JRR Tolkien Takes Us to a Place We Would Not Have Visited

On this date in 2009, Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún was published, thanks to the untiring work of his son, Christopher. I thought today would be a good day to share my review of the book as it was published on Examiner.com in July of 2015. The Examiner article was based on a review I did for Hollywood Jesus in June of 2009. On the day the book came out, I posted a brief announcement in HJ's "Bagshot Row Bulletin." I commented: "Reading poetry is certainly not one of my strong points, but I look forward to trying to tackle the book. I hope to publish a review in the near future." I am thankful I both tackled and reviewed it; it was a profitable exercise.

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

Almost eighty years ago, a strange children’s book from a then unknown author hit a few bookstore shelves in England. JRR Tolkien soon secured a small but loyal following, and readers were clamoring for more. Little did Professor Tolkien understand what he had started.

In 2009, legendary director Guillermo del Toro was part of the team working on the pre-production preliminaries for the Hobbit movies. In June of that year, del Toro gave an interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and described his view of Tolkien's The Hobbit.

…it’s all going to be a beautiful tale of a guy with an incredibly beautiful spirit, which all Hobbits have, who is confronted with a very vast much darker world than he knew. And he comes back to his point of origin completely changed and yet very sure of his own nature.

That’s what Tolkien has done to many of his fans. Through the eyes of his Hobbits, he has taken us to places we would have never thought to visit. If it weren’t for Bilbo and Frodo, many would have never developed an interest in fantasy literature. And certainly only a very few specialists would have ever picked up a book written in verse by some obscure philologist.

Without The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, that is all The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún would be to Tolkien’s fans. Undoubtedly, as was the case with The Silmarillion, many more copies of this book have been sold than have been read. A few devoted fans might even begin to attempt the read, but, undoubtedly, no more than a small fraction will ever finish the epic poems, let alone the commentaries.

If you are one of those readers who skips over the poems when you read Tolkien, because you just can’t “get into” poetry, this book is definitely not for you. On the other hand, for those of you who enjoy poetry, but find Tolkien somewhat lacking in skill, you will find these much better than anything in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was at the top of his game when he created these “lays.” And he was quite adept at using the alliterative style and meter of Norse poetry. It is impressive how much he could convey in a short stanza. Here is a sample passage from "The Lay of Gudrún."

Horns they sounded -
strode the stairway;
stern their onslaught.
The stones they stained
with streaming blood;
snaketonguéd arrows
sang about them.
Doors clanged backward,
din resounded:
Hunland’s champions
hurled upon them.
Hard were handstrokes,
hewn were corslets,
as on hundred anvils
were hammers ringing.

Tolkien’s vivid imagery is not just limited to his prose. If providence had not found a publisher for The Hobbit, I doubt the world would have ever seen these lines, and we would be a little less rich. Like Bilbo in his hole, we would have been just fine without adventures in Middle-earth or Norse poetry, but there is a part of us that is changed because we have been there. And that just may be a good thing.

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún was not published until 2009, but was written by JRR Tolkien probably in the 1930’s. Tolkien at one time feared the poems had been lost. Besides the poems themselves and a few notes by the author, the book also contains commentary by Tolkien’s son and literary executor, Christopher.

The Last Earth Day

The following article was first published in the now defunct Examiner.com on April 21, 2010. It is an expanded version of a blog post from 2009. I thought this Earth Day Eve would be a good time to share it for posterity. 

Tomorrow is Earth Day around the world. It was founded by the late Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson to help us remember the importance of treating our planet properly.

A flood of movies has been released in the past few years that emphasize the importance of taking care of our planet – from the humorous Wall-E, to the suspenseful The Day the Earth Stood Still to the blockbuster Avatar. Although I believe much of the hype about catastrophic climate change is most likely greatly inflated, we certainly do have a responsibility to care for the earth.

In The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), the alien Klaatu says that it is more important for the Earth to survive than it is for humankind to survive. There are few planets that can sustain complex life, he says, and it would be better to destroy humanity and let the earth have a fresh start than to let humanity turn the world into an uninhabitable rock. It must be decided whether humans are capable of improving to the point that they are not a threat.

Some time back, this examiner wrote an article about an essay by C. S. Lewis from Christian Reflections titled “The Funeral of the Great Myth.” The “Great Myth” for Lewis was the idea that humankind is progressing and gradually becoming better and better. Developmentalism is not a new Hope that has just shown up recently. It has been popularized in science fiction for decades, and been a subject of philosophy for centuries. Somehow, it says, we will overcome our proclivity for destroying ourselves – whether by war or by pollution. Peace will reign on Earth, and we will take our place among the stars.

C. S. Lewis wrote an article in 1958 for the Christian Herald titled “Will We Lose God in Outer Space?” (Published as “Religion and Rocketry” in the C. S. Lewis anthology The World’s Last Night—1960, still available as a reprint.) While logically explaining why life on other planets would not preclude God or Christianity, he wonders whether God would allow us to venture out with the possibility of contaminating unfallen races (a subject which, of course, he delves into in his Space Trilogy). Lewis did not believe that we would progress to a point where we would no longer be a threat to hypothetical worlds.

