, he’s a huge Tolkien fan. (Coincidentally, his birthday was yesterday, April 16th). Best,
B.
PS: Making progress with the proposal for my institute – were you serious with locating it in LA? At some point I would need local support for whatever place I pick?
Stephen:- try to find the recording of the BBC radio 4 dramatization of it… It is wonderfully long and involved, and among other excellent things, they pay a lot of attention to the songs there, doing a very good job, overall.
(Of course, in my ideal world I’d love it if the songs and the poetry were part of the film, but I’m quite sure it was probably the right decision, by Jackson and his team, commercially to not try to include them… I’m not seriously objecting to them having been left out. I think…)
-cvj
There’s an unabridged audio recording of TLOTR, which has passable renditions of the songs. As near as i can tell, the book doesn’t give you the musical score, so it must have been invented.
WOW. “Of Turin Turambar” was just about my favorite chapter in the Silmarillion …