Being a Tolkien fan is all about the reading experience

It occurred to me the other day that I could probably be classified as a bit of a Tolkien fan. I’ve been soaking up Tolkien’s books ever since I was about 10.

I had to pose in the entrance of the 2012 Hobbit Artisan Market in Wellington …but that’s the limit of geek, for me.

I must have read The Lord Of The Rings a dozen times or more. The Hobbit as often. I have the maps, I saw the movies, and I went to the exhibition of movie props.

But I wouldn’t call myself a total Tolkien fan. I don’t dress up in the costumes – you know, green cloaks that render you invisible against green grass, green rocks, green water, green sky etc.

My copy of The Lord Of The Rings is from three different editions. Nor do I collect memorabilia, or go to Armageddon comic-con gatherings to ogle merchandise and be photographed beside the guy who swept the studio floor on alternate Sundays while they were shooting out-takes for The Return of the King.

It is a limited kind of enthusiasm; and I also view what Tolkien did in a literary sense with a suitably critical eye; he wasn’t perfect, and he wrote a lot of stuff the hard way.

So what is it, for me? Well, it’s the reading experience. Tolkien created a world that became real for the reader. He did it by description – if you open The Lord Of The Rings at virtually any page, you’ll find evocative descriptions of the settings – the sounds, the smells, the feel.

He did it by depth; his world was rich with its own mythology and history, rich with culture, with language, with peoples of all kinds, all of them carefully described.

Not actually Rohan. Tussock and Echium – Patterson’s Curse, in the top of Lindis Pass.

He did it with scope; his themes struck chords with the very heart of western thinking, western mythology, and western culture; epic battles between good and evil, between right and wrong. Clear-cut, scarcely shaded in any greys.

And he did it by giving us heroes we could identify with – not Aragorn, who was the archetypal mythic  hero; but the hobbits, who were ordinary, everyday folk. Effectively, people like us – people who we could identify with and journey with, who became heroic.

A message of hope, swathed in all the things that speak to our sense of culture, right, wrong – and place.

That’s why I like Tolkien. Have you read his books? What draws you to them – for you, is it the reading experience, or something else?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up: more writing tips, humour geekery and other stuff.

Sixty second writing tips: how J K Rowling twisted the tropes

One of the secrets to successful writing is offering something readers can identify with, but that has enough originality to be new. The same…but different.

Modern meets fantasy in another way – a pic I took a few years back of Kastel de Haar, near Utrecht, Netherlands.

J. K. Rowling’s shown us how it’s done. Back in the 1990s, Brit boarding school stories were dead, dead, dead. The world of ripping wheezes at the expense of The Beak, followed by clandestine visits to the tuck shop  with Bunter Major, was soooo 1930s.

Trad magic stories were pretty much dead too – I mean, spells, wizards and potions were so cliched. Put together, they should have worked even less well.

What Rowling did was genius – mashing up two cliches and giving them a twist. That came partly from the way she reinterpreted the spell-and wand trope, partly from the seven-story plot cycle, and partly from her style – easy, unadorned and well pitched for the readership. And now writing has its first billionaire author.

Time for the rest of us to follow suit. But not with school magic mashups. They’ve been done…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 17: Tolkien’s lessons about writing a best seller

How do novels become not just sellers, but best sellers – and hyper-sellers?

Hobbit Market, November 2012. I had to lie prone to take this picture. ‘Get up,’ She Who Must Be Obeyed insisted. ‘People will think you’re dead.’

Quality’s important, but not always a criteria. Seldom have I read a novel as incompetently researched and clumsily styled as The Of Vinci Code (I know what I said). I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, nor do I want to, but I’m sure somebody’ll comment about what I am told is, well, derivative dribble.

I posted the other week about how genre becomes popular because it keys into changing social ideals – and last week about how types of genre become specifically popular on the back of particular social trends.

The best-sellers are the ones who float to the top of those heaps. The thing is, they’re usually transient. But every so often a book transcends that – becomes not just a best seller, but a lasting best seller. A classic.

Something everybody has at least heard of – even if they haven’t read it – and which stays in the public mind for years – even decades.

Like The Lord Of The Rings. In just a few heady years during the late 1960s,  J R R Tolkien’s epic effectively mainstreamed fantasy. His mythos was embedded in western popular literature even before Peter Jackson’s movies (filmed in my country and my city, bwahahahaha) catapulted his creation to stratospheric popularity.

