Looks like a final piece of news for The Cimmerian, at least for the month of May: according to TheOneRing.Net, Guillermo Del Toro is apparently leaving production of the upcoming film adaptations of The Hobbit.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. The financial and legal wrangling going about the project looked like they weren’t going to be over anytime soon, and with over two years going, I can’t blame Del Toro from moving on. While I think Del Toro may have surprised us with the films, Jackson (pictured above with Del Toro) & company are still in control, and that will always be a source of intense division among fans.

The question now becomes, who will step up to the plate in Del Toro’s absence?

If there’s one thing that can be said for Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, it’s that it doesn’t nearly muck up Tolkien’s source material to the degree the many adapters of Howard’s work have. For all the alterations made to the story and characters, it could so easily have ended up even worse: Arwen joining the Fellowship and lending a sword at the Hornburg, Sauron laying the smackdown on Aragorn at the Black Gates, Frodo pushing Gollum over the precipice at Mount Doom, and other heinous elements in the early two-film script. At least they didn’t add in superfluous secondary characters beyond Lurtz in Fellowship and Sharku in Towers, and the odd cameo of someone’s adorable kids. Or Peter Jackson.

With Boyens, Walsh & Jackson doing the script for The Hobbit, my hopes weren’t particularly high, but I at least had some idea what to expect. I thought. Unfortunately, as reported on TORN, a list of major roles for The Hobbit was posted on spoilertv.com, and it’s… well, you guys might want to have a seat and a dram ready before reading this.

WARNING: The review below has been written in full “snark” mode. Luckily, it isn’t four thousand words long, as that other overview was, indicating that things aren’t that bad.

SpoilerTV.com just alerted us to a list they posted today of major roles being cast for “The Hobbit.”  The complete list of roles can be found on the Spoiler TV.com website . Be sure to share your thoughts about these roles on our Hobbit Discussion board or Barliman’s Chat.

Update: After touching base with more of our contacts, we’ve been notified that this is not a valid list of lead roles and, in fact, some of the roles listed in the links are not relevant. Stay tuned here for more casting information as we get it, and rest assured we will follow every new story to confirm whether or not it is legit.

No need to panic quite yet, since the veracity of the list has not been confirmed: nonetheless, I feel I have to comment.

Brian Blessed as Balin: this, I demand.

First of all, there are three notable omissions in the list: Gandalf, Balin and Beorn. Gandalf I don’t think we need to worry about, since it’s pretty clear that Ian McKellan will be reprising the role. The absence of Balin is more worrisome, and I dearly hope that it’s a result of an actor already being cast for the role (please, please, please be Brian Blessed) of my favourite dwarf from the book. I’m sure fellow blogger Brian Murphy will be as dismayed about the nonappearance of Beorn as I am: hopefully he’s also been cast.

As a welcome divergence from that other casting sheet, the major players Bilbo, Thorin, Bard, the dwarves and Smaug are largely how they appear in the book. No superfluous “origins,” contradictory personalities, or invented traits that I can see. It’s hard for me to openly commend them for that, though, since that’s pretty much what you’re supposed to do for a film adaptation of a book. Interestingly, Radagast the Brown makes an appearance: in the book, the Brown Wizard only appears offstage, when Gandalf mentions his “cousin” in the meeting with Beorn. I guess Jackson & co feel they needed to make up for his cutting from Fellowship, because Tulkas knows we really needed Merry & Pippin’s fireworks shenanigans and that five-minute chase sequence on the bridge in Moria.

Most mysterious is the appearance of Primula and Drogo Baggins, the parents of Frodo. Tolkien says very little of the Bagginses, save that they drowned in a boating accident on the Brandywine river, leaving Bilbo to help raise little Frodo. Still, the character traits don’t seem too bad: Drogo is “outgoing, friendly, likes his food, good ale and the companionship of others,” “good looking,” “well liked,” and “a bit of a ladies’ man”–so far, so Hugh Grant. Primula is “bright, lively and pretty,” considered to be “wayward” and “not proper,” but of course she “doesn’t care.” How very Jane Austen. They seem painfully generic and uninteresting to me–possibly a Petey Stu and Frannie Sue, given the husband and wife team already cast themselves as Baggins family members–though perhaps they will be more fleshed out in the film. Already unpleasant and outlandish theories are swirling about my head: will the Bagginses be involved in the Quest for Erebor, or the White Council? Will there be some nonsense about their son being “destined for some great purpose”? Will their deaths instill some sort of resolve in Frodo a la Bruce Wayne? Heck, will the Bagginses’ untimely death not be an accident, but an assassination by agents of the Necromancer? Perhaps I’m getting carried away.

Other additions are less welcome. First of all is “Itaril,” a “female woodland elf,” and “shorter than other elves.” She is, of course, a natural fighter: “showing promise at a young age,” and became a member of “the Woodland King’s Guard.” Ersatz Arwen, or at least the film’s interpretation, because no major female character in a Lord of the Rings film is allowed to be anything other than a warrior or leader. I guess the lack of female characters in The Hobbit made a shoehorned she-elf inevitable, and it’s at least preferable to the nonsensical idea of a female dwarf.

Honestly, you might as well just throw in Legolas for the fangirls.

Also involved with her is “a young elf lord,” who sounds like an ersatz Legolas: “tall and good-looking,” “very athletic,” “comes from a noble family,” “wry and dry,” with a “sharp sense of humor,” and “deadly with both sword and bow.” Disturbingly, he’s also called the “Lord of Rivendell”: was Elrond on holiday during The Hobbit? I don’t see any reason to doubt that the Elf-Lord in The Hobbit is not Elrond himself. Not-Arwen and Not-Legolas, “secretly” in love: no doubt her father will be opposed to the romance, just as Film-Elrond was inexplicably stubborn about Aragorn and Arwen’s relationship. Naturally, we’ll be in for a lot of twirly acrobatic fight sequences with the two, like in Del Toro’s Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.

Let’s not come under the impression that it’s only new heroes being wedged into Tolkien’s narrative: there’s at least one generic villain supplemented to complicate matters. Lord knows the Great Goblin, Gollum, the spiders, trolls and the mighty Smaug just aren’t enough. This script sees a character known only as the Mayor, or “The Master of Laketown”: a “quintessential politician,” who’s “clever and cunning,” and attained such a position through “exaggerated promises and fear mongering.” The original Master of Laketown, like Denethor, was not a true antagonist, but a sympathetic character overcome by terror and madness. I guess Jackson, Boyens & Walsh weren’t content with the demonization and simplification of Denethor in The Return of the King, they need yet another obstructive, cowardly, bullying male authority figure for the heroes to put in his place. Still, one hopes that even Del Toro wouldn’t be so stupid as to have this Mayor be lit on fire, and run a half-mile off a precipice. The Mayor’s not alone, for he has an obsequious lackey in “Alfrid.” A spineless toad who nonetheless harbors his own designs, though without the chutzpah to do anything about it. Typical yes-man for a typical cliche character.

Overall, there’s much less to worry about than the upcoming Conan project. Certain elements are sure to make it in. Jackson & company would be idiots to mess with Smaug. The story will likely be adhered to, rather than discarded and replaced with some invented nonsense. I don’t have high hopes for the film, but if this character sheet turns out to be even a bit accurate, I don’t see those hopes ending up unfounded. The update on TORN says that “some” of the roles are “not relevant”: of the fourteen characters listed, one is a migrant from The Lord of the Rings, three are minor Legendarium characters, while three are complete inventions. That’s seven: half of the characters! Surely that means that at least some of the characters will appear? Even The Fellowship of the Ring only had one major original character in Lurtz, who was at least pretty badass and somewhat plausible in the narrative. Three invented characters is too much, in a narrative already heaving with characters. I’ll be supremely irritated if the likes of Beorn, the Trolls and the spiders were shunted in deference to Not-Legolas and Not-Arwen, let alone Middle-earth’s answer to Walter Peck.

I hear William Atherton's available: let's get him for the Mayor.

