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How do you translate the enduring popularity of Middle-earth into a film about the author who created it? This is the question Tolkien, the new biopic of the life of J.R.R. Tolkien, writer of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. And that's what I thought after seeing the movie and visiting Oxford on a tour sponsored by 20th Century Fox. The Hobbit is one of my first memories of reading and, with its follow-up, The Lord of the Rings, started my love of fantasy. I was so eager to go to England for TolkienThe screening and tour of the film, especially a tour of Tolkien at Oxford, thought it would strengthen my appreciation for an author who was of paramount importance to the fantasy genre and to my own love of reading.
As cool as it was to retrace Tolkien's footsteps through the famous university, the trip brought to light the folly of trying to understand a person by visiting his old places of trampling. There is an undeniable attraction for the type of tourism that marries a destination already renowned. As an American, I am perhaps particularly sensitive to the idea of a typically British author in a typically British place and what is more British, for the foreign tourist, than Oxford?
Inextricable with the idea of Oxford is his literary output, Tolkien and CS Lewis to His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, perhaps my favorite book series of all time, which revolves around the likes of "The Book". an Oxford of a different universe – similar but almost, in fact. very close to the way I envisioned Oxford as an enthusiastic tourist. I took pictures with my cell phone while our elderly tour guide showed us the places where Tolkien had spent time – the wall that he climbed, drunk, to get to his place as a ### Undergraduate student; the pub where he met his Inklings; Oxford University press where he worked on words "W" for the dictionary – but these places are not substitutes for the people who populated them. These are just places, as important as we try to create them, no matter how difficult we are to scrutinize the past through their windows.
Similarly, while Tolkien the film is pleasant in its own way, it acts better as a period piece detailing the beginning of the life of a creative soul who falls in love, who enjoys the camaraderie of a group of friends of artistic spirit and who leaves at war. The problem with creating a biopic in an author's life is that there is nothing interesting to watch this kind of creativity unfold. The biggest problem is that tackling the life of this specific The author – whose work is incredibly well-known, both by unpublished books and films they have inspired – risks making every moment represented directly correlated with what the public already knows. In other words, it may affect the service of fans.
Tolkien opens on the Western Front of the First World War in a scene that looks like The king's returnThe battle takes place at Black Gate in the sulfur view of Mount Doom. In a short time, the film travels back in time to show a ring glowing in the eyes of a boy, while his mother tells the story of a knight and a dragon that strangely resembles the introduction of the voiceover of Cate Blanchett in The Lord of the Rings. From the German Calvary at Nazgûl's pace to a professor of philology at Gandalfienne, Tolkien explains that some of the most memorable images and ideas of the author's work have been directly and literally taken from his life. This approach turns the biopic into a "source of inspiration" game, which awaits the fans to experience strong emotions when they hear Tolkien (played by Nicholas Hoult) gently pronouncing the word "fellowship" by describing the about his book.
And maybe for some fans of Tolkien's work, it would be helpful to understand how some pieces of his story – a loud group of friends, reciting Beowulf from memory at an early age – can be understood as an influence. Personally, this fan has found little pleasure in reducing the life of the author to parts that can be read, speciously, in the work. While the film tries to demonstrate how well Tolkien was read and immersed in languages, he never knows how to show how Tolkien is inspired by these stories, stories and languages to create something totally new. . Instead, Tolkien's group of friends translates into a "fraternity" and the evils of war are Sauron.
This reductive reading was rejected by the graduate student in medieval literature who explained to my group the Merton College, where Tolkien taught English, his training in philology and his love of the language strongly influencing the language. departmental orientation. (This is one of the few English-language colleges where "language" is listed before "literature.")
In Merton's garden is a famous stone table, where Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis supposedly wrote parts of their masterpieces. The table is better known for what fans of Lewis's work deduce: it's the direct inspiration of Aslan's table in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But Tolkien's fans can also follow pictures of this place where they know that Tolkien was sitting: From the table you can see two of Oxford's famous arrows: two towers, you see. "People say it's there that Tolkien found inspiration for both tours," said the graduate student while we were sitting at the table. "But my friend is a novelist and says that it's not really how it works."
It is oddly discouraging to try to minimize the immensely creative prowess of novel writing, especially an epic as rich as possible. The Lord of the Rings, by establishing direct correlations between the work and what was in the author's field of vision at a place where he is known to have sat down sometimes. It equates what a person sees and experiences in his complex work life that is writing. Experience can play a role, but it is nothing without the long and painful process that editors go through, which consists of reading and doing research and sitting thinkingto contemplate ideas, to transform them and transform them into something that will eventually become a book through more reading and research, contemplation and writing.
That's why Tolkien fails: he tries to show pieces of the life of an author who nourished his creativity but ends up reducing the feat of this creativity in the process. It is difficult to document the writing on a visual medium, it is perhaps the reason why the genre remains largely away from the authors for the benefit of the musicians: there is so much more in the life and the production of a musician that the film support can dramatize and represent. Writing, on the other hand, is an inherently solitary and silent activity, the action taking place in the mind until it is written.
In Tolkien's own words: "An author obviously can not remain totally insensitive to his experience, but the way in which a germ of history uses the ground of experience is extremely complex and attempts to define process are, at best, misunderstood and ambiguous. In his intention to The Lord of the Rings"Second edition, Tolkien tackles the attempts of his readers to relate the events of his life and contemporary events in Europe to The Lord of the Rings. He had clearly heard many, since he devotes several paragraphs to refute these readings.