Hobbit market, November 2012 – Tolkien, mainstreamed.

An astonishing achievement for a modest and retiring Oxford don who had to be nudged into finishing anything for a publisher.

Tolkien never planned it that way. His publishers didn’t anticipate it either. The book he presented Allen & Unwin with in the early 1950s was barely publishable – they broke it into three parts to spread the risk, and a glance at early print runs reveals it shifted only a few thousand copies.

Then, in the mid-1960s, it took off. Kicked into life by a pirated American edition, followed by Tolkien’s authorised edition. It kept on selling. And on. And on. And on….

What happened?

His themes struck chords with a new generation, particularly the idealised pre-industrial England of the Shire and the hippified, natural Earth-spirit lifestyle of Tom Bombadil. The link between Bombadil and counter-culture values was lampooned with all the subtlety of a sledge-hammer in Bored Of The Rings.

Rohan. No – central Otago. No, Rohan…oh, I give up…

This was a generation that read a lot of fantasy, partly because fantasy had become an element of their fabric of escape. Tolkien met their need on both counts. Genre tastes, in short, had caught up, though his own motives were different in many respects (eerily, also similar – every generation found reason to object to industrialisation).

Other authors tried to imitate him. Tolkien, in short, had created a new genre, about a generation ahead of its time.

Hutt River or Anduin. Well, maybe the houses are the give-away.

As if that wasn’t wonderful enough, the book gained an enduring public audience. Part of that was due to the way that 1960s youth ideals were mainstreamed. Part of it was the scope of Tolkien’s vision, engaging symbolisms at a fundamental level. And that wasn’t surprising. He was trying to write Britain’s missing mythology; he wrote to fundamental themes – capturing our cultural framework in soaring battles between total good and utter evil; the symbolisms of mythic heroism.

All was given a dimension that ordinary people could identify with, through the ordinariness of the hobbits – little folk who, inevitably, were more heroic than anybody could imagine.

A stunning achievement. And not something that can be easily repeated – certainly, I suspect, not by design.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next time: getting down to the nuts and bolts of novel writing.  More humour, more writing tips – and, well, more. Watch this space.

Write it now, part 15: the rise and rise of the genre monster

One of the big literary inventions of the nineteenth century was one that transformed the novel-writing scene. Genre.

When novels first emerged in the early part of the century they were, as often as not, social commentaries. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was typical. So were Charles Dickens’ various stories. They were joined by others that we might , indeed, call ‘genre’ – notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But for a long while these things were few and far between.

Jules Verne, public domain from Wikimedia.

That changed with the commercialisation of novel writing – with the advent of the steam driven printing press, with the advent of mechanisms for mass-producing and mass-selling novels to the rising urban middle classes of the developing world who had the leisure time – and the spare cash – to buy books and then read them.

One of the earliest genres was science fiction, a device for social commentary. Jules Verne introduced the world to it, using his ‘science fiction’ stories –really, travel romances – to lampoon national cliches; German stern-ness and order (Professor Lidenbrock/Journey To The Centre of The Earth), American go-getting (From the Earth to the Moon) and British reserve (Phileas Fogg/Around The World In Eighty Days) among them.

H. G. Wells used science fiction for social commentary towards the end of the century. When five British Maxim gun crews slaughtered 1500 spear-wielding Matabele at the Battle of the Shangani river in October 1893 – and another 2500 a week or so later at Bembese - the world was horrified.  ‘Whatever happens/we have got/the Maxim gun/and they have not,’ Hilaire Belloc intoned in The Modern Traveller, a little later. From that also emerged Wells’s The War Of The Worlds, a remarkably slim book pivoting on one question; how would the British feel if a superior technology descended upon London?

Detective stories flourished. Conan Doyle effectively popularised and defined the ‘short story’ format for them at the end of the nineteenth century – giving the world one of its most iconic and enduring literary characters in the process.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, Americans thrilled to their own genre – westernsl, celebrating the myths of frontier. A form epitomised by Zane Grey, who spent periods big-game fishing in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands.

The point was that popular genres changed as society changed. Cowboy stories went in and out, detective stories rose and fell. Science fiction, which began life for social satire and comment, retained that function into the twentieth century – but became a way of popularising tech-wonders.

