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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Respite Open Thread: Do What You Love!

Respite Open Thread: Do What You Love!

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It always amused me that buttoned-up JRR’s I awoke and found me there on the cold hill side interlude, the brush with Wild Magic that leaves its victims shaken and confused, is… a couple of happy subsistence dwellers, who sow not, and yet reap all they need. The vasty halls and elves of otherworldly beauty, serious business; living in coexistence with the natural world, eerie!

BUT SRSLY…

From early reports, it is — well, not great. On the other hand, considering what its makers had to work with:

… Khraniteli (The Keepers) is based on the first novel in the Tolkien trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, but while readers may recognise the plot and the characters, this weirdly psychedelic Soviet reimagining is a very different experience from Peter Jackson’s epic film version a decade later.

To find out just how different, we spoke to Irina Nazarova, a Russian artist who saw Khraniteli when it first came out and was familiar with the arts scene which inspired it in Leningrad (Russia’s second city, now known again as St Petersburg)…

So how was your viewing experience this weekend?
Like all my friends, I felt shock and pity… It really was laughter through tears. Actually this was more about the fading away of the USSR than any adventures in Middle Earth [the imaginary world where the action unfolds in The Lord of the Rings].

Are Tolkien fans in for a lavish visual treat?
Nope. Zilch budget. Really not sure whether this version is The One To Rule Them All. I have my suspicions that at least some of the people who took part in this worked for free or paid for it themselves, like in a school pantomime, just to get it filmed. The costumes seem to have been assembled from all Leningrad theatres that ever staged a play by Shakespeare or Lope de Vega, which is why Gandalf [the wizard] looks like a knight errant and why Elrond [the elf ruler] pinched his outfit from Othello.

Sam [protagonist Frodo Baggins’ sidekick] has four eyebrows for some reason, while the puppet eagle which carries Gandalf to safety looks like a seagull that drank aviation fuel – maybe that’s why it flies like that?…

It was a desperate attempt to present a much-loved book [published in the UK in 1954] to the masses through the medium of television. They made it without anyone’s help. There was no money, there were no experts. People at that time would go for half a year without getting their wages paid and they didn’t know how they would feed their own children.

Bearing all that in mind, have a bit of mercy on the people who made this and give them credit for trying at least. I’m not sure anyone else could have done better in the circumstances…

Reader Interactions

90Comments

  2. 2.

    mali muso

    Good lord, I need a respite from my mom sending me idiotic anti-vaxx propaganda. I’ve already hidden her from my FB newsfeed so my blood pressure doesn’t have to take a hit seeing the nonsense she posts but she keeps dropping “facts” or amazing YouTube videos into messages. Whhhhyyyy!  I can’t engage with the idiocy, just ignore and delete, but it pisses me off that the zombies have gotten to her.

  5. 5.

    mali muso

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Yeah, sadly no. I have tried to provide her with actual facts, legitimate sources, etc but it never lands. I’ve also blown up at her on email a few times and told her to keep that shit to herself, but like a true believer, she eventually comes back to sending me stuff, convinced that this one miracle “study” or “expert” opinion will be the thing that makes me see the light.

    I hate the disinformation networks that have caused this stuff.

  6. 6.

    moops

    If Tolkien had an editor, Tom would not have made it into print.   I suspect that his initial readers of Book One assumed this over-developed character would play a role in later books.

     

    Tolkien himself might have written him in as a potential Deus Ex Machina if he wrote himself into a corner.  The Return of the King was still pretty roughly plotted when Fellowship was released.

  9. 9.

    dmsilev

    @mali muso: That’s a real shame. I can’t imagine our usual slate of vaccine jokes would be at all helpful, but maybe just the passing of time and the example of umpteen million other people getting the shots without ill effect might help?

  10. 10.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @mali muso: I can only imagine how sad and angry you must feel to lose your mom for these reasons and in such fashion. I have a RWNJ brother but at least so far, he still believes in science and his family is vaxxed. My good friend’s brother, who had a serious case of COVID, refuses to mask, attends a church with singing and no capacity limits, will not get vaxxed because the vaccines contain baby parts. There’s no way to reach him and she’s close to giving up trying. I’m so sorry.

