The end of an era

Below: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 20th Anniversary $2.00 The Lair of Shelob stamp, $2.00 Arwen stamp, $3.30 The Shieldmaiden of Rohan stamp, $3.30 The Army of the Dead stamp, $4.00 Gandalf and the Moth stamp, $4.60 The Ring is Mine stamp

At the end of 2023 the final stamps and coins in our three-year The Lord of the Rings 20th Anniversary series were issued. An adaptation of epic proportions, the movie trilogy's creation out of such a beloved and influential piece of literature has become a story in itself. In the 2023 Annual Album, Laurence Patchett discussed how the film came across to the book's most dedicated fans.

In the small cinema of a Welsh town in 2003, the lights went down for the beginning of The Return of the King Immediately, a man in the front seats stood up, thrusting his fist high in the air. ‘Aragorn!’ he shouted, at full volume. Then the movie theatre went quiet again, the man sat down, and the opening scene played, a flashback to a pair of stoor hobbits who went fishing and accidentally found the Ring.

Sitting in that cinema that day, I heard that man’s shout for Aragorn, and smiled. You had to admire passion like that, I thought. But his enthusiasm also pointed, according to some critics, to an Aragorn focus that went too far. In director Peter Jackson’s hands, some fans and critics said, Aragorn was elevated and centred until his character overshadowed JRR Tolkien’s beloved hobbits in a way he hadn’t in the novel version of The Return of the King or the entire trilogy. Cranking up Aragorn’s love story with Arwen changed the focus even more, the critic Jane Chance wrote, in a complex critique of the entire adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. And online it’s easy to find some Tolkien fans who love the film adaptation, but others who say that hobbits like Merry and Pippin were sidelined, or made too ‘childish’ or comic, or variations on this theme.

But hang on, you might say. What about that scene right at the start of the film? Surely that put hobbits at the centre of the Ring story, a thread that Frodo picks up in his determined climb towards Mount Doom. And the film devotes many scenes to moral questions that centre on Smeagol, the second of those stoor hobbits who see the Ring in the opening scene.

Which of these positions is correct? Where does the balance lie? And what does this debate tell us about the decisions that Jackson and his scriptwriting colleagues made as they wrestled this massive and beloved final part of The Lord of the Rings onto the screen?

Fans of the book know that one of the biggest changes in the film adaptation came not at the beginning of The Return of the King but the end. In the book Tolkien’s four hobbits - Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin - return to the Shire to find it overrun by evil ‘ruffians’. They respond by mounting an armed resistance campaign to ‘Scour the Shire’.

None of this appears in the film, and it’s easy to see why it was cut by Jackson and his scriptwriting colleagues, Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens.

This is an excerpt of an essay by writer Laurence Patchett. You can read the full piece in The New Zealand Collection 2023.