If nothing else, I have confidence that the elements the Lord of the Rings trilogy did right–the creatures, the props, the music, the set design, the cinematography, basically anything not directly related to the script–will be in evidence. Guillermo Del Toro is an accomplished director, has a much stronger knack for horror and the dark than Jackson did, and seems to have a better handle on choreographing action and sensitive drama. I might not be looking forward to what it’ll be as a Tolkien adaptation, but I’ll be intrigued to see what Jackson & Del Toro come up with for a fantasy film.

First editions of The Lord of the Rings published in 1954 and 1955 by George Allen & Unwin.

On this weekend that we are honoring what would have been The Professor’s eleventy-eighth birthday I’m going to discuss Tolkien collectibles –a subject so vast that I will only be able explore it in the most general terms. From books to action figures to replica movie props to artwork, there are countless items of Tolkien-related memorabilia on the market. With such a vast array of choices there are interesting items available for collectors on any budget, from first editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that run tens of thousands of dollars to “Frodo Lives” buttons from the 1970’s that cost a few bucks.

There are a number of online references and resources for Tolkien collectors. One of the most useful is TolkienCollector.com which has page after page of useful information in numerous different categories, including a detailed description of the differences between the various editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit-Movie.com site has a page dedicated specifically to collecting books and has a basic listing of prices.

First edition of The Hobbit (1938) published by Allen & Unwin.

The first edition of The Hobbit, published in the UK by George Allen & Unwin in 1937 had a print run of around 1500 copies. The wraparound dustjacket, designed by Tolkien himself, has become an iconic image. In jacket, it sells for between $15,000 and $30,000 depending on condition. Later impressions sell for several thousand less and jacketless copies go for around $1000-5000. The first American edition was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1938, with a different dust jacket design based on two of Tolkien’s interior illustrations. In jacket the first American edition sales for around $5000.

The first editions of the three volumes of The Lord of Rings were published in 1954, 1955 and 1955 respectively by Allen & Unwen. The set of three sells for $20,000 to $50,000 in jacket depending on condition. As with The Hobbit, later impressions of the first editions and jacketless copies sell for several thousand less. The first American edition set sells for around $10,000-20,000.

First edition of Farmer Giles of Ham published in 1949.

These books are out of the range of most collectors; however, there are Tolkien first editions that are more affordable. Farmer Giles of Ham, published by Allen & Unwin in 1949 sells for around $800-1200, with the 1950 first American edition going for $200-300. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, published in 1962 sells for $150-200. The first American edition sells for about $75. An interesting first edition published in 1968 is The Road Goes Ever On, an over-sized collection of Tolkien’s poems and songs from The Lord of the Rings set to sheet music (written by Donald Swann). Unlike most of Tolkein’s works, the American first edition of The Road Goes Ever On actually precedes the UK edition. Both editions sell for around $100-150.

1977 saw the posthumous publication of The Silmarillion, a collection of several pseudo-mythological works from the First Age of Middle-earth, edited and in some cases completed by Tolkien’s son Christopher. The Allen & Unwin first edition sells for around $100; the American first goes for $30-40.

Signed/numbered Lord of the Rings portfolio by Frank Frazetta published in 1975.

Aside from firsts, there are number of collectible commemorative and limited editions of Tolkien’s works. A few of the notable ones include the Silver Anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings, published in 1981 in a silver leather binding and slipcase which sells for around $450-500. The similar Golden Anniversy edition of The Hobbit, published in 1988 in gilt leather and slipcase sells for around $150. The release of the Lord of the Rings movies saw a number of very nice editions of Tolkien’s works released, many quite affordable in the under $100 range.

Beyond the books, there are countless items of Tolkien memorabilia, many dating from either the fantasy boom of the 1970’s or the recent Lord of the Rings movie craze. There are far too many items to detail here, but I refer the reader to the abovementioned TolkienCollector.com for more information. I will, however, mention a few items that I think are noteworthy.

In the realm of artwork, there are many prints and posters available by a number of great artists. The Hildebrandt brothers did several beautifully illustrated calendars in the ’70s that were hugely popular. There were many of these printed and they can often be found quite cheap on the internet. Frank Frazetta did a series of pen and ink drawings of scenes from The Lord of Rings that was published in a signed/numbered portfolio in 1975. It sells for around $200-300. Animation cels from Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings feature film occasionally come on the market and prices vary widely on them depending which charcters they depict. Illustrators John Howe and Alan Lee received a great deal of publicity due to their work on the Lord of the Rings films and their original art now sells in the thousans of dollars.

The highly sought after series of LOTR action figure released by Knickerbocker in 1979.

Several series of action figures were released in recent years with The Lord of the Rings movies and are still readily available at around retail price in secondary markets like eBay. The action figures that are really sought out by collectors though, is series that was put out by Knickerbocker in conjunction with the 1979 Bakshi The Lord of the Rings film. Figures for Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Gollum, and the Witchking were released, along with two mounts, Gandalf’s horse Shadowfax and the Witch King’s black steed. These figures are very rare and sell for hundreds of dollars even loose.

One popular area of collectibles in recent years has been replica movie props from the Lord of the Rings films. A wide assortment of weapons, clothing, armor, jewelry, pipes, etc. are available for purchase. A great site to shop for these items is TolkienTown.com which has a large inventory of this type of merchandise. A simple search on eBay will also turn up Tolkien merchandise of all sorts – toys, games, puzzles, statues, posters, and so on.

Collecting Tolkien books and memorabilia can be a fun and rewarding experience, but also quite daunting and expensive for the completist. There will no doubt be more merchandise available soon with the two Hobbit movies coming down the road, and the hunt for Tolkien collectibles goes ever on.

While of course we’ll always have the book, regardless of what we get in the final film product, my fervent hope is that producer Peter Jackson and director Guillermo Del Toro get the movie right. It’s too important to screw up.

Some of my questions about The Hobbit were answered back in May of 2008 in an interview with Jackson and Del Toro over at the WetHolics Web site. For example, we now know that Del Toro plans to make The Hobbit as a serious PG-13 epic, similar to Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. That isn’t such a bad thing. While some argue that a film adaptation of The Hobbit should be light-hearted and geared for children, Tolkien’s novel reads differently. While there is some adolescent, fairy-tale quality at the outset of The Hobbit, a change occurs over the course of the tale, and by the Battle of Five Armies we’re in the midst of a rather adult, grim story.

But that’s not to say that The Hobbit will and should be a LOTR clone. Later in the interview Jackson states that The Hobbit “can, and should have a different tone.” I certainly wouldn’t mind a slightly lighter version of The Hobbit, and I hope a few songs make their way into the script. For what it’s worth, I’ll be sorely disappointed if this snatch of verse isn’t in the finished product, sung by deep-throated dwarves:

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns cold
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold

The interview also managed to allay some of my fears as well. Del Toro says his wargs will be wolf-like, not the oversized hyenas of Jackson’s film. He also recognizes the importance of Smaug, who not only has to be a convincing piece of CGI, but more importantly charismatic, sinister, and terrifying. Del Toro also expresses his affection for Beorn in the interview (I love the bearded shape-changer to an unhealthy degree as well), and adds that, if he has anything to say about it, Beorn will be in The Hobbit. Good news all around.

Yet there are reasons for Tolkien fans to worry. While on the surface The Hobbit seems much easier to adapt than The Lord of the Rings—it’s shorter, with fewer characters, and has a tighter, more focused narrative—it does present some difficulties. For one, it contains no strong male or female human leads, just hobbits and a lot of dwarves (unless you count Gandalf, and Ian McKellen isn’t going to set any teenage hearts aflutter). I of course am fine with this, but I hope this lack of a dashing, handsome human a-la Viggo Mortensen, or elf (aka., Liv Tyler) doesn’t panic any of the bean counters at New Line Cinema. Al Harron has already noted that there’s been a casting call for an apparently prominent female role, including the possibility of a female dwarf.

Now, I didn’t mind Arwen from Jackson’s LOTR, given that she was based on an actual character from the novel (albeit greatly expanded from her appearance in the Appendices to Return of the King) and served as a stand-in for Glorfindel. But a wholly manufactured female dwarf, for example, is another matter altogether and a very troubling sign.

