The Desolation

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Seriously: can you really imagine the sort of viewer who actually likes THOS to have any use for Tolkien's gentle, whimsical original?

That's the thing, isn't it? I can only imagine that reading The Lord of the Rings after first seeing the films might contain a number of surprises, especially in terms of the description, how the characters converse and so on in addition to alterations made to the plot. The Hobbit on the other hand would surely be almost unrecognisable to someone who'd seen the film first.

The excuses made by the filmmakers of "it's from the Appendices" (largely untrue or warped beyond recognition) or "it's in the spirit of Tolkien" (entirely debatable) just perpetuate a culture of misinformation about Professor Tolkien's work. I still regularly see people claiming in comments on articles and Facebook that, for instance, the Hobbit films include material from Unfinished Tales and The Silmarillion. That in my opinion is the biggest issue - not the changes/omissions/additions in themselves, but the PR spin that these modifications are in fact faithful, as well as how this has mutated (just as they hoped, I daresay) into a public belief that even books the filmmakers lack the rights to were sourced. It's the misrepresentation which irks me the most. And of course, surely logic dictates that anyone who thinks that the added material is from the Appendices (let alone The Silmarillion etc) must never have read said material, or else they'd know otherwise - so how can they derive any satisfaction from their inclusion? Because someone else told them this is what Professor Tolkien wrote?