  11. 11.

    NotMax

    Have not seen the Jackson versions and have no intention to do so. Do not care to interfere with, or worse, overwrite the intricate film which played out in the head when read the trilogy in the Ballantine paperbacks edition, coming up fast on 60 years ago.

    Incidentally,

    The week of Sept. 25 through Oct. 1 celebrates the multitude of books that have been either challenged, banned, or discriminated against due to the stories they contain. Among the list of books banned from libraries and school districts, most had complaints about vulgar language or sexually explicit scenes. However, one book in particular didn’t seem to fit the mold. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien, had been burned in 2001 because it was deemed as ‘satanic’. Source

  12. 12.

    mali muso

    @dmsilev: unfortunately her slide into the cult predated the pandemic. She was trying to send me gentle “helpful” articles about the dangers of my baby getting her regularly scheduled shots because of autism. Sigh. The past year has certainly turned up the dial on the whole thing.

  14. 14.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    I’ll bet the Soviet version is better and closer to the books than the Ralph Bakshi version which debuted in 1978 to great fanfare (Bakshi had kind of created a name for himself as an animator). I wanted to like it, I really did. But it was totally incomprehensible and stopped in the middle. I believe he ran out of money.

  15. 15.

    NotMax

    @dmsilev

    I think it boils down to misplaced blame. His brother David was an intravenous drug user (although died of an ingested overdose of drugs), therefore all needles bad.

  16. 16.

    JanieM

    @NotMax: You made the right decision. I did see the first two, and was annoyed; I’m not sure why I even bothered with the 2nd. My son told me I’d hate the third even more, so I didn’t bother. Luckily, the movie images went in one side of my brain and out the other. My original film still plays.

    I first read The Hobbit and LOTR in 1966, when I was 15 or 16. Read LOTR (but not always The Hobbit) roughly every year after that for 50 years, until I changed over to just sort of skimming here and there ad hoc.

  19. 19.

    Juju

    @mali muso: I feel for you. My brother in law, who is a TFG humper was not going to get the vaccination.  My sister asked his doctor what he thought about my BIL not getting a vaccination after three knee surgeries and a cancer surgery, at his most recent checkup. The doctor said my brother in law was nuts if he didn’t get a vaccination and he may not even need a doctor any longer if he doesn’t, because dead people don’t need doctors. My BIL signed up for his vaccination the following day and has gotten both as of a week ago.

    A good book for your mother to read would be “Vaccines did not cause Rachel’s Autism”, by Dr. Peter Hotez.  He knows about this stuff.  I found an interview about his book.

    https://www.tmc.edu/news/2018/11/a-vaccine-doctor-whos-an-autism-dad/

  20. 20.

    PST

    I know everyone has seen this, but I never get tired of it.

    There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

  21. 21.

    Just One More Canuck

    Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth I took a Russian film appreciation course at university  – the Russian department was desperate to juice its enrollment numbers – you’d watch a movie every week, listen to a short lecture (like the intros on TCM) and write a short essay.  Unfortunately, this never made it to Victoria.  It seems gloriously bad

  23. 23.

    Felanius Kootea

    “Rah-rah-rasputin Russia’s greatest love machine.  It was a shame how he carried on…” This takes me back to awkward childhood parties in Ibadan. Ah…Boney M.

  27. 27.

    Geoduck

    For any fans of The Hobbit out there, I do recommend the Rankin-Bass animated version done in the 70s. They managed to cram a surprisingly faithful adaptation into a fairly short runtime, and the voice talent is quite good. Well, OK, the guy playing Bard is pretty wooden, but nothing’s ever perfect.

    And there’s reason that every single adaptation of TLotRs to date has left out Bombadil.

