Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað

[steepholm]

I’ve been musing on calimac’s recent post, in which he blasts Shaun F.D. Hughes for his assertion that "There is no return to a pre-Peter-Jackson understanding of Tolkien" and his advice that scholars should "[take] advantage of this new reality.” As you will see if you follow the link, calimac disagrees strongly. And I’m fairly sure that Tolkien would have concurred with calimac. The philological/archaeological enterprise to which Tolkien devoted his scholarly life, and with which his fiction is shot through is, after all, one of painstaking restoration, and it's hard to imagine anyone less willing to be carried along on the crest of the Zeitgeist. To those not in sympathy with it this may smack at best of futile scholarly fussiness. To others it is an act of keeping faith, of telling the truth by being true oneself. The knowledge that it is doomed to failure – that there are pieces of the puzzle forever missing, snatched from the world by death, fire and moth – takes nothing from the worth of the effort, but rather lends it a tragic grandeur. What could be more Tolkienian – or more Anglo-Saxon – than the idea of courage in the face of insurmountable odds? That’s what makes the Battle of Maldon more than just an undignified scrap on an Essex mudflat.

(Digression: compare, if you will, the boastful grief of Y Gododdin with the steadfastness of The Battle of Maldon. Both sets of warriors are doomed and know it; both are courageous; but one exults recklessly, while the other stands grimly fast. And they echo down the centuries, these styles of defeat, issuing at last in the salty beer of a London Welshman on St David’s Day, or the bee-like hum of ‘Mustn’t grumbles’ from an English Post Office queue. I see all this clearly from my panopticon on Steepholm island, with my feet planted in the Severn, and dragons both white and red on my escutcheon.)

calimac has my sympathy. But I do wonder. Sometimes associations colour a book for ever, and we’d have it no other way. The voice of a parent reading a story aloud, for example, becomes part of that story for us. When I first read The Mabinogion I did it with the sound of Fairport Live Convention in the background – an album I’d bought the same day - and the two are indissolubly linked, along with the room where I read it, and even the age I was at the time. 1977 was a very good year for books and music.

Now, maybe films are a bit different from that happenstantial kind of association – but are they totally different? Does it matter, for example, that I now tend to think of Mr Darcy as looking like Colin Firth? Is that a taint on Austen’s text? Not much of one, perhaps. On the other hand, I feel it would matter quite a lot if I secretly believed that Mr D really had gone for a dip in his carp pond before fetching up in front of young Elizabeth Bennett. But that’s so wrong that it’s easier to edit out, somehow. I suspect that the most stubborn and insidious variations on the original are those that are almost right, or that might actually be right, but that confine the possibilities of the text to a narrow range of meaning and make what had been a polysemous rainforest of potential an impoverished monoculture. (But, but – well, isn’t that kind of narrowing what all adaptations necessarily do, to an extent? Or even all productions of a play?)

As you'll have gathered, I'm in several minds about all this. Anyone out there willing to put me straight?

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

The Jackson films spurred me to tremendous Tolkien-based creativity, partly as a result of some of the terrific visuals in the first film, but very little of wot I wrote ended up 'inspired' by his films.

But any reading I do of The Lord of the Rings is almost entirely filtered through the BBC radio adaptation, which I heard on broadcast, at around the same time as reading the book for the first time. The two are very closely linked in my imagination.

I rewatched films, relistened to radio version, and reread the book recently - and it's the radio actors who speak the lines for me (with the possible exception of Ian McKellen). The images are a pleasing combination of Alan Lee, Victor Ambrus, and several other artists working both before and after the films (and not necessarily in their 'shadow', even in portraits of characters).

I personally don't see Jackson's films as 'taint' - I think there's a great deal to be liked and admired, particularly in the first one - but his version has had surprisingly little effect on my experience of the book, other than sparking a tremendously rich and productive re-encounter with Tolkien (and an extraordinary fandom experience).

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Like you, I believe that the more intense a first experience of a work, the more the other sensory input, including the form of the work, lingers, no matter how many other ways one encounters the work. It could be that various people then adjust to degrees, depending on how they process text/media/whatever.

So, yeah, forever and ever I will think of Gone with the Wind while crossing the English channel, and listening to St. Paul's Suite . . . though I do see Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable and Olivia de Haviland as the characters. (I saw the film at an art house some five years later, when the film had been recently retooled.)

LOTR--for me, the story comes with my fourteen year old memories, though I do see Orlando Bloom now as Legolas, and some of Viggo's body language for Aragorn. Oh yes, and the hobbit hole . . . except that that filmic hobbit hole matched my original depiction. the rest? No, I've gone back to my original images, though I, unlike Calimac, enjoyed the films.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Well, I can't see why it would matter that you think of Mr Darcy as looking like Colin Firth at all, as you haven't taken on the wet-shirt look approach. (Fun scene when he meets her anyway though!) Not to mention the cutting of some of the best dialogue between Elizabeth and Darcy at the end of the book for a totally forgettable visual of a double-wedding. But do you think your understanding of Pride and Prejudice is forever post-1996 BBC television production? (It's such a ludicrous question, even!) Similarly, you might well think of Marianne as looking like Kate Winslet, but you're not going to forget that Willoughby's hugely important explanation of his actions to Eleanor actually happened, just because it was cut from the film, right?

And yes, that is essentially what an adaptation of a play or novel does - and a film or TV version does it more so, as the director also focuses your vision on the character(s) he or she wants front and centre in a way the director of a play can't. But again - I seem to have caught your habit of reductio ad absurdum! - an 'important' new adaptation of Hamlet isn't very likely to change Shakespearean studies forevermore, is it?