J.R.R. Tolkien thought ‘The Odyssey’ would be easier to film than ‘The Lord of the Rings’
The Lords of the Rings films of the early 21st Century are some of the greatest fantasy movies of all time. Directed by Peter Jackson with screenplays from the likes of Jackson himself, Fran Walsh, Phillipa Boyens and Stephen Sinclair, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, the films have gone down in history as true fantasy masterpieces.
Tolkien’s novel was published in three parts between 1954 and 1955 and began as a sequel to his 1937 children’s book The Hobbit. It, like the later films, tells of a Dark Lord, Sauron, who creates a Ring to rule over all those that were given to the Men, Elves and Dwarves of Middle Earth and a young hobbit’s quest to destroy it when it comes into his possession.
However, Tolkien himself had felt that film adaptations of his legendary fantasy novel would be almost impossible because of how much text is actually in the books, whether it be action, description or dialogue. This was, of course, long before cinema had exploded into the epic medium that we know it as today.
In an interview with The Telegraph in 1968, Tolkien revealed that he had once been written a letter from a 17-year-old girl who begged him not to let a movie adaptation go ahead. “Please, don’t let them make a movie out of your Ring,” the girl wrote. “It would be like putting Disneyland into the Grand Canyon.”
Tolkien followed up on the little girl’s letter in the interview by putting forth his own reasons for why Ring should not have been made into a film. “You can’t cramp narrative into dramatic form,” he said before noting that he thought it would be easier to make a movie from one of the best-known epics of all time.
Discussing the cinematic potential of Homer’s legendary poem, Tolkien said, “It would be easier to film The Odyssey. Much less happens in it. Only a few storms.” Ultimately, though, Tolkien would be proven wrong many years after his death, and Peter Jackson did a glorious job of bringing his iconic fantasy novels to life on the big screen.
Jackson’s films of the 2000s are some of the greatest works in the fantasy genre ever made. They’re beautiful to look at, contain some of the greatest scored moments of the 21st Century, the narrative is wonderful, charming, tense and exciting, and the acting is quality throughout, too. How wrong the author was in thinking that his novels could not be made for the screen, but cinema was quite a different matter back in his day.
