Tag Archives: Middle Earth

Revisiting The Hobbit movie (yes – as one movie not three)

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Having recently re-read The Lord of the Rings trilogy (see my earlier post) and realizing that Peter Jackson had changed more in the movie versions than I had realized, I decided to rewatch the three Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movies for the third time, but this time in the Extended Edition, which I’ve never seen. I purchased a copy of that, which has just arrived. But I have been pondering whether to watch the Hobbit movies before watching LOTR.  I really disliked Peter Jackson’s padding out the story with made-up elements that were not in the book, and spinning it out to three overblown movies. There were some aspects I enjoyed, but I just could not bring myself to watch them again, let alone in the extended editions.

Then I stumbled across a “fan edit” of the Hobbit movies to make a single movie (of length just under 4 hours) which is reasonable faithful to the book, removes excess material and the more ridiculous action sequences. This fan edit, called “The Hobbit – The Cardinal Cut” is described here and can be downloaded or watched on Youtube.

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How long ago were the events of The Lord of the Rings?

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As I discussed in my previous post, Tolkien set out to create a mythology for the English in the Lord of the Rings (LOTR), the Silmarillion and related writings on Middle-earth. He presented himself not as the author of LOTR, but as the translator of various histories written by Bilbo, Frodo and others in the Third and Fourth Age of Middle-earth. This makes Tolkien quite unusual among modern writers of fantasy in presenting it as set in the real worlc albeit in an imagined prehistory. What happened in that period before the Earth’s actual recorded history is otherwise remembered down through the generations as folk myths and legends, especially among the Old English. Tolkien’s life work was an attempt to reconstruct our prehistory, and more specifically the prehistory of the English. Critics Lee and Solopova commented that “Only by understanding this can we fully realize the true scale of his project and comprehend how enormous his achievement was” [1].

Tolkien described the region in which the Hobbits lived as “the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea” in LOTR, ie. essentially Europe (including Britain). However, as he noted in a letter [2], the geographies do not match, and he did not consciously make them match when he was writing. In another letter [3] he became much more specific, saying “If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.” In the Prologue to LOTR, Tolkien also notes that “Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed…”

Fascinated by the detailed chronologies and calendars set out in the Appendices to LOTR and elsewhere, I have naturally wondered how long ago from now the events of LOTR took place. About 15 years ago, I came across an article in the Journal of the Tolkien Society [4¡ which deduced that the Fourth Age began on Wednesday 18 March 3,102 BCE.  The events of LOTR took place during the preceding year.  Despite the bizarre exactness of this, I was quite impressed by the argument, which I summarize here briefly.

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On re-reading the Lord of the Rings 50 years later

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My first encounter with Middle Earth was when I came across The Hobbit in my first year of high school. The Hobbit gave me the same sense of the numinous and of “Northerness” as earlier had C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I had borrowed it from the local library, did not remember the name of the author and only several years later as a teenager did I discover the Lord of the Rings (LOTR).  It was originally published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955, 18 years after the Hobbit was published in 1937. The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s with the publication of the Ballantine paperback editions, and in North America, the publication of the Ace pirated edition.  I first read it in 1969, when I purchased the 1968 first edition of the George Allen and Unwin one volume paperback with cover illustrations by Pauline Baynes:

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Wayland’s Smithy

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After walking from the White Horse across Uffington Castle perched on the hilltop (see previous post  Iron Age hillforts), I walked for about a kilometre to join the Ridgeway track that leads across the Wessex Downs in southern England. I followed this west for about a mile to another Neolithic chambered long barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy. The Smithy is about 100 metres off the Ridgeway nestled in a grove of trees.

The ancient Ridgeway track

Some forest near the Ridgeway

The first version of the barrow was built between 3,590 and 3,555 BC. It was 20m long and the remains of 14 people were buried here in a stone and timber box over a period of less than 15 years. Between 3,460 and 3,400 BC a second larger barrow 56m in length with a stone chamber was constructed over it, and the chambers contained the jumbled remains of several people.

Wayland’s Smithy

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