If anything, genre change is moving at hyper-speed on the back of the web revolution.  We have to keep up with – and ahead of – the trend if we’re to succeed.

Urban fantasy, anyone?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now, part 13: novels and novelability

In this series we’ve been exploring writing in all its forms. Today we’re starting a detailed look at one of the most popular forms of writing – fiction.

Jane Austen. Public domain, from http://www.wpclipart.com/famous/writer/writers_A_to_D/ Jane_Austen_coloured_version.jpg.html

Fiction, and particularly novel writing, is the writing that attracts the most interest. It’s where most people start. I was trained in it myself, way back when. Most ‘how to write’ training today is geared towards fiction, and I’ve noticed that a lot of online discussion is predicated on the assumption that any book being written will, by default, be a novel.

Not all books are, of course. But it’s true about a lot of the books that are written these days – and certainly that’s true of the books being self-published on Amazon.

Fiction is also where the money is. The only billionaire author, and most of its millionaires, are novellists.

So where did the ‘novel’ come from? The form we know and love today emerged in the late eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift had something to do with it. So did Jane Austen – she, in fact, is often regarded as the inventor of the novel in its modern form. That’s not quite true. But certainly she helped shape it. Specifically, she found new ways of engaging reader emotion – she created interesting characters and set them to interact on a stage identifiable to the audience.

In her classic Pride and Prejudice (1813) the main emotion was – well, pride. By modern standards Austen’s style was pompous, even clunky. Check this out:

“She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so  great man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her was still  more strange. She could only imagine however, at last, that she drew his notice  because there was a something about her more wrong and reprehensible, according  to his ideas of right, than in any other person present…” (Pride and Prejudice, 1813)

But that was perfectly acceptable in that age; Austen was a great novelist, a great story teller, and we can but lament at the way her premature death cut short her career.

Nor was Austen alone. In 1816, Mary Shelley took novel writing in different directions with Frankenstein, effectively a foray into science fiction. Novels, it seemed, did not have to be ‘real’ in order to engage their reader – indeed, one of their appeals was that they allowed readers to escape.

By the early nineteenth century, then, the modern novel was fairly on its way. Understanding how the novel journeyed over the next 200-odd years is handy to know if we want to write one – because it allows us to understand how the form has always been shaped in the specific by contemporary need, contemporary ideal – and it is still changing. Next week.

Meanwhile, do you have thoughts on why novels are such a popular first stop for people wanting to write? The creative urge? Expression of a story? All these things? I’d love to hear from you.

And have any of you seen  ’Ink and Incapability’, from Blackadder The Third (BBC 1988).

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next week: Write it now – the evolution of the novel; also more funnies, more writing tips, and some highly refined geekery.

How Tolkien became part of my life. Is he part of yours?

Forty years after I first encountered the work of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, I am still on a wonderful journey of discovery in his world.

I had moment to think about it on the weekend when my wife and I passed through Miramar, Wellington and stopped at the ‘Weta Cave’. It’s a store run by Weta Workshop, who made the props for Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Tolkien’s work.  In typical Kiwi fashion it’s in an unprepossessing building of late 1930s austerity construction.

Weta Cave – unprepossessing ordinariness masking the home of something truly extraordinary.

Most of the buildings in the area are like this. It’s the heart of Peter Jackson’s movie-making empire. You wouldn’t think so, to look at it. But that’s the magic of movies for you.

It’s all in an ordinary industrial-style street. I don’t know if these warehouses, directly opposite Jackson’s post-production building, are part of the studio or not, though interesting drumming noises were coming out of them when I took this photo.

Though the Park Road Post Production building is pretty impressive.

I took this from the street.

The visit – coupled with last week’s viewing of The Hobbit movie - got me thinking. I wouldn’t call myself a ‘fan’. I approach Tolkien with a critical eye, I don’t consume every word.  Each volume in my copy of The Lord of The Rings is from a totally different paperback edition and I’ve never bothered to get any of the different illustrated, one-volume or ‘collectors’ versions issued since.

But I like his created world and his writing very much indeed, and have ever since I was eight or nine - about as long,  in fact, that I’ve been writing myself.

It was the Pauline Baynes map that captured me first. Her artwork  was evidently frowned upon by Tolkien himself. But it spoke of adventure, of exploration – of the unknown. I wanted to experience that magic – to live that world. I started imagining. A little later, I read The Hobbit. And I was hooked. I still have that copy of the book, the third edition paperback with Tolkien’s own ‘Death of Smaug’ sketch as cover art. It’s totally battered. I don’t know how often I’ve read it. Lots.