I’m also not going to rest easy until the casting of Bilbo is complete. The film’s success hinges on someone who can really act, with the ability to evolve Bilbo’s character from a sheltered, comfortable, slightly stuffy resident of Bag End, to a hobbit awakened to accountability, more self-sufficient and with a deeper appreciation for the peace, whose “Eyes that fire and sword have seen, and horror in the halls of stone.” Ian Holm was brilliant in LOTR and I have no doubt he could pull this off, but he’s certainly too old for the role. Is it too much to hope that we’ll get someone else with Holm’s chops to play the younger Bilbo? The film needs this, more so than any convincing CGI or beautifully choreographed battle sequences (though I’m looking forward to these, too).

We also learned back in April that the mysterious second film will not be a sequel to The Hobbit or some pseudo LOTR prequel, but rather The Hobbit broken up into two films. Praise be to Eru Ilúvatar for this news. With all due respect to Del Toro and Jackson—talented filmmakers both—creating their own stories of Middle Earth was a recipe for disaster. Tolkien’s imitators are legion, and none of his literary successors in my opinion have come close to equaling the unique feel of Middle Earth, or its mythic depth.

Following is a chapter-by-chapter rundown of my favorite scenes from the book and what I expect (and hope) to see on the big screen.

An unexpected party. I hope they film the whole bloody thing, word for word from the book. I want to see Gandalf carving his mark on Bilbo’s green door (Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward), the dwarves drinking ale and eating cakes and singing old dwarven songs, and Gandalf unrolling Thror’s curled, yellowing map of the Lonely Mountain on Bilbo’s dinner table. I would love a flashback sequence of the coming of Smaug, and dwarves roasting in the dragon fire in the dark halls of Lonely Mountain, with Thorin providing a grim voice-over. And at the end, poor Bilbo hurrying out the door without his hat, walking-stick, or any money.

A Short Rest. A return to Rivendell and the last homely house would be welcome sights, as I thought the Rivendell set-piece from LOTR was well-done. It would be great to see Elrond examining Orcrist and Glamdring, and watching the dwarves’ faces light up in surprise as the moon-letters appear on Thror’s map.

Over Hill and Under Hill. I’m envisioning a great scene of the dwarves slogging through the Misty Mountains in a driving thunderstorm, stooped over in the swirling winds, and a scene of stone giants hurling rocks into vast, bottomless chasms. The entire sequence with the goblins—the crack opening in the cave; goblins emerging and grabbing the sleeping dwarves; Gandalf to the rescue, rushing in with magic and sword to slay the great goblin; and the pursuit through the tunnels—is made for film, and is cinematic enough to probably make it more or less intact.

Riddles in the Dark. This should be the centerpiece of the film. I fear it may lose some impact because the audience has been saturated with Gollum from the LOTR films. I also wonder whether the riddle-game will translate well on the big screen. Some of the riddles are lengthy and difficult to comprehend (I personally don’t see No-legs lay on one-leg, two-legs sat near on three-legs, four-legs got some making its way into the final script), so some cutting/revision/simplification will probably be necessary.

Queer Lodgings. Del Toro has stated that he likes Beorn, but the interview leaves open the possibility that he may be cut from the script a-la Tom Bombadil. While it seems like an easy cut—the party’s trek to Beorn’s home isn’t necessary to advance the plot, and it introduces another narrative-slowing character—lopping Beorn from the script would rob him of his grand entrance into the Battle of the Five Armies, whereby he smashes the bodyguard of Blog in bear-form. For this alone, I hope he makes it in (or at least in the Director’s Cut).

Flies and Spiders. Given Jackson’s love of monstrous spiders and other nasties (witness Shelob, and the insect cave in King Kong), I fully expect to see a CGI feast in Mirkwood. My guess is they’ll make the spiders more insect-like and remove their speaking voices to increase their menace, which would sadly rob Bilbo of his comical taunting (“Attercop, Lazy Lob,” etc.). Regardless, it will be great to “see” an invisible Bilbo driving off the spiders with Sting.

Barrels out of bond. The barrel-riding scene should add some nice comic relief.

A Warm Welcome. Seeing Thorin come into his own as the King Under the Mountain, revered by the awed populace of Laketown, would be cool to see on film. Cue epic music.

On the Doorstep. More opportunity for a CGI-fest as the dwarves pass the wreckage of old Dale and the Desolation of the Dragon on their way to the Lonely Mountain.

Inside Information. A chance for some horror as Bilbo makes his way down the dark tunnel into Smaug’s cave. I can’t wait to see what the effects gurus do with Smaug, and I hope it’s as terrifying to see him fly into a red rage on film and smash the secret door as it was when I first read The Hobbit. Smaug’s treasure horde should be suitably awesome cinematic eye-candy as well. But I hope they don’t sacrifice charisma and menace for CGI. These traits make Smaug unique among dragons.

Not at Home. I was impressed with the way Jackson handled Moria in LOTR and I expect a similar great tour of the halls of the mountain king here. I’m sensing a mix of comedy (oversized mail shirts, helmets falling over eyes) and the epic (in the vein of Theoden girding up for the battle of Helm’s Deep, reciting the poem about Eorl the Young) as Bilbo and the Dwarves arm themselves with ancient gem-crusted weapons and mithril shirts of mail.

Fire and Water. The action of the film will pick up here as we get Smaug’s attack on Dale. Again, let’s hope Jackson and Del Toro keep the character of Bard and let him slay Smaug with his black arrow. Sure, Bard is a minor character but it would be cheesy to rewrite the script to have Thorin or Bilbo playing the hero’s role here.

A Thief in the Night. I hope we don’t lose the great interlude of Bilbo handing over the Arkenstone to the elves and the men of Laketown in an attempt to bring Thorin to the bargaining table. But I fear we might.

The Clouds Burst. Get ready for an epic battle, at least on par with Helm’s Deep and perhaps even Minas Tirith. I’m looking forward to seeing dwarves get their due as great axe-fighters, which is one of the criticisms I have of LOTR (Gimli was used too much as comic relief, largely ignoring the fact that he was also quite a grim fighter in the book). And what red-blooded fantasy fan isn’t looking forward to seeing men and elves and dwarves of Dain fighting shoulder-to-shoulder against goblins and wargs? What insane individual doesn’t want to see Thorin and co. wading out into the mass of fighting bodies like a wedge, driving their foes before them until they break on the bodyguard of Bolg? And as I stated before, I hope the battle climaxes with Beorn in bear shape crashing into the bodyguard and bringing down Bolg himself. All in all, this has the potential for greatness.

The Return Journey/The Last Stage. The last two chapters appear to require little to no modification, as they provide a perfect cinematic wrap-up to the tale. We get Thorin on his deathbed, repentant at last (and I hope to see his dying lines verbatim: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world”); gift-giving with the elven king; tearful farewells with the dwarves; and Bilbo’s return to Hobbiton bearing his two small chests of gold, placing Sting over the mantelpiece. It’s probably not necessary to include Bilbo’s presumed death and the scene with the Sackville-Bagginses clearing out Bag-End. I can see the film ending on a portent-laden scene with Bilbo protectively tucking away the Ring, a possessive gleam in his eye as he does so.

If done right, this could be a phenomenal film. But one can also see the potential for it to be mucked up, its magic scripted and CGI-ed out, or modified for the sake of pleasing/pacifying a “modern” audience.

I’ll be there on the opening night of The Hobbit, of course, but I’ll be watching with one eye open, the other shut, hoping that everyone involved in its making has the sense to hew closely to Tolkien’s novel. It’s a simple formula, and therein lies success.

Artwork by Michael Hague, David Wenzel, and Justin Gerard.

Unlike The Lord of the Rings, the dramatis personae of The Hobbit was pretty much of exclusively male composition. The film trilogy boosted the presence of Arwen to mixed reaction, and the roles of Galadriel and Éowyn were slightly expanded. It’s possible that this casting call could be for a minor role–perhaps as the voice actress of one of the many animals in the book, which could certainly be interpreted as female–but as the report mentions, such an early announcement indicates a featured role, rather than a lesser one.

