"Is Martin Freeman too ordinary to play the title role of The Hobbit?"
This question posed by an anonymous author in theTelegraph Online got me thinking not just about Tolkien's book but also about something his friend C.S. Lewis once wrote:
"... the more unusual the scenes and events of a story are, the slighter, the more ordinary, the more typical the writer's persons should be. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice a commonplace little girl. It they had been more remarkable they would have wrecked their books ... To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much. He who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange." (from the essay "On science fiction" with minor adaptations)
Is this why outrageously improbable films starring James Stewart and Matt Damon work so much better than those with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams? Is is that just because Carrey and Williams are irritating?
Going back to Tolkien's 1937 book, even at the time it was written, the author was well on the way to inventing a complex make-belief world with its own history, its own languages, its own geneaologies. As Lewis puts it in his book review for the Times Literary Supplement of the same year, Tolkien "obviously knows much more about [his characters] than he needs for this tale".
And yet, this doesn't alter the fact that the tone of the earlier book is quite different from that of the three volumes that were later (17 years later) to be published as The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, as Lewis writes in his review of The Fellowship of the Ring for Time and Tide in 1954, "The Hobbit was merely a fragment torn from the author's huge myth and adapted for children; inevitably losing something by the adaptation".
The hobbits are simple folk living an idealised life (smoking their pipes, eating, drinking, quarelling with each other and, naturally, being waited on hand and foot by their womenfolk) in the type of rural paradise that Tolkien ached for as he saw large swathes of the English midlands being chewed up for development by machines. (It's not difficult to see the inspiration for his Orcs and super-Orcs, the Uruk-hai, and for their evil human and sub-human masters.)
So, taking the straight man from The Office and making him Bilbo Baggins seems good casting to me. What matters is whether this Everyman can act, and that he undoubtedly can.
This question posed by an anonymous author in the
"... the more unusual the scenes and events of a story are, the slighter, the more ordinary, the more typical the writer's persons should be. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice a commonplace little girl. It they had been more remarkable they would have wrecked their books ... To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much. He who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange." (from the essay "On science fiction" with minor adaptations)
Is this why outrageously improbable films starring James Stewart and Matt Damon work so much better than those with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams? Is is that just because Carrey and Williams are irritating?
Going back to Tolkien's 1937 book, even at the time it was written, the author was well on the way to inventing a complex make-belief world with its own history, its own languages, its own geneaologies. As Lewis puts it in his book review for the Times Literary Supplement of the same year, Tolkien "obviously knows much more about [his characters] than he needs for this tale".
And yet, this doesn't alter the fact that the tone of the earlier book is quite different from that of the three volumes that were later (17 years later) to be published as The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, as Lewis writes in his review of The Fellowship of the Ring for Time and Tide in 1954, "The Hobbit was merely a fragment torn from the author's huge myth and adapted for children; inevitably losing something by the adaptation".
The hobbits are simple folk living an idealised life (smoking their pipes, eating, drinking, quarelling with each other and, naturally, being waited on hand and foot by their womenfolk) in the type of rural paradise that Tolkien ached for as he saw large swathes of the English midlands being chewed up for development by machines. (It's not difficult to see the inspiration for his Orcs and super-Orcs, the Uruk-hai, and for their evil human and sub-human masters.)
So, taking the straight man from The Office and making him Bilbo Baggins seems good casting to me. What matters is whether this Everyman can act, and that he undoubtedly can.
4 comments:
Given that the Second World War intervened between the publication of The Hobbit and that of Lord of the Rings, it's not unreasonable to assume that the darker tone of the latter was influenced by this event = though Tolkien was too good a writer to make the link overt. Certainly The Shire is an idealised version of the rural England of Tolkien's childhood; but by the same token, Tolkien's vision of the inhuman land of Mordor cannot fail to owe something to the horrors of Dachau and Auschwitz.
His own experiences in WWI (in which many of his friends died), his hatred of the killing machines of WWII, his feelings about "total war" (the carpet bombing of German cities as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki), his hatred of Communists (one of his letters expresses support for Franco's Nationalists after he heard that Soviet-trained Republican squads were destroying churches and murdering priests and nuns) - all these may have played a part in his thinking and writing, in his life-long invented mythology.
Some people think the ring represents the Atomic bomb but of course it couldn't because it just didn't exist when Tolkien came up with the idea in the 30s (or maybe even before then). As Tolkien himself said in response to the latest theory about the genesis of and motivation for his work, his Middle-earth "legendarium" was conceived long before even the October Revolution of 1917.
Tolkien's views on Spain seem contradictory given that Franco supported the Nazi war machine, and the Spanish church largely supported him. I'd prefer to take Orwell as a reliable guide to the rights and wrongs of that conflict - he fought against Franco, but also saw the Communists doing as much to destroy their Republican allies as the Fascists they were supposedly united against.
He was certainly a complicated person, but the influence of his Roman Catholicism on his views should not be underestimated. The atheistic foundations of Communism would have coloured his view of the whole enterprise.
Post a Comment