A year or two after that I read The Lord Of The Rings. And read it again. And again. And again. And many times again after that. I’ve read it only twice since I was a teenager – but I can still pretty much quote passages from it.

Check out the wear and tear. Is my copy of ‘The Hobbit’ much-loved, or what?

Tolkien’s work spoke to me on many levels. He conveyed a sense of wonder on an epic scale, yet in terms that brought that wonder back to ‘ordinary’ through the hobbits. I could share their sense of discovery, of growth, as the world unfolded for them – and which they had to find the strength to handle.

Later, as I learned more about literature and writing, I came to realise just how much of the essence of the western mind Tolkien had put into his work. My enjoyment of his world became a journey of discovery - re-awakening a sense of wonder when I read his material.

I am still on that journey, and it is a wonderful journey indeed.

How about you? Are you a Tolkien enthusiast? What drew you to his work? And if he’s not your cup of tea – well, what doesn’t appeal? It’s all valid. I don’t like some of his material myself, actually – too inaccessible, too academic; or written in ways that don’t capture. As I say, I approach this with a critical eye – not adulating fandom. But what he imagined remains very much a part of my life.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Kindness 2013: thinking about kindness the Asimov way

 I posted last week about how difficult kindness is to really pin down – how to make it work we have to find a philosophy that encompasses many virtues from tolerance to reason to acceptance to thoughtfulness.

It struck me that a lot of what I was talking about can be found in the stories of Isaac Asimov. More often than not, his scenes involved characters talking. It is a measure of his extraordinary talent as a writer that his novels were dramatic, gripping and compelling througb the tensions between the characters as they talked. Wonderful, wonderful writing.

Asimov’s greatest legacy remains his ‘Three Laws of Robotics’, designed to break the early twentieth century trope of psychopathic metalloids turning on their creators. In essence they said (a) don’t hurt humans, or allow them to be hurt; (b) obey orders, except where it breaks the first law; and (c) protect yourself, except when it breaks the other two laws.

Asimov imagined societies where robots were ubiquitous – where they would prevent humans from hurting each other, a kind of active conscience for the dark side of humanity.

Needless to say these ‘robot laws’ were problematic. Asimov knew it – most of his ‘robot’ plots involved showing up loopholes. How do you define ‘harm’? (‘Galley Slave’ involved a robot fixing an author’s galley proofs, because the stress to the author of doing it himself, the robot judged, amounted to harm). Suppose you re-define ‘human’ so the First Law doesn’t apply? (Asimov explored this in Robots and Empire). What happens if a robot is met with equally balanced choices between the laws? (‘Runaround’).

A lot pivoted around the premise that robots operated by if-then logic. Asimov’s key robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, was just that – literal minded, a point Asimov used in a plot turn in The Caves of Steel. But in his later robot novels, robots could reason their way through dilemnas. By the end of the cycle, R. Daneel was largely indistinguishable from a human in behaviour – and, unerringly, working for the good of humanity.

It would be nice to imagine af ‘First Law’ equivalent for humans – but we already have this. We are exhorted from childhood to look after others – to help others – in short, to be kind. It’s just that we don’t. Not often enough. Things seem to get in the way. A pity, really.

I’ll explore some of those ‘things that get in the way’ in the next few posts. Meanwhile – what do you think about a human ‘first law’ equivalent?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: Sixty second writing tips, more on Tolkien, and continuing the series ‘Write it now’ – an A-Z of how to write.

A small eternity watching ‘The Hobbit’: a personal view

On the weekend my wife and I went to see The Hobbit.

The Hobbit is one of my favourite books, Jackson is one of my favourite directors, and we live where it was made – there has been a buzz around Wellington for years. Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings – all three parts – was stunning. It was stunning as a story, stunning for Jackson’s deft handling of an epic canvas. Stunning for its effects.

Gollum in Wellington airport passenger terminal – a marvellous example of the model-maker’s art.

So we had plenty of build-up for this one. And in many ways it did not disappoint. The actors were superb. The effects were brilliant. The set dressing was astonishing. The attention to detail was incredible. I wasn’t worried that the movie bore only passing resemblance to the book, either. Movies are different media – they require different handling, especially this time. Jackson has taken Tolkien’s low-key story of a quest for treasure – explicitly, Bilbo’s hero journey – and turned it into a nine hour epic. That meant it had to be significantly deepened.