To take one of the clearest examples: there is a convincing argument that Frodo is experiencing something very similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, and that the time that Tolkien spent in the Battle of the Somme was in his memory when he wrote why Frodo was not explaining the same thing after returning to the Shire: "I was hurt too much, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and she l & # 39; was, but not for me. Yet Tolkien refuses this connection, writing in his preface that the cleaning of the County does not reflect a post-war England specific, but a Tolkien Youth England: "The country in which I lived in my childhood was being destroyed before the age of 10. "
What about the parallels of the second world war? Published in 1954 and 1955, the three books that form The Lord of the Rings seems to have been read by many as a direct response to the last war, which Tolkien also refutes categorically in his attack:
As for any internal meaning or "message", it has no intention of the author. This is neither allegorical nor topical. As the story grew, she rooted (in the past) and threw unexpected branches. […] The crucial chapter, "The Shadow of the Past" is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It had been written long before the 1939 space became an inevitable disaster threat. From that moment, history would have developed essentially in the same direction if this catastrophe had been avoided. Its sources are things we had long in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing has been changed by the war that began in 1939 or by its aftermath. The real war does not look like the legendary war in its process or conclusion.
The works of Tolkien certainly have obvious inspirations: the extremely mythical nature of all history; timelessly good against evil and a moral philosophy among the characters; and the Finnish and Welsh languages, on which Tolkien is largely inspired for his different Elvish languages (there are six in total, two of which are entirely written). But to try to interpret a fantastic work from the point of view of the life of the author and his time shows the danger that readers force a writer's output into a restricted set of events and experiences, undermining thus the genius in favor of explanations by heart.
If Tolkien is to believe in the cleansing of the Shire (and I do not know why we would not believe it), even one of the most "obvious" parallels between his life and that of his character is mistakenly inferred. the Tolkien biopic, and even a trip through Tolkien's Oxford, run the risk of seeing information that is not there. You'll know more about who Tolkien was by reading his charming breeze Farmer giles of ham and delve into the dense historical myth of The Silmarillion that you will watch a film with force and precision will establish the link between the battle of the Somme and Sauron. It's not that readers can not take what they want out of Tolkien's work: The author himself provides a better lens for analyzing Middle-earth according to the "applicability" of his works. stories to the story.
I cordially hate allegory in all its manifestations, and I have always done it since I grew old and have been careful enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or false, with its varied applicability to readers' thinking and experience. I think that many confuse "applicability" with "allegory"; but one lies in the freedom of the reader and the other in the desired domination of the author.
What I read as pure allegory in the biopic was not the intention of its director. Dome Karukoski wanted to show the young Tolkien a nascent creativity, how the experiences of his youth and the creation of a new language for the sole purpose of growing his joy in a fantasy world to which we are all accustomed. "There is not yet Morgoth, not yet Sauron, but there is this idea of evil," said Karukoski about his approach to inserting fantasy elements into Tolkien's battlefield visions. "You see the Nazgûl but it's not the Nazgûl yet. I mean, I guess people will see it as a Nazgûl, but that's not the case. He has a history of his mother, he sees this gallant white horse, ancestor of Maedhros, ideal of a hero with a white horse. And slowly, his mind is corrupted during the war and this image turns into evil. Karukoski said the same thing when I evoked Tolkien's vision of Sauron on the battlefield: It's not yet Sauron, but a vision of evil. Whichever approach is taken, a biopic of Tolkien's life will always have to face this double-edged sword: the reason we are interested in Tolkien is because we love his books, and that these books have left such a visual and semantic legacy. that there is no way to introduce the man without bringing the inherent baggage of The Lord of the Rings.
Karukoski's enthusiasm for what one might call Tolkien's extended universe was my greatest conclusion from my interview with him, and the added context clearly shows that the many allusions inserted into the Tolkien's youth, suggesting an inspiration for later writing, come from a deep love of the director. has for the work of the author an attempt to show "the way a story uses the soil of the experience". Rereading our conversation, I realize that we have spent almost no time discussing Tolkien himself. Instead, we became interested in the stories that matter most to us, the way we connected them when we were young and lonely, and the ones we would most like to see in the future.
I hope that Karukoski will really have the opportunity to engage in Tolkien's work in a future project, because I think it would be much more interesting to see his interpretation of "Túrin Turambar", which Karukoski cited as his story favorite in The Silmarillion. (He also rightly pointed out that the fall of Númenor is essentially a ready-to-use television season.) The story of Tolkien's life is not interesting, but his legacy is mythical; the myth eclipses the man and the success of his work contributes to the failure of the biopic. And Karukoski's attempts to show the nascent creativity that is being formed – the vision of pure evil, supposed to be abstract but which must be interpreted literally by anyone familiar with the film adaptations or Tolkien's illustrations – are the most interesting parts of biopic, precisely because they are The most madly out of tone for this kind of movie. So, here's hoping that Tolkien biopic reengage (or, perhaps for a younger population, simply introduces) people with Tolkien's work, and that people like Karukoski, who see the potential to turn mythical stories that are not obvious choices for screen adaptations, have the chance to do it.
the Tolkien Biopic and a visit to Tolkien's Oxford were ultimately futile attempts to communicate with the author. Perhaps it is simply that extratextual knowledge rarely adds much meaning to the text itself. There is nothing better than digging into a beloved book, because nothing replaces the fantastic world that exists between your imagination and that of the author. Or, as Thorin Oakenshield tells his group of dwarves and Bilbo, "There is nothing like searching, if you want to find something. You certainly find something, if you look, but it is not always what you are looking for.
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