The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The last film in The Hobbit trilogy is by far the best because it shares the elegiac mythic qualities of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. After watching the first film in the trilogy, I criticised Peter Jackson for his decision to tell the story of The Hobbit as a prelude to The Lord of the Rings rather than as a story in its own right. That decision gave an uncertain quality to the first film with the film makers unsure as to whether to emphasise the lighter nature of The Hobbit itself or to continue the mythic feel of The Lord of the Rings. In this final film, there is no such uncertainty and the elegiac nature of the film fits the content closely with its theme of the seductions of wealth and power.

As Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian:

'Peter Jackson has pulled it off. He has successfully concluded his outrageously steroidal inflation of Tolkien’s Hobbit into a triple-decker Middle Earth saga equivalent to the Rings trilogy, and made it something terrifically exciting and spectacular, genial and rousing, with all the cheerful spirit of Saturday morning pictures. And if poor, bemused little Bilbo Baggins now looks a bit lost on this newly enlarged action-fantasy canvas – well, he raises his game as well, leavening the mix with some unexpectedly engaging and likable drama. The Battle of the Five Armies is at least as weighty as The Return of the King. It packs a huge chain-mailed punch and lands a resounding mythic stonk. But it’s less conceited, more accessible and it makes do with just the one ending.'

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Billy Boyd - The Last Goodbye.

Sarehole Mill

Sarehole Mill was a childhood haunt of J.R.R. Tolkien. Born in South Africa in 1892, his family moved to Birmingham in 1896 and lived close to the mill for four years. Tolkien and his brother spent many hours playing around the mill. This and other local settings such as the Moseley Bog provided inspiration for 'Hobbitton' and 'The Shire' in his books The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Tolkien contributed to the restoration of the Mill in the 1960s. Sarehole Mill is part of the Tolkien Trail, which follows the childhood footsteps of the author and the places that influenced his writing. Download the Tolkien Trail leaflet (PDF).

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Far Over The Misty Mountains Cold.

The Hobbit: An Unnecessary Inflation

In The Lord of the Rings films, there is a fine balance struck between the seriousness (within the context of the fictional world created) of the unfolding narrative and the particular responses and stories (often incorporating humour) of the main characters. The main focus is on a state-of-the-universe narrative but the potential portentousness of this big story is leavened and humanised by the humour and humility of the central characters and the parts they play within this meta-narrative.  

The Hobbit was originally written by J.R.R. Tolkien as a children's story complete in it's own right and it only later became a prelude to The Lord of the Rings. Having reached The Hobbit by the opposite route seems to have meant that Peter Jackson is unable to tell the earlier story in its own right and for what it is in and of itself. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the first of a three part series which can only tell this the slighter of Tolkien's originally published tales of Middle Earth at this length because of the decision to also tell the story as an explicit prelude to The Lord of the Rings.

This has two implications. First, that The Hobbit films will only make sense to those who already know The Lord of the Rings films as the additional material doesn't progress the story which is actually told in The Hobbit but does fit that story into the bigger story of The Lord of the Rings. Second, the balance between seriousness and humour/humanity found in The Lord of the Rings films is lost here because of the decision to tell both the story of The Hobbit and the story of The Hobbit as a prelude to The Lord of the Rings. The story told in The Hobbit is a lighter, slighter tale which is well told in this film with humour (except when Radagast's distraction of a hunting party of Orcs is turned into the equivalent of a Benny Hill-style sketch) but this is then set against the seriousness of the storyline which explains how the events of The Hobbit fit into the state-of-this-universe narrative that is The Lord of the Rings. Instead of the leavening of seriousness with humour and humanity that is found in The Lord of the Rings films here we get a jarring shuttling back and forth between these two separated styles and stories.

This results, I think, from a lack of trust on the part of the makers in the ability of the story of The Hobbit to communicate in its own right and its own form. Jackson, essentially, does not trust that the seriousness of the tale and its links to The Lord of the Rings would emerge simply by dramatising the tale as told by Tolkien. In the story, as told by Tolkien, these aspects emerges from the lighter, humourous form of the story. It is the reverse of what is achieved in The Lord of the Rings films and it is ironic that Jackson having found for himself a balance between seriousness and humour for The Lord of the Rings films (as this balance is not in the book as written by Tolkien) has then been unable to trust the reverse balance which is naturally found in the original tale as told by Tolkien.

