richard, I think the majority of images attached to tolkien are by alan lee (dale?) who was also involved with the movie sets. They’re very far from vallejo and D&D – D&D images are more aimed at the Dragonlance style of novels (which, incidentally, I would love to see as movies) and Vallejo at the Swords and Sorcery thing. I think that Alan Lee’s images suit most people’s vision of Tolkien quite well. I also don’t think that a sensitive reading of Tolkien’s dwarves and elves leads to a very “operatic” or D&D interpretation. If you read the old Middle Earth Role-playing books they have some beautiful pictures of elves in them, and they really do look like strange and alien creatures, not just short pretty girls like in D&D. To his credit, Peter Jackson tried to stick to this.

Also, if you scratch the demon then it’s hard to do that whole gotterdammerung Dore-meets Wagner sequence of falling out of the bottom of the world, which reminds your audience of the other Ring, and Tolkein’s affinity for a rather late 19th century Teutonic romantic sensibility. Personally, I find Tolkein’s position vis a vis this theatrical tradition of Germanic mythmaking one of the most interesting things about him. You can see him trying to excavate all these ideas for himself, trying to de-Grimm the folklore of his adoptive nation without merely recasting it in the image of his own age, but you can also see how those elves and dwarves resist his efforts, how the shreds of operatic costume cling to them. Jackson faces another iteration of the same problem, trying to wrest Tolkein away from the images of D&D and Boris Vallejo. I think the Balrog’s quite a smart response to all of that: it first appears as a D&D cliche, then Falls, evoking this older tradition, all in dreamy post-hoc narration, and is finally dismissed by Gandalf with a firm ‘to business.’

Don’t forget the surprisingly good TV adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven….

The sad thing is that Miyazaki Hayao asked Ms. le Guin years ago for the rights to WoE, and she said no because she wasn’t familiar with his work and thought “cartoon” meant disney. Ah, sometimes cultural ignorance is a terrible thing. Had he made Wizard of Earthsea in his prime (at the time of Nausicaa or even Spirited Away) we would finally have what the world needs.

But since it’s too late for that, I think Peter Jackson should drop all his other projects, suck in all the spare capital in the whole world, and finally make a perfect movie version of a perfect book.

And while we’re at it, maybe Ang Lee should make “The Left Hand of Darkness”, and that chap who did “Children of Men” could make “The Dispossessed”. Governments should mandate this sort of thing…

Speaking of Boyens, and speaking of The Hobbit, I am much more interested in knowing whether she is still on board than in who the director will be. She was the Tolkienist on the LotR project, which I believe she kept on track at important junctures.

Wasn’t his co-author on the script workin gon a version? Perhaps Sci-Fi channel ungodly fuck-up of novel screwed that deal.

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Hmmm … some combinations are worse than others. “Hercules vs Azathoth” might be campy, but “My Dinner with Nyarlathotep” (with Wallace Shawn, of course), well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.