  28. 28.

    dmsilev

    Speaking of respites… Today is, roughly speaking, my Day of Semblance of Normalcy, ie two weeks after my second vaccine dose. After doing the due diligence to assuage a year of paranoia (local case rate, safety protocols, outdoor table spacing, blah blah blah), I celebrated by …eating dinner at a restaurant. First time in about fourteen months. It felt damn good.

    May everyone here have their DoSoN soon.

  29. 29.

    ThresherK

    As a youth I read lots of library books about the history of movies and TV, written largely in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

    I’m amazed and grateful to live long enough that so many items listed in a 50-year-old book as considered lost have been recovered.

  30. 30.

    dmsilev

    @ThresherK: The one I’ve always liked is the recovery of a nearly complete version of Metropolis about fifteen or so years ago, found in an archive in South America and then very carefully restored.

  32. 32.

    marcopolo

    So it’s a local election night in StL City & County.  Just dropping in to announce a bunch of progressives flipped enough seats on the St Louis Board of Alderman tonight (thinking 5) to take control of the city’s legislative branch.  This was a well planned out in the open campaign.  A lot of folks worked hard to make it happen & I am looking forward to seeing what change will now occur regarding zoning & other stuff.

    There is also a very close contest for mayor between 2 women (both single mothers!):  with 2/3 of the vote in the margin is like 51%-49%.  No idea how that turns out

    Edited to add they just called the mayoral race for Tishaura Jones.  St Louis now has it’s first ever AA woman mayor!  About time.  Woot.

  33. 33.

    Kay

    Taniel
    @Taniel
    JUST IN: a progressive win in Wisconsin.
    Jill Underly, a progressive who was supported by teacher’s unions, has won WI’s statewide election for school superintendent against Deb Kerr. (who was backed by Scott Walker & the charter school network associated with Betsy DeVos).

    Beat Betsy DeVos

    Again :)

  36. 36.

    dmsilev

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Everyone has their own comfort level. I’ve done takeout a whole bunch of times, but this was the first sit-down meal in a long while. A week or so from now, I’m going to get on an airplane and go visit family, another normally banal activity that feels like a big deal.

  38. 38.

    randy khan

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:

    The Bakshi version was supposed to be two movies.  IIRC, it ends with Helm’s Deep.*  It flopped, so there was no money for the second movie.

    *I may not remember it right – I saw in just once, in the theater after it was released.  Not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, as I sat all the way through Dune at the midnight showing on opening night.

  39. 39.

    randy khan

    @JanieM:

    But how many times have you read the Silmarillion?

    At some point I got it in my head to read the books in order – Silmarillion, Hobbit, LOTR.  Big mistake.  Then I read LOTR followed by the Silmarillion.  The Silmarillion made a lot more sense after LOTR than before.  Kind of like how you should watch Star Wars IV, V, I, II, III, VI instead of I-VI in order.

  43. 43.

    Arclite

    Moscow Mitch, “Stay out of politics, except for donations.”

    McConnell said during a stop at a health clinic in Kentucky that, given the heated divisions that currently American politics, “If I were running a major corporation, I would stay out of politics,” adding that they are “irritating a hell of a lot of Republican fans.”

    But McConnell hedged, stating that businesses have “a right to participate in the political process,” specifying that he’s “not talking about political contributions” in his warnings, calling them “fine, it’s legal, it’s appropriate. I support that.”

  44. 44.

    JanieM

    @randy khan: Agree. I hadn’t run across this strand of BJ strong opinions before. I’m glad you spoke up, I don’t feel so uncool now. ;-)

  48. 48.

    Craig

    @randy khan: I’m reading Narn I Hîn Húrin right now. The tales of The First Age fascinate me. On just about any day Beren and Luthien’s tale is my favorite story in the world.

  49. 49.

    PJ

    @randy khan:

     

    @JanieM: in longer novels, the peculiarities that the author indulges in are the fat that gives the meat its flavor.  It’s ok if Bombadil doesn’t float everyone’s boat.  I’m not that into flowers, or wallpaper, or women’s couture, but Proust is, and when I read In Search of Lost Time, I got to learn a lot about a lot of things that interested Marcel, and because he was so insightful about human folly, I was glad to listen to his other interests.