There is much to enjoy in the film and I'll be there with the many who will see all three over the next 18 months and then will watch all three all over again on DVD but, on a first viewing at least, my view is that the story would have been better told by reflecting and respecting the lighter, slighter nature of its form instead of this attempt to inflate it with the expansiveness and seriousness of The Lord of the Rings.

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Howard Shore - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Harry Potter and true myth

Three quarters of our family recently watched Part 2 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and we are now working our way through the films together from the beginning, noticing more of the clues planted in the early stories which point towards the series end as we do so. Like so many others, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed the shared experiences of books, films and dvds from bedtime stories through books passed around to be read one after the other and shared cinema visits followed by shared evenings in with the dvds.

For me, it has all been another demonstration of the power of story; one that has connected with my experiences as a child reading The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (also The Books of Earthsea and The Chronicles of Prydain). These are stories which enable us to experience and live in other worlds; through the imagination of the author married to our own, such series enable us to inhabit the story over a sustained period of time. That that is so despite there being real weaknesses to each series - Narnia sails too close to allegory; the action in The Lord of the Rings gets bogged down in the marshy detail of Middle Earth; and J. K. Rowling has a rather flat writing style - speaks volumes about the power of story itself and the skill with which C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Rowling weave their plots and realise their characters.

I was wondering what happens next for those of us who have lived in the Potterverse (with the exception of Pottermore) as the books and films have overlapped, in contrast to Narnia and The Lord of the Rings where the films have enabled later in life to revisit the books. There is a real sense now in which living in that story will stop with the release of the final dvd. This brought my thinking to the contrast between living imaginatively in an fictional story and living in a story which encompasses and explains our everyday existence. The Greatest Story Ever Told is such a story and this reminded me of the distinction that Lewis and Tolkien made between myth and true myth:

"Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were "lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver."

"No," Tolkien replied. "They are not lies." Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic "progress" leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.

"In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology," wrote Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, "Tolkien had laid bare the center of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion." It is also the creed at the heart of all his other work. His short novel, Tree and Leaf, is essentially an allegory on the concept of true myth, and his poem, "Mythopoeia," is an exposition in verse of the same concept.

Building on this philosophy of myth, Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality. Whereas the pagan myths were manifestations of God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using the images of their "mythopoeia" to reveal fragments of His eternal truth, the true myth of Christ was a manifestation of God expressing Himself through Himself, with Himself, and in Himself. God, in the Incarnation, had revealed Himself as the ultimate poet who was creating reality, the true poem or true myth, in His own image. Thus, in a divinely inspired paradox, myth was revealed as the ultimate realism.

Such a revelation changed Lewis' whole conception of Christianity, precipitating his conversion."

Something similar also applies, it seems to me, to the story told within the Bible; a story which is true to life itself and within which one can truly live. This, it seems to me, has been one of the major insights from the writings of Tom Wright where he describes the story of the Bible as a five act play (containing the first four acts in full i.e. 1. Creation, 2. Fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus) within which we can understand ourselves to be actors improvising our part on basis of what has gone before and the hints we have of how the play will end:

"The writing of the New Testament ... would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end ... The church would then live under the 'authority' of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion ... the task of Act 5 ... is to reflect on, draw out, and implement the significance of the first four Acts, more specifically, of Act 4 in the light of Acts 1-3 ... Faithful improvisation in the present time requires patient and careful puzzling over what has gone before, including the attempt to understand what the nature of the claims made in, and for, the fourth Act really amount to."

Wright concludes that he is proposing "a notion of "authority" which is ... vested ... in the creator god himself, and this god's story with the world, seen as focused on the story of Israel and thence on the story of Jesus, as told and retold in the Old and New Testaments, and as still requiring completion."

The story told in and through the Bible is therefore true myth because it is viable to live real (as opposed to imaginary) lives within it. As Lesslie Newbigin has written, this story is understood "as we are in engaged in the same struggle that we see in scripture"; that "is the struggle to understand and deal with the events of our time in the faith that God creates purpose, sustains all that is and will bring all to its proper end."

To accept the story of the Bible as true myth conversion is required because, to quote Newbigin again, "Western culture is outside of the believing community where the authority of the bible is accepted":

"Here a paradigm shift is required whereby the current framework of thought of the culture can be radically understood from the viewpoint of the new (in this case Christian) framework of thought but which cannot be arrived at from any process of thinking within the current framework."

Having said that, it may be that the experience of living imaginatively within the story of a fictional series can provide a parallel enabling some understanding of the way in which the story of the Bible functions as true myth.

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Regina Spektor - The Call.