On Tuesday (17th) my wife Paula and I had an evening with friends here in Canberra we’ve known for a long time. We were discussing The Lord of the Rings, and they mentioned that they had heard a radio interview with (Sir) Peter Jackson’s wife, (Lady) Frances Walsh, who co-wrote the screenplay with him and Philippa Boyens; and when mention was made of Peter’s handling of one particular scene, she stated that they had handled it the way they did because in the novel Tolkien’s Catholicism deeply informs the scene. Our friends didn’t recall which scene it was; and I suspect that the interviewee was actually Philippa Boyens, since Frances is notoriously averse to attracting publicity to herself. Even so, the interview underlined the fact that throughout the two years of filming the scripting team was acutely sensitive to the profound influence of Tolkien’s Catholicism on his novel — a fact which has been noted by Fr Dwight Longenecker in an online article focusing on Boyens (http://www.dwightlongenecker.com/content/pages/articles/cavewall7New.asp). As Fr Longenecker observes, it is a fact which goes a long way to explaining Jackson’s astonishing sensitivity to every nuance of Tolkien’s thinking and characterization. I’ve always considered The Lord of the Rings a miraculous novel — like Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner, it is a superlative work of literature which had no precedent, yet not only introduced a new genre but perfected the genre in introducing it — and I regard Jackson’s trilogy as a near-miraculous cinematization of it, reproducing the profound Catholic humanism and Catholic imagination which pervades it, and which explains the depth of its appeal, with a fidelity I would never in advance have imagined possible.
The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson
Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!
About the Author: colinjory
Colin, I have to disagree with you. I agree that the films were amazingly well done, but it’s the book itself that accounts for the success of the films. Since their production–because they were so well done–it’s become an almost universal belief that the films account for the success of the book!
Not so. And if Tolkien had written certain elements the way that Boyens, et al, re-wrote them, we would not be having this conversation at all. The book would not be as great as it is, and the films–therefore–never would have come to pass.
The discarding of the epithalamion, and
the characterization of the two women. Those two elements are so critical that their destruction–by Jackson–all but destroyed his entire achievement. And those two elements–directly related to each other–were foundationally Catholic.
I could pick a bone or two with him on other matters, like the characterization of Elrond (which he altered) and the Elves in general, and his emasculation of Aragorn, but they were not so critical as his annihilation of the feminine principle.
The irony is that where the book and the film most closely resemble each other, the enchantment of nature, is where Jackson destroys the very element that united the two.