Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Mickey has an interesting post about Peter Jackson's revisions to the Lord of the Rings story: what he has left out, what he has added (or given extra emphasis), and what he has focused on to the exclusion of other things. It's pretty interesting. I don't entirely agree with him, but I see where he's coming from.

(Spoilers for Return of the King ahead)

Mickey's a bit worried about Jackson's failure to understand the point of Tolkien's "Scouring of the Shire" sequence. For those who have not read the book, and are not wary of spoilers, this is a sequence that comes after just about everything else is done: the Ring has been destroyed, Aragorn has become King and married Arwen, and the Hobbits of the Fellowship have returned home. But they discover that the Shire is no longer the peaceful, idyllic place they recall. Rather, it has been taken over by some mysterious individual (who turns out to be Saruman) and forced to live very differently: the doors have locks, the trees have been uprooted, et cetera. So our intrepid Hobbits rally the Shirefolk to drive out the ruffians. In the course of all this, Saruman is killed by Wormtongue, who is then in turn killed by some Hobbits.

This episode does exactly what Mickey says it does: it shows how the great War of the Ring has ultimately affected the Shire; it shows that truly nothing will be the same in Middle Earth, not even the Shire. It's a stark depiction that the Third Age has ended, and it's not an isolated episode: in the timelines of the book's Appendices, Tolkien identifies the Scouring of the Shire as the true end of the War of the Ring.

But the episode also does what Jackson says it does: it sticks out like a sore thumb. I had the same reaction, the first time I read it back when I was ten: you get through all of the exciting stuff, the climax of the great quest, and then there's another hundred or so pages of aftermath and other things to be taken care of. I didn't really grasp what Tolkien was getting at until I re-read LOTR in college, and even then, the Scouring isn't something I really enjoy. I suspect Tolkien actually intended this to be the feeling of that chapter; the return to the early tone of The Fellowship of the Ring clashes mightily with all the heroic language that's been the book's hallmark pretty much since "The Council of Elrond", and when that tone returns with "The Gray Havens", it's a relief. We feel the way Frodo feels: it's time to leave this world.

The problem is that Jackson is making a movie on its own, as opposed to a straight telling of Tolkien's story. I'm really not sure how he could return the Scouring and not have the film of ROTK grind to a total halt. I suspect he's making roughly the right decision here, although I do hope he can find some way to indicate that the Shire after the War of the Ring is not the same Shire before it.

I also partially agree with Mickey's take on Jackson's de-emphasis of the Hobbits. But I don't agree that Frodo is the main character. While Frodo has been "wimpified" a bit in the movie, I think he's more the main character of the movie than he is in the books, where Tolkien chooses a structure that keeps Frodo offstage for great passages of material at a time (the entirety of Books III and V, mainly). When I did a research project on LOTR in high school, I found a number of scholarly articles on the work suggesting that the main character is not Frodo but Aragorn (note that the third installment is titled Return of the King, a direct reference to Aragorn). Frodo's quest is only the centerpiece of the story for a brief portion of the whole (from the Council of Elrond to the Breaking of the Fellowship), and after that his story does equal time with the larger War of the Ring.

I'm not sure if LOTR even has a "main character", in the sense that Indiana Jones is the main character of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Orson Scott Card once defined a "main character" as the character in a story whose actions and decisions drive every other event in the tale. So, looking at it this way, I think the main character of LOTR is actually the One Ring, itself. Tolkien even uses language thusly, repeatedly ascribing intent to the Ring, and Peter Jackson has retained this aspect with lines like Gandalf's "It wants to be found", and Galadriel's description of the Ring "betraying" Isildur. The Ring is a character, and it is the main character, in much the same way that Darth Vader is the main character of the Star Wars saga.

And then there are those Star Wars fans who…oh, wait. I didn't want to rant about that today. Whoops!