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Christopher Tolkien says 'Film won't do justice' but...

December 07, 2001 at 23:12:29

In a historic first public comment on the upcoming Peter Jackson trilogy of films based on his father's work, Christopher Tolkien says the movies will not do justice to his father's work.

LONDON (Reuters) - The son of J.R.R. Tolkien says the forthcoming Hollywood adaptation of his father's classic "The Lord of the Rings" will not do justice to the magical Middle Earth tale.

In a statement to newspapers published on Saturday, Christopher Tolkien, who is literary protector of his father's works, said he did not disapprove of the film but was dubious about the adaptation.

"My own position is that 'The Lord Of The Rings' is peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form," he said.

Read the rest of the brief article here.

Christopher Tolkien brought his father's life-work, The Silmarillion, to publication in 1977, four years after J.R.R. Tolkien died. In 1980, the younger Tolkien published Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, a collection of stories, story fragments, notes, and essays drawn from the immense archive of material left behind by the elder Tolkien. From 1983 through 1996, Christopher published the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth, which followed in painstaking detail the evolutionary development of the stories which eventually gave rise to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

Christopher Tolkien moved his family to an undisclosed location in southern France to escape the intense public scrutiny that his father's fame and his own renown as the world's leading scholar in Tolkien studies brought to bear on him. A veteran of the Second World War who served in the Royal Air Force, the younger Tolkien followed in his father's professional footsteps, pursuing a career in linguistic and literary studies at Oxford. Christopher Tolkien has made only rare public appearances on behalf of his father's work over the past 20 years.

"The Fellowship of the Ring", the first of three movies by Peter Jackson based on The Lord of the Rings, premiers in London on December 10, 2001, and begins a world-wide run on December 19.