Weta’s 10-metre high Gandalf above the Embassy theatre, Courtenay Place, Wellington.

There was just one small problem.  Nothing happened other than a relentless bang-bang-bang succession of chases and (literally) pit-falls.  The movie was about half over when my wife whispered in my ear. ‘Are we there yet?’ We weren’t. Eventually the end credits rolled. ‘Well,’ my wife said. ‘That was awful.’  I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s three hours of our lives we won’t get back.’

What happened? To me, the main problem was that it hadn’t been deepened enough – or properly structured. The existing Hobbit plot was stretched, thinly, across a three-hour movie-scape in which other material seemed to intrude, sometimes for no obvious reason. It opened with a loving, nostalgic reprise of The Fellowship of The Ring, which didn’t seem to do anything for the plot other than add fan-fic style ’completeness’. It took over an hour for the story to actually get going, and then, as my wife put it, the thing felt at times like a succession of out-takes from The Fellowship of the Ring, slung into a bucket. I got the impression, at times, that I had been watching The Hobbit re-written as rather mediocre fan fiction.

That diorama from another angle.

Structure is everything with fiction – novels and movies alike. In the specific, to me the main over-arching plot, leading to the ‘big boss’ battle at the very end – was Azog’s quest for revenge. This was a new element, not envisaged by Tolkien. Unfortunately, Azog kept turning up to intensify danger or push chases along, without real build-up or tension – more melodrama than drama. But in any case, the whole thing needed a more epic plot to match the scale of movie, the scale of effects, and the scale of the settings; and Tolkien’s legendarium has many gigantic elements that could have been brought in – from the origin of dragons as corrupted Maiar and servants of Morgoth, to the full back-story of Sauron deceiving the elves into forging rings.

The other problem was tone. It came across to me as an awkward juxtaposition between Jackson-style slapstick – not much related to Tolkien’s gentle brand of intellectual humour – and deep, dark seriousness, which the plot elements didn’t quite match.

To me the strength of the 1937 Hobbit novel was tightness and the fact that the magic and wonder of Bilbo’s world unfolded for us as it did for Bilbo. Along the way we watched Bilbo grow as a person.  All was presented with Tolkien’s gentle humour and pitched for its reading audience, initially his children. Tolkien’s characters were also discomfited by ordinary problems, such as rain and storms, which we can all identify with. It led them into adventure with trolls and goblins. The ordinary became the extraordinary – but one we could share because we had been led gently into it. I got none of that feel with the movie.

I am a huge fan of Tolkien. I am a huge fan of my fellow Wellingtonian, Sir Peter Jackson. But this movie didn’t do it for me.  The Gollum riddle game, which was truly masterful, went some way towards redeeming the whole. But not far enough.

What did this movie do for you?

In post-scriptum, we found succour on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrKXH1CeXck

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: Write It Now, Part 2; more on kindness; and picture inspirations from earthquake-hit Christchurch.

A visit to some old Tolkien filming sites in New Zealand

The Hobbit has been breaking box office records both here in New Zealand and in the US, and showcasing our scenery (blush).

Hutt River or Anduin? Well, maybe the houses are the give-away. I took this picture a while back.

Quite a lot of it, though, wasn’t shot “on location” exactly – a fair chunk was made in Wellington, partly in Jackson’s studios, partly on an outdoor lot on the hill adjacent to the studio complex, well hidden by trees from prying eyes. And that marked one of the big differences between the shooting of The Hobbit trilogy and The Lord Of The Rings a decade or so ago.

The Hobbit was secret – filmed behind closed doors to the point where security guards accosted people entering the park above the studio lot. But a dozen years ago, Jackson filmed a large chunk of The Lord of The Rings in public less than 10 km from my house. Starting with the Saruman death-by-fall-from-Orthanc scene which was filmed in a small park adjacent to suburban houses, against a green screen. Right out in the open, and boy did it puzzle fans who knew that no such scene occurred in the book.

The other day I went out to have a look at the Dry Creek Quarry, where Jackson’s crews once built the walls of Helm’s Deep and – then – Minas Tirith. The set was enormous, and directly visible from the road. Here it is today. That grassy ridge is where the fortifications were built. Back in 2000, my wife and I drove past the set in its Minas Tirith configuration. ‘Wish we could get a look at that,’ I said wistfully. Neither of us knew it was open day, right then. Sigh.

