If J.R.R. Tolkien were still in his grave, it is likely that he would be turning in it. The cause of his consternation would be the gollumizing of Middle-earth by the forthcoming TV series bearing the name of The Lord of the Rings. This new “adaptation”, produced by one of the Tech Tyrants which are the dark lords of our globalized world, will reflect our own disfigured and gollumized zeitgeist, mirroring the death-culture and the dictatorship of relativism and proving Tolkien correct in his assertion that fairy-stories hold up a mirror to man. This new version will be a perversion and an inversion of the moral vision of Tolkien’s epic but will be a faithful reflection of the ugliness of the perversion itself and of those who have carried out the textual abuse.
Were we to seek an inkling of what Tolkien might have thought of this perverting of his work, we can find it in his response to three American businessmen, Forrest J. Ackerman, Morton Grady Zimmerman and Al Brodax, who showed him drawings for a proposed animated motion picture of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was impressed by the “really astonishingly good pictures”, which he was relieved to discover were “Rackham rather than Disney”, but he was appalled with the storyline. “People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation,” he complained to his publisher, “Lorien becomes a fairy-castle with ‘delicate minarets’, and all that sort of thing.” Worst of all was the description of lembas, the elvish waybread which has been associated allegorically with the Eucharist, as a “food concentrate”. Needless to say, Tolkien discontinued negotiations with the film moguls, seeking to preserve and protect his epic creation from the assault of such banality and crassness.
There is no way of knowing what Tolkien would have thought of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings but there’s no doubt that Jackson went to great pains to evoke the epic sweep of the original work and to avoid provoking the ire of the Tolkien fanbase worldwide. In fact, part of the marketing strategy for the film was to win the hearts of Tolkien fandom with assurances that the aim was to be faithful to the books. Those who had been expecting the worst, the present author included, were pleasantly surprised, for the most part, by the fidelity of the films to Tolkien’s text, obvious and sometimes egregious exceptions notwithstanding.
The same could not be said of Jackson’s woefully bad adaptation of The Hobbit. Clearly hoping to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings movies and suffering from the avaricious dragon-sickness, which is the very root of all evil in The Hobbit, Jackson took outrageous liberties, transforming Tolkien’s succinctly sublime children’s story into a techno-addicted and computer-generated travesty and farce.
Let’s conclude by considering a little more deeply the spirit which is likely to pervade the new Tech Tyrant production of The Lord of the Rings. There has been talk of adding a little libidinous spice to the stories with the introduction of sex scenes and we have been promised that the Shire will conform to the dictatorship of relativism’s insistence on what it calls “multiculturalism”. The former will remove the veil of chastity which clothes Tolkien’s work, stripping away the self-sacrificial love which animates Tolkien’s Middle-earth with the animus of self-absorbed and self-indulgent lust. It will transform the viewer into a voyeur, disfiguring him with the power of the Ring that binds all in darkness instead of transfiguring him with the power which rides above all shadows.
As for making the Shire “multiculturally” acceptable, the Tech Tyrant production of The Lord of the Rings will merely impose upon the authentic culture of the Shire the globalist monoculture which the cultural imperialism of the Tech Tyranny is seeking to impose upon the world. The Middle-earth which Tolkien conceived is authentically multi-cultural. The culture of the hobbits is their own; it is the grassroots culture, rooted in the people themselves, passed down from generation to generation. Similarly, the culture of Rivendell and Lothlorien is authentically elvish, passed down through immemorial millennia. The culture of Rohan and Gondor, the culture of men, is itself authentic and distinct from the cultures of hobbits and elves, as they are distinct from each other. And then there is the enemy of this healthy cultural diversity, Mordor’s culture of death, which despises the cultural diversity of the peoples of Middle-earth, seeking to impose its own global brand or orcish ignobility, marked with the Eye of Sauron, on all people.
The death-culture of Mordor, like the death-culture of the Tech Tyranny, seeks to wipe out genuine cultural diversity, the multifarious fruits of the folk cultures of the free peoples of the world, each in their own hobbit-sized shires, in order to replace it with a one-size-fits-all “multicultural” monoculture in which nobody sings their own songs but everyone listens to globally marketed “world” music. This “multiculturalism” which the Tech Tyrant is imposing upon the Shire in Middle-earth and the shires of the world is nothing but the cultural imperialism of the globalist plutocracy. It ploughs down all the beautiful and multifarious flowers of authentic local and national culture, replacing it with one brand of bland monochromatic monoculture. It is the replacement of the spectrum of colours with fifty shades of grey.
It should go without saying that those with a modicum of freedom-loving sanity and wisdom will steer clear of this new “adaptation” of The Lord of the Rings, which might be likened to one of the palantír stones, the so-called seeing stones which allow the Dark Lord to feed his propaganda to anyone stupid enough to peer into them. Denethor spent so much time staring into one of these stones that he believed the Dark Lord’s victory to be inevitable, committing suicide in an act of abject despair. It is no coincidence that the word palantír means “far-seeing” and can be translated as television, which was surely Tolkien’s intention. Choosing to watch the Tech Tyrant’s palantír version of The Lord of the Rings is playing with fire. It is taking the Denethor option. It would be much better to make a silent protest against this latest desecration of Middle-earth by picking up a copy of Tolkien’s classic and reading or re-reading it. Doing so will not only shame the devil and his globalist servants, it will lead us closer to the God to whom Tolkien points in what he described as his “fundamentally religious and Catholic work”.
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