  50. 50.

    Mary G

    @dmsilev: Congratulations! I went to Easter dinner at my dear honorary Mom Maureen’s house for the first time since Christmas 2019, and hugged her twice. It was heaven.

    I have no plans to go anywhere, but it is so nice to know that I can.

  51. 51.

    Benw

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I have a good friend who’s fine without Bombadil, but swears leaving out Frodo’s encounter with the wights at the barrow-downs is great sacrilege. Nerds, man :)

  52. 52.

    Ked

    I don’t hate Tom the Bomb because he’s a hippie living off the land. I hate him because he steps into a narrative that’s been (very, very) slowly gathering dramatic steam and shoves dozens of pages of “look how clever and witty Mr. Tolkien is with the poems and songs and (to a lesser degree) allusion” down our throats. It’s massively dispiriting.

    Something like this showing up much later in the books, reviving Frodo and Sam’s spirits as they struggle on the fringes of Mordor, might have been well-taken. (It might have been an interesting recursive metaphor for the books themselves.) In the first book, where it’s not even a proper deus ex machina, where all it does is destroy my confidence it the writer, no thank you.

  53. 53.

    Mousebumples

    @Kay: hell yeah! ? I voted for her, and it’s nice to have an election called before ,so I can sleep more easily. ?

  57. 57.

    oatler.

    A late-night TV wag about avoiding the Hobbit movies: “If I want to see hairy feet I’ll look down.”

  58. 58.

    West of the Rockies

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym:

    I felt that way about Wizards.  The first half hour was intriguing, but a big chunk of the end was clunky rotoscope nonsense.  Probably helps to be a bit buzzed while watching.

  59. 59.

    JoyceH

    @Ked: ​
     

    I don’t hate Tom the Bomb because he’s a hippie living off the land. I hate him because he steps into a narrative that’s been (very, very) slowly gathering dramatic steam and shoves dozens of pages of “look how clever and witty Mr. Tolkien is with the poems and songs and (to a lesser degree) allusion” down our throats. It’s massively dispiriting.

    Too many modern writers in both novels and movies have the opposite problem – they start out with a hero in a bad situation, and then they make it worse – and then they make it worse – and then they make it worse – etc etc. It becomes downright stressful and unpleasant to read/watch.

    Even way back to Shakespeare, writers knew to throw in a humorous gravedigger or two even into a high body count tragedy. Tolkien does the same. Danger danger danger, whew, we made it to Rivendell. Danger danger danger, whew, we made it to Lothlorien. The reader recuperates along with the heroes.

  60. 60.

    beef

    I tended to like the Bombadil interlude, for the quiet moment it affords the hobbits.  The dream Frodo has of the rain curtain opening on the West is a beautiful piece of foreshadowing.   As for Bombadil himself:  Tolkien needed something to get the hobbits safely to Bree — he had already laid out the map in the Hobbit, and he wouldn’t have been Tolkien if he hadn’t cared about the logistics of the journey — but he also needed the character to be inconsequential in the rest of the story.  So we get Bombadil, master of his little domain and uninterested in anything else.   Gandalf basically dismisses him at the council of Elrond.

  61. 61.

    Beautifulplumage

    Wasn’t there a LOTR using animation over live acting, sometime in the 70’s?

  62. 62.

    West of the Rockies

    @oatler.:

    Cole, is that you?

    (We’ve been provided several feet photos when JC is taking pics of this four-legged friends.)

  63. 63.

    Felanius Kootea

    @karen marie: Oh nice – I have a lot of ISI friends; many of my friends from primary school went there. One of my closest friends ran relays for Osun house. Didn’t know anyone in Ogun.

    I grew up on the UI campus but insisted on going off to boarding school elsewhere because I thought my life was going to be UI Staff School -> ISI -> UI and then teaching at UI like my parents. I decided that I didn’t want to spend my whole life on one university campus (had no idea we’d later move to the US). Boney M at Ibadan parties was all the rage between 1979 and the early 80s.

