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National Geographic launches LoTR movie site

March 20, 2002 at 22:52:41

There is misinformation there, as well as in the television special which inspired it, but National Geographic has created a unique Tolkien Web site in collaboration with Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. is a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner, the parent company for New Line Cinema, which underwrote and distributed Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" movie and the two sequels due out later this year and late next year, "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King".

Among other errors of fact in the history they provide, the National Geographic site says:

Tolkien's concern for nature echoes throughout The Lord of the Rings. Evil beings of Middle-earth dominate nature and abuse it to bolster their own power. For example, Saruman, the corrupt wizard, devastates an ancient forest as he builds his army.

The Elves, in contrast, live in harmony with nature, appreciating its beauty and power, and reflecting a sense of enchantment and wonder in their artful songs.

However, these are errors in fact with respect to the book only, as the movie does alter the history of the Rings of Power to a considerable degree. In the book, it is the Elves who make the Rings of Power for their own purposes, to delay or halt the effects of Time, to prevent their own inevitable fading. Hence, the greatest perversion of the natural order in Middle-earth is committed by the Elves.

The television special wholly omitted Tolkien's extensive knowledge of and admitted influences from Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and other ancient languages. While the National Geographic site is interesting, and is well worth a friendly visit from fans of the movie, it is only a glimpse into the complicated career and life of author J.R.R. Tolkien. We recommend that interested fans who want to know more about the author of The Lord of the Rings browse our selection of books about Middle-earth and Tolkien.

To visit the National Geographic site, go to http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngbeyond/rings/.

While the information regarding Tolkien's linguistic influences is generally correct, it is extremely incomplete. Tolkien based Sindarin, for example, on Welsh, and Sindarin actually plays a greater role in both the book and the (first) movie than Quenya. Quenya, on the other hand, seems to have caught the media's attention.

National Geographic also tells its visitors that "Tolkien created the mythology and history of Middle-earth to serve as the poetic legend he felt his homeland, England, lacked." This is not true. Tolkien did attempt to create a mythology for England. That mythology was published in the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth, and was called The Book of Lost Tales. Much of what transpires in The Book of Lost Tales is actually set in the English geography.

What we generally regard as Middle-earth -- that is, the world of hobbits, wizards, and Dunedain and High Elves -- came together as a result of the combination of Tolkien's intense desire to see his Elvish legends -- derived from but not the same as The Book of Lost Tales -- published and pressure from his publisher, Allen & Unwin, to see more about Hobbits. When first asked to write a sequel to The Hobbit, Tolkien wrote to his publisher, "And what more can Hobbits do?"

He certainly came up with something, and The Lord of the Rings helped to launch a new era in popular fiction.

The information provided by National Geographic is regrettably incomplete and represents very poor scholarship. We do recommend that people visit the site to gain a better understanding of just how limited and misrepresented the public view of Tolkien's career and influences have become as the decades have passed. The tremendous influence he acknowleged in his letters from sources as varied as ancient Greece, Egypt, and Babylon (in addition to the much more well-documented Anglo-Saxon and Finnish sources) deserves better attention than to be snubbed by such a prestigious organization as the National Geographic Society.