If you’ve been Puttin’ the Blog in Balrog this summer, and taking part in the group read of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, you may have been brave enough to take part in the live-tweeted movie drinkalongs organized by SJ.
Every Friday, whoever uses the hashtag #PtBiB can join in for an hour of snark (and drinking). This past Friday marked the third week, so the group is done with Peter Jackson’s version of The Fellowship of the Ring.
It’s often said by readers, “The book is always better.” But is it? Are some works of literature impossible to translate to such a visual medium as film? Or do they just need some tweaking to let their stories run free on the silver screen?
I wrote this piece some years ago; my opinion still stands, though I’m interested to hear what readers and fans of Tolkien have to say, since I’m well aware opinion is divided on what Jackson did with Tolkien’s work.
Tolkien began working on the stories that would form the history and mythology of his Middle-earth while still a young man; he even worked on it sporadically as a soldier in the First World War. So those tales, eventually collected posthumously as The Silmarillion, are properly the beginning of the story of Middle-earth.