  68. 68.

    James E Powell

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I cannot tell you how tedious I find Tom Bombadil

    Every time I’ve re-read The Fellowship of the Ring, I scan through that section at top speed barely reading the words.

  70. 70.

    NotMax

    @Beautifulplumage

    That was the Ralph Bakshi version, using the rotoscope process. Not entirely successfully as there are scenes where one can see hints of the live actors underneath the animation, but an interesting experiment. Technically speaking, Bakshi got better at the process of rotoscoping with Fire & Ice.

    Incidentally, Bakshi turned down the offer to direct what would become Blade Runner, at which point the studio offered it to Ridley Scott.

  71. 71.

    Anne Laurie

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I cannot tell you how tedious I find Tom Bombadil

    Well, that’s kinda Tolkien’s point:  There are beguiling distractions in the world which can seduce the hero from his Great Quest.

    In the classic Gaelic myths JRR was invoking, the beguiling distraction was an underground palace where beautiful, ageless, souless Sidhe feasted forever.

    In Lord of the Rings, it’s… hippies!

    (Little did the good professor know he’d only be encouraging that feckless, happy tribe when the bootlegged paperbacks came out in America. )

    @Beautifulplumage: Wasn’t there a LOTR using animation over live acting, sometime in the 70’s?

    That’s the Bakshi version too many people here are abusing.  I really liked Ralph’s ideas — if only because he gave us the Aragorn (John Hurt) of my personal imagining — but he was fighting the backers for every penny, and those cowards pulled back at the worst possible point in production.

    Wonderful things might’ve been done with animated LOTRs, but I suspect Jackson’s bloated baggy no-thrillogy killed those chances, outside of very personal film-school projects.

  72. 72.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @beef: Nice take.

    I like Tom B, myself. Agree that he wouldn’t translate well to film, though.

  74. 74.

    Sloegin

    The Harvard Lampoon did a very good sendup of Bombadil in their parody _Bored of the Rings_, and gave the always stoned pill peddler the name of Tim Benzedrine.

    It’s a very dated work now, with loads of the references being nigh-unfathomable unless you lived in the 60s and 70s, but for those in the know, it’s a howler of a book.

  75. 75.

    cain

    @Ked:

    I don’t hate Tom the Bomb because he’s a hippie living off the land. I hate him because he steps into a narrative that’s been (very, very) slowly gathering dramatic steam and shoves dozens of pages of “look how clever and witty Mr. Tolkien is with the poems and songs and (to a lesser degree) allusion” down our throats. It’s massively dispiriting.

    I think I would have liked  an added scene similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark when an assassin shows up giving a lovely display of swordsmanship and Indy just shoots him. I’d like the same ending please. Maybe the Nazgul gets him and then drops him like a seagull does to a crab.

  76. 76.

    NotMax

    @NotMax

    By the by, the rotoscope process came out of the Fleischer studios, which first used it early in the 20th century, still in the silent era, coming to full big screen fruition (IMHO) with 1939’s Gulliver’s Travels and the 1940s Superman cartoons.

  77. 77.

    cain

    @Anne Laurie:

    In the classic Gaelic myths JRR was invoking, the beguiling distraction was an underground palace where beautiful, ageless, souless Sidhe feasted forever.

    Oh great – it’s the Hotel California distraction.

  79. 79.

    Beautifulplumage

    I too failed to get through the Silmarillion, but he caught my imagination with the creation myth prolog; I’ve always wanted to hear the music it describes.

  80. 80.

    Joey Maloney

    Tim, Tim Benzedrine/Hash, boo, Valvoline/Clean, clean, clean for Gene/First, second, neutral, park/Hie thee hence, thou leafy narc!

    I, too, had a SoND yesterday. It was unseasonably warm so I walked up to the beach shack and sat down to enjoy an overpriced margarita and some indifferently fried fish. First restaurant experience for me since the Before Times.

