‘Complete lack of respect’: Tolkien hated the first Lord of the Rings adaptation

Dying in 1973, five years before Ralph Bakshi’s animated feature film, JRR Tolkien never saw a single Lord of the Rings adaptation in his lifetime.

Knowing his clear temperament, his sense of precision and the special importance he attached to the world he built, we also wonder how he would react to a 1978 animated film, a Peter Jackson trilogy or a 2022 Amazon series.

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While we can only speculate on the reactions he would have had to successive adaptations of his work, we do know very well how he received his first attempt at a film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.

Indeed, in 1958, after an agreement with a British writer, agent Forrest J. animation.

As recently recalled Article from ColliderTolkien took the time to carefully read the script after finishing it, and expressed his gratitude at length in several very detailed letters.

Tolkien’s opinion

The least we can tell from reading his writings is that the author did not express his frustration (or even his anger) with the scenario:

“I would say that Zimmerman, , fails to extract or adapt the “spoken words” of the book. He is eager, callous and insolent”He wrote in one of his letters before continuing:

“He doesn’t read. It seems clear to me that he flew The Lord of the Rings and then built Partly from confused memories, with minimal reference to the original. (…) I am very unhappy with Z’s extreme stupidity and incompetenceAs well as its utter disrespect for the original.”

irritation and resentment

In another much longer letter, in which Tolkien took the time to go through Zimmerman’s script page by page to detail all the elements that didn’t sit well with him, he also specified the nature of his displeasure:

“If and/or other They may be irritated or offended by my tone of criticism.”he said.

“If that’s the case, I’m sorry (although I’m not surprised). But I would ask them to have enough imagination to understand the irritation (and sometimes the displeasure) of an author who finds – as he reads – that his work seems to be generally ignored, sometimes carelessly and without the slightest obvious indication of what it is about.

Tolkien then listed many details that did not work in this scenario, such as the fact that the orcs were equipped with beards and feathers, that the Balrog talked and laughed, or that Lothlorien was transformed into a fairy castle. Elves are like little fairies.

Would Tolkien have been as harsh on Peter Jackson’s trilogy, awarded 11 Oscars and ranked among the greatest feature films of all time by AlloCiné viewers?

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