[Riff] My Time with The Lord of the Rings, or Why I Struggle with Tolkien
By Hamza Siddiqi
Note: Before anyone reads this, I'll preempt you all by admitting that, yes, I *am* an uncultured swine.
A few years ago, I tried reading The Hobbit, and I gave up about 100 pages in. I figured that if I wasn't enjoying it by then, I probably wouldn't start doing so later, so I left it at that and have been hyperbolically telling people ever since that I hate the book. Upon reflection, I don't really *hate* The Hobbit, I just find it mind-numbingly boring to read.
Bilbo's adventures never seem to really hold me emotionally, and Tolkien’s seemingly endless descriptions of what some random (to me, almost definitely not to him) hill, valley or forest looks like just… ugh. Maybe I would have really enjoyed it as a kid; maybe mini-me might have really gotten a kick out of it - but adult me just can't make myself care about the antics of Bilbo, and Thorin Oakenshield, and Bifur, and Bofur, Bombur, Oin, Gloin, groin*, what-fucking-ever.
But, and not for lack of trying, I never got my hands on a copy back then. I generally had less say in what was on my bookshelf back in the day, being at the mercy of my parents on that one, and the general book-reading public when it came to library visits (100 million copies sold, goddamn!). The best I could eventually do was Chuck Dixon's graphic novel version, which I did actually enjoy a lot. Excellent art, really bright and charming and homely, and the cosy feeling I had reading it has really stuck with me over the years.
*I know it's pronounced Glo-in, shut up, nerd.
Chuck Dixon's Graphic Novel. Picture shamelessly stolen from Voyage Comics.
But I never got to read Tolkien's original version, until I picked it up at an op-shop halfway through my 20s. I did have a copy of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ that I was able to convince Mum to buy me when I was maybe 9 or 10. I was a cocky kid, and I found that it was, well, not beyond my reading level, but had to do with topics I couldn't get myself to care about; I skipped the prologue and went straight to Bilbo's eleventy-first, a novel concept to my Harry Potter-addled mind, but the lead up to to it being a bunch of uppity Hobbit gossip and extremely minor characters chatting about family histories in pubs proved a pretty early obstacle for me; like, where's all the dragons, and the evil ring, and sword fights and stuff? All of this domestic shit is booooring!
Side note: My childhood high fantasy book series ended up instead being the Inheritance Cycle (Eragon, Eldest, etc.), possibly still a banger of a series. Sword and sorcery-lite. Simple enough that the plot's similarity to the original Star Wars didn't slip by me even as an 8-year-old. I wonder what Christopher Paolini’s recent books have been like?
Now, even at that point, The Lord of the Rings as a series had always been interesting to me. When the Peter Jackson films were being released, I would have been just starting school, and it was everywhere in the media and, at least in my mind, very much imbued with this sense of huge gravitas and grandeur. It was one of those things that even my pop- culture-shunning parents seemed to treat as noteworthy. I also remember seeing the ads for Inevitable Entertainment's The Hobbit video games, which looked incredible to me as a 6-year old, but which I never got to play.
How cool does it look, though?
I remember picking my Dad up at the airport(?) on his way back from business-land, and him gifting me a toy bow-and-arrow set with Viggo Mortenson's face on it (not Orlando Bloom’s, strangely), which I thought was just the coolest thing in the world. I hung the target off of the bunk bed I shared with my brother, and went on to spend hours giddily mastering the art of the bow. Well, actually, I was 5, it was probably more like 10 minutes really – but my time with Aragorn's bow became a core memory for me, nonetheless. If I think back really far to some of my formative experiences, the Lord of the Rings is there; not super important, but there, along with a variety of choice early-2000s nostalgia, like 'Shrek,' 'Cheez TV', 'Bionicle', 'Dragonology', 'Digimon: The Movie' and Limp Bizkit's shitty "Behind Blue Eyes" cover.
Fast-forward to high school, when my interest was again piqued when I noticed that Tolkien was a part of the metal subculture into which I was trying to immerse myself. References to Middle Earth are frequent in power metal and black metal - the polar ends of the metal world - and bands like Battlelore (who I just learned reformed in 2022) and Burzum made me feel once again like Middle Earth was a world that I needed to inhabit.
