The Hobbit

    It is my opinion that far and away the best thing about the Peter Jackson film version of the Hobbit is Sylvester McCoy as Ratagast the Brown.   Mr. McCoy beloved of Whovians as the most Chaplinesque doctor since Patrick Trouten and the most charming since Tom Baker, equaled only by Matt Smith in the current era, is the ultimate hippie psychedelic back to the land phantasy.  Rattagast as played by Mr. McCoy is equal parts Doctor Who and Doctor Doolittle and is a PETA members dream guy as he heals cute little animals while herocially saving the world while tripping on some good 'shrums....and yes that is clearly stated in the script by a snarky Sarumin the White brilliantly portrayed by Christopher Lee at his most villainous.
      Readers of this blog will be familiar with a nasty little statement from Tolkien's editor and son, Christopher Tolkien complaining about the liberties that were taken with his father's work, and his resentment that people are less interested in reading difficult epic verse such as The Lays of Belelerand which only an English Lit major can understand never mind appreciate, than in seeing the familiar characters that they've loved since childhood.
     The fact is that, although J.R. R. Tolkien clearly saw himself as the creator of a uniquely English mythology in a tour de force of Oxford don scholarship, he will be remembered and loved for his most accessible works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  There is a perfectly sensible explanation why this is the case.   Only in these novels and a couple of excellent shorter works such as Farmer Giles of Ham does Tolkien use amusing dialogue and create fully realised characters rather than mere sketches of heroic figures drawn from poems along the lines of Beowulf and The Song of Roland, which few people read unless forced to by an English teacher.  I wish the reader to understand, that I love these things, but I was an English major and I know how marginal this sort of thing is to mainstream culture from bitter experience.
     Neither the elder (deceased) nor the younger (in his eighties) Tolkien ever understood the Tolkien audience.   This is clearly illustrated by the elder Tolkien preventing  the Beatles from making a movie of The Lord of the Rings with John as Gollum, Paul as Frodo, Ringo as Sam and George as Gandalf back in the mid  sixties.    Every long haired dope smoking kid in every school in America had a paperback copy of one of Tolkien's book in his or her backpack, and Tolkien only referred to his hippie fans as 'my lamentable cultus.'
     It did my heart good to see the casual hippie jokes about mushrooms and implied marijuana smoking acknowledging the importance of said cultus.  Tolklien did not approve of the Beatles making movies and Led Zepplin writing songs taken from his work but this is a very sad thing.  What this means is that J.R. R. Tolkien was incapable of accepting love from a younger generation that adored him.   This is yet another example of how damaged our society was and remains by the generation gap of the 1960's.
      Oddly enough this generation gap existed at all specifically because World War II, like the War of the Rings destroyed the old world and created a new one.  How sad that in his determination to preserve the sanctity of his ivory tower, Tolkien failed to recognise his fictional creations when they stepped out of his novels to approach him for an autograph.