20/12/2002 - 12:22 a.m.

I asked for a single strand of her hair, she gave me three.

If I ever, and I mean ever meet a certain pompus idiot going by the name of Roger Ebert, he is not going to like what I have to do to him. Anybody else read his review of TTT?

This is not a "movie about Hobbits". It was not a book about Hobbits. If Mr. Ebert wanted to read a book about Hobbits, perhaps he might read The Hobbit. However, The Lord of the Rings, the last time I checked, was a book about a war, and the returning of a king to power. The third book is called The Return of the King, not The Return of the Hobbit (because that book is There and Back Again: A Hobbit's Tale by Bilbo Baggins), and the Hobbits act throughout as Tolkien's storytellers, really. Always and forever, Merry and Pippin feel as though they're being dragged around as extra baggage, and Sam and Frodo are convinced that their entire journey is in vain, and they'll most likely end up dead on the scarred and blackened plains of Mordor.

The Two Towers is not a book that abounds in "charm and whimsy". It is a dark, foreboding, downright cruel sort of book. In TTT can be found no Lothlorien, no Prancing Pony, and no Tom Bombadil to stray across, instead there are winged Nazgul, who inspire terror on the ground when they pass over miles higher than man can see or arrow can fly. There is a great spider, Shelob (saved for the final movie, but in the book nonetheless) older and fouler than her children who thrive in the depths of Mirkwood. There is the creature Gollum, a sly, cunning, fiend tied to the One Ring. The only whimsy in this book is found in the Ents, and even they can roused every once in a while.

To refer to the good doctor Tolkien as a "gentle medievalist", seems a tad bit oxymoronic, does it not? Perhaps "gentle professor", or "humble writer", for he was both of those things. Tolkien was a veteran of the Battle of the Somme, which figures on any proper war historian's list of really massively not good battles. He translated Sir Gwain the Green Knight and wrote seriously of politics and war in his books. Even in The Hobbit through rumours of the Necromancer, and of Gandalf's White Council come thoughts that all is not well in Middle Earth, and has not been since the beginning, as those who have read The Silmarillion know. I do not believe that our Master Ebert has that book in his India paper copy of The Lord of the Rings, which he was so excited to make special mention of to all of us in his last review. In that same review, the cautious reader would note that he had not bothered to turn the pages of that book until he was to watch the movie.

So, should I ever have chance to meet with the man who can give two Harry Potter movies in a row five stars, but slight The Lord of the Rings... well, words will be exchanged, and may someone stop me doing anything more dangerous to him than my words might be.

Really. Every Harry Potter fan whines and complains that the movie does not reflect the book. Those who love Tolkein's work are not saying that. They say instead that they understand the choices that Peter Jackson and his crew made. They allow changes because so much is so true to that world that they know and love. Such is the case with me, I am so glad that so much was done so perfectly that I don't mind much that the songs were cut, or it was really Merry who solved the riddle of Moria, or that Sam did not accompany Frodo to the mirror of Galadriel, because it was so much more than a regular movie might have given us. What we have been given in these movies is such a rare gift; like Galadriel, Jackson has presented us not with one golden strand, but three. This is not the same world that Master Ebert is a part of, because he never understood it aright the first time, and I daresay he never shall.

I should like it if someone were to make perhaps an independent film of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, that way the fellow might be explained and given a moment. I should hate for him to be neglected entirely.