How to Use your Education to Prove that Sanity's Overrated

[ealgylden]

I’ve been thinking about the two LotR movies quite a bit recently while I’ve been wrestling with my Theoden thoughts, and it occurred to me to wonder why the various changes made in the transition from book to screen didn’t bother me that much. Part of it is my feeling that, in general, the changes made have been to the benefit of the movie (because of differences in the media in question, and so forth). And part of it is that I’m just not a book-bound fanatic when it comes to Tolkien. I’m fond of the books; I enjoy reading them and aspects of them fascinate me, but they aren’t "holy writ" to me like they are to some fans (unlike, say, Good Omens. I long for and fear a Good Omens movie). I’ve seen the movies referred to in various places as very long, very expensive AU fanfic, and that way of looking at them works for me. It isn’t an interpretation that had occurred to me on its own, though, so I can’t blame fanfic for my comfort with the changes PJ and co. have made. So instead I’ll blame academia.

I’m an early medieval historian, and one of the fun things about the study of history is that no text can be approached as if it were holy writ. No historical text can be viewed as sacrosanct and inviolable because the act of writing history is inherently biased (in the sense of "from a specific, non-universal viewpoint", not in the common usage sense, though that’s not out of the question). All the stuff that’s ever happened is the past, but it isn’t history. Framing off pieces of that unwieldy mess and recording/examining/analyzing them creates history, and the frame is built from the historian’s bias: what he or she decides is interesting, or worthy of study, or has been too long overlooked, or whatever. The historian chooses to tell a particular story from among any number of possibilities, any one of which could be deemed more interesting or complete or "right" by another historian.

So what does this have to do with the LotR movies? Well, we know from several sources that Tolkien began his foray into world-building by first creating languages (not a surprising approach for a philologist). He then needed someone to speak these languages and someplace for them to live, so he created various peoples and the world they inhabited, Middle Earth (or Arda, if you want to get fancy). Well, there’s no point in having a world full of people, standing around speaking multiple languages and having complex cultures but not doing anything, so the good professor began to take all the interesting things he knew about his new-born world and its inhabitants and wove them into stories. He created a world and its past (and present), then created the world’s history by deciding which stories to tell.

Tolkien occasionally spoke (in letters and such) of his Middle Earth as though it were real, and he were merely its historian (this approach seems particularly evident in the Silmarillion). He wasn’t crazy (well he might have been, but probably not about this)- this is, of course, a fairly common authorial conceit. So why not go along with it? Allow the imagination to accept the reality of Arda (and really, how hard can it be to accept as real a world full of beautiful immortals, four-story elephants, intelligent evil jewelry and the Giant Flaming Eyeball of Death?). The novel The Lord of the Rings becomes the history The Lord of the Rings, complete with the understanding that, as a history, it privileges certain viewpoints, though there may be alternate views that are just as valid. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are both hobbit-POV stories. So imagine how LotR might have sounded if retold from a dwarvish viewpoint. How would the elves be portrayed? Or Gimli, in his position as the lone dwarf in the Fellowship? Would the descriptions of local plant life be replaced with mini-treatises on local geology? Would stoic endurance replace the palpable longing for home that runs through the text?

Anyway. Once you’ve switched to the “Middle Earth is real and LotR is a history” mindset (and you might not want to tell anyone that you have, unless you’re absolutely fearless in the face of hearty mocking. And are, perhaps, a gamer or SCA-er.), it becomes easy to see the movies not as Tolkien-gone-wrong (which I don’t believe anyway, but I know some people do, and vehemently), but as simply another reading of events. There were no elves at Helm’s Deep? Well, maybe they were left out of some sources (for political reasons, because of prejudice, because the annalist was recording rumors and someone forgot to mention them, etc) and therefore they don’t appear in all versions of the story. Faramir was a lamb, as pure and unselfish as Galahad, while his brother was a braggart and a bully? Historians certainly aren’t above showing favoritism towards their subjects, and sometimes events can take on an entirely different cast with the addition of one adjective, or a simple shift in emphasis. And so on down the line.

So there you go. A historian’s approach to reconciling the differences between book and movie. Or, alternatively, the crazy person’s approach. Whichever.

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[ealgylden.livejournal.com]

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