In the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, the reason for Klaatu coming to Earth was not to save it from us, but to save the other planets from us. The concern was not what we were doing to our own species or our own planet, but what we might do if we were to travel to other worlds. Klaatu explains how these worlds have solved the problem of hostility and war – not through progressing beyond it, but by controlling it. Robots have been programmed to take action against any aggression. The peace is maintained by the threat of force.

Lewis believed that the final peace will come by force. In 1952, he wrote “The Christian Hope—Its Meaning for Today” for Religion in Life (titled “The World’s Last Night” in the above anthology). He believed the Second Coming of Christ would be apocalyptic in nature. No gradual “bringing in” of the Kingdom, but a sudden, forceful take-over. He presents sound theological reasons for supporting such a Coming, and uses the same arguments against Developmentalism that he used in “The Funeral of the Great Myth.”

Lewis does remind us that Christ said no one knows the day or hour of His Coming. He did not even know it Himself (one of the great mysteries of the incarnation). But we should live with the reflection that it could be at any moment, and that He will come in Judgment.

We cannot always be excited [about His Coming]. We can, perhaps, train ourselves to ask more and more often how the thing which we are saying or doing (or failing to do) at each moment will look when the irresistible light streams on it; that light which is so different from the light of this world—and yet, we know just enough of it to take it into account.

Buying Middle-earth: Amazon Dives into the Tolkien Legendarium

For some time now, it has been known that Amazon Studios is going to be working on a television series to run as an Amazon Original series based of Tolkien's Middle-earth novels. When the news first broke, it looked like they were merely going to rehash The Lord of the Rings, and possibly The Hobbit. It was assumed that JRR Tolkien's son, Christopher, who headed the Tolkien Estate, would never allow the rights to any other writings about Middle-earth. However, as details came to light, it became obvious (to me anyway) the series was going to be much broader in scope than that. As I wrote in my article for Screenfish.org, 

According to the Amazon Press Release, as published on TheOneRing.net, “the television adaptation will explore new storylines preceding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. The deal includes a potential additional spin-off series.” This places the series directly in the Middle-earth universe, and, yes, potentially includes material from The Silmarillion!  What exactly will be included is only speculation at this point – beyond the fact it is about Middle-earth and is set before Bilbo’s famous Party.

Reports have been stating Amazon will be spending upwards of a billion dollars on the series, including about a quarter billion just for the rights. With Christopher Tolkien retiring from his position with the Estate, the rights to stories beyond The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were secured – apparently after a bidding war with other studios. (See the Variety article from last November.)

When the film industry spends that kind of money on a production, you can be sure Forbes will, sooner or later, comment on it. Yesterday morning contributor Paul Tassi weighed in on the project, but he does not seem to understand the breadth of Tolkien's Middle-earth Legendarium.

Peter Jackson’s follow-up trilogy is pretty bad. This demonstrates what happens when you run out of source material and have to stretch what little you have to work with into something larger than it should be. The Hobbit trilogy pales in comparison to the original LOTR trilogy, and if Peter Jackson himself couldn’t make the concept work, I’m wondering what chance Amazon has without him, and almost no source material to work with at all, given that everything else has already been adapted to death. They can have a world with Hobbits and Elves and Orcs and power rings, but they have no roadmap, they’ll have to make it all up unless they re-adapt the original books, which seems like an even worse idea. Even Game of Thrones had George RR Martin’s books to follow, and Amazon seems like it’s on its own arduous path to Mordor, with peril lurking around every turn.

First of all, Peter Jackson's latest trilogy did not garner groans from the fan base because he ran out material. There is plenty in the novel he chose not to cover. And Gandalf's side trip to Dol Guldur is mentioned in Tolkien's writings (more cryptically in The Hobbit, more explicitly in Appendices of  The Lord of the Rings). Jackson's sextet is not weak, in my opinion, because he ran out of good material to use, but, as I've said elsewhere, he didn't trust the material.

The Lord of the Rings movies are, in my opinion, at their best when they trust Tolkien. They get into trouble when they don’t. As I expected, in this first Hobbit movie, Jackson only trusts Tolkien to a point. He is a fan, but he is not a believer. Not that Tolkien is infallible, or that he cannot be improved upon. But Jackson has not proved, at least to my mind, that his version of Middle-earth is better than that in the books. He has two more movies to show me I’m wrong.

But, if Amazon's original Press Release is correct, the series is not going to be about the adventures of Bilbo and Frodo anyway. As I point out in my quote near the beginning of this piece, the material being used will most likely include The Silmarillion. Certainly there is plenty of "source material" to use.

Let's just hope whoever writes and directs this mammoth series trusts Tolkien more than Jackson did. If all goes well, sometime in the 2020s we shall see.