The Lord of the Rings , said Tolkien, is a “tale that grew in the telling”. Almost 60 years after its first publication, that tale is still growing with next week’s release of The Fellowship of the Ring , part one of the pound;180 million film trilogy based on Tolkien’s tour de force .
This seven-year Herculean effort by director Peter Jackson is an awesome attempt to make flesh the pre-history of Middle-earth, with its epic struggles between good and evil, which John Ronald Reuel Tolkien began when the words “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” popped into his head.
The tale, which started life as a curious, archaic literary phenomenon and became a badge of counter-culture in the Seventies, has always had its devotees, but the film version has already fuelled a mass-marketing juggernaut on the lines of the Hogwarts’ Express.
The high-budget, star-studded production (Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, Cate Blanchett as the elf queen Galadriel) has opened the gates of Middle-earth to hordes of readers, including many who may previously have been reluctant to dive into a sturdy volume or three. Tolkien’s world has become accessible through the accompanying publications - new editions of the trilogy itself, film companions, audio-tapes - the return of the BBC’s excellent radio drama and the creation of a table-top battle game.
Young people are undoubtedly drawn to this epic tale of the struggle between good and evil played out in an entire other world. They’ll tackle it from the age of nine, after The Hobbit (especially those whose parents are Tolkien fans - it is a book some fathers will happily read to their children), although most will read it from their early teens onwards. To a nation reared on “snappy bits”, as Tolkien once described our media, the book’s bulk is not necessarily a barrier. Indeed, young readers seem to revel in the intricate detail of Tolkien’s universe.
Tolkien did not see himself as the creator of a fantasy, but believed he was reaching back to a coherent, imaginative world that really existed, drawing on genuine mythic elements and linguistic structures from various Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Scandinavian sources. Like it or loathe it (Edmund Wilson writing in 1956 described the trilogy as a “combination of Wagner and Winnie The Pooh ”; critics were still fuming in 1997, when Waterstone’s customers voted it the top book of the 20th century), there’s no denying that those who have attempted to make it visual have striven to do justice to its complexity and serious purpose - despite Tolkien’s belief that the book was “very unsuitable for dramatic representation”.
The Library Association and the National Reading Campaign have seen the potential for encouraging young people to extend the reading habit, hard on the heels of Harry Potter. They have joined forces with Games Workshop for a national Lord of the Rings libraries promotion in February. Games Workshop staff will take the game into libraries, where the book, related guides and other fantasy fiction will be displayed, with figure-painting sessions and writing competitions also on the programme.
The Fellowship of the Ring (PG) is on general release from December 19
Websites
www.tolkiensociety.org an excellent site with articles and reviews about Tolkien, his appeal to young readers and the film. A promising education section still in development includes, for example, ideas for using The Hobbit with seven to eight-year-olds.
www.theonering.net nbsp;regularly updated, chatty site of the “fans of J R R Tolkien”. Full of behind-the-scenes-gossip about the film.
- Picture: Ian McKellen as Gandalf
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