I took this photo the other week, 12 years after the Helm’s Minas Tirith Deep set was demolished. You’d never know today. But hey – it’s a working quarry.

Here’s Queen Elizabeth II Park – er – the Pelennor Fields. They filmed the dead Mumakil scene here.

Either the Pelennor Fields or a public park…

It’s near Paekakariki, and the site of a US military base during the Second World War. And here’s Shed 21 on Aotea Quay, in central Wellington. Back in 2000 it was a warehouse. Jackson had the interior set for the Minas Tirith throne room built into it. Later the set was demolished and the building refurbished – today it’s apartments and a small office park.

Shed 21 – was Minas Tirith throne room set. Now apartments.

All this underscores just how much of the movies, these days, seems to be made inside the blade server with Autodesk, Terragen and Massive. But the magic’s still there in the original locations, if we let our imaginations work.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Soaking up the down-town party buzz on Hobbit premiere day

It’s been Hobbit party time today in Wellington, and I took a walk to party central – Courtenay Place – early afternoon to check it out.

Probably Bert and Tom, I think. Two of the three ‘life size’ trolls. Cool.

Yes, THIS is the red carpet laid out for the stars…later…

Don’t do anything orc-ward,’ my wife told me when I left the house. We have lame conversations like that quite often.

Courtenay Place is the main café district. It’s our equivalent of the Rue de Lafayette in Paris - only on fast-forward and micro-sized.

It’s often crowded – but the crowds this time were thicker than I’ve ever seen, the mood electric, happy, excited. People have been camping out since last night to get good places for the red carpet walk by the stars before the evening world premiere showing of The Hobbit -  An Unexpected Journey.

Hobbit food?

Crowds are expected to top 120,000 – 2.6 percent of New Zealand’s entire population, all jammed into a half-kilometre stretch of inner city street. That’s also a fair chunk of the population of greater Wellington. Special trains were laid on for everybody coming in.

Put another way, a proportionate crowd in the US would top 8.08 MILLION people, all going to this one event.

Blowing the dirt off the red carpet.

Now, which star do these people like?

But even 120,000 is a fair crowd, especially when they’re rammed into a linear kilometre (and where the public toilets at the southern end just got turned into a cafe).

That is why my wife and I decided not to go to the premiere street party. Jostling through packed people while failing to get a view isn’t our thing.

Besides, it’s being shown on national TV, live. A way better view, up front.

But I still wanted to soak up the buzz and feel of the event. So I went down early afternoon anyway to see what was happening.

For me it was just as important to get a feel for the emotion of it – for the excitement as it built – as it was to attend the moment itself. This movie has captured Kiwi imaginations in a fantastic way. More so than The Lord Of The Rings. It bas become OUR movie, OUR national triumph.

And I found the mood electric. There were people with Gandalf hats, people with themed shirts. People with signs. People waiting out the day in the sun – all of them happy, having fun, laughing, just having a great time.

It’s a lot more, for us, than just a movie of a great fantasy story made into a movie by a local boy-done-good. Why? I’ll blog about that in the next and – for the moment – final post on this very exciting local engagement with John Tolkien and his fantastic creation. And I have to wonder. What would Tolkien have thought of this? Of a whole nation taking to the streets in joy and celebration, because their imaginations had been captured by something he’d written? Food for thought.

Meanwhile – here are the pictures. Enjoy.

Even early afternoon there were lots of people. Some had been camping overnight.

Says it all, really.

Readying for the VIP’s and dignitaries.

A stage had been set on Kent Terrace – cleverly positioned to give the illusion of continuity with the Bag End door on the fascia of the theatre about 30 metres behind. Double cool.

Courtenay Place is also a main bus route – but not today.

Sneaking around behind Bert. Well, it was daylight…

I’m going to wait for the rush to settle down a bit before heading off to see the movie. I’m not sure whether with all the whistles and bells yet either. Kind of tossing up which cinema to go to. The Embassy – where the premiere is showing –  is set up for full 48 fps, the sound system, and 3D. But the seats are pretty uncomfortable. Um.

Are you going to the movie when it opens worldwide in a fortnight? I’d love to hear from you!

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012