Off of the Wish List and Into My Library: Tolkien (2019 DVD)

     It has taken me some time to come around to getting and watching the 2019 biopic of my favorite author, J. R. R. Tolkien. I have my sister and her Christmas bounty to thank for finally being able to order it. I heard much about it when it came out, both good and bad, and then it just disappeared. But I always knew that I would have to someday own it and see for myself, just because I am such a Tolkien fan. And now I do and I have.

My first impression was that it was a strange patchwork sort of a telling. The movie used Tolkien’s experiences during World War One as a kind of framing device, opening with him in the trenches and suffering weird visions of black riders, dark lords, and dragons as he faces bayonets, gas attacks, and primitive flame-throwers. It flashes back to his mother and her death, his placement in a boarding house by his guardian Father Francis, his growing love for his fellow border Edith Bratt, and the development of a “fellowship” with three of his schoolmates as he deepens his love of language under the tutelage of Professor Wright. These patches of storytelling are broken up by more struggles in the No-Man’s-Land of WWI, where Tolkien is aided by his batsman, “Sam Hodges”, as an obvious stand-in for the private soldiers Tolkien based Sam Gamgee on.

So far, so good. But why doesn’t it work? Things happen, but they seem to have no connection to each other. The elements do not mingle into a satisfying theme. And I can only conclude it is because the creative team behind the movie (director Dome Karukoski and writers David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford) do not understand the true significance of the threads that helped make Tolkien what he was.

I have read enough biographies to know that Tolkien and his friends were not “outcasts” but a tightly knit society that followed their own star. I know that his fealty to Father Francis was finely balanced with his love of Edith, and it was his loyalty to the two of them that led to his keeping faith with both, returning to Edith the moment he had promised. I know that he was writing his myths long before he ever set pen to paper and wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

That is how the movie ends, skipping from Tolkien leaving the war all the way to him being a professor with four young children. Suddenly, out of the blue, as if it were the culmination of all his life experiences so far and not a simple tale that he begins on a whim and then tells his children (and which becomes the beginning of the unforeseen “The Lord of the Rings”), he as good as raises his head to the camera and gives us a significant look.

There are a few original bits and pieces I found pleasing. The casting of Colm Meaney as Father Francis and Derek Jacobi as Professor Wright I thought well-done. I groaned with familiarity when Tolkien corrected the professor’s pronunciation of “Tol-KINE” to “Tol-KEEN”. One of Tolkien’s friends says of Wagner’s Ring Cycle that it shouldn’t take six hours to tell a story about a magic ring. But there are far too many missteps which I can only say are the result of using frog DNA when you are trying to recreate a tyrannosaur.

It is perhaps noteworthy that “the Tolkien family and the Estate issued a statement before the film's release to make clear that they did not approve of, authorize or participate in the making of this film, and did not endorse it or its content in any way.” Maybe that was just a piece of legal boilerplate. But maybe there were deep personal reasons. As it is, I simply hope that the day will come when a more accurate and artistic work will be produced that will better recount Tolkien’s journey. 

From the Commonplace Book: C. S. Lewis

“The First [Friend] is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights. There is nothing to be overcome in making him your friend; he and you join like raindrops on a window. But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman. When you set out to correct his heresies, you will find that he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night, or walking through fine country that neither gives a glance to, each learning the weight of the other's punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another's thought; out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge.”

― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

What Happened (Part23)

We all convene to Mom and Pop’s room, get a short scolding from Mom for the ruffled bedclothes, and then we all lay down on the cool, satiny cover. Mom lies down with us, trying to get us calm and composed so we’ll fall asleep. She might sing a lullaby, or tell us stories (fairy tales or stuff from when she a little girl), or in the end she just might have to order us with physical threats to settle down.  When we do finally drop off it is the dead-to-the-world, careless sleep of youth. In summer it is particularly good way to get through the afternoon Texas heat. Sometimes Mom will sleep with us, but more often she gets up and has some quiet time for herself, maybe watching some “stories,” as the family calls the soap operas like The Edge of Night or The Days of Our Lives that Omi has got her hooked on.  Nap time lasts about an hour or so, and when one of us wakes up we all soon follow, partly from the bouncing up off the bed and partly from our flock instinct.

What Happened (Part 22)

 

Lunch is a very simple affair, usually sandwiches.  Mom puts all of the stuff on the table, and we each get a glass of ice water (tea is for supper, and soda is a rare treat). The usual suspects on a lunch table are chopped ham lunch meat, American cheese slices, pickles, tomatoes, mustard, Miracle Whip, peanut butter, jelly (peach or grape), and, if we are lucky, Lay’s potato chips.  Mom likes to put chips in her sandwich, and eventually we pick up the habit.  One of us is chosen to pray, and then we dig in.  The first round is a luxurious meat-and-cheese sandwich, each of us putting in orders for our individual variations and Mom making them for us.  Seconds, if we’re still hungry, is the less expensive peanut butter and jelly, full, or folded if we’re less ravenous. There is chatter and exuberance at the table, and even the occasional bit of taboo singing (“If you sing at the table, you’ll have a crazy wife!”).  We admonish each other to keep our “ables off the tables.”  When we’re done Mom clears the food away and puts the few dishes in the sink, and it is nap time.

From the Commonplace Book: J. R. R. Tolkien

“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

Letter to his friend Robert Murray, S.J. (December 1953)

From the Commonplace Book: G. K. Chesterton

"There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys: and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys takes so very much more time and trouble than anything else. Playing, as children mean playing, is the most serious thing in the world. And as soon as we have small duties or small sorrows we have to abandon to some extent so enormous and ambitious a plan of life. We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy: we do not have enough strength for play. This is the truth which everyone will recognize who, as a child, has ever played with anything at all; anyone who has played with bricks, anyone who has played with dolls, anyone who has played with tin soldiers. My journalistic work, which earns money, is not pursued with such awful persistency as that work which earned nothing."

--from "The Toy Theatre," in Tremendous Trifles (1909), by G. K. Chesterton.
 

From the Commonplace Book: Lafcadio Hearn

“Each heart, each brain in the billions of humanity,—even so surely as sorrow lives,—feels and thinks in some special way unlike any other; and goodness in each has its unlikeness to all other goodness,—and thus its own infinite preciousness; for however humble, however small, it is something all alone, and God never repeats his work. No heart-beat is cheap, no gentleness is despicable, no kindness is common; and Death, in removing a life—the simplest life ignored,—removes what never will reappear through the eternity of eternities,—since every being is the sum of a chain of experiences infinitely varied from all others....” - Lafcadio Hearn, “Two Years in the French West Indies” (1890).