Never ever mess with a hobbit
The Tolkies' provisional wing is after me for dissing their religion
By Mark Lawson
Saturday December 29, 2001
The Guardian
[
film.guardian.co.uk]
As a journalist, I've never been a controversialist. Britain's prisoners start sewing extra mail-sacks when they learn that Julie Burchill is writing a column. For me, they could make the shallowest of in-trays during recreation. But, in the last two weeks, I've started looking at brochures for bunkers. There have been letters verging on death-threats, calls for me to be sacked or (a recurrent and perhaps revealing word) "disciplined", vicious comments on websites.
What produced this abuse was expressing dislike of the recent film of The Lord Of The Rings twice on television. For the record, it's my view that JRR Tolkien's books are a laboured reorganisation of Norse myth by a writer who struggled with the sentence structures of English. Professor Germaine Greer, who joined in, is also, according to my correspondents, to be the subject of calls to the director general for her life-time banishment from the BBC.
In the course of more than 900 arts shows on radio and television - on such reliably contentious subjects as The Satanic Verses, modern jazz, pornography, Intimacy, and Tracey Emin - there has never been such an extreme reaction. Nowhere in the commendably detailed book of BBC producer guidelines on the handling of contentious editorial issues did anyone ever think to print: Don't Mess With Hobbits.
As in all discussion of fundamentalism, it's necessary to acknowledge that the vast majority of Tolkien-readers are gentle, peaceful people who tolerate the existence of other points of view. We are talking in this piece only about a small band of fanatics who have misunderstood the message of the holy book.
The religious metaphor is appropriate. The nearest I've previously come to the seething directed at me in the last two weeks followed hostile comments about the TV version of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. It's clear from this that I suffer artistic resistance to mock-antiquated myths which tweely create fake kingdoms, and that works of that kind have a tendency to become, for some admirers, a displacement religion.
So deep is these people's acceptance of the legends and beliefs of Peake's or Tolkien's fiction that any dissent from this world-view is classified as blasphemy. But at least Salman Rushdie took on a great prophet. My nemesis is elves and those other ones called - is it orks? Orcs?
Reading the letters and emails from the extremist Tolkies, I thought of a story which has appeared in Britain's newspapers in the last few Christmas seasons. It's about a man who loves the rituals of December 25 so much that he eats a full Christmas dinner every day of the year after sitting down to watch a video of the most recent Queen's Speech.
For several years, this has been reported as if it were a touching human interest story -The Man They Call Mr Christmas - although it always seemed to me that he might more accurately be described as Mr Christmas Crackers. Finally, this year's pieces revealed that his doctor has warned that the unvaried intake is killing him and that he is being treated as an addict.
It's pretty clear that festive lunch had become a crutch for Mr Christmas: he was happier living there than in the actual calendar. And I'd guess that, among the provisional wing of The Tolkies, elves are to them what turkey is to Mr Christmas. Escapist literature has its place, but if a book, and a children's book at that, means so much to you that you can hate other people for disliking it, you've walked through the library into some other room: and perhaps a ward.
While the Tolkies are an extreme example, the elevation of dislike of a children's movie to heresy is part of a worrying wider trend in culture. A curious feature of cinema in 2001 was the sudden clutch of movies made from books which had attained the status of sacred texts for their readers: Harry Potter, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Bridget Jones's Diary, as well as the Tolkien saga.
At screenings of these, you felt that large parts of the audience had come not in search of enjoyment but to monitor deviation from the original. The directors were widely praised for how close they had stayed to the page. This hostility to interpretation is anti-cinematic. The point of movies is to rip up the words and reassemble them as pictures which may - which should - differ in key details.
Another point of films, in fact, of all art, is to produce two views about their meaning and worth. Although the word "reviewer" has become synonymous with critic, it's an odd term because it strictly means to see again - a second opinion - despite the fact that critics pride themselves on giving the first opinion. This kink in etymology is presumably explained by the fact that critics are looking over or re-viewing the conclusions of the creator.
Even so, there will always be a second opinion or a twentieth. The opinions of critics are reviewed by audiences and then by other audiences. I accept that the Tolkies may disagree with me about the supremacy of the movies of Baz Lurhman or the excellence of the novels of John Updike. But I wouldn't want them reviled or sacked for thinking differently. Like Christ, Mohammed and Karl Marx (though all were rather better wordsmiths), JRR Tolkien would surely be horrified by some of his followers.