One Book To Rule Them All
I like to consider myself fairly well read. That doesn’t mean that I’m particularly voracious in my reading habits, but I think I’ve read my fair share of diverse authors covering many topics. I have a feeling that I’ve read more books than most, but the one book that I never got into was The Lord Of The Rings. I’ve had this particular tome sitting idle in my library for quite some time, and have stared at its alarmingly red spine as it jutted out from the upper bookshelf like a crooked tooth for many years. Last week I finally decided to correct this textual shortcoming of mine and crack into this imposing novel, and now I find that I’m unable to put it down. I’m but a mere 200 pages in, yet I’m amazed at how much of the book is missing from the Peter Jackson films (Frodo selling his home, less intimidating (and easily fooled) Black Riders, travel through the Old Forest, dinner with the elves, Tom Bombadil, talk with Farmer Maggot, etc).
Now, I fully understand the need to parse out the less important bits from the movies to make for a more digestible end product, but after reading what little I have so far, I feel I would have really loved to have seen some of these missing scenes on the big screen. But then again, thinking about it, if the movies retained a painful loyalty to the book and included each and every scene from the novel, I could envision the movie easily having a runtime of 20+ hours. As much as I love the extended versions of the movie trilogy as they now stand, I think I’d go insane if I had to absorb all of the original material in one theatrical sitting.
It’s funny how a movie such as Where The Wild Things Are used as its springboard a children’s novel that’s composed of a scant ten sentences. From that meager source material a two-hour movie was produced, with the holes in the story having to be filled in by an imaginative team of writers and producers. There was so much that had to be (re)envisioned to make for a cohesive story simply for lack of original source material. On the other end of the spectrum is a novel like The Lord Of The Rings, where the story is so far reaching and overflowing that there’s a need to have to ignore vast swaths of text and whittle down the over-arcing storyline to fit into a (still impressive) six hour movie.
Ah, but there I go, rambling again. I think I’ll activate that brain/fingers filter right now, power down the laptop, and pick up a good book. ”Hey! Come derry dol! Hop along, my hearties!“…