I have great difficulty imagining who this female role could be for, as it would entail either a gender-switch, inclusion of another character from the legendarium, or an invention. At best, I can imagine it being an established Tolkien character given inclusion in a believable manner: perhaps Belladonna, Bilbo’s mother, has a role in an exploration of Bilbo’s earlier life. Primula Baggins, too, may have a larger role, seeing as she’d be the mother of the future Ringbearer, and Bilbo would raise him as his own upon her death. A more abstract possibility is Legolas’ unnamed mother, who would possibly have met Thorin’s company when they were in her realm. Of course, there are more unpleasant alternatives: a love interest for Bard, giving one of the dwarves or elves a sex-change (I suppose “Dori” could sound a bit feminine from a certain angle), or having some “she-elf” accompany the gang to Erebor, but I’d rather not dwell on such ideas.

What of the second piece of news? Just what is coming? Courtesy again of theonering.net, this might be related to The Hobbit, the film trilogy, or something else entirely. The internet is aflame with speculation on exactly what will “come” on 8th December, many of which are suggested in the accompanying poll. I tremble in dread at the prospect of Warner Brothers getting their hands on The Silmarillion, now that they mention it, though I don’t doubt Christopher Tolkien will be as resistant as he’s ever been.

I myself am not willing to have any expectations regarding The Hobbit, good or bad. I fairly liked Del Toro’s previous work, even his  daft slapstick interpretation of Hellboy, but I cannot say whether it will truly be his picture, or a continuation (or worse, shallow imitation) of the trilogy. That said, as with the upcoming “Conan” film, I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

DEUCE ADDS: I pretty much agree with everything Al said, but I have a few speculations/observations of mine own. Jackson’s “LotR” films did a fair job of relentlessly pushing a “women up, men down” agenda, with males being routinely out-thought, out-fought and out-principled by their female counterparts whenever and wherever possible, JRRT’s text be damned. I remember when my friends and I first heard about the Hobbit film adaptation. I joked that Fralippa couldn’t screw that one up, since there weren’t any female leads of any kind. Then one of my buddies said, “Yeah, but they could always sex-change somebody.” That sobered us up quick.

I think the most likely candidate is one of the dwarves, despite what Tolkien said about dwarven women. To wit:

Dis was the daughter of Thrain II. She is the only dwarf-woman named in these histories. It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-woman, probably no more than a third of the whole people. They seldom walk abroad except at great need. They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart. This has given rise to the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves “grow out of stone”.

Now, either this hypothetical dwarf-gal is “outed” to Bilbo (and the audience), or somehow it doesn’t really come into play. In the former instance, it would needlessly change the story-line. In the latter case, it is utterly pointless. In either case, there’s no need to cast a female for the part, because dwarven lassies sound (and look) just like dwarven lads.

Fralippa (and Petey)

On the other hand, I wouldn’t rule out a sex-change for Bard of Lake-Town or Beorn. Bard is sensible, honorable and he kills Smaug. All traits and feats that Fralippa would logically see as being more appropriately bestowed upon a female. Beorn is kind to animals and travelers, as well as being very deadly. Once again, the types of attributes that most rightfully should belong to someone with two “X” chromosones. How Tollers ever screwed up like that in the first place, I’ll never know. Obviously, a helping hand from Fralippa is in order.  

One thing I’ll guarantee is that it will not be Smaug who gets transgendered. Fralippa wouldn’t throw away a perfectly good evil male.

Earlier this year, Leo Grin reported on the debut of The Hunt for Gollum, a fan film chronicling Aragorn’s search for the fallen hobbit during the Watchful Peace prior to the outbreak of war. It was well-received, and is probably one of the finer examples of fan cinema in terms of technical achievement. However, like Leo, I have to lament the fact that it wasn’t truly a Lord of the Rings adaptation, but a New Line Cinema Lord of the Rings fan film: the cinematography, costume, music and character design was exactly like in the films.

It’s really hard to criticize the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The sheer amount of love, effort and perseverance which went into production from every member of the crew is breathtaking and infectious, practically unprecedented, and the sort of thing we rarely see in such a project. It undoubtedly led people to seek out more Tolkien to read, and though Jackson, Boyens & Walsh took some unfortunate, unnecessary and downright infuriating liberties with the script, they were certainly more respectful and appreciative of Tolkien than, say, Paul Verhoeven was with Robert A. Heinlein, whose first few chapters of the novel Starship Troopers left him “bored and depressed”–not that it would stop him from adapting it. Or John Milius was of Howard. I tend to swing between two extremes: on the one hand, great appreciation of the score, cinematography, creature design and environments; on the other, dislike of the additions and alterations of the script, plot and characters. When it reached the highs, it was stratospheric: when it plumbed the depths, it was subterranean.

Which brings me to Born of Hope, another fan film of the trilogy. It’s been in production for quite a while, and a release appears to be imminent. Like The Hunt for Gollum, it focuses on a more obscure portion of the story, that of “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” found in the Appendices. The story of Born of Hope revolves around Aragorn’s father Arathorn, his relationship with Gilraen, and the Dúnedain themselves.

Right off the bat, I can see problems. The makers of the film are quite obviously inspired by the films, but they show an unfortunate lack of familiarity with Tolkien’s other writings outside The Lord of the Rings, which is discouraging, since I would’ve thought they would devour everything they could in order to fully render Tolkien’s work to screen, even if it was primarily a tribute to the films.

From the Q&A:

Andy Serkis, the actor whose voice and mannerisms brought to life the character of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of Lord of the Rings, has now taken on another unsavory character sprung from the well of imagination that was the Inklings. This time, Serkis is trying his hand at Screwtape, the epistolary demon from C.S. Lewis’ classic, The Screwtape Letters (which book was dedicated to JRRT).

As reported on the Oxford Inklings blog, Serkis is part of the cast for an audio dramatization of Lewis’ short novel being produced by Focus on the Family Radio Theatre (Lewis’ step-son, Douglas Gresham, is also involved). Check out the behind-the-scenes clip and judge for yourself whether Serkis pulls off one of the most memorable fiends in all of literature.

From what I can discern regarding Serkis’ rendition of Screwtape, he’s done a fine job, quite possibly surpassing the previous performances of Max McLean, John Cleese and Joss Ackland. To be honest, while I thought that Serkis did an excellent job portraying Gollum (or, at least, the Gollum he was given), I’ve always preferred Brother Theodore’s performance in the Rankin/Bass production of The Hobbit. In the case of Screwtape, I think Serkis’ rendition may end up being the definitive take.

I just can’t get Serkis’ “WOORRMWOOOOD!” outta my head.

Good news for all those J.R.R. Tolkien aficionados waiting for a film adaptation of “The Hobbit.”

New Line Cinema, the Tolkien estate and publisher Harper Collins have settled the lawsuit over profits from the “Lord of the Rings” films released between 2001 and 2003.

The Tolkien estate had sued New Line for at least $150 million in damages for failing to pay 7.5% of gross receipts from the three films, which netted an estimated $6 billion combined. The estate claimed it hadn’t been paid “one penny” from its contractual share and took issue with many of New Line’s claimed expenses, including “advertisement” payments made to AOL (also owned by Time Warner) and money for production offices and facilities being used for other New Line films.

At the time, the plaintiffs wanted a court order that would give them the right to terminate any rights New Line might have to other Tolkien works, including “The Hobbit.” New Line and MGM have announced plans to turn that work into a film with “Rings” helmer Peter Jackson producing.

But in a statement on the settlement, Christopher Tolkien said, “The Trustees regret that legal action was necessary, but are glad that this dispute has been settled on satisfactory terms that will allow the Tolkien Trust properly to pursue its charitable objectives. The Trustees acknowledge that New Line may now proceed with its proposed films of ‘The Hobbit.’ “

Terms of the settlement were not released.

“We deeply value the contributions of the Tolkien novels to the success of our films and are pleased to have put this litigation behind us,” said Warner Bros.’ president and COO Alan Horn in a statement.

Although the story says the terms of the settlement were not released, a followup article on THR, Esq. states that the settlement was for more than $100 million.

I’m glad that the Tolkien estate appears to have received its just due from New Line, and while I can already hear the groans from Leo Grin I’m pleased that “The Hobbit” is moving ahead. Their faults and imperfections aside, I very much enjoyed the LOTR films, and was wowed by Pan’s Labyrinth, a wonderful film by “The Hobbit” director Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro is a gifted director and it will be interesting to see the mood he sets in this film, whether it will mimic Jackson’s serious, epic direction or whether he will hew closer to the book and strike a slightly more light-hearted tone (perhaps including some of the songs which appear throughout Tolkien’s novel).