Also of note was Rhapsody (of Fire's) Tolkien-esque lore, which I took a lot more seriously than I probably should have. Boy, I was not a cool kid; my teen years were characterised by near-obsessive immersion in whatever I thought was cool at the time (literature and film at best, brony culture at worst), not to mention an unhealthy disdain for my “normie” peers, whose brains were too small to understand how cool of my hobbies were, or something. Imagine a 15-year-old gremlin with dirty clothes and unwashed hair trying to look cool sitting in a school library pretending to ready 'The Bible' and 'The Silmarillion' at the same time, and you'll get the picture; you could have read me stories from either, and I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.
Self-loathing digression aside, the point is that The Lord of the Rings cropped up again in my early teens, and after my first full viewing of the film trilogy, I slogged my way through the novels. I was now more determined and more literate, my stamina was higher, my vocabulary was bigger, and I pushed past Book 1 of Fellowship to find that, thank The One, the plot starts moving during Book 2, and progresses pretty consistently from 'The Two Towers' onward. Peter Jackson’s excellent Appendices documentaries, which I’m currently making my way through, note that the book’s two parts are split between Frodo and Sam’s journey and everything else that was happening, the latter happening first, a fact which I had completely forgotten about, but if I know myself, I think it was the latter story that engaged me more. I *do* remember reading through the Treebeard chapters, which I found strangely compelling. Finishing The Lord of the Rings felt a monumental achievement to me, and even now I’m kinda impressed with my teen self, especially considering that reading was at that point not something I did as regularly and as vigorously as when I was in primary school.
From there... nothing? I might have watched the film trilogy a few times over the next few years, but if I have the timeline right, I got into anime shortly after this, and that consumed me for a couple of years. By the time I was out of my weeb phase, I moved onto bigger and better things, like film (not movies), and trying to get to know my peers. I was relatively successful at the former and I made a short film and a music video during VCE, both of which are lost to time, and neither of which were probably very good anyway.
Anyhoo, fast-forward again to now, my 20s. I've already mentioned that I tried and failed to read The Hobbit a few years ago, and when that didn't work, I tried and failed to re-read Fellowship, but gave up around the Barrow-downs. Groping for a story, indeed. One pandemic later, I visited the Hobbiton set in New Zealand, re-watched the film trilogy for the first time in years, and found that I love it more than I thought I would. The resulting mini-obsession has led to this article. I just reached the end of Andy Serkis' narrated audiobook of Fellowship, and it's the most fun I've had with the novel... uhh, ever. He manages to vaguely invoke the film (I'll be disappointed if he changes the Gollum voice even a little bit), but it's still all completely Tolkien, down to long descriptions of scenery, which I find are a lot more palatable when I can check out and in at will. His take on Tom Bombadil's cheery sing-songiness is loud and obnoxious, but charming nonetheless, and importantly not boring and obnoxious, which is how it comes off to me on the page. Apparently the late, great Christopher Lee used to read the entire thing every year; I could never.
I don't love the fact that I probably prefer Peter Jackson's trilogy to Tolkien's... not-trilogy. Anyone who's read this far has probably picked up on my pessimism, and I don't like what said pessimism tries to tell me about my preference. The world is incredible, but Tolkien's writing, raw, is an obstacle for me.
Books were fun when I was a kid and had limited screen time but, like everyone else, my reading stamina fell sharply once I had video in my pocket, my attention span shortened when I had the internet in my pocket, and these days reading feels like exercise or creative writing: rewarding, but often a slog.
The novels were published in the 60s and 70s, when the technology we have now was still being dreamt of in science-fiction, and the social and psychological implications of them were thought about less than the conveniences. Tolkien is long-winded, has a love of nature and natural beauty, and is almost equally invested in the minutiae of his legendarium as he is in its cosmology. These qualities, in my opinion, do a lot to imbue his work with that huge sense of gravitas and grandeur that remains so potent that it even manages shine through Peter Jackson's films Streamlined as they are, the power of Tolkien's initial vision was such that I felt it as a child, and so did my parents. But reading is still hard; Andy Serkis' talents manage to bridge that gap for me and bring me closer to Tolkien's vision than Peter Jackson could.
TLDR:
If mass appeal is the goal, then the film's work fine to bring Middle Earth to life. More than fine, really: Jackson's films are flawed, but also perfect, and there are aspects to it draw me in in ways that that the books can't - but maybe more on that another time.
I think that's it. Is any of this interesting to anyone else? No? I think this one's just for me.