Tolkien, the Movie
I read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was ten. He had died the previous year. His books and his fantasy land creation, Middle Earth, were famous by then; his fame grew into the 1980s and 1990s, even before director Peter Jackson bowdlerized first The Lord of the Rings and then mangled The Hobbit.
The books are still popular because they're great and readable stories centering on small seemingly insignificant people called upon to do courageous deeds. Both novels focus on Hobbits as protagonists, little furry-footed people who act much like country English folk. Their homeland, the Shire, looks like the rolling green hills of numerous parts of England.
Tolkien, born in 1892, wasn't from England. His parents were living in South Africa when he was born, but he mostly grew up in England, was orphaned young, going on to live in a boarding house run by an old woman in Birmingham, an industrial city that later gave the world Black Sabbath.
In the 2019 biopic, Tolkien, Cypriot-Finnish director Dome Karukoski covers part of the author's childhood, his vivid imagination throughout his early years, his time in Oxford University, his relationship with Edith Bratt, the vivacious and brilliant young woman who became his longtime wife, and his dreadful experiences in the Somme Campaign (about 1.2 million casualties, French, British, and German) in World War One.
The film also deals extensively with his deep friendship with three school comrades, two of whom are killed in France. A flashback-flashforward structure plays throughout, necessitating the use of child and young adult actors playing the same characters. This is done very well. The entire film, I found, is quite well done, moving and dramatic, amusing at times.
Tolkien (as an adult played excellently by Nicholas Hoult), especially in the trenches of northern France, visualizes characters and situations from his work in progress, a vast legend and mythos that's come to be known as The Silmarillion, pieces of which are referred to in The Lord of the Rings. We know that Tolkien had been writing early versions of this epic (most of it not published until after his death), and that his three best friends were among those who first read it or heard these versions read by Tolkien himself during their frequent pre-war get-togethers in Birmingham.
This makes poignant the fact that two people who first became familiar with such a later vastly popular series of stories and novels didn't live past 1916. I read somewhere that one of these men encouraged Tolkien to stay with this epic. This belief in his friend, the later world famous author, helped Middle Earth, Hobbits, The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings come to pass. Forged in fellowship, in deep connections between like-minded friends, the similar themes explored in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have their root, probably, in Tolkien's friendships with these three Birmingham comrades.
That's what the movie suggests, too, but the story of Tolkien's relationship with Edith Bratt (Lily Collins) comprises the other main part. She brings to his life an embodied presence connected to the real world, although her own vivid imagination complements his. In the practice of those times it takes years for these two to get together. His guardian at first is against their marriage. The war keeps them separate, she gets engaged to someone else for a time, but she's there when he awakens from his ordeal in France, a gas attack survivor, shellshocked and grieving the loss of his two friends.
The next two decades go by in a flurry: he becomes Professor Tolkien. With Edith's encouragement he writes something for himself, which becomes The Hobbit.
"Hobbit" is the film's last spoken word, an appropriate one since that first novel sparked so much. It's felt to the present day. When he's shown writing the famous first sentence of The Hobbit, "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit," he writes on clean new paper. This isn't how it happened.
Tolkien was in his home study grading exercise books for one of his classes. His mind beginning to wander from a sense of tedium, he used some of the unused pages in one of the exercise books to begin writing a story he'd told, in simple form, to his children. Without thinking, he wrote the above opening line of what became a mega-bestseller on the unused sheets of a now unknown student's exercise book.
That, the true story from Tolkien's own account, would have been a better depiction of that pivotal moment in his career and in the history of twentieth century literature--nevertheless, it's a good film with many emotionally powerful moments as well as a presentation of Edwardian England fascinating for the eyes, a world remote from our time, like Middle Earth.
Vic Neptune
I read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was ten. He had died the previous year. His books and his fantasy land creation, Middle Earth, were famous by then; his fame grew into the 1980s and 1990s, even before director Peter Jackson bowdlerized first The Lord of the Rings and then mangled The Hobbit.
The books are still popular because they're great and readable stories centering on small seemingly insignificant people called upon to do courageous deeds. Both novels focus on Hobbits as protagonists, little furry-footed people who act much like country English folk. Their homeland, the Shire, looks like the rolling green hills of numerous parts of England.
Tolkien, born in 1892, wasn't from England. His parents were living in South Africa when he was born, but he mostly grew up in England, was orphaned young, going on to live in a boarding house run by an old woman in Birmingham, an industrial city that later gave the world Black Sabbath.
In the 2019 biopic, Tolkien, Cypriot-Finnish director Dome Karukoski covers part of the author's childhood, his vivid imagination throughout his early years, his time in Oxford University, his relationship with Edith Bratt, the vivacious and brilliant young woman who became his longtime wife, and his dreadful experiences in the Somme Campaign (about 1.2 million casualties, French, British, and German) in World War One.
The film also deals extensively with his deep friendship with three school comrades, two of whom are killed in France. A flashback-flashforward structure plays throughout, necessitating the use of child and young adult actors playing the same characters. This is done very well. The entire film, I found, is quite well done, moving and dramatic, amusing at times.
Tolkien (as an adult played excellently by Nicholas Hoult), especially in the trenches of northern France, visualizes characters and situations from his work in progress, a vast legend and mythos that's come to be known as The Silmarillion, pieces of which are referred to in The Lord of the Rings. We know that Tolkien had been writing early versions of this epic (most of it not published until after his death), and that his three best friends were among those who first read it or heard these versions read by Tolkien himself during their frequent pre-war get-togethers in Birmingham.
This makes poignant the fact that two people who first became familiar with such a later vastly popular series of stories and novels didn't live past 1916. I read somewhere that one of these men encouraged Tolkien to stay with this epic. This belief in his friend, the later world famous author, helped Middle Earth, Hobbits, The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings come to pass. Forged in fellowship, in deep connections between like-minded friends, the similar themes explored in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have their root, probably, in Tolkien's friendships with these three Birmingham comrades.
That's what the movie suggests, too, but the story of Tolkien's relationship with Edith Bratt (Lily Collins) comprises the other main part. She brings to his life an embodied presence connected to the real world, although her own vivid imagination complements his. In the practice of those times it takes years for these two to get together. His guardian at first is against their marriage. The war keeps them separate, she gets engaged to someone else for a time, but she's there when he awakens from his ordeal in France, a gas attack survivor, shellshocked and grieving the loss of his two friends.
The next two decades go by in a flurry: he becomes Professor Tolkien. With Edith's encouragement he writes something for himself, which becomes The Hobbit.
"Hobbit" is the film's last spoken word, an appropriate one since that first novel sparked so much. It's felt to the present day. When he's shown writing the famous first sentence of The Hobbit, "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit," he writes on clean new paper. This isn't how it happened.
Tolkien was in his home study grading exercise books for one of his classes. His mind beginning to wander from a sense of tedium, he used some of the unused pages in one of the exercise books to begin writing a story he'd told, in simple form, to his children. Without thinking, he wrote the above opening line of what became a mega-bestseller on the unused sheets of a now unknown student's exercise book.
That, the true story from Tolkien's own account, would have been a better depiction of that pivotal moment in his career and in the history of twentieth century literature--nevertheless, it's a good film with many emotionally powerful moments as well as a presentation of Edwardian England fascinating for the eyes, a world remote from our time, like Middle Earth.
Vic Neptune
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