Am I also apprehensive about “The Hobbit?” Sure. But my reservations are outweighed by the opportunity to see Smaug and the Lonely Mountain on the big screen, and to see and hear the thunderous clash of five armies. I look forward to experiencing the quiet moments too — the dwarves singing “Far over the Misty Mountains cold” by the light of Bilbo’s hearth in Bag End, the whisper of “Riddles in the Dark,” spidery silver moon-letters appearing on Thror’s map in the Last Homely House.

Given the success of the LOTR films I’d be surprised if the look and feel of “The Hobbit” deviates much from Jackson, but at least now with the lawsuit settled we’ll get the chance to see for ourselves.

It’s called The Hunt for Gollum, and there’s some trailers up for it right now at their website. The entire forty-minute film is set to debut on May 3.

This is the kind of thing I’m intrigued by on many levels, as a guy who has often harbored dreams of doing something similar. Think about it: they used a couple of HD prosumer video cameras in the $3000-$5000 range, some extra equipment to achieve a cinematic look (SGPro depth of field adapter, SteadiCams, computer color correction and visual effects), and a lot of donated acting, prop, and makeup help. Putting aside for a moment my loathing of the Lord of the Rings films and watching the trailer, it seems they did a good job of pressing up against true feature quality, with the usual exceptions common to fan films: somewhat subpar acting, like kids playing dress-up, along with poor choices of lenses and angles in the action scenes (too many wide lenses and not enough telephoto, odd bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views, and camera skews with no motivation or coherence) which seem to give away that it was shot on a video camera. But the long shots and general quality of the images are quite stunning, the British locations magnificent, and even the Orcs seem to mirror those in the Hollywood version, at least in the little clips I saw of them in the trailers.

The main thing I am always struck by when seeing these sorts of films (there are a lot of good Star Wars ones out there, too), is that people would spend so much time and effort aping a copyrighted world, when with a few small adjustments and a good script they could make a similarly inspired and magnificent film based in a world of their own making, which would allow them to make money off of their effort, use it as a demo reel to get a job making a more expensive feature set in the same fictional universe, or any number of other options. But I suppose that a lot of people helped solely because it wasn’t just any fantasy story but one that aped Jackson’s LotR vision. I personally can’t stand that vision — that grey and drab world of misty forests peopled by unshowered Rangers and hippie elves accompanied by a soundtrack of ghostly Enya-esque wails. I think it’s beyond silly for the orchestra to boom and the camera to swoop around every time there’s a nice view or a mountain. But these guys have clearly made a great effort, achieving enough to prove yet again that independent films of this nature can and will become as cool as Hollywood fare someday soon. Amazing new cameras and computers are coming down the pike, stuff that is going to make a good homemade video every bit as stunning as most Hollywood films, even effects-laden ones. When that happens, I wonder how many Howard stories are going to get filmed? That little Solomon Kane one that made the rounds a few years back might only be the humble beginning of a big low-budget push to get Howard’s work on screen.

Too many of my waking hours are given over to thinking about the Hobbit films due in December of 2011 and December of 2012; no sooner is my attention directed elsewhere than the voluble and value-adding Guillermo del Toro is interviewed again and — sproing! — my thoughts ricochet back to the movies he’s about to make. After all, it won’t hurt to have something to which I can look forward after moving to a Hooverville and while shuffling along on Hoover leather (The Internet is of course rendering Hoover blankets obsolete). Admittedly my druthers would have been a movie about the wrath of Fëanor, the wanderings of Húrin, the fall of Gondolin, or the last days of Númenor. But any Silmarillion-based movie would be hobbit-free, and hobbits shift units and sell tickets. Me, I tolerate rather than love them, although I would never go as far as Michael Moorcock, who quipped of Sauron, “Anyone who hates hobbits can’t be all bad,” or the younger Charles Saunders, who once expressed (he has since mellowed) a profound relief that there were no black hobbits. Admiration and affection for Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin I have aplenty; I just don’t love hobbits qua hobbits. But many do; adoption agencies that offered hobbit orphans would be forced to hire extra security for crowd control.

In his magisterial two-volume The History of the Hobbit John D. Rateliff backhands “critics who would prefer The Hobbit to conform to and resemble its sequel in every possible detail.” Guilty as charged; I try and mostly succeed in cherishing the book for its own self, and almost fainted when, in the dealers’ room at the 2006 World Fantasy Convention in Austin, I came face to face with a first edition 1937 Hobbit. But reading-sequence is destiny, and I first read the “enchanting prelude” in the spring of 1971, a few weeks after hurtling through The Lord of the Rings. As a result, what really got my pulse pounding like hammers in dwarven smithies were what Tolkien, looking back from the vantage point of LOTR‘s Second Edition, described as “references to the older matter: Elrond, Gondolin, the High-elves, and the orcs, and glimpses that had arisen, unbidden, of things higher or deeper or darker than [The Hobbit's] surface: Durin, Moria, Gandalf, the Necromancer, the Ring.” Although not immune to the beguilingly unique properties of The Hobbit, I responded the most to premonitions and foreshadowings of the later work, the design features of the Eohippus from which the later Arabian stallion could be extrapolated. So for me “higher or deeper or darker” is the way to go in the impending movies, because so many millions of filmgoers will plant themselves in multiplex seats as vividly aware of the previously-viewed-even-if-chronologically-”later” Peter Jackson films as I was of the previously-read-although-chronologically-”later” LOTR back in 1971. Some of the posts at Tolkien-oriented and other genre sites reflect apprehension that Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson will “spectacularize” or “bombastify” the source material, inflate a children’s classic into a swollen epic, and such protectiveness is laudable, but barring an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style memory-scrub, the audience can’t be made to unsee The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. Ergo higher, deeper, darker.

Del Toro and Jackson are both sometime horrormeisters, and can be expected to seize upon non-kid-lit moments like the orc-head impaled on Beorn’s gate and the warg-skin nailed to a nearby tree after the shapeshifter’s night reconnaissance. The “creaking and hissing” of the Mirkwood spiders as they gloat over their captives is right up del Toro’s alley as well: “What nasty thick skins they have to be sure, but I’ll wager there is good juice inside.” Do spiders have lips? If so, the words “good juice inside” should be pronounced with lipsmacking relish.

And given the blockbuster imperative of more is more (with the corollary that less is less, and therefore unacceptable), the visitation of Smaug’s wrath on Esgaroth, a few thrilling paragraphs in JRRT’s telling, is certain to escalate into something like the February 1945 Dresden firestorm. By higher, deeper, and darker I don’t mean a half hour of pyrotechnics or a metal-meets-meat approach to the Battle of Five Armies à la Stephen Pressfield or Paul Kearney’s The Ten Thousand. Nor, although Tolkien himself marveled, in his December 16, 1937 letter to publisher Stanley Unwin, at how “even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge” of what “began as a comic tale,” am I angling for an unconscionable text-deviation like issuing Smaug a palantír so he can be in constant communication with the Dark Lord in Dol Guldur throughout the first of the new movies. Instead, my agenda is filling the vacancies that will be left by aspects of The Hobbit that won’t translate to any adaptation other than the 1977 Rankin/Bass Kinderspiel.

The narration, for starters. In later years Tolkien made no secret of his misgivings about the tendency on the part of the book’s narrator to talk down to readers and, if a story in print rather than onstage or onscreen can be said to possess a fourth wall, break that wall. John D. Rateliff’s Mr. Baggins is doughty in defense of the narrator’s voice as “an essential element in establishing the tone of the story and hence of the book’s success,” one that makes the narrator himself, both playful and at pains to capture and retain the attention of the children who in effect are listening to him, “one of the most important characters in the tale.” But he won’t be a character in the movie; an attempt via voiceover to present him as one would be an irreparable alienation effect for too much of the audience.

