At the very least, it’s forced New Line to break their vow never to work with Peter Jackson again, and Jackson his own vow never to direct another bloody hobbit picture. And while this first serving of the Jackson version is still an astounding warg’s breakfast, the film adaptation’s epic journey from there to back again has managed to burgle some unexpected treasure from the hoard. The Hobbit was a strange book to start with, and only got more so after Tolkien started fiddling with it to force it into coherence with the larger story of Sauron’s quest for the Ring. But the actual 1944 rewrite of “Riddles in the Dark” (incorporated by a happy mixup into the 1951 and subsequent editions), and the subsequent well-documented smaller changes to the text, are all but incidental to this story, which centres instead on matters that never made it into the book at all: above all, the retrospective expansion of the single sentence explaining Gandalf’s detour to eject the Necromancer from Dol Guldur (which Tolkien admitted in correspondence was merely an ad hoc contrivance to take Gandalf out of the story for nine chapters) into the climax of a 2000-year prequel to the War of the Ring.
What do You think about Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013?