  82. 82.

    dimmsdale

    @Feathers:  AGREED! Didn’t know it was on YT, but a Russian friend let me borrow her box set, and yep. Very well acted, fascinating locations, kind of 90s VHS look to it from a lighting standpoint. Subtitles, of course–the only spoken words I understood were “Meestair Homes” (as the Watson character was fond of saying).

  84. 84.

    Tehanu

    @randy khan:  Me too.  I totally disagree with the idea that every part of a story must “advance” the plot.  The whole point of the Bombadil episode is to reinforce the reasons to fight Sauron et al. — to actually show the good lives and homes being defended.

  85. 85.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Anne Laurie: ​
     

    In Lord of the Rings, it’s… hippies!

    Hash, boo, Valvoline!

    Wonderful things might’ve been done with animated LOTRs, but I suspect Jackson’s bloated baggy no-thrillogy killed those chances, outside of very personal film-school projects.

    Wasn’t thinking specifically about animation, but that was my reaction to the Jackson trilogy at the time: that it killed the chances of a good screen adaptation of LOTR being done for at least another generation.

    And it bugged the hell out of me at the time that everyone seemed to think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, while I thought it was a disappointment. It’s a relief to find out here in this thread that I was far from alone.

  86. 86.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Kay: Beat Betsy DeVos

    Not like a rented mule, with a rented mule**, dropped on her from a great height, then winched back up and dropped again – blather, reince, repeat until the crane gets tired or bored.

    ** We specify that the mule had previously expired and been stuffed with marbles, so that no animal was harmed in this exercise in political payback…

  88. 88.

    Connor

    @Anne Laurie: 

    That’s the Bakshi version too many people here are abusing. I really liked Ralph’s ideas — if only because he gave us the Aragorn (John Hurt) of my personal imagining — but he was fighting the backers for every penny, and those cowards pulled back at the worst possible point in production.

    Not exactly. Saul Zaentz got Warner Brothers to pump a lot of money in, but Bakshi had never done a project this big and made a lot of money-wasting mistakes along the way. Still, the second half would have been produced if the first had done decent business. It didn’t, so Zaentz and Warner Brothers very quickly pulled the “to be continued” screen at the end, flipped some material around, and added a voiceover that made it sound like Helms Deep was the end of the story.

    In 1976 I interviewed Bakshi about the project for one of the magazines I wrote for. At the time Ralph was ballyhooing this super-secret NEW way of animating that he was using, and how it was going to revolutionize the industry. While I walked through the Los Angeles production office on the way to meet him, I saw what the animators were busy doing: rotoscoping. So the interview with Ralph begins, and it is going really well. He’s excited and eager and enjoying himself. About 30 minutes into the scheduled hour I thought I had enough of his trust to ask the obvious question: “Ralph, this secret new method of animation…it’s just rotoscoping, right?” He instantly clouded over, said “Absolutely not,” and then ended the interview early just a couple of minutes later.

    Wonderful things might’ve been done with animated LOTRs, but I suspect Jackson’s bloated baggy no-thrillogy killed those chances, outside of very personal film-school projects.

    Once upon a time, the idea of computer animation was pure science fiction. So much so, in fact, that in 1967 Vernor Vinge wrote a story called “The Accomplice” that has a computer company employee stealing mainframe time to sneakily animate an entire movie based on THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It was published in Worlds of If.

    Here’s a link to the story on the Internet Archive:

    https://archive.org/details/1967-04_IF/page/n117/mode/2up

  89. 89.

    Miss Bianca

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Way late to the party, but I feel a need to defend Tom Bombadil. Yeah, Tolkien did him a disservice by giving him all that “hoppity-go-kick” doggerel to spew, but I always loved the notion of a being in Middle Earth that the Ring had no power over, so I’ve always been inclined to give him a pass. Plus, he saves Our Heroes from Old Man Willow, so there’s something.

    Also, since there is such a desperate dearth of female characters in LOTR, I always welcomed the fact that at least Tom Bombadil had Goldberry by his side.

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