With a narrator absconditus, the 2 new films will need other sources of information (Notice I don’t say exposition; the Medvedites of the world are convinced Hollywood hates the word patriotism, but Hollywood — even Hollywood outsourced to Wellington — really, really hates the word exposition). What I’m after here might be demonstrable by turning to the two songs of the very first set piece in The Hobbit, when the thirteen dwarves stop in at Bilbo’s hobbit-hole. The first is a washing-up song, in which the guests appall their host with mock threats to break his glassware, annihilate his crockery, and render his larder unusable. Although a child-delighter, no way that song goes into the movie; too Seussian. But the second song, “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold” — not to be confused with Led Zep’s “Misty Mountain Hop” — which sweeps the previously recalcitrant Bilbo “away into dark lands under strange moons” and conjures for him the depredations of Smaug and the sad comedown of dispossession — that’s a challenge I’m betting composer Howard Shore and probable lyricist Philippa Boyens will be unable to resist (The “places deep, where dark things sleep” mentioned in “Far Over” always read to me like a presentiment of the Balrog and the Matter of Moria, although the drafts in The Return of the Shadow: Part One of The History of The Lord of the Rings indicate that Tolkien’s original intended foe for Gandalf on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm was “merely” a Black Rider, not a Balrog). The two songs constitute something of a tonal tug-of-war, one noticed by John Rateliff as well: “Against the comedy of confused expectations on all sides is set this poem describing the lost kingdom of the dwarves and its fiery destruction by the dragon.”

Much of what I’m looking for in terms of higher, deeper, darker comes clad in dwarf-mail. Whereas the Rings films contained multiple hobbits but only one Dwarf, the Hobbit films will contain multiple Dwarves but only one hobbit, and therefore afford an opportunity for a do-over of sorts. Although John Howe, Alan Lee, and the production designers triumphed with the look and feel of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring — the greatest and deepest of dwarrowdelfs, implying an entire chthonic civilization — Gimli’s chief function in the Jacksonian scheme of things was to sit down on a succession of whoopee cushions and intercept one custard pie after another with his face; a shame, as John Rhys-Davies easily sold the serious dialogue he was given, and could have made, for example, the character’s Glittering Caves of Aglarond prose poem in The Two Towers sing. But with thirteen Dwarves (although some of them will be but stumpy extras; Tolkien wasn’t exactly even-handed in his sharing-out of speaking roles) plus the army that arrives for the climax, del Toro should be able to convey the pitted rockface of their culture and collective experience much more thoroughly (One of the delights of Douglas A. Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit is a collection of 1938 American reviews of Tolkien’s book, two of which invoke Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a 1937 release, but an association that would have mortified the Disneyphobic Tolkien). Return to Bag-End, part the second of Rateliff’s The History of The Hobbit, includes a resonant sentence cut from the Prefatory Note included in the book’s Second Edition in 1951: “Dwarves had already known a long and troublous history in the world before the days of Thror, and when he wrote of old he meant it: in the ancient past, remembered still in the songs of lore that the dwarf-kin sang in their secret tongue at feasts to which none but dwarves were bidden.”

If Dwarf-lore must remain a feast to which none but Dwarves are bidden, at least the chance to journey in company with thirteen of them will permit us to catch a little of the smell and savor of that feast, learn a little of the “long and troublous” history. Elsewhere, in the Appendices of The Return of the King, Tolkien terms the Dwarves “a tough, thrawn race for the most part, secretive, laborious, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits), lovers of stones, of gems, of things that take shape under the hands of the craftsman rather than things that live by their own life.” My ten-year-old self hotfooted it to several dictionaries upon encountering that winningly flinty old word thrawn, the Scottishness of which now seems to anticipate the accent Rhys Davies adopted for Gimli in the Peter Jackson films; a case can be made that no finer example of the mot juste exists in all of fantasy. Tolkien’s Dwarves don’t necessarily make the best first impression, nor did they endear themselves to him when he was initially sketching his legendarium, as The Book of Lost Tales documents. They’re a dour, only-truly-at-home-underground bunch; Gandalf displays a barbed insight into Dwarven values in “the Quest of Erebor” when Glóin disparages hobbits: “I suppose you think them simple because they are generous and do not haggle; and think them timid because you never sell them any weapons.” Maybe it’s fitting that some delving is required to reach the ore of the best qualities of this “race apart.”

Del Toro and Jackson don’t have the rights to any of the material in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, or The History of Middle-earth, which is regrettable because the revenger’s-tale aspect of Thorin Oakenshield’s mission could be deepened and darkened by an allusion or two to the old, old vendetta between Dwarves and dragons. In “The Quest of Erebor” — the pendant to The Hobbit which recontextualizes events through the prism of Gandalf’s grand strategy for saving the West, first published in Unfinished Tales and also available in The Annotated Hobbit (Second Edition, 2002) — wizard admonishes dwarf-grandee as follows: “Smaug does not lie on his costly bed without dreams, Thorin Oakenshield. He dreams of Dwarves! You may be sure that he explores his hall day by day, night by night, until he is sure that no faintest air of a dwarf is near, before he goes to his sleep: his half-sleep, prick-eared for the sound of — dwarf-feet.” But a case can be made that the scaly folk and the longbeards have been figuring in each other’s nightmares since the Battle of Unnumbered Tears in the First Age:

For the Naugrim [Dwarves] withstood fire more hardily than either Elves or Men, and it was their custom moreover to wear great masks in battle hideous to look upon; and those stood them in good stead against the dragons. And but for them Glaurung and his brood would have withered all that was left of the Noldor. But the Naugrim made a circle about him when he assailed them, and even his mighty armour was not full proof against the blows of their great axes; and when in his rage Glaurung turned and struck down Azaghâl, lord of Belegost, and crawled over him, with his last stroke Azaghâl drove a knife into his belly, and so wounded him that he fled the field, and the beasts of Angband in dismay followed after him. Then the dwarves raised up the body of Azaghâl and bore it away; and with slow steps they walked behind singing a dirge in deep voices, as it were a funeral pomp in their country, and gave no heed more to their foes; and none dared to stay them.

(I’m not aware of any evidence that those First Age war-masks survive into the Third Age, but they would make a killer visual for the Battle of Five Armies) But even without Silmarillion-gleanings, the filmmakers enjoy a wealth of back-story in the form of what Gandalf, in “The Quest of Erebor” styles “feuds and disasters on the far frontiers more than two hundred years ago.” Thorin is the heir to those disasters, and del Toro recently said “To me a lot is hanging in the narrative in the relationship between Bilbo and Thorin — obviously because out of the Dwarf group the transformation that Thorin goes through, and the way Bilbo’s character reaffirms itself in light of greed and the desire of ownership that Thorin experiences once they find the treasure trove. . .” My own favorite word-portrait of Thorin can be found not in The Hobbit but the portion of the aforementioned “Quest of Erebor” that Tolkien did squeeze into the ROTK Appendices:

The embers in the heart of Thorin grew hot again, as he brooded on the wrongs of his House and of the vengeance upon the Dragon that was bequeathed to him. He thought of weapons and armies and alliances, as his great hammer rang in his forge; but the armies were dispersed and the alliances broken and the axes of his people were few; and a great anger without hope burned him, as he smote the red iron on the anvil.

He is both smiter and smitten, both a king in exile (from the Smaug-usurped Lonely Mountain) and an anger-heated piece of metal upon which the blows of a great hammer have fallen. A very accomplished (theater-trained?) actor, as well as someone better able than was the long-suffering Rhys-Davies to withstand the facial excruciation of “dwarf-ifying” prosthetics, is required for this role; by the end, the audience should reel as the character addresses Bilbo as “child of the kindly West,” informs him that he “[goes] now to the halls of waiting, to sit beside [his] fathers until the world is redeemed,” and ruefully realizes how Smaug-like he himself became as soon as the dragon-sickness went to work on him: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

Here’s hoping del Toro and screenwriters Jackson, Boyens, and Fran Walsh manage to convey that Thorin & his followers, whom del Toro has jestingly likened to the Dirty Dozen and the Magnificent Seven, are triple exiles, first from Moria, then from the Grey Mountains of the far north from which they were driven by dragons including a “cold drake,” and lastly from the Lonely Mountain, now the seat of Smaug the Magnificent. “Durin’s Folk,” Appendix III in ROTK, tells us “the Dwarves delved deep at that time, seeking beneath Barazinbar for mithril, the metal beyond price that was becoming yearly ever harder to win. Thus they roused from sleep a thing of terror that, flying from Thangorodrim, had lain hidden at the foundations of the earth since the coming of the Host of the west; a Balrog of Morgoth.” (A footnote that’s always fascinated me suggests “released from prison” as an alternative to “roused from sleep,” speculating that the demonic being was already stirring thanks to “the malice of Sauron”

The Dwarves’ memories of their grievances are longer than their beards, and their tribulations mark them like welts. The more I think about it the more I conclude that what’s needed to do even fast-paced justice to the long and troublous history of Thorin’s kind is a prologue like the one that gave the screenwriters fits but ultimately did its job so well in The Fellowship of the Ring; del Toro saw fit to begin Hellboy II this past summer with something similar. Six, seven, or eight minutes briefing the uninitiated on the abandonment of Moria to the Balrog and the ensuing War of the Dwarves and the Orcs, which as related in the “Durin’s Folk” Appendix was the showcase, in the years before the publication of The Silmarillion and the “Wanderings of Húrin” fragment, for Tolkien’s matchless gift for saga-stuff. Such a prologue might be miserly with names — Gil-galad and Elendil aren’t identified during the Dagorlad sequence in Fellowship — but we would still glimpse the ill-advised coming of the rightful lord Thrór, “a little crazed perhaps with age and misfortune and long brooding on the splendour of Moria in his forefathers’ days,” to the wrested-away kingdom, prideful as “an heir that returns.” The contemptuous separate expulsions of his head and body “many days” after his entry, to the accompaniment of “orc-laughter in the shadows,” and the jeers of Azog, who has gone so far as to brand Thrór’s brow with his own name in dwarf-runes: “I wrote it! I killed him! I am the master!” Insult on the iron-shod heels of injury as loyal fellow wayfarer Nàr is tossed a pittance-bag, “few coins of small value” as a “fee” to deliver a message to the other “beggar-beards.” His flight as the Orcs emerge, “hacking the body and flinging the pieces to the black crows.” The furious clangor of hammer on anvil in every dwarrowdelf as the news spreads, the muster of a last great host, the “death and cruel deeds by dark and by light” as the maddened weapon-forgers turned weapon-wielders hunt down Azog. The climactic Battle of Azanulbizar, “at the memory of which the Orcs still shudder and the Dwarves weep.” The slaying of Nàin by Azog and of Azog by Dàin Ironfoot, and the sinister hint of what the new hero senses or surmises, there on the very doorstep of Moria: “. . .hardy and full of wrath as he was, it is said that when he came down from the gate he looked grey in the face, as one who has felt great fear.” The insult answered at last: “They took the head of Azog, and thrust into its mouth, the purse of small money, and then they set it on a stake.” The chastened mood of the survivors: “If this is victory, then our hands are too small to hold it.”

In the actual Hobbit Tolkien refers to a goblin-grudge “against Thorin’s people, because of the war which you have heard mentioned, but which does not come into this tale.” But the prologue we’ve just outlined, like the loss of the Lonely Mountain to Smaug, would inform the rest of the first of the two new movies, moments like Bard’s grim assessment of the advancing dwarf-host: “They do not understand war above ground, whatever they may know of battle in the mines.” Or Gandalf’s words to Ironfoot: “Bolg of the North is coming, O Dàin, whose father you slew in Moria. Behold! The bats are above his army like a sea of locusts. They ride upon wolves and Wargs are in their train!” (Evidently the War of the Dwarves and Orcs did creep into Tolkien’s tale a bit) Swiftly establishing the brutal mystique of Azog as a fearsome Dwarf-bane in a prologue will lend blunt force trauma to the appearance of his payback-lusting son Bolg just before the outbreak of general hostilities.

As for Smaug, he must bestride the earth like a saurian colossus, even posthumously; the leadup to the Battle of the Five Armies is really a succession struggle, a dispute over who will be the next dragon king. Listen, as Thorin fails to do, to the warning delivered by Roäc son of Carc (the Raven Anti-Defamation League-endorsed counterweight to the cawing “spawn of perdition” that torments Conan in The Hour of the Dragon):

“The news of the death of the guardian has already gone far and wide, and the legend of the wealth of Thror has not lost in the telling during many years; many are eager for a share of the spoil. Already a host of the elves is on the way, and carrion birds are with them hoping for battle and slaughter. By the lake men murmur that their sorrows are due to the dwarves; for they are homeless and many have died, and Smaug has destroyed their town. They too think to find amends from your treasure, whether you are alive or dead. “

Del Toro continues to talk not just a good but the best of all possible games when it comes to Smaug; he’s recently extolled draconitas in general as “Fear and awe inscribed in our very genes. Dragon and man tangled in the dreams of an unending spiral of X’s and Y’s,” creatures “equally feared and admired, cherished and longed for as a lost creature of Eden.” And he’s well aware that Smaug’s surroundings are an externalization of his essence: “Understanding that designing Smaug you have to design Lonely Mountains, not Lonely Mountains, inside and out, because it will tell you who he is in a way that — to use a majority example — in the way that the first time you go inside: Tony Montana in a white suit walking in a marble palace — you know exactly who he is — the gold chains. . .”

Smaug as Tony Montana is a diverting conceit; since reading that GDT interview earlier this week I’ve been unable to stop imagining a red-gold dragon lolling on his hoard and inviting Bilbo to say hello to his little friend or explaining that “In this country, first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman,” all in Al Pacino’s version of a Marielito accent. More serious guidance for voicing Smaug is available in this passage from Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth :

He speaks in fact with the characteristic aggressive politeness of the British upper class, in which irritation and authority are in direct proportion to apparent deference or uncertainty. ‘You have nice manners for a thief and a liar’ are his opening words to Bilbo (their degree of irony unclear). ‘You seem familiar with my name, but I don’t seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?’ He might be a testy colonel approached by a stranger in a railway carriage; why has Bilbo not been introduced? At the same time the ‘bestial life’ of the worm keeps intruding, as he remarks on Bilbo’s smell and boasts parenthetically ‘I know the smell (and taste) of dwarf — none better’, or when he rolls over, ‘absurdly pleased’ like a clumsy spaniel, to show the hobbit his armoured belly.

Is it so wrong to associate the ruling class of any era with reptilian speech patterns? (Well, perhaps that’s unfair to reptiles, who haven’t really been running things since the Dragon Kings of Elder Hyperborea) Were Ian McKellen not so indelibly associated with another character, the voice he uses in his 1995 film Richard III, which relocates Shakespeare’s schemer –now half Duke of Windsor, half Oswald Mosley – to an increasingly Blackshirted British Thirties, would be purrfect for Smaug.

In any event, del Toro is righter-than-right to zero in on the design of the wyrm’s digs, which should be as eloquent as a drug-lord’s luxury lair or Blofeld’s hollow volcano in You Only Live Twice. Tolkien, like Robert E. Howard, was extraordinarily attentive to symbolic lighting effects in treasure-scenes:

Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.

Del Toro and his cinematographer should highlight that description, and also this one of the elf-combatants in the Battle of Five Armies: “Their hatred for the goblins is cold and bitter. Their spears and swords shone in the gloom with a gleam of chill flame, so deadly was the wrath of the hands that held them.” Christopher Lee’s Saruman touched upon the atrocious origins of the Orcs in The Fellowship of the Ring, and little would be so conducive to a higher, deeper, darker Hobbit than a screenplay that found a way to reinforce the “We have met the enemy and he is us” underpinnings of the Elves’ “cold and bitter” hatred:

All those of the Quendi [Elves] who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved, and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes.

I get a kick out of Scott Oden’s “weird fascination with Orcs,” but for me to reconfigure them as an unlovely-but-arguably-racially-profiled warrior-race, unrestricted free agents looking for a destiny of their own is to risk losing the plot. It’s precisely the fact that they were gengineered in the hells beneath the halls of a Dark Lord — “And deep in their dark hearts the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery” — the tension between slavery and sentience that characters like Gorbag and Shagrat evince, that renders them so compelling.

That having been said, the northron-orcs of The Hobbit do differ from Sauron’s conscripts; as John Rateliff writes “The goblins are presented for the first time as something more than swordfodder, having their own (admittedly wicked) culture and civilization, complete with poetry, commerce, an apparently thriving slave-labor industry, a hierarchical society from the Great Goblin on top down through the warriors to the slaves, and xenophobia.” In view of del Toro’s interest in an archaic arms race as part of the mythology of Hellboy II, he might be intrigued by Tolkien’s notion that “It is not unlikely that [goblins] invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them.” William Manchester’s classic The Arms of Krupp never mentioned that the dynasty had goblin-blood in its veins. . .

This whole post isn’t just a selfish attempt to rip a beloved book out of small, innocent grasps. Tolkien himself left the start of a trail of adaptation-crumbs for del Toro and Jackson to follow. In 1960 he embarked upon a retrofitting of The Hobbit to render the “enchanting prelude” a little bit less enchanting and a little bit more of a prelude. The rewritten chapters are available in The Return to Bag End, where they provoke a magical piece of what-iffery from John Rateliff:

We cannot know what else Tolkien would have added to the story, had the 1960 Hobbit or Fifth Phase continued beyond this point. Bilbo could not have met Arwen at Rivendell, for we know she was at that time in the middle of a decades-long visit to her grandparents, Galadriel and Celeborn, in Lórien. But did Bilbo’s lifelong friendship with Aragorn (then a ten-year-old living in Rivendell with his mother and being raised by Elrond) begin during his visit there, either on the outgoing or the return trip? Did Legolas Greenleaf fight in the Battle of Five Armies? Would more light have been cast upon the storm-giants of the Misty Mountains, or the source of Beorn’s enchantment, or would we have learned a little more about the elusive Radagast? Would the Spiders of Mirkwood have been made more horrific, àla Shelob, and the wood-elves absolved of all blame in the treatment of the dwarves? Would Balin’s visit in the Epilogue include some mention of his plans for Moria? And most importantly, would the Ring have been presented in more sinister terms throughout, with hints of his corruptive influence even on one such as Bilbo?

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? asks T. S. Eliot in “Gerontion.” After the knowledge that millions have acquired by reading The Lord of the Rings, and tens of millions have acquired by watching the Peter Jackson films we can neither “forgive” the Ring nor travel “back in time” to perceive it as a relatively innocuous, invisibility-conferring trinket. Similarly, after Gandalf the White and even Gandalf the Grey it will be quite difficult to retrench to the more limited and rather part-time wizard of The Hobbit. Which is why, ensnaggled in a thicket of litigation though the Tolkien Estate and the corporations financing the new movies may be, I burn for a side-deal to be cut allowing access to “The Quest of Erebor.” That material’s entrée to Gandalf’s oft-veiled Valinorean perspective would redouble higher, deeper, and darker: “. . .I used in my waking mind only such means as were allowed to me, doing what lay to my hand according to such reasons as I had. But what I knew in my heart, or knew before I stepped on these grey shores: that is another matter. Olórin I was in the West that is forgotten, and only to those who are there shall I speak more openly.”

But what he does say in “The Quest” is strikingly open, as when he confides that his reasoning at that time was “that of a captain, a member of a Council of War,” one preoccupied with Sauron’s ever-longer reach: “Smaug he might use with terrible effect.” So too is Gandalf’s take on Thorin revealed to have been that “He was involved, as I saw only too well, in the net of Sauron’s designs, a dark strategy beyond his powers, and beyond his grasp.”

John Rateliff is less fond of “the Quest” than I am: “Fascinating though it is, ‘The Quest of Erebor’ does set one unfortunate precedent: it diminishes Bilbo in the reader’s eyes, casting him very much as a silly fellow puffing and bobbing on the mat. Gandalf, after describing Bilbo as ‘rather greedy and fat’, says the hobbit ‘made a complete fool of himself’ and ‘did not realize. . .how fatuous the Dwarves thought him. . .Thorin was much more . . .contemptuous than he perceived.’” And yet Gandalf also deems Bilbo “neat-handed and clever, though shrewd, and far from rash. And I think he has courage. Great courage, I guess, according to the ways of his people.” It seems to me that this high praise from the Middle-earth sojourner from whom one would most desire praise balances out his more exasperated assessments. “The Quest” is always going to be read as an afterthought, a postprandial morsel, and for anyone/everyone who’s read The Hobbit and LOTR first, Bilbo’s stature is impervious to shrinkage. Far from talking down to young readers, the second half of The Hobbit raises them up to a height where the perils and rewards are a dizzying departure and to keep up with Bilbo, they must grow up like he does. The recollection of that process makes the Gandalfian snark in “The Quest” enjoyable rather than belittling (Part of the cumulative power of Tolkien’s characterization of his wizard is the way the stress of Gandalf’s responsibilities as “the Enemy of Sauron” unleashes itself every so often in flashes of asperity, like heat lightning: “This dwarvish conceit that no one can have or make anything ‘of value’ save themselves, and that all fine things in other hands must have been got, if not stolen, from the Dwarves at some time, was more than I could stand at that moment.”

In effect a continuation of “The Quest of Erebor,” the 1960 Hobbit rewrite didn’t get all that far; Tolkien tested the “new” chapters on a friend, and as Rateliff tells it

We do not know this person’s identity, but apparently her response was something along the lines of ‘this is wonderful, but it’s not The Hobbit.’ She must have been someone whose judgment Tolkien respected, for he abandoned the work and decided to let The Hobbit retain its own autonomy and voice rather than completely incorporate it into The Lord of the Rings as a lesser ‘prelude’ to the greater work.

My own inclination is to reply across the decades to the unidentified test reader that “This is wonderful, and it’s The Hobbit as it might well have been.” And I would quibble with Mr. Rateliff’s word “lesser”; yes, a prelude can labor under something of a disadvantage in that it comes first, but there is nothing lesser about Smaug the Magnificent and the Battle of Five Armies. Witness this Tolkien passage: “Messengers had passed to and fro between all their cities, colonies and strongholds; for they resolved now to win the dominion of the north. Tidings they gathered in secret ways; and in all the mountains there was a forging and an arming.” The more dangerous the ancient northern world into which Gandalf coaxes Bilbo is shown to be, the more impressive his gradual adjustment — while preserving his defining decency — will be.

In a medium-hopping sort of way, the Hobbit films represent a second chance for Tolkien’s discarded 1960/Fifth Phase version. Del Toro has said ” The first film will stand on its own, and the second will be a transition and fusion with Peter’s world. I plan to change and expand the visuals from Peter’s, and I know the world can be portrayed in a different way. Different is better for the first one,” but in other interviews he has emphasized the seamless incorporation of The Hobbit into the greater work as a desideratum, with an ultimate goal of a five-film, two-director whole. Can the earlier adventure “retain its own autonomy and voice” as part of such a grand continuum? The worry for many Hobbit-lovers is that charm will be sacrificed on the altar of consistency; characters and events, particularly in the pre-Lonely Mountain chapters, are going to be forced to put away childish things even as they were in the process Tolkien began in 1960. But for me results that approximate “The Quest for Erebor” or those redone Fifth Phase chapters will be quite livable with, and livable-for. A stage suitable for the great Smaug, a Thorin who rises to the occasion, and then falls, and then rises again, a Volstaggian Bombur, an Elvenking-thesp who can make music with lines like “Long will I tarry, ere I begin this war for gold,” or “You are more worthy to wear the armour of elf-princes than many that have looked more comely in it,” the latter of which always reminds me of Amalric’s double-take in “Black Colossus”: “By my finger bones, Conan! I have seen kings who wore their harness less regally than you!” But also a stage spotlighting a casting coup who performs much the same miracle Robert De Niro pulled off in The Godfather Part II: uncannily presaging the older Bilbo without simply doing an Ian Holm impersonation.

As we have already seen, in 1965 Tolkien adduced “glimpses that had arisen, unbidden, of things higher or deeper or darker than [The Hobbit's] surface”; if new glimpses arise, only this time bidden, in the 2011 and 2012 movies, so be it, provided they are indeed satisfyingly